Post it on BitcoinStarter, and keep one critical aspect of your game idea undisclosed or undetailed?

Ideas are less steal-worthy than you might imagine.  As you'll no doubt have noticed, a great idea also requires a lot of effort to make it happen, and most people who'd steal are looking for something effortless.  That's kind of the point of stealing.

Also, be aware that if a good idea occurs to you and you do nothing with it, someone else will eventually get a similar idea and implement it anyway.  I got the idea for BitcoinStarter about a decade ago, but couldn't raise the money to fund development.  Someone else did, and it looks as though it will become successful!

Welp, I didn't mean to convey the idea that I'm a Platypus Egg Expert or anything.   

As I understand it, eggs don't need oxygen because there's a little air bubble in them at one end.  If you think about chicken eggs, you'll get what I mean.

They absolutely need to be kept warm, which is probably the biggest concern.  Particularly if you're having them shipped Air, which is the fastest.  They'll be at high altitudes and low pressure.

And keeping them free from jostling is going to be important.  Label them Fragile, obviously.  Someone I was reading online had been shipping chicken eggs using egg carton holders, on the top and the bottom, and with a lot of bubble wrap and styrofoam and tape around that assembly.  Evidently they'd been shipped just fine.  Of course, he was talking about a percentage of the eggs that made it and lived; keep that in mind in terms of your friend's case with attempting just a single egg.  No idea how he managed with the warmth factor, but I doubt he was sending chicken eggs trans-continental over the oceans.  It was probably within the same country, reducing both the time in transit and the duration at high altitudes.

I'd think those prolonged chemical warming packs that campers use might be good, but somehow I doubt they'd last for two or three days.

Your friend has a lot of research to do on this before proceeding.  I don't have all the answers.  I would also think that if your friend isn't willing to do the online research needed first, they probably lack the interest and involvement that's needed to take care of the platypus once it arrives anyway.  It would involve quite a lot of forethought, as I'd mentioned before.  Any word on how they'd deal with the fact that males are poisonous, in a country where a trip to the vet - or the emergency room if necessary - simply wouldn't be an option for them?  Or the unfamiliar germs and virii problem?


Be well,

- Satori

Jeez Mushroomized, how pure are they selling them where you are?  If it's anything like over here, they've been cut with leopard or even dolphin by the time they get to the street.  You're lucky if you get one that doesn't have a dorsal fin.

I feel for your loss, but from here it sounds more like your brother likely didn't overdose per se, quite so much as miss when he tried to get the spurs to dig into a vein.  It's difficult to get a decent aim when the little guys are thrashing around that hard in your arms trying to get away.  Sometimes people will have a rogue spur jab them right in the jugular, and then it's game over for real.

I wish you'd consider giving lectures at schools.  You'd be an obvious person to give them, and it's a message a lot of kids need to hear.  When I notice the kids today doing the "duckface" trying to score a little 'pus, I wish they knew better what they were getting into, and that their parents knew the warning signs.

Very swank!  Looks great.   

I would suggest the ability to Favorite entries, and have a Favorited page.  Might be a bit much for now, but with a slew of entries later on that could be very worthwhile to users.  Maybe a low priority?

Feedback: I realize you've put a lot of effort into getting the frontpage to look nice, but as a user all the images, and less categorized information available, actually make the site more frustrating to use.  The listings per category were great, and it was nice to be able to determine at a glance what new sites had been added recently.

Also, the poll here asking to rate the speed of our connection to TBR on a scale of 1-5 could probably use more detail.  Is 1 the best, the least, the slowest?  Is 5 like "5 Stars", or the worst?  I didn't vote because I wasn't sure.

I've never had a connection speed problem with TBR.  Automatic site logouts are more often my problem, as TBR is essentially designed to be a site you'll tab away from (to check out a site) and then back to a few minutes later.  When I come back, I invariably have to log in all over again.  It's not as though TBR is a high-security site with lots of BitCoins flowing back and forth.

ProTip: Platypi hatch from eggs, which are much easier to ship.  The eggs take 10 days to hatch.

Sure you could label it some other species and pay for whatever Super Awesome Ultra Deluxe Shipping they have.

So, a little more research and you can just post for someone in Australia to obtain and ship the egg for a bounty.

Have you given any thought to how you'll get it inoculated against the various germs and viri in the air where you live that it's surely not going to have an immunity to?  You probably won't be able to take it to the vet.  That means that if it turns out to be male, you won't be able to get it de-venomed either.  You'll have a very cute, poisonous mammalian duck freak waddling around your house.  Has your friend thought this through?

Looking for a way to promote your new website?  How about if you - and your users - stick these 5"x5" weatherproof stickers around town at cafes, clubs, and the sides of newspaper vending machines?  There's enough room on them for a QR code that links to your site, as well as a quick eye-catching title and slogan.  Buy them through me with BitCoins; I can even do the design for you for a little more if you'd like.  They cost $2 or 1.5 Euros per sticker, with $6 or 4.5 Euros for shipping.  Minimum order is 25 stickers.  Other sizes are available.  Full color is no problem, and these things are rugged.  They'll survive rain and the elements with the printing staying on fast.  They're very durable stickers made of polypropylene film, not paper.

You can buy in quantity, and mail stickers to your users around the world to promote your site in their area.  If you compensate users on your site for sending you snaps of your stickers they've posted, they'll have a reason to promote your site!  This is a great way to make effective advertising use out of the fact that your users are located all over the world.

You can even create referral links and share your site revenue for business generated by new users that your existing users have referred.  CMS' like Drupal have a Referral module for that purpose.  If you're using referral links the QR codes will vary from user to user, so you'd want your users ordering them from me.  They can place an order with you, and I can send their stickers out to them directly.

The price if you don't need graphic work done is whatever the total amount comes out to, just converted into BitCoins.  PM me if you're interested.

Have you considered an API that would allow other sites to add credit to user accounts automatically?  I'm thinking specifically of sites adding GLBSE credits to users for promotions and compensation, instead of the paltry Bitcoin amounts they do now.  It would be a good promotional situation for GLBSE.

There's a site called BTCTip that tips Bitcoin from your account with them via a Tweet.  I hooked Bets of Bitcoin up with them so they could combine what they do, and their userbases as well.  If you combined your service with BTCTip (to add credit to another user's GLBSE account via Tweets) the resulting free publicity on peoples' Timelines would increase your trading volume immensely.

Were it me, I would combine that strategy with a referral link program - users earn a percentage of GLBSE's points from other user's they've referred with their link.  The result would be more promotion, more trading volume and commission, and unlike placing ads it would only cost you a portion of money it had brought you anyway.

Very interesting.  Well, the technical information makes it reasonable enough to accept what you've said as valid.  I apologize sincerely for jumping to conclusions about you, dropboxexpander.

Freelancer.com's Data Entry listings are so full of job postings that end up being Dropbox scams, that applying for data entry positions is a lost cause.  Typical Dropbox postings advertise data entry positions, and often emphasize that they're willing to hire people who've had no prior data entry jobs.  30 - 40 job candidates respond with their interest.  Those candidates are PM'ed by the job poster, telling them that there's a few things they'll need to do to get started.  First, they're directed to an online typing test that takes about three minutes.  They're told to send a JPG of their typing speed results.  They're also given a shortened referral link to Dropbox and told to create an account there "to receive work files", and PM the "employer" with the e-mail address they used to register at Dropbox.

Reading the list of applicant replies, these postings get a lot of responses.  Each.  The entire lot of applicants is then kicked to the curb as the job posting is cancelled, and the process repeats: New "employer" account purporting to be from somewhere else, new user image (I got a nice Middle Eastern lady named "Dr. Munni"), same body text verbatim.  I was out for a data entry job, noticed this, and got suspicious.  That's when I checked Dropbox and found out they were offering free drivespace for referrals.

I've contacted Freelancer.com and Dropbox about it, but there's little they can do without getting together to share IP log information.  And even that isn't likely to do much if scammers are using proxies.  I suppose if Dropbox has been notified of this and keeps their offer without providing due diligence, they're liable to a class action from sites and job seekers for knowingly enabling the problem.

That's all the info I have on this.

dropboxexpander, I'm glad to hear we're both in agreement that the method I encountered was wrong.  And my post was definitely pretty aggro, for obvious reasons.

I'd retract that hostility in a heartbeat, if I could be sure that (or similar) wasn't how your service works.

I'm sure you won't.  

When looking for Data Entry work on the freelance sites, we'd regularly encounter fake accounts there posting jobs.  They'd put 30-40 potential applicants per ad through an online typing test, then tell them to register for a Dropbox account through their referral link "to receive work files".  None of the applicants looking for work were ever hired.  The posting would be closed, and a new posting with the same requirements would show up from a different dummy employer account.

There's no way to know for sure that dropboxexpander is defrauding these job-seeking applicants, but it seems likely and we know it's how a lot of paid "Dropbox expander" services work.  By defrauding and wasting the time of hundreds of people who are unemployed and actively looking for work.

Good times.

guruvan is quite correct.  I'd just been about to post that myself.

In this country, rights are considered to be intrinsic parts of us, given by our Maker.  The idea of living without your rights is similar to that of living with an artificial wooden head.

The whole excuse for having a government is to keep those rights upheld.  To the extent that it does not - or encroaches upon those rights itself - it's failing in its own purpose.

We delegate specific authorities to that government in the founding documents.  Anything we did not delegate to it, or to the States, remains with us.  No matter how big a heap of legislation they generate purporting to give themselves brand-new authorities, or create brand-new offices to control, monitor or dictate various aspects of our lives.

In order for me to give something to myself or someone else, I must first have it to give.  The same goes for government.  I suppose I could steal it from someone else, but that would be theft on my part.  In government, this is called usurpation.

So waiting for a government to tell you what you can and can't do is pretty silly.  They do have control over how corporations are run, but that's only because we told them to regulate interstate commerce.  That's probably forfeit at this point, inasmuch as they're so far outside the Constitution in most other ways.  I would say people would be completely within their rights to do an end-run around them and do whatever via Tor-based encrypted sites; the government has pretty clearly defaulted on its Constitutional duties by this point, and subsidizing it or adhering to it is more or less giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Oh, you seem to have got it then.  Are you using a CMS yourself?  If so, there may be a script for that.  If there isn't one, once you have one coded you may be able to sell it as a digital good and recoup your investment for the coding.

If you don't have the funds for coding the script, I suggest GLBSE.  They just went into Beta about a week ago.

About the Sunflower: Unsalted, Salted, Raw?

Site added:

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Internet & Mobile services >> BitCoin-related

Send BitCoins via Twitter!

Bugswat!  Just typos.

Here, "Catagory" and "Sub-Catagory" should be "Category" and "Sub-Category".  The misspelling also appears in the pulldowns.

Is there some reason the links in ads can't clickthrough to your site, which would then redirect the user to the advertisers'?

Seems like you could track visits to your own pages rather easily.

Yeah, I'm taking night courses at Twitter University to trim some of my posts.   

Hmm.  That's a difficult question.  Were it me, knowing what I know about how people are getting money by raising false hopes of people who are looking for work, and wasting their time, I wouldn't accept the ad.  Morally, that's probably worse than merely being opportunistic at a large corporation's bonus offer.  To my thinking, they knew they were running that risk - or certainly should have known - when they made that promotional offer, and made it anyway.

But I am not you.  My sense of Right vs. Wrong appears to be a lot stricter than those around me: I've been living off the grid for over a decade rather than subsidize a lot of the things the federal government has been doing (slaughtering Iraqi civilians, playing gofer for the Israelis, building an estimated 600-800 "FEMA" concentration camps within the U.S.).  Because it would be wrong of me to be a party to those things (treason, in fact), I refuse to do it.  And must take the brunt of the repercussions for that choice: Can't work reliably while off the grid, and homeless as a result.  If everyone made the same caliber of choices I do, our government wouldn't be doing what it does, out of sheer necessity to collect tax revenues.  But they don't, and I encounter what I do because the rest of society doesn't boycott things I consider Wrong.  Wrong begins when you knowingly and avoidably cause harm to another.  Either directly, or through being a knowing accomplice.

So it's not my place to tell you what decision for your own domain is the right one.  I would proffer the suggestion that your site policies should probably be an expression of your personal moral standards as much as possible.  If at that point you're dissatisfied with the quality of one of those - in either direction - you may want to adjust the other to match as well.


Were it me, that's what I think I would do.  But it's not, and it's tough to make a decision based on profits and needs that I don't actually have.


Bingo.  There's the rub.

We know that some people are offering promotions like that by defrauding large swaths of unemployed people actively seeking work.  We do not know that moredropbox is doing that.  We can probably agree that it's probably pretty likely.  If this tactic turns out to be against arsenische's ad standards, then due diligence on arsenische's part would probably require an inquiry into the moredropbox' business practices.  I.e., "It's been called into question; show me how you're doing this or have your ad rejected / downgraded / etc."  Having a moral standard means acting on it; whether arsenische opts to have that standard or not isn't for me to impose.


Yes, and no.

Users have a responsibility not to send 100 Bitcoins to the first Nigerian scammer they happen to find a link to, anywhere.  But an ad network also has an implied responsibility not only not to become a getaway driver for scams, but also to ensure a certain degree of quality for the ads it accepts.  It's sort of like the attractive nuisance laws in real life (i.e., "Your rusty playset on your lawn attracted my kids to start playing on it, and now they have tetanus").  To what extent an ad network does that determines, in part, whether it's considered a high-class establishment or a rickety internet death-trap.  In the online world there isn't a lot of actual legal liability, but users - and advertisers - notice which it is and on that basis determine whether they read or place ads there.

That works in either direction: High-class advertisers won't publish on a rickety internet death-trap, but there are plenty of scammers out there who will take their place.  It all depends on what sort of business arsenische has in mind, what his or her financial need level is, and what the caliber of his or her self-image will allow arsenische to accept or reject.

And that's not a judgement against you either way, arsenische.  Part of being a society of free, mature and responsible people means having the right to make choices, live with them, and decide whether we like the results they bring us.  A large part of society's detriment has been due to a tyrannous effort to childproof our choices, to let someone else make them for us, so that we never get the chance to grow and learn.  If I tried to do that, even by trying to force some position of implied moral superiority on you, I'd only be doing the same thing myself.

That's a rare fluke: They're in the middle of a move, and something knocked out one of their DNS servers for a day.  20% of their accounts were affected, and they've already apologized humbly and offered their users 10% off their bill to make amends.

I use their service and cannot recommend them enough.  Full-featured accounts at good rates, cron included, responsive and attentive tech and customer support.  I've already had them go beyond the call of duty for me more than once.

Check out their separate bitcoind accounts if you just need a bitcoin daemon running on a site you already have, to add BitCoin functionality.

Oh, and you can have your site at MicroT running cron every minute if you'd like, so that end-users encounter minimal wait-time as the sent bitcoins wait for however many network confirmations you've stipulated are required to complete the transaction.