Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

I can't give company names on this one, but I dealt with two lawsuits in one week, once. One turned out to be an idle threat, and the other was filed in the District Court and served in triplicate.

Intrigued? Here's how it went down:

Here's a fun little CS project I assigned myself on a boring plane flight:

How much space would it take to create and store every possible song?

I'd like to compose every song that could possibly be written, and then sue everyone else who ever writes a song for violating my copyright.

It's a noble goal! Read all about how I plan to accomplish it.

A woman is awarded millions for spilling hot coffee in her lap at McDonalds.

Then a woman "finds" a human finger in her chili at Wendy's.

Do punitive damages work? What is the point of the "punishment" in the punitive damage? Why are they awarded to people?

KPMG's recent woes recently came home to me as a great example of the problem with punitive damages as currently implemented.

LONDON (AP) - Police released photographs Friday of four completely featureless men suspected of launching a second wave of terrorist attacks on London's transport system and said the attacks bore similarities to the fatal bombings on July 7. The attacks, that is, and not necessarily the attackers, who were so devoid of any distinguishing characteristics that we will mention only that one was wearing a "dark shirt with 'New York' across the front."

You probably already knew about this incident from back in 2004: Nightline spent an entire 40-minute show just reading the names of soldiers who have fallen in Iraq.

How does Microsoft dominate the world? Are they that much better than everyone else?

No... The brilliance of their strategy lies in its acceptance of their own mediocrity. They succeed because they don't have to be brilliant to succeed. And they are very good, for an average company.

Authority is essentially the promise of power. In the absence of power, authority is meaningless.

Currency is essentially the promise of money. How's that for an interesting analogy?

There is a fine art to programming. The intricacies of bit manipulation, the subtleties of representation and abstraction. Layer upon layer of meaning in compiled code. Simple beauty in loops and control flow.

I hate it all.

Because "10" is so cliché.

1. Spider Man 2 (Love the first one, but this just blew it away)
2. Lord of the Rings (whole set together) -- and Narnia, which is basically Lord of the Rings for kids
3. Minority Report (again, the technology and marketing thing)

It was fashionable, to me, for a brief time, to rage against The Gap. (Or is it just Gap?) (My ragings were never particularly well-informed.)

But raging 'against' something is ultimately so draining, so unproductive. And the marketer in me cries out, "So what? What's the call to action?" Because we can't just NOT do things.

"What are you doing today, Bill?"

"NOT windsurfing!"

So, I decided to do something: Obscuritees.
http://www.cafepress.com/livelife
http://www.cafepress.com/obscuritees