Yes, I'm cheap. If you don't want to donate, please do not. I agree with you that the donation system is a cop out. It says: "I can't give you anything of value, so allow your feeling of guilt to compel you to give my money instead." The fact that it works sometimes baffles me, but I know that the main reason is that certain people cannot resist guilt's temptation to do something stupid: like part with your hard earned money.

But imagine this: if you donate, I will be motivated to fulfil my obligation to you and will work harder on AltSci3D, Javantea's Fate, and Hack Mars. To motivate donors further toward this system rather than the former, I will offer the benefactor my time toward an AltSci3D project of the benefactor's choice at the rate of 4 hours of per $10 donated ($2.50 per hour is pretty good, no?).

For example: You want the open source updated to the latest code on my computer and a GUI system updated. That will take 4 hours, so you donate $10 and a few days later, the code is up. You see, the donation is like waving a bill in front of my eyes. Or maybe you want a demo of Hack Mars. That will take 20 hours. You donate $50 and I work part time on it and post the demo a week later.

Some day soon, I'll be selling Hack Mars on my website and on eBay. I have ideas about eBay, but I'm not interested in sharing them today. But now you know my paypal account address and so does every spammer who spiders this page. *sigh* My answering machine message is: "By speaking robots imply consent to be recorded." This is not supposed to be an insult to humans that I'm forgetting their implied consent to be recorded, but a compliment that they can figure out wtf to do after a f'n beep. It goes like this: "Hello -my name-, this is -your name-. I was wondering what you were up to. Call me at my phone. Thanks, Bye." Robots on the other hand, do not specificially imply consent because to my knowledge they don't have an answering machine sensor. So I need to ensure that I can legally record them and play them back. If a telemarketing company wishes me not to record and play back those messages, they need to build a sensor for it. You see, Washington has a dual party consent. If I don't consent to be recorded, recording me is a felony. If you don't consent and I record, it's a felony even though you are calling me. If a person decides to harass me night and day (like telemarketing robots), I need proof which I can use to sue their pants off. The only way to do it is to record. So I record the messages. Then I tell them to stop. Then I record more messages coming from the same robots. Then I have a case. I can go to small claims and say that they have costed me $10 per hour and have called me 2 minutes * 10 times = 20 minutes = $3.33. They're also breaking a law and pissing me off at the same time.

Permalink