but this sort of thing seems to keep happening to me
Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.
Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.
Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.
When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.
Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)
It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.
I think I must be missing something here. Don't people set their screens to higher resolutions because they want to see more stuff on their screen.
I always assume that people set their resolutions such that they can read normal-sized (12-14pt) text. If that's too small for their eyes, they would have set their screens to a lower resolution. As someone who likes to see a lot at once, this would probably irritate me.
Yeah, their example goes exactly the wrong way for me. I use Terminal 6 (or XTerm "Tiny") on a 1600x1200 15" LCD, and I don't use Antialiasing because at this font size every pixel counts, I don't need 6 blurry pixels, I need 9 sharp ones.
All of this said, there's no reason why, if they provide proper instrumentation/controls, that I couldn't use a resolution independent display to crank the UI down to tiny size (tell it that I have low DPI) and provide a lot of screen real estate.
We've been keeping quiet for the last few months while we brought in our new singer, but are about to start performing again... Moment of Inertia (http://www.moirocks.net)
It doesn't seem like anyone's problems are really being solved. I accomplish all of this with Hacker News, Delicious, Digg, and my own browser bookmarks. If I tried to become involved in every company whose products I use, I would not have time to create my own company/products.
I can appreciate your enthusiasm for community and the web, but I think your passion may be better served elsewhere.
edit Then again, maybe I'm just not your target user/owner.
I got two engineering degrees (ME and EE), and you know what I learned? I learned that engineering is an amazing field and a boring career (for me anyway)!
So, I started doing something else. I now own two companies and in the 6 months since quitting my engineering job, I've doubled my income. No regrets, just decisions and action.
I wouldn't be here had I not went to school and gotten my degrees. Sure, I could probably be somewhere else equally exciting, but this is what I've done, and I enjoyed all of it greatly. When I realized I wasn't enjoying my path at any point, I figured out why and turned.
My one piece of advice is this: don't turn until you've figured out exactly why you're not happy.
That looks like an excellent idea and very well executed. I really liked that it literally only took 1 click to vote (as opposed to usual where you have to click the radio input, and then click a submit button).
I have two suggestions for it:
1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.
2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.
I noticed that Disqus uses a JS widget to embed comments. I like that approach a lot. I wasn't sure of all of the benefits, but full CSS styling is pretty nice.
As a way to get bloggers to adopt it, I think I'm going to make custom CSS skins on a blog by blog basis and start posting links to a new relevant poll that I made in the comment section.
You don't think that would annoy people, would you?
Hopefully a few bloggers will start embedding the poll into the bottom of their post.
Geocoding IPs would be really cool to combine with a map. I'm set up to do that now, I just need to collect more data.
It'd be even cooler to be able to find polls that a similar user base has answered and statistically analyze a certain poll(85% of the people that agreed with your blog also agreed with ...).
I was in your exact same boat, though I stopped just shy of multivariate calculus in High School, and after the first 2 calc classes, took statistics and whatnot.
Anyway, I would suggest staying in high school and enjoying it. I ended up only going to school for half the day my senior year along with a buddy who was in a similar situation. Then a few days a week, we'd attend a college class in town. The other days, we'd go to the beach, or really anywhere and just relax. Those are days we'll never get back, but it's ok, because I think we spent them properly the first time around :-)
Yes you are crazy. And yes, I say do it. It seems the vast majority of the time, that the less crazy an idea is, the less it's worth doing.
Also, I'm an entrepreneur in Ann Arbor, MI, which could be an option for a closer stop if you want to do a trial one close to home first. We have an extra couch you could crash on.
Ayn Rand was able to name so much of what I've felt growing up. While she may have used the literary technique of exaggeration to heighten the contrast between her philosophical views of moral vs. immoral, I don't think she took it "too far" as others are commenting. I think that's like saying Philip K. Dick took the ideas of technological advances and psychic ability too far in his story, "Minority Report", or like saying Pablo Picasso took multi-perspective simplicity too far in his Cubist paintings. Of course they did, it's part of their literary freedom. Exaggeration helps to make an underlaying principle become self-evident by speeding along conclusions that could eventually be drawn from observation.
Atlas Shrugged was a formative influence during my late teens, but Rand is above all things an extremist. Still, she had some good ideas, she communicated them well, and she got me into philosophy. If you take the best parts of Rand and leave the rest, you'll be well served.
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him." - I think she's still basing it on merit. While I disagree with some of what she says, and she says a lot, she does a decent job of staying consistent.
Rather teleological argument from Ms Rand. If the heir manages to keep the inheritance, then they deserved it, however if they lose it, they weren't worthy. Perhaps a new "Ayn Rand" inheritance tax is in order; those heirs who fail to double their inheritance within, say, 5 years, must donate them to needy, friendless orphans, these then have their chance for five years. Imagine all the stimulating entrepreneurship! Now excuse me while I go patent some alloys.
It would be consistent if everyone who was fit to inherit actually did inherit. But that is not the case. Some of those who are fit do not inherit and others do. What is the basis for this inequality? Birth.
She destroys the idea of meritocracy that she herself presented so eloquently and discredits libertarianism as yet another excuse for those born wealthy to keep their wealth.
If an hair is not equal to his money it destroys him? Come on, what does it even mean to be "equal to money"? And how can someone who does not inherit wealth even prove that he or she is "equal to the money"? That's just the kind of fluffy nonsense that moral philosophers are so infamous for.
I don't think you would enjoy reading Rand (either you haven't yet read any of her work and are going based solely on what you read in this thread, or you just completely didn't understand her work).
As she argues, money is a means of trading human production and value. To be equal to your money is to provide production and value to society equal to the value of your money. According to Rand, if one who is barely capable of ever making more than $30k per year were to inherit $5m, it would not end well. And actually lottery statistics support this pretty consistently.
How does that explain why it is consistent that some get the opportunity to start out wealthy and some do not?
You don't seem to get what I'm saying at all. Among those who are willing and able to provide production value are some who get a boost from inherited wealth and some who do not.
Do you consider that fair or consistent with a merit based society? I do get perfectly well what Ayn Rand says in her books, and based on that her stance on inheritance is grotesque.
I think that according to Rand, fairness is a moot point when it comes to this situation. She is saying that if you are capable of achieving wealth, then you will achieve it no matter where you start from in our society. She also explains that those who are capable of achieving are concerned only with their own achievements and awards, and those of others only so far as they help to achieve their own.
If you put all of this together, you end up with the person of achievement not caring where others started (or what they inherited) in relation to themselves. Fairness only holds value when the person getting shafted cares enough to give it value.
Besides, Rand's argument is that over the long run, it really doesn't matter, as the person who is capable of producing great wealth will do so, with or without an inheritance. The person who is not will quickly squander it all and end up right back where they started. Her point is simply that an inheritance does not change one's ability to produce.
Her defense of inherited wealth amounted to the right of the creator of the wealth to dispose of it as he/she chooses. If he leaves it to his children, fine, if he gives it to a house for stray cats, fine,it's HIS choice because he earned it.
Ayn Rand's philosophy is that of a free economy that stresses the importance of the individual. A democracy is a political institution that stresses the rule of the majority. Rand idealized the self-sustaining individual. A democracy by definition cannot be sustained by one individual. So, it's a difficult analogy to make.
A better analogy would be like saying that a king has a right to abolish his monarchy.
Also, it is only self-defeating if the original goal was only to amass the wealth.
To continue the analogy to this point, a king abolishing his monarchy would only be self-defeating if his only goal was to be a king. However, if his goal as king was to make life better for his country, then abolishing his monarchy in favor of a democracy would be a very good move and not self-defeating at all.
Likewise, if the person's original goal was to produce and then dispose of the rewards as he wished, then doing so is not self-defeating. It's only self-defeating if his original goal was to simply have wealth.
<edit>
The other part of Rand's argument is that the individual has the right to dispose of their wealth however they please, because they produced it and they own it. A democracy would only have a right to dispose of itself provided it was the democracy that created itself in the first place.
</edit>
That's a pretty fatalistic argument. I think meritocracy has merit and I don't want it to self destruct. That's why, like other principles, this one needs exceptions as too.
Set theory is very useful but it needs an exception to survive Russel's paradox. You can't let useful things become useless just to uphold some moral rule.
Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.
Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.
Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.
When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.
Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)
It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.