The Invention Trade: Buy and Sell Patents at the Free Patent Auction

Inventions, ideas and everything of the sort are sold at the Free Patent Auction. Online since 2004, this site has never been the most popular one out there but haven't we all learned that it doesn't have to be popular to be useful.
At the homepage, you'll see a very simple layout, nothing fancy, mostly just text. However, the concept behind this site is a lot bigger. The basic idea is that inventors who have either lost hope or just want to make immediate profit from a patented invention, can sell these patents at often negotiable prices.
If a user of the service wants to sell a patent they can either set a price or list "to be negotiated", then write a description, give a simple diagram, add the country of protection and they'll be off and running. Of course, anybody with a patent can do this by making a free account with the Free Patent Auction.
And if buyers are particularly interest, they'll have a chance to have a peak at the seller's website, as well as access to the patent web page, all inventions from the member and contacting the seller.
At any certain time, there are usually over 1500 patents that are waiting for buyers, all categorized and searchable.
However, this is not for everyone. First of all, buying a patent costs at least $1 million and not everybody owns a marketable patent. As well, it is rare that anyone actually purchases so beware of that too. But maybe you'll be part of the lucky few who get noticed on this site and soon receive a cheque for a million dollars.

6 Reasons to Hate and Never Read Engadget

Ah. Tech blogs. Everyone knows that they have to be up to date in the world of technology so everyone favours one tech blog that they read everyday. Most of the time its either one of the utter nerd tech blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo. I'm starting the non-nerd tech blog movement so read this instead. Or you can go back to your geeky texts talking about RAM, microchips and special wiring. Here's why you shouldn't read Engadget:

6. Owned by AOL

AOL, Google's friendly enemy. It doesn't have any unique features from Yahoo! and MSN and all these copied services are downgraded. I have a very personal hate of AOL and all of its entities and you should too.

5. Way too many ads

An irritatingly obviously and poorly designed ad in the wrong size between every two posts is a bit hefty. And that's in addition to all the banner ads on the sides and banner on the top. Plus, the unbearable marketing of other AOL affiliations everywhere on the page definitely counts as well.

4. Biased because affiliation

Rarely will you see Engadget promoting Microsoft or Yahoo!. After all, they're AOL's competitors ("Microsoft's Profits Sink for the First Time in 23 Years", "Microsoft to Pirates: You're Bad but You'll Still Get Windows 7 Updates").

3. Spams your RSS Feed

Do you honestly need to know about the latest "endoscope" or "Thrustmaster's" latest additions to there line-up of products? And with the tens of geeky staff bloggers (meaning they do nothing but blog about stupid crap and enjoy doing it) as well as a host of guest bloggers, they can pump out 10-20 posts like these out every day. Oh yeah, don't forget about the "USB light" either.

2. Keeps you out of touch with the real world

When you start to get hooked on reading Engadget posts all day, you know your soul has totally died. I mean, you're not even chatting on MSN Messenger, let alone socializing physically. Instead, you read dozens of posts per day on the latest features on the new Palm.

1. Super-geeky

No need for explanation. When your blog is called "Engadget", is a division of AOL and talks about the latest breaking news in the tech world such as Norway's laptop giveways, it just is.

How Amazon is Cheating Millions, and Making Big Bucks Doing It

Believe it or not Amazon the huge internet retailer, comparable to Wal-Mart in the physical world has joined in the massive internet scam marketplace. Okay, they're not pulling off pyramid schemes or engaging in boiler room operations but they are doing something almost as bad. It's name, Mechanical Turk, its innovative way to make money online. Already, you should be suspicious. Apparently, it's name is derived from a wooden chess player that was believed to be run on artificial intelligence but actually had a Turkish chess player inside. And it seems innocent enough with its cute slogan, "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", but trust me, it isn't.
To summarize Mechanical Turk, it is a place where companies distribute small internet jobs such as data entry and labeling and hand a amounts of money for these jobs instead of paying individual workers to specialize in these things. The rewards can range from a penny to $20, requiring from 15 minutes to 2 months of your time. It lets workers complete "HITs" to make money, which will be channeled to you via mail.
Of course, that isn't all. There's a lot more that can be said.
To begin with, most tasks are long and gruelling, and can take days, for a few pennies. This is a distraction from what you should be doing, your job or finding a new job.
Also, this undermines users as ignorant idiots who can't do anything decent, giving them jobs like finding images and RSS URLs for websites. Of course, there is little to no reward for your effort and they set strict time limits on your work. If it isn't done by then, you'll be penalized in approval rating (which you need to "qualify" for other HITs). Can you see a relationship here? I sure can. Slavery.
And other than seeing all these people suffer for nothing, they have other benefits as well. Each time someone publishes a HIT, they get a part of the money that is supposed to go to the worker who completed it. Let's say they get 1% for each payout. For the 4,000 individual workers multiplied by the 100,000 HITs published every day, that turns into a lot of money at the loss of their users. Even Amazon has perpetrated the laws of internet ethics, even Amazon.

Why Adding Annotations to YouTube Videos is Stupid

Yes, we've all seen the incredibly attractive offer of adding customizable annotations to our uploaded YouTube videos. Perhaps some of you have tried it. For those of you have avoided this, good job because they're stupid.
Basically, annotations are little blocks of text- messages that "add" to the video in some way- that you can put in different types of speech bubbles. Anyone who uploads a video or who has permission from the uploader can do it to a video.
However, these things are extremely, unbearably, harassingly annoying. If you're trying to watch a decent video about say, dinosaurs and a block of text that says, "SUBSCRIBE!" suddenly pops up from a desperate user, you're damn right it'll ruin the appeal of the video. It interrupts all the important content in the video. In fact, I don't really see much reason why these annotations can't simply be added into the description to not interfere.
There's no appropriate situation for this horrible offense. Annotations are just wrong. Don't fall into their trap.