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Are you a true SNSer?

Most newsletters have an audience; SNS has a network. Some of the biggest names in technology and business subscribe to Mark Anderson's weekly insiders' newsletter, and it's a principal topic of conversation when they meet in the meatspace ... fostering contacts, friendships, and economic growth. Redpump subscribes to SNS, and you should, too.

But there's a problem. With its subscriber base now in the thousands, you can't be sure if the suit reading SNS in the business lounge is a real mover and shaker, or just someone whose friend clicked Forward. So it's time to sort out the men from the boys if you're a subscriber - by taking this quiz.

Here's the deal: without referring to your old SNSes or stratnews.com, answer these multiple choice questions. If you choose to share your name and email with us, our privacy policy's simple: we don't share them with anyone else, at all, ever - with this exception: anyone providing an email address here will be cc'd to SAM, SNS's Shirt Queen.) Your score and an analysis will be given when you submit.

SECTION 1: ABOUT SNS

1. SNS stands for*:
a) Society of Nerdy Scientists
b) Swear No to Socialism
c) Self-absorbed Naughty Salespeople
d) Strategic News Service

2. Which one of these is not an SNS concept?
a) The Carryalong PC
b) AORTA
c) Dark Fiber
d) The Inkwell Computer

3. Which of these can you NOT get from SNS merchandising?
a) Mock turtlenecks
b) Leather jackets
c) Baseball caps
d) Luggage tags

4. The SNS shirt logo consists of:
a) A pair of whales
b) A Damien Hirst-commissioned abstract
c) A pair of upturned surfboards
d) The anti-nuclear symbol

5. SNS shirts are embroidered with:
a) An individual member number
b) The NASDAQ on the date you subscribed
c) Your secret SNS nickname
d) Your ICQ handle

6. SNS likes to poke fun at:
a) The French attitude towards free markets
b) Japan's head-in-the-sand economy
c) The dishonesty of Chinese politicians
d) All of the above

7. SNS's information-gathering skills come principally from Mark's:
a) Personal connections to technology and finance leaders
b) Skill with Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Google
c) Frequent chats with barbers and taxi drivers
d) Compromising photographs of Fortune 500 CEOs

8. Friday Harbour is:
a) Mark Anderson's hometown
b) Any excuse used by a programmer for not finishing the week's tasks
c) A term for any bar or restaurant where SNSers can meet in private
d) A rarely-open dockyard in the Pacific Northwest

9. How often does Mark send out SNS special alerts?
a) Trick question. He doesn't
b) 1-2 times a year
c) As often or rarely as conditions warrant
d) At one-month intervals

10. The Silver Bullet Award is:
a) An incentive to troops to get Bin Laden
b) A weekly bulletin of tech leaders 'outed' as vampires
c) A 'black spot' given to CEOs whose days are numbered
d) A real bullet left in lapsed subscribers' letterboxes as a warning

ABOUT MARK
11. Mark lives in:
a) Redmond, Washington
b) San Jose, California
c) A rural hideaway populated by rustic families, killer whales, and Microsoft millionaires
d) Lubbock, Texas

12. Mark's garden shed is known to contain:
a) A gas-driven whaling harpoon
b) A complete but non-functional Tiger Moth aircraft
c) A Hitachi 10-inch, dual slide, reversing compound mitre saw
d) A complete collection of the pre-Internet, paper-published SNS dating back to 1931

13. Mark's leisure interests include:
a) Okinawan karate
b) Whitewater rafting
c) Compound archery
d) Underwater hang-gliding

14. Least likely to be spotted in Mark's fridge are:
a) Snake's livers
b) Whalemeat steaks
c) Champagne bottles
d) Plates of sushi

15. According to Mark, who sang 'Is That All There Is?'
a) Doris Day
b) Peggy Lee
c) Tammy Wynette
d) Madonna

16. According to official musical history, who sang 'Is That All There Is?'
a) Doris Day
b) Peggy Lee
c) Tammy Wynette
d) Madonna

17. By what name is Sharon Anderson-Morris known to SNSers?
a) Sammo
b) The Blonde
c) Shamoo
d) SAM

18. The Beach Palace Hotel is:
a) A spa resort for businessmen owned by the Andersons
b) Mark's covert hedge fund 'boiler room'
c) SNS World Headquarters
d) The Cancun hotel where Mark conceived SNS with a bottle of tequila

19. The end of each SNS includes a rundown of:
a) The week's market closes
b) Upcoming earnings reports
c) New SNS subscribers
d) Mark's plans for the weekend

20. Which of these is not a Mark quote?
a) If those horses are going to loaf anyway, they might as well loaf in style
b) Looking for harmony, where nature did not intend
c) floating on a cedar raft, surrounded by damselflies and dragonflies
d) All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

SECTION 2: PEOPLE

21. According to SNS, Oracle CEO Larry Ellision most needs:
a) A new girlfriend
b) Adult supervision
c) A Remington shaver
d) To merge with Microsoft

22. Current candidates for the Silver Bullet include:
a) HP's Carly Fiorina
b) Sun's Scott McNealy
c) Microsoft's Bill Gates
d) Cisco's John Chambers

23. The term 'Other Bill' referred to:
a) Bill Gates
b) Bill Clinton
c) Billy Holliday
d) An item of privacy legislature

24. Mark of course was the first SNS subscriber. But who was the second?
a) Brad Silverberg
b) John Malone
c) David Kaufer
d) Steve Wozniak

25. Michael Dell once had to correct Dell's address after it appeared as:
a) Round Rock, Texas
b) Round Pond, Texas
c) Little Rock, Akansas
d) Rolling Rock, Michigan

26. How does Mark refer to Fed chief Alan Greenspan?
a) The Superman
b) The Patriarch
c) The Fireman
d) The Batman

27. Within SNS, Apple's head is nicknamed:
a) Steve 'The Magician' Jobs
b) Steve 'Type A' Jobs
c) Steve 'Obsessive-Compulsive' Jobs
d) Steve 'Next' Jobs

28. Mark believes Bill Clinton was perhaps:
a) Our dumbest president
b) Our smartest president
c) Our luckiest president
d) Our most libidinous president

29. Which of these regular SNS contributors has not guest-written an issue?
a) Scott Foster of Lehman Bros
b) Steve Waite of Trilogy Partners
c) Alex Letts of RI3K
d) Mark Edwards of iQuantic

30. Anyone using past data to model future trends risks being labelled:
a) An RVM guy
b) An ROI guy
c) A POS guy
d) A TLA guy

SECTION 3: TECHNOLOGY & BUSINESS

31. A 'Raisin Muffin' is:
a) A piece of confectionary made with eggs, butter, and flour
b) A model of emerging local broadband
c) The SNSers' euphemism for having a girl in every port
d) A metaphor demonstrating the increasing decentralisation of software companies

32. Which of these concepts was born in SNS?
a) Internet Assistant I
b) Internet Assistant II
c) Always-on, Real-Time Access
d) All of the above

33. Complete this SNS sentence: 'You can't patent my...'
a) Child
b) Business process
c) Dog
d) Lunch

34. Resonance Theory is:
a) A new form of musical notation based on quartertones
b) A theory stating that all energy and matter result from the properties of empty space
c) The study of shapes and the applications they lend themselves to most harmoniously
d) A theory of how international markets interconnect when trade barriers go down

35. SNS believes the principal danger of mobile phones is:
a) The possibility that low-level electromagnetic radiation may cause cell damage
b) The extent to which musical ringtones can incite fellow travellers to violence
c) The way they'll let governments track our every move and utterance
d) The freedom of movement they offer to terrorists

36. What was 'that rabbit jab fakeout cable-owned defensive reactionary complementary satellite TV service that no one wanted, was about to run out of cash, and that everyone talked about'?
a) Rupert Murdoch's Sky network
b) Primestar, on being bought by Hughes
c) Iridium, on announcing its plans to become a broadcaster
d) The DirecTV service

37. What does the CG in the C/G Effect refer to?
a) Charles de Gaulle Airport's gradual supplanting London's Heathrow
b) The combined economics of Hugo Chavez and Alan Greenspan
c) The Correlation/Gradient parts of SNS's economics as taught at Stanford
d) The Corporate Governance principles not followed by oil companies or American presidents**

38. Which PR-challenged company, we learned in SNS, hands out a monthly 'Muzzle Award' to anyone speaking to the press?
a) Juniper Networks
b) Microsoft
c) Intel
d) Goldman Sachs

39. The Nasty Babies are:
a) Failed human cloning experiments
b) AT&T spinouts engaged in illegal, anti-competitive behaviour
c) The young dotcommers who made it big in 1999 but are now flipping burgers
d) The independent states of the former Soviet Union

40. The phrase 'Mooned the Gorilla' referred to:
a) Dr Diane Fossey's influence over Fortune 500 CEOs
b) Symantec's successful competing with Microsoft
c) Microsoft's 'give 'em this broken version!' defence at the tying trial
d) A technical term for replacing obsolete optic fibre with nice fast WDM glass

SECTION 4: GEOGRAPHY & POLITICS

41. Project Intelligent Response is:
a) SNS readers' suggestions for dealing with the terrorist threat
b) A successful (and famous) Microsoft direct mail campaign
c) A plea to Americans not to answer the phone with 'Who dis?'
d) A grassroots initiative for people to be nice when dealing with each other

42. According to SNS, it's possible future trading borders may be defined by:
a) Ethnicity
b) Encryption
c) E-commerce
d) Corruption

43. The new criminal economy includes:
a) Columbian-led narcodollars
b) The Russian Mafia
c) The OPEC oil cartel
d) All of the above

44. SNS believes governments acquiring $200-300bn for 3G rights amounted to:
a) Exhaustion and inaction
b) Extortion, not auction
c) Evaluation, not action
d) Engagement and activity

45. SNS's modest proposal asked governments to:
a) Convert payments due into long-term loans
b) Privatise state-owned telcos
c) Exclude illegal bidders from spectrum auctions
d) Create scarcity in available spectrum

SECTION 5: MISCELLANEOUS & OBSCURE

46. What creatures of Mark's acquaintance have used the same nest for over ten years?
a) Barn swallows
b) Canadian geese
c) Orca whales
d) Wolf cubs

47. The Bottom Three Billion is:
a) Melinda Gates' housekeeping allowance
b) Slush funds of Latin American leaders
c) The number of people not wanting PCs at any price
d) The final tally of failed dotcoms

48. The tall ship most closely connected to SNS is:
a) The Golden Hind
b) The Regina Maris
c) The Mayflower
d) The Cutty Sark

49. The Orca Relief Citizens' Alliance is:
a) The first enfranchised society outside homo sapiens
b) A charity supporting the whales of Puget Sound
c) A term for two pods of whales in the Pacific Northwest
d) A society of deprived whale-watching boat captains

50. According to published figures, the SNS subscriber base is now:
a) Over 2,000
b) Over 5,000
c) Over 10,000
d) Big.

That's it! Now hit submit to get your results. If you'd like to know what you got wrong, why not enter your name and email address too (which won't be shared with anyone else, of course) and you'll get a list from Redpump's Chris and/or SNS's SAM shortly.

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