abrimo

I agree! My reply would never be endorsed either!

You're trying to blame the victim, which is troublingly common when someone has been raped or sexually harassed but it is never the right response. It is traumatising when these things happen, it is personally demeaning and it is never acceptable.

Justine is brave for coming forward and we should encourage everyone in a similar situation to do the same and support them when they do.

The deeper cultural problem here is that your comment has been voted to the top.

Yea it really is - I have nothing to do with these fellows but I found it interesting nonetheless so I posted it.

When you board a commercial airline you have to show that you have a valid visa/passport for your destination however that is not technically checked until you go through that country's immigration service.

So would it be possible for a private jet to pick up Snowden and drop him in Ecuador where he could officially apply for asylum? It sounds like the main issue is that he has to be in Ecuador to apply.

The university is paid upfront by the federal government so it can still cover all of it's costs. The taxation office then collects the repayments, which are just taken out of your income.

There are risks for the government. For example, lots of Australians work overseas and unless they return to Australia to work, they won't pay back the debt. http://theconversation.edu.au/expat-workers-have-cost-austra... But that's probably not a huge percentage of outstanding debt.

I grew up in the US however I'm Australian and attended university in Australia.

The Australian system (HECS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aust...) of managing higher education costs seems very fair. I studied two degrees at a leading university over 5 years. The accumulated cost for five years was about $30-35,000 for Engineering and Politics (some degrees are more expensive). My degree cost the university more than I paid with the remainder being covered by international students (thanks!), government subsidies/grants and donations.

All local students entering a university automatically go into this system. Each year you get a statement that lets you know how much debt you've accumulated and how much is left to pay. If you want to pay upfront then you receive a discount (10-20% off or something). However almost no one does because your debt is interest free and only indexed to inflation.

You don't start paying it off until you earn over $49,000/year (http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.aspx?doc=/content/...), at which point you pay about 4% of your income until you've paid it off. If you earn more then you pay it off more quickly and at a higher percentage.

This system has enabled me to work on my startup right after finishing uni without the burden of a debt that needs to be repaid immediately. It also let me focus on enjoying university without upfront costs. I think it also removes the cost barrier for students wanting to go to uni, as all universities cost the same and are all covered by HECS. You can decide where to go based on convenience, degree and anything else without worrying about the cost.

Lots of people here still complain about the cost and the system could surely be improved a bit. But it's quite a good solution and I'm glad the article mentioned it.

That's 28 months - not weeks. So assuming you would normally upgrade every 2.5 years then it's about the same cost. If they release a new version each year then the subscription service would win easily.

More importantly, creative suite is now affordable for a huge range of people. Freelancers, students and small businesses can now afford a legal and full version.

This reminds me of the article gruber wrote late last year about the types of companies that make future concept videos.

http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/companies_that_publish_con...

Asimo seems quite a bit more advanced overall than those robots. They are designed for quite specific purposes and domain - it's hard to tell but they also don't seem autonomous. With Asimo, Handa is going for a general purpose robot that can emulate a human while Boston Dynamic appears to be going for more specific military needs with things like BigDog.

I remember someone on Silicon Beach said they went through it. It sounded good so I had a look and called up about it however you aren't allowed to launch your business until you complete the program. It also seems geared towards small local businesses (e.g. businesses must be 'not competing directly with existing businesses').

However I like the idea behind it. I was even thinking of some program similar to the way university is funded (HECS scheme) that provides interest free capital (maybe right after you finish uni) to explore starting a business. After spending 4 years at uni, an extra year to learn and explore business ideas would be very rewarding even if you end up working after that.

Thanks, great job on trying to change Tourism Australia - some of the campaigns I've seen from them are just embarrassing. It really does feel that those startups which have been successful have done so in spite of being in Australia, not because of it. I, like you, am determined to try and do it on my own.

Yea I was hoping they would reallocate the money they are currently spending. For example, they give over 60m a year to private VC firms which 'manage' the money by making very few investments. They've also committed almost as much to Commercialisation Australia which doesn't seem to go anywhere.

The current government programs are costly and not yielding many results. I'm hoping they could take a fraction of that for programs such as the ones in Singapore or Chile and get far better results.

I've attended one of Stallman's talks and it was more of a comedy than anything else. I don't actually take him seriously, he did some great work in the past but the world has moved on.

I love that speech, back in the early 80s he spoke to the Academy of Achievement which was also great to listen too: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/pagegen/brochure/p3.html (search for steve jobs)

I completely agree. Although it might seem like we work hard and are fairly rewarded, the fact we have the skills and opportunities that we do is through no doing of our own.

President Kennedy gave a great speech about the role and responsibilities of educated people in society. 'Increased responsibility goes with increased ability, for "of those to whom much is given, much is required."' http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/aZ0Im5s0mUqPJlFNs6iO4...

Yea I agree, this is quite annoying.

I stopped reading on the first page where he showed a 'default' screenshot from each program and stated they were strikingly similar. Only to spend the next 3 paragraphs explaining how he customised the Windows version to achieve that similarity.

At the bottom of the first page he compares the number of places to click and comes up with a figure of 14 for iPhoto and 5 for Windows. Apparently it made sense to include all the navigation for iPhoto in the count but only include the menu bar for Windows.

It was clear which he preferred so no further reading was necessary.

Yea I saw that list, I was asking because we're trying to list our app and haven't received any response from their support email, google group or official blog. They seem a bit under resourced or neglected.

Cool - looks kinda nifty. The priority list approach to task management is something we've done for our software as well. https://mijura.com/

The idea of fixed priority isn't very flexible or realistic anymore. Having a list of tasks to complete in the order you have to complete them really make it easier to focus and prioritise.

Sometimes things do go wrong however the impact of them going wrong differs between businesses. When things go wrong for a mobile phone company lots of people might have poor reception but when things go wrong for AirBNB, a person could actually get killed. This has always been my fear and I sincerely hope they shutdown or pivot before this happens.

AirBNB hasn't been upfront about the level of risk their customers undertake when they use their service. And the downside, however rare a occurrence (even if it's one in a million or one in a thousand) is just too bad to even consider consider using them.

Is this the worst thing you've seen him do because it personally affects you?

All the times that you said he was just being harsh, I'm sure the people who were impacted thought he crossed the line as well.

To be fair I doubt the victim would be comfortable receiving airbnb credit or using the service again. If this happened to me and I was offered credit, I would feel insulted.

I thought it actually did take a weekend because when I say 'weekend project' I literally mean that I spent one weekend on it and then it was working. I posted some time ago about http://bemyfirstcustomer.com which I thought of and then coded in a weekend.

Little projects are a really nice distraction and I use them to clear my mind. I've found out early on that spending all my time developing the same thing, https://mijura.com in my case, was draining. Short projects also let me test out new libraries, hosting providers etc. That said, a weekend project can prove popular and then consume an immense amount of time. This happened to me with http://vodafail.com, which I initially created while waiting on hold for customer service.

Yea, I was researching frameworks for our software (https://mijura.com) and I had all but given up on Java until I found play framework. It's like Ruby on Rails meets Java, very well designed and the views are in Groovy.

It's also under active development and the community is quite strong.

Thanks for the feedback. Yea the UI could use some work and a nice logo would be good too, I'll see if I can get that done soon.

Yea it's not meant to be literal, the companies that post offers are able to disable them whenever they want. So it's really about getting your first few customers I guess. This being a spur of the moment sort of thing, the name was a tad humorous as well.

Good points, and glad BugCam got an early signup - I really hope it helps people discover cool new products.

Yea it's hard to know how it will end up. I kind of want to keep it open so any startup can advertise their product/service. Instead of a groupon clone where you have to have some awesome pre-approved deal to get listed.

Thanks for the suggestion, I've just added a field for you to put your email address to hear about new offers.

Thanks - those are some good points. I've just added some more text in bullet form that hopefully explains it a bit better.

Yea just your email address if you are interested in being one of the firs customers. Your email address is then given to the person who posted the service and they can follow up. You can also visit the company's website directly and signup for their service.

I've just started a company with one of my friends and now we are working on getting our first customers. I read a lot of articles about the topic and it seems everyone faces the same challenges. So I was thinking of creating a place where startups could post their upcoming or newly released products and early adopters could happily be their first customers.

I had some time yesterday so I created a site for it: http://bemyfirstcustomer.com/

You essentially just add your product and some sort of discount or offer and people will register their interest. Then you can just contact those people. It's pretty informal, not like those coupon sites that cost money but hopefully it will help people generate leads (if enough people use it).

What does everyone think? Does this already exist somewhere else?