demandred

Rhetoric of SOPA supporters > Rhetoric of SOPA detractors, when it comes to winning public support. The message needs to be streamlined...

This started as an idea to save money on laundry. We've visited the offices of Dropbox, Twilio, PB Works; even new startup Piazza, and we always accepted free t-shirts because it means more to wear and less to wash. Our ambitious goal: Sell 25 startup tee shirts for $25 each from 25 of our favorite startups. "

The one who raises the question against God in effect plays God while denying He exists. Now one may wonder: why do you actually need a moral law giver if you have a moral law? The answer is because the questioner and the issue he or she questions always involve the essential value of a person. You can never talk of morality in abstraction. Persons are implicit to the question and the object of the question. In a nutshell, positing a moral law without a moral law giver would be equivalent to raising the question of evil without a questioner. So you cannot have a moral law unless the moral law itself is intrinsically woven into personhood, which means it demands an intrinsically worthy person if the moral law itself is valued. And that person can only be God.

Our inability to alter what is actual frustrates our grandiose delusions of being sovereign over everything. Yet t he truth is we cannot escape the existential rub by running from a moral law. Objective moral values exist only if God exists. Is it all right, for example, to mutilate babies for entertainment? Every reasonable person will say “no.” We know that objective moral values do exist. Therefore, God must exist. Examining those premises and their validity presents a very strong argument. "

RZIM.org

This does not nail it though on why the country is failing at Math & Science. Parental influence is the top correlation between children and success in school. It's not a surprise that 50% of STEM degrees are going to International students (who make up less than 10% of the general US student populous) -- their parents push them towards the most difficult degrees -- Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Powerset is worth whatever MSFT was willing to pay for it, not what the predictor says its worth.

of course, now it all makes sense.

This from 28 February 08 (and blog posts dating back about 9 to 10 months as well):

We have been working on our Social Marketplace “Onista” for quite sometime and every week (and every month) we think we are almost ready for launch “only if we fix these remaining little issues”. To be honest, there is no such thing called “little issues”. There are bugs in product (tons of bugs) and we must fix those before launching.

While this is an interesting idea to help advance the revenue model, I'm not sure I understood how this would potentially 'save' the music business.

Yet on Hacker News, the recruiting grounds of said cult, this post (information contrary to the teaching of said cult) has ascended to the top?

as a consumer -- amazing as it sounds -- i would not trust something with that silly logo with my money, without doing some pretty extensive research.

in general, I feel that the look and feel of the logo, design, and mascot are just ...wrong. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but for a micro-payments service (or any that service that deals with real, hard, cash) I would surmise that presenting a reputable foot forward would go a long way in building trust and brand equity.

If a reporter/interviewer asks you about your failures, and you simply reference your success, does that necessarily mean you do not fix your mistakes?

How do you suggest you 'fix' the mistake of dropping a few balls in a game on the spot? The only answer is, you go out and continue to have big games. This would be akin to an interviewer asking Michael Jordan 'why did you miss 10,000 shots in your game' and he says 'I made XYZ game-winning shots and was NBA Finals MVP.'

If you look at any of the interviews about teammates/opponents of MJ, they all say he was very, very cocky.

Cocky != Refusal to fix mistakes.

Or perhaps, in a better context, an interviewer asking you why some of your stock purchases did not work out favorably, and you stating that you've had a lot of successes despite your failures.

I'm by no means a Michigan fan, but I saw him play a few games last year (on TV) and he was clearly a very, very good football player. Looking at Manningham's stats on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Manningham he seemed to have a pretty good season last year, when I believe the interview took place.

And that is why Manningham is in the NFL and OP is the one writing about him. Excuse someone for wanting to focus on their accomplishments and not their failures and for having a little backbone -- must be a terrible thing to have. Great athletes who aren't uber confident (whether or not they express it externally) aren't great athletes.

Solid writing though.

Great that they're 'making something people want' but their posts are generally condescending -- stop the incessant chatter and show off this amazing product you've built for 'normal' people that is going to change the world and be uber-profitable.

He already had lots of traction. I think the author's supposing that Zuck went to a VC before FB took off like crazy.

Sure, Facebook may not have made sense until it existed in some form, nor friendfeed, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have a good elevator pitch, the pitch is often showing off part of the product, not just an idea, which by itself is largely worthless. Most VCs don't fund just ideas, there has to be at least some basic implementation already.

What is this point talking to? I don't think it addresses anything in the post, and I think you might have read it incorrectly.

The author's arguing that elevator pitches don't do justice for some products; that a VC essentially won't be able to understand/grasp the power of a product until s/he sits down and uses it, a la the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone.

great execution, but where's the differentiation with Songza, Seeqpod, Streamzy, et. al?