incomethax

Open Question to HN: How would you go about making a cellphone company that could both make a good network and not treat its customers terribly?

Sharing an mp3 is dramatically different from designing a similar website.

When I give a song to my friend, its like I put a website in an iframe. The whole site is still there, attributed to the website's owner, the owner just doesn't get money for it.

When I make a design that looks eerily similar to someone else's, I am trying to pass it off as my own. That's plagiarism, and that is the line that is more morally reprehensible because of the implicit deceit.

That's not to say that infringing on someone else's property is not wrong, but infringing with deceit is IMO much worse than infringing without deceit.

Apple doesn't spend its money making sure people want iPods, they spend their money making sure people want to listen to "the right song wherever they are," and making sure that the iPod is the device that lets them listen to "the right song wherever they are."

When I first saw the title of the post, I thought it was going to be about financial capitalization, but alas, some capital is still a requirement for business.

Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.

some of that stuff can be found in the Richter Scales parody of the same Billy Joel song... www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

The college humor vid reminded me of this.

The total PFE (potential future exposure) off of those 200T in derivatives is only about 8.5T (from the Q4 OCC website) (hence the need for the gov't to put out 9T in stimulus)

One thing to note, the total PFE was thought to be around 500 billion prior to the bubble collapsing, so even this analysis may end up being incorrect.

Most of those derivatives are the 'toxic assets' that everyone talks about, essentially houses that are built with no one to pay for them.

Only if the paper is a quantum state

YC has always had the brand image of turning out good, well trained, companies. I remember a post about it a while back, on how YC was like the "Harvard or Stanford" of the seed stage incubators.

There are a couple, Techstars [http://www.techstars.com] in Seattle is one that comes to mind. Another is iVentures10 in Chicago [http://www.iventures10.com]

However, YC still has the brand and the experience with this format.

Hmmm... Interesting... Seems like a prisoner's dilemma situation to me. If I was to patent, it would be to my benefit, but it would also hurt the 'other ' I was playing the game with (supposing he didn't patent).

I suppose Carmack's position paper would advertise to the world that he is in favor of no patents, thus in this 'multi-round' game he is providing others with the ability to collude with him to keep patents out of his field.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Then he wouldn't have driven his horse to death. He would have enjoyed the time riding and wouldn't have any regrets when he stopped. He would have been happy.

Of course this would affect hackers around the world. Anything that Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. affects hackers because so many hackers are employed by these companies. Facebook is the same way, the churn of ideas that goes through each of these companies matters because only through working with other hackers do hackers develop and refine their own ideas. Without these large companies subsidizing hacker side projects we wouldn't get any of the idea building that spins into new companies and growth for our economy.

Even in the face of a highly devalued dollar, the US is simply no longer equipped to shift to a manufacturing base. The cost structure for any manufacturing company that relies on labor is too high for any margin of competition due to current laws.

If the dollar dies, especially if doing so removes its status as a reserve currency for much of the world's economies, the US economy/nation-state will be in for a long time of restructuring.

The only part of the economy I see any potential real growth is the creative sector. That too is in some serious trouble with the number of science/engineering grads decreasing and the test scores for science and math being as dismal as they are for high schoolers.

That's why I like gold ;-)

Compiz-fusion also has a nice widgets layer (similar to dashboard) that makes making python widgets a breeze.

Also the desktop cube helps when you're using 4 virtual desktops and can't remember which desktop had what running

There have been plenty of 'first steps toward building practical nuclear fusion power stations.'

Excuse my skepticism, but I doubt anyone will come out with a breakthrough anytime soon. Even if they do, it will still take years to figure out how to commercialize the technology safely.

No fusion reactor is going to be the answer to our energy needs in the foreseeable future.

Most values for quantum variables have multiple values at any point in space-time.

That said, even if we assume that the universe had no state prior to the big bang, we can postulate that state to be arbitrary, because it may be 0, it may be 1, or it may be both 0 and 1 at the same time.

Is there some kind of startup association that startups could join to negotiate better healthcare insurance plans as a collective?

Seems to me like it would provide many startups a large cost savings if one were to join.

To our vantage point, the universe was "undefined" before the big bang. It's also "undefined" from our vantage point to every space that exists (or rather doesn't exist) outside of our universe.

If you buy certain flavors of string theory, you could say that we can only tell what's going on beyond our own 'brane, as our 'brane happens to be an embedded system that we would need to step outside to understand what exists outside of it.

Essentially it seems to me that Yegge is saying that we don't know what's going on outside of our 3-space 1-time universe, and that even posing the questions from within the universe is an exercise in futility.

What does that make javascript then?

(IANAL) FSF has to make those silly/scary claims in their suit because lawsuits much like negotiations will end up starting at extremes of price and will work their way to a generally 'reasonable' middle ground. Which may be something more like a bunch of money to FSF from Cisco.

Also, we might get some good case law if this actually goes to trial.

I think he must have heard the term "Artificial Neural Network" and made some hasty inference that it means something having to do with the brain.

On a side, is it just me or has HBR putting out more link bait in the past couple of weeks?

If it wasn't hard it would have already been done. It's time we had a "healthy disregard for the impossible" and get to work fixing the people problem.

Ghandi was one man (albeit a great man), yet he alone changed a country, and the world. We are already a community strong, and a community of leaders and visionaries at that. There's no reason we can't do as ajkirwin suggests and build our own protocols, systems, and infrastructure.

We are the future, and its our chance to make the world as we want to make it.

Let's get to work.

Down for me too

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/...

Says its down for everyone.

When I felt I've really changed the world for the better.

I've always estimated the discount rate based on the expectations for growth from the buyer. At the end of the day, the valuation on a site or business is simply whatever you can get for it. A site might be worth more to a buyer who sells a similar product whereas it might have less value to someone in another industry.

It seems as though this list is more accurately a list of web and energy startups, as there are companies that have raised money between 2006 and 2008 that is greater than 25 Million. Pacific Biosciences for example has raised ~$100 Million

(http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/fast-gene-sequencing-in-tw...)

It seems to me as though the list is not of the companies that raised the most money in the past two years, but rather the a list of companies that raised the most money that TC follows.

What I want to know is what a VC would say if presented with this prior to receiving a business plan.

While exit strategies might be fewer during a recession, the point of starting now is that the economy will (hopefully) be out of the recession by the time you want to exit (typically beyond 12-18 months).

Unless you know that it's inherently valuable... oh wait most of it is worth less than it was after the dot-com bubble burst