I'll buy one...but your discount code doesn't work. It says "Enter a valid discount code".
557 karma · joined February 12, 2010
Venue shopping would obviously help him (ie Silicon Valley vs Arlington, Virginia). However, I think what he's pushing for is to be able to raise the illegality of the programs the government was hiding from the public (and lying about before Congress). It is not at all clear that this type of evidence would be allowed, and is pretty important for how a jury would construe his actions.
In addition, it waters down the statute from "intent to defraud" to "willfulness".
Oh by the way, they also want to take all your stuff, regardless of if you're convicted.
Seems like this will backfire spectacularly when foreign countries and companies stop buying American made tech for fear of these hardware backdoors. Spectacularly irresponsible.
Anywho, you can do the search that got him caught yourself.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A+bitcointalk.org+ross...
The relevant result is now #2, but used to be #1 (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-google-search-that-took...)
He had deleted the original comment, but someone had replied and copied the text. He subsequently posted an ad for job postings with the same username and his personal email address (I think rossulbricht@gmail.com).
Basically, he was about as sloppy as it gets if you're running a criminal drug enterprise. Also, his confidant, Variety Jones/Cimon, hinted that he had done some research on Ulbricht and found some stuff. He was absurdly cocky about evading law enforcement. Makes you wonder if he has some kind of psychological disorder.
Personally, I used to like to quote fixed prices for my projects, based on what I knew the approximate time it would take to complete the project. This gives certainty to your clients about how much they will pay, and also incentives you to deliver the project on time and without too many headaches for the client (thus leading to unpaid time bugfixing).
If you don't have any contacts who know people in tech, then another way to go is to start attending hackathons, or to do contract work on freelancer websites. These two options are less desirable, as you will tend to find customers who are much more picky and more price sensitive, but it is a way to get started absent a network.
What you should charge is a tough question. I think it really depends on what you are building. Mobile apps tend to fetch more than web apps. I'd shoot for $50-100 per hour to start out, and you can perhaps bump that up the better you get (especially if you are doing fixed price work and are conservative about how you quote jobs).
For invoicing, I would say Microsoft Word usually suffices. Unless you have an insane number of clients, it's pretty easy to keep track of your invoices by emailing PDFs and cashing the associated checks. For contracts, there are a number of options online for doing freelancing. I would download about 4-5 of them, read them thoroughly, and pick and choose the best options. If you want, once you have put together your ideal contract, you can hire a lawyer for an hour to review (but probably not necessary, assuming you are doing business through a corporation that doesn't have substantial assets).
On the contract front, one thing to note that is important. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, sign non-compete agreements. Everyone and their mom is going to want you to sign an agreement that says you will not compete with the product you build for them for 1-2 years (or perhaps more). I would highly recommend against this. By the time you get done working for 5-6 clients, you are arguably going to be non-competed out of pretty much every segment of the software industry in one way or another. When someone asks for this (unless they are offering you a yacht and $20 million dollars) just say no. On the other hand, I tend to view non-disclosure agreements as being pretty harmless (however, read these thoroughly. sometimes people sneak non-compete language into agreements titled "nondisclosure").
As far as legal issues, the big thing is to have an LLC. You should also have a bank account for your LLC. All transactions concerning your business go through the business bank account. Your business bank account should not be particularly well funded (i.e. pay yourself often from your business bank account). All agreements are signed by you, the "Member" of the LLC, not by you individually. Read up on "piercing the corporate veil", and don't do any of the things that might lead to this. If you do this, generally the only recourse someone will have will be against your company, and this allows you to avoid personal liability for issues that arise in the business, assuming you are not grossly negligent in some way.
Visa/Mastercard/Amex take on the risk of deferred payment (you buy something today, and they don't get paid for a month). They compensate for this with merchant fees and high interest rates for those who don't pay.
Bitcoin seems to suffer from similar problems as cash: https://www.rfc1149.net/blog/2013/05/02/why-bitcoin-transfer...
However, it's worse, because its value relative to cash is neither stable nor predictable. If someone comes out with a better protocol that solves these problems in the future (and for which the Bitcoin protocol can't be upgraded), then Bitcoin could be worth nothing.
Is it really smart to suggest that loading all your money into Bitcoin is a good investment strategy?
Money is purely based on trust. That when I take dollars or bitcoins from you today, I will be able to spend them on something real in the future. I don't see why Bitcoin solves this fundamental problem, and therefore, the current system of high fees for deferred payment will apply equally to Bitcoin as it will to dollars or any other currency. Banks protect your money for a fee. How is Coinbase or any other provider in the Bitcoin ecosystem different? Let's just assume that Bitcoin disrupts all other currencies and takes over the world. Why will a Bitcoin money system not have the same problems as our current monetary system? Coinbase is still storing most of their currency in a vault...
I think that there are probably different flavors of this type of program depending on where you attend, but from my observations (regular MBA who had some minor interactions with EMBA's during school), they tend to fly/drive in for the weekends and return to work during the week. Depending on the program, you may or may not be exposed to "hard skills" such as finance, accounting, etc, as there is a presumption that students already have some of these skills. My understanding is the focus tends to be more on soft skills like leadership, management, etc, which will help competent employees become better managers in the future.
From the way you posed your question, it sound like you are thinking about paying for this yourself. If that is the case, and you don't already have an undergrad or grad business degree, then I would probably recommend either a full-time or part-time MBA, instead of executive MBA. You will probably get more for your money out of one of these programs.
I hadn't ever used this app before I downloaded it today, just to check out why Facebook payed $19 billion. It looks to me like a total ripoff of the iPhone SMS Messaging App. It sounds like they have a huge userbase, and have been able to monetize it, so there is real value there. However, this valuation seems, quite simply, insane.
Even if all 400 million of their users paid $1 per year (which isn't happening), this purchase price would be 47x revenue. Of course, since many internet software companies are operating in negative revenue territory, this is perhaps reasonable in comparison.
Call it a "vacation", or a "break", or whatever you want. But you have to step away sometimes in order to clarify your thinking. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. Despite all the lean startup craziness, nothing truly gets built in a day, a week or a month. If he has literally made no progress in a month, then something needs to change. Personally, I think the most effective thing is a change of environment. His office has become a toxic place to go during the day and procrastinate. He needs to get away from it and do something else for a bit, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.
Here are some further suggestions for what he can do to regain some balance. http://zenhabits.net/the-10-essential-rules-for-slowing-down...
https://www.tracy.k12.ca.us/sites/clunetta/Java/practice/pra...
The last question on the test is this:
The method mixup is defined as follows: String mixup(String word) { if (word.length() == 1) return ""; else return mixup(word.substring(0, word.length() - 1)) + word.charAt(word.length() - 1); }
What is the value of the string returned by mixup("IDEAL")?
a) IDEAL b) IDEA c) LEAD d) LEDA e) DEAL
I don't program much in Java, so maybe I'm missing some gotcha, but shouldn't the answer to this be "L"? The recursive mixup call will go: IDEA... IDE... ID.. I, at which point the final return value will be "".
So the value of the returned string will be "" + "L" therefore returning "L"?
In any case, the point of looking at this was to get some sense of whether a kid would even want to take AP Comp Sci. My concern with this, knowing how most of these subjects get taught in school, is that teachers would teach to the test, therefore sapping all of the fun out of programming. Knowing some of this stuff by heart is potentially valuable I suppose, but kind of operates in a vacuum, as practically you have a ton of resources at your disposal when programming (ie Google, Stack Overflow, API references, etc). This rote memorization of things could actually turn kids off of computer science instead of drawing them in.
What do you like to do? It doesn't have to cost money, per se. Go visit some friends for a week, or go on a hike, or just go do something around town you've been wanting to do but haven't. However, try to have it involve other people, and not just be by yourself.
Right now, you're working" every day, but getting nothing done. There is probably a lot of fear that your app won't work, that no one will use it, that you are wasting your time and will have nothing to show for it at the end. Of course, there is the possibility that I am just projecting on you, as I have had all of these feelings and displayed some of the same behaviors, but I guess that is for you to decide.
The purpose of the break is to get some perspective. Life is not all about this app. Even if it goes down in flames, it's really not a big deal. You're smart and you'll find something else you want to do and do that. The self doubt and fear of failure is what keeps you going to the office every day, but getting nothing done.
By taking a break and clearing your mind, you can reassess where you're at with fresh eyes, tackle the big problems keeping you from moving forward, and create a solid plan of action to move forward.
That's just my two cents, having had similar issues...
These problems can be solved with KV stores, but at the cost of human readable databases. Likewise, with ORMs, you sacrifice performance and direct understanding of how the database is being queried.
There are many advantages to a document-graph model like orientdb for these reasons.