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The FUD "defaulting" means they won't pay you back. The real "defaulting" in this case means they will restructure the debt.

It is a credit agency's definition of "default", but it won't be as adverse as the money disappearing from balance sheets.

Except most of the banks have paid back TARP. Most major banks are back to 10+ % profit margins (only one lower I found was BAC).

Out of the 700 billion TARP fund, only 51 billion remains outstanding (as of September last year), which is larger then the 41 billion number you were floating around:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870343160457552...

I'm not saying all banks will be fine if Greece "defaults" (remember in this case "defaulting" implies restructed debt), but causing a US recession? Highly highly unlikely.

I've never heard any claims that the 41 billion will just disappear. The worst I've heard is that they will restructure the loans to extend pay back dates.

Also, from the article, the banks have a drop in the bucket exposure to these loans, which isn't even reporting in their annual reports as a risk. The highest exposure bank seems to be half a billion on BoA's balance sheets, and like I said, it isn't like that debt obligation is just going to disappear.

There's a lot of FUD around Greece "defaulting", and like I said, I think the main impact area will be the stock market, not necessarily bank balance sheets or the economy at large.

Seems a little high on the fear mongering and a little light on the details.

I fail to see how a Greece debt restructuring would negatively impact the US economy except to cause a little more fear on wall street.

Also - anyone else notice that the only people who seem to give praise to Greenspan are his ex-colleagues in the central bank?

First off, the global warming debate is not just about temperatures. It is also about resource use, pollution, waste, contamination of environments, etc.

Secondly, the effect of this 'mini ice age' will last a scant 10 or so years. Call me crazy but it doesn't make sense to burn more fossil fuels and continue to cause potentially unrepairable harm to our environment to optimize for a period of 10 years of relatively cool temperatures.

If the scientific community agrees that warmer temperatures are in the planet's best interest, I'm sure there is a safer and more effective way to bring that about then the massive amount of pollution and CO2 we are currently pumping into the atmosphere.

I don't think that's surprising is it? Silicon Valley is known to be the best place for VC in the world. I'm sure if you draw arbitrary lines around the hottest investment communities in Israel the numbers would also be much more even.

That Israel as a country beats us in per capita investment is an interesting figure which we should all consider.

For companies like Linked In with tiny earnings a sky high multiple might make sense. They only have one or two quarters of profitable business in. But for companies like Netflix and Amazon, who have sustained growth, revenue, earnings, and a pretty clear business model, you really have to think about the magnitude that 70x earnings growth implies.

To be honest I'm not an expert. In my opinion Netflix feels overvalued to me. Maybe not based on the P/E but it certainly doesn't seem like a 15 billion dollar company to me.

It's not a bubble because there's only a handful of companies which are trading at values which I would consider to be excessive for the underlying business.

Netflix, Salesforce, Tesla, LinkedIn, and potentially Facebook/GroupOn.

Almost every other technology company is trading at lower then average P/E values, including for the first time in a long time, Google and Apple.

So is a handful of potentially over-valued companies reasons to call out a bubble? I'd say no, at any given time there will be absurdly valued companies trading on any given stock exchange, that probably hasn't changed in the entire history of the NYSE.

Here's another quote from the page:

"In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages"

Can you point to a single case where someone did what AirBNB did and got a conviction?

Also, violating craigslist TOS is debatable, pretending to be females is not on it's face immoral.

Nothing AirBNB did was illegal or immoral. The most you can say about what they did was that it was mildly annoying.

And the sad truth is the majority of "shiny things" are sold to people living vastly beyond their means trying to pretend to live like these wealthy people.

All companies take risks, including Microsoft and Amazon. I could argue Microsoft has taken numerous more high profile risks then Facebook has. Beacon vs. Zune, Facebook Messaging vs. Microsoft Communicator.

There is nothing special about the risks that Facebook takes.

Sure, but the story is from a year and half ago.

AirBNB didn't become 'ramen profitable' until April 2009.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-did-Airbnb-raise-What-is...

I agree the 'attaboy' comments are way out of place, but there is also an over the top reaction the other way with the criticism being heaped onto the AirBNB guys in my opinion.

It was technically wrong of them to leverage craigslist by circumventing the community's own "no commercial email" request, and they should get dinged for it.

But in the grand scheme of things, when you are a tiny start up struggling to survive, this is a relatively benign grass roots attempt at marketing which the AirBNB guys even probably regret doing.

Comparing RIAA's scare tactics to this seems a little out of place, but it is right in line with Microsoft's shady attempts at astroturfing.

I expected disagreement, but didn't expect it would be so strong as to lead to down votes without discussion.

I am not trying to 'troll' anyone here, but I think if you look at the truly innovative business processes, technologies, and sheer inventions, Nokia as a company has Apple beat hands down over the last few years.

Yes, in some sense, building a better mouse trap is innovation, and no one can deny Apple's success as a company especially over Nokia's, but I would still strongly contend it has more to do with sheer execution and market positioning over sheer innovation.

Personally I think the claims of Apple's innovation are way overblown. They aren't innovators, they are generally executors. They execute very well, and market very well.

The only innovation I can really find where they were truly leaders is the concept of the app store - which admittedly has been huge - but outside of that they sell an extremely well executed smart phone and tablet.

Aside from that, Nintendo's strategy is miles away from Apple's.

Reminds me a lot of Porsche's situation a few years ago in the sports car market.

Thanks for doing the math. Unless you are currently a shareholder or options holder, market cap is a much more meaningful number then price per share. I'm surprised tech crunch didn't mention it at all.

Three billion might seem low compared to Facebook, but it is actually higher then I expected. I will be a patient outside observer for this IPO to see how Wall Street treats and values social network stocks.

TJ Maxx data theft involved 45 million confirmed credit card/debit card numbers stolen, which I believe was more serious then this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17853440/

Fact is people put most of that other information on Facebook anyway, so for 500 million people, you can quite easily find someone's age, birthday, pets, and much more just from their FB account.

There is none. In fact this whole good programmers are 10x-100x more productive then average programmers is treated as gospel around here, but I don't trust that either as a first principal or obvious assumption.

In my experience, there are good programmers and bad programmers, just like good project managers, bad project managers, good people managers, bad people managers, etc.

A bad employee is bad for your company period.

Does anyone else think that Reddit's usage of EBS might be the culprit?

Looking at their past outage response:

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/01/why-did-we-take-reddit-down-f...

Money quote: "In response, we started upgrading some of our databases to use a software RAID of EBS disks, which gives drastically increased performance (at a higher cost of course)."

RAIDing EBS disks seems like a really really BAD idea. There is a non-trivial failure rate of any single EBS disk, and if you RAID them together, your failure rate of the RAID will consequently increase. Am I understanding that correctly?

If they fix that, could that be a 'silver bullet' to fix these outages?

Top 500 web site vs. Top 50

Unfortunately for Justin.tv, those 'approved partners' is also likely the key players where the money is for live events (Olympics, sporting events, etc.).

Starcraft/WoW matches and such will only be so popular.

I think you are VASTLY overstating the importance of Top Gear, which is essentially an entertainment talk show which happens to talk about cars.

I guess I'll be the lone discenting voice and say I don't think it's that bad. Bob Parsons has always run his company the way he wants, and he has particular freedom to do so since he has zero investors and is the sole owner. He does certain things for shock value, such as the super bowl commercials, which by the way caused outage with a completely different demographic of people.

Slaughtering an elephant might offend some of your sensibilities, but hunting in Africa is wide spread and as long as the elephant is not endangered, I don't think your outrage has a leg to stand on. The elephant was used as food and now crops are protected.

There are much worse things going on in America's food industry then this. In fact if anything if that elephant could feed the village I'd say this was actually a good thing.

I can understand how this might offend vegetarians but even then, it's not like the animal was wasted.

BASIC was the foundation of the company, by 1980 SoftCard was one project of many.

I don't discount the importance of SoftCard, it was actually key in the development of the relationship between IBM and Microsoft in the 80s, but even more key was the building of the relationship itself, which was largely driven by Gates.

Allen's attitude at the time reminds me of software developer coworkers who over emphasis the contributions that software development makes. I can understand Gates' reaction - Gates' job was not any easier and certainly not any less important, so why redistribute shares?

According to Wikipedia, you recall wrong. Gates wrote the interpreter and Allen wrote the emulator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft#History

I feel like I've worked with people like Paul Allen (programmers). They tend to over value their own contributions and have "revisionist histories" when considering their relationship with their manager, but really it comes down to how much recognition they received.

The quote about Paul wanting significantly more shares for his contributions to SoftCard specifically ring true. SoftCard might have been a sales success, but comparing it's impact on Microsoft to Basic itself is a little off.

I understand, the spin came directly from Velocity.