hnsmurf

Because the people who run publicly traded companies have their compensation heavily tied to the short term share price of their organizations. Every mobile industry analyst is most definitely reading BGR.

This is the kind of company that's supposed to get a VC round. Profitable, growing, unquestionable business model, solving pain points, etc.

First start by telling them they don't have to switch. There's no reason one can't use both. Facebook would never have gotten past Myspace if users had to switch.

Interesting that it doesn't mention the craigslist spamming. I'd wager that's far more responsible than YC. As great as YC is for many things it's not a significant source of traction for most startups.

Also the notion of using only a few apps doesn't apply to games, which is one of the killer features of smart phones. They are largely meant to be disposable, and you assume you'll be playing new ones periodically. I might keep 7 or 8 utility apps that I frequently use, but I've got a constantly rotating selection of about 1 or 2 games I'll play, and I'm not even much of a gamer.

The problem is everyone has a different 10 apps they "need" and even if you figure only 1% of apps fall into that category for someone, there's still a lot of value in a platform of 200k apps.

Have you read Steig Larsson or Dan Brown? Poor writing skills don't disqualify one from selling millions of books at a much higher price point.

20 years ago computers were a rich people toy. They quickly became a near necessity. Same with cell phones 10 years ago.

At least Axl Rose can feel a tad less bad about Chinese Democracy now.

As I mentioned below it does very much show psychopathic tendencies. These people clearly have no empathy for those they are harming. This includes far more than just the Sony executives that everyone hates (despite not knowing).

Online security is poor for the same reason airport security is. Good security would take enough time and money to make the whole thing economically unviable.

This is classic psychopathic behavior. Instead of torturing people physically to see them squirm they're doing it digitally, but the same lack of empathy is there.

Farm Town was definitely not a copy of myFarm. MyFarm was (and probably still is) far inferior in almost every respect.

Farmville was more or less a clone of Farm Town, though it evolved at a much faster pace.

There's a trade dress issue here and I'd guess that's what Zynga's claiming. It seems rather clear that a consumer could confuse this company's products for one of Zynga's and that that is their intent. It's as if you made Cleanex Tissues and then copied the design of a Kleenex box.

This is something every PR company does tacitly. Why wouldn't they? If you give journalists your product and they shit on it, you're going to go to other journalists next time.

I'm surprised a PR doesn't know enough to not state that publicly, but still.

Meizu m8? Seriously?

Right, we pay our waitstaff next to nothing in terms of hourly rate (it's well below minimum wage) and they make all of their money on tips. If a bill is $50 worth of food, you should tip the waiter on that, even if you got it with a Groupon that cost $25.

Waiters at higher-priced restaurants do make considerably more. Thus those restaurants are far more selective (a lot of waiters at, say, Fridays are new to the trade, not so at Mortons) and the waiters are better. Their jobs are more time-consuming too since there are more courses, wines, they're expected to be more knowledgeable about the ever changing menu, etc.

WWII is, in many ways, the demarcation point of the modern era. Almost every facet of life was changed. Women entered the workforce, agriculture and industry were more or less entirely rewritten.

In terms of genocide, it was the first one to use computers. It used systematic, organizational principles similar to what a business might use. It created a set of processes both to carry it out and to make the population accept and even participate in the unspeakable.

Groupon customers are definitely poor tippers. I've known a number of waiters to complain about it.

The problem is they tip on the Groupon price, not the full price, and are thus tipping something like 40% of what they should be.

You should never use manure that hasn't been properly composted. I don't think anyone who grows chickens and their own crops would not know this.

Most problems like that come from the industrialized food supply. You'd be pretty hard pressed to get e coli from spinach you grew yourself.

I don't think anyone is calling them evil due to the app store restriction here. But they definitely stole the guy's app and logo. That's both illegal (at least the logo part) and immoral.

Reject the app, sure. Build similar functionality yourself, perhaps a bit scumbaggy but also probably legal. (This crowd still hasn't forgiving Microsoft for doing that 20 years ago.) Do all of that and steal the logo too and you've crossed the line.

The logo certainly makes Apple guilty of a trade dress infringement. This guy will have no shortage of IP attorneys willing to take his case pro bono.

I don't get it. Most of what iCloud does is already being done on smartphones for free. Gmail and Exchange Server both already sync contacts, calendars, and email quite nicely across devices. I haven't had to manually transfer any of that to a new smartphone since long before there was an iPhone.

The music thing is nice too, but it's either a paid solution or an incomplete one. Apple once released a stat that only 10% of the music on iPods comes from iTunes (most of the rest is either pirated or ripped CDs).

With proper settings the AMOLED just blows the iPhone out of the water. I have loaded the same Flickr accounts on both side by side, the extra contrast is very noticeable.

Oh, well that's nice then. About time!

Meh. I still can't go PC-less on my iPad. I have plenty of music that didn't come from updates and isn't for sale on iTunes, and I don't see anything about OS updates OTA. Exchange and Gmail already do most of the rest for me.

The winners are highly likely to evade taxes but have no need to launder. Money laundering is unnecessary because online gambling proceeds aren't illegal in most states, and even where they are the Silver Platter doctrine and the fact that AGs don't prosecute customers generally makes it not worth while. I played poker for a living in a state where it is illegal to do so and still just claimed taxes legally (which is unusual for a poker player).

You can do that but it would serve no purpose. If you bought $100k bitcoins on a credit card, now the IRS has a paper trail. They'll want to know where that $100k you paid the credit card bill came from.

Even if you got the money in without being traced and spent them that's not laundering, it's tax evasion.

You are not wrong, unless there's some way to buy bitcoin by cash or some other untraceable means (Western Union?). I think many people are confusing laundering with other things like tax evasion. They're distinctly different.

"Hustling money through" is not exactly laundering. To launder you have to:

#1 get the money into bitcoin. How did you get it there in substantial quantity to begin with? There may be $100m of it in supply but how many people have a hundred k bitcoins they will readily exchange for cash? It has to be cash, if you put the money in a bank it's easily traced and therefore pointless.

#2 get the money out of bitcoin in such a way that you can pay taxes on it. Since you presumably can't buy houses, cars, or jet skis with bitcoin it's not very useful there. Even if you could buy a house or car, you'd still need to file taxes since the government can easily see that you bought a $500k house while claiming 0 income. The whole point of laundering money is to pay taxes on illegally gained cash so you can spend it. (Tax evasion is its own separate crime and industry, and I suspect bitcoin isn't very useful there either.)

So now you have to start a shell business that you can claim made all of those proceeds in bitcoin. It has to be one that doesn't legally require you to KYC (banking industry slang, meaning gather relevant info about the people you do business with) and report to the IRS. Then you have to find people to buy the hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from you.

Far easier to start a bar, buy alcohol, pour it down the drain, and claim you sold it. If I were laundering a few hundred grand a year I wouldn't waste time on bitcoin.