hnsmurf

I get the impression that the supply and utility of Bitcoin are both still far too low to be used for serious money laundering.

Laundering isn't particularly difficult anyway. You're probably still just better off buying a bar and pouring vodka down the drain.

The investors are tasked with making money. The investors are going to have made a lot of money after the IPO. It doesn't matter much to them whether the Groupon CEO took their money and rolled it up and lit it to make a really awesome bonfire, if the investors put in $1 billion and get back $10 billion they're happy. That's why they allowed it, and it's also why they turned down $6b. They're all acting in accordance with their financial incentives.

What we need is a trade association to address this issue. One specifically focused on software startups would be nice. It'd probably have to be funded more by investors and recently successful startups. Maybe Fred should give it a shot.

HTC and Samsung are both building Windows Phone. It's not exclusive to Nokia.

I think that's the problem, no one company is capable of doing it on their own. I don't think what Apple has done can be replicated now, in fact I don't think even they could replicate it if they were starting over.

A monoculture just can't compete at this point. I love WebOS, but I won't buy the phone. The apps aren't there like they are on Android, and as long as HP alone is selling it the platform won't be big enough to encourage that.

Since I've already derailed this, also what's up with everyone saying "I could care less" when they mean "couldn't"?

"It is a literal gold mine for black hats that learn how to exploit its millions of users and curtail its terms of service."

Either he doesn't know what "literal" means or I need to get a pickaxe and head on over to Craigslist.

It's a bit of a scare tactic to compare it to lead and DDT. Both of those are extremely harmful, but not because of their carcinogenic effects. The fact that cell phones are in their same group on some carcinogen list means essentially nothing, in fact it's not even worth mentioning. I suspect the article only does for the scare value.

If they're going to go that route, they should use scarier things. Maybe they could get rabid bears and Al Queda members listed in the same group.

In my experience people who write blog posts like this don't have enough eggs to really worry what happens to the basket. It's either someone with very little life savings or a pump and dumper.

That flares up every few months. It's pseudo-intellectual herpes.

The Berkshire Hathaway quote illustrates the diversity point here. Berkshire made a lot more than 10 investments, just those 10 returned most of the money. If they knew in advance what those 10 would be they would have only made those 10 investments, but they didn't so they diversified.

They look fairly close when viewed head on, but then a lot of phones do. The EVO or just about any Android handset without a keyboard looks like a slightly bigger iPhone from the front. They've got a few more buttons, but other than that it's just a big touchscreen.

Turn any of them sideways though and the iPhone still looks better. This picture does a good job of showing that:

http://iphonehelp.in/content/uploads/2010/06/iphone-4-vs-gal...

It's not the worst option at all, it's just the best of a bunch of bad ones. As a small software company CEO I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to maximize revenue, not to take stands against patent abuse. If my options were pay a small fee to someone who didn't deserve it, or go broke trying to fight it (no matter how right I am) I'm choosing the former.

It's unclear here what is right, even if you assume the patent is total bullshit. Is spending the money your investors gave you, and that your employees depend upon for their livelihoods, to fight a (probably) unjust patent claim right? It seems you're trying to make a right out of two wrongs there. It's certainly foolish from a profit-maximizing standpoint, and it's hard to imagine it's going to have any positive effect on the patent system even if you win.

By "legacy" do you mean restaurant?

I suppose the fact that more people use Dropbox than Google Docs shows they overestimated the speed of the transition.

Unfortunately it's more because my customers are. If I could just move I would have to have maintained that level of income. It's hard to pass up a few hundred grand a year for not much work.

I once had a collection of poker-related software that did in the low 6 figures per month. Unfortunately recent government actions kicked that in the nuts.

I'd be surprised if you don't do well with AR too. You could probably benefit from an active sales force a lot, though I could certainly understand why one wouldn't want to go down that route. The place I get my hair cut at, for instance, makes dozens of these calls a day yet would probably never hear of your service without a cold call.

The media is largely conflating two very different definitions of "hacker" here. There's a big difference between the people who jailbreak hardware and the people who steal credit card data. The former is arguably legal and moral, the latter is neither.

The type of hacker that brought down PSN and stole credit card data needs no motive other than the millions of dollars of credit fraud that will follow. They need only opportunity.

The difference is the more I get rejected, the less each individual one hurts. I don't think that's true about getting stabbed, though I haven't experimented to prove it.

Did you get an apk or something?

He's right, I quit three times and probably should go for #4 sometime soon.

I think it's a relevant distinction. Clearly the California company doesn't apply to all corporations in the world or even country. The point is there's likely a loophole that for an interstate or international software corporation will render the regulation toothless.

Every company in Silicon Valley is actually a Delaware corp anyway..

I'd be more interested in seeing the breakdown by revenue. In my experience FB ad CPMs are way lower than Google's. Even if they had equal impressions Google would still be profiting something like 10x more probably.

How is that possible? Was it USB tethering or something?

I'm not sure this matters much. To use one of these apps you have to root your phone. Anyone who knows to do that knows you can sideload apks.

Average consumers, who don't have the slightest clue what rooting is or why they'd want to do it, just use the tethering app installed by the carrier, or nothing at all.

There are a ton of web based ones if you don't want to use a spreadsheet. These calculators are very popular amongst direct marketing and CPA affiliate profiteers. I hesitate to link to any here for fear of being marked a spammer, but a Google search will turn up tons.

This is why video game companies hire more artists than programmers.

Counting frames is often not productive though, cut-out animations (which PvZ appears to be using) allow artists to render many frames from one base illustration and some extra work. They're not necessarily easy but they're often a large time savings over frame by frame.

"Apple has not “lost sales” to Android as it has been selling all it can produce. "

I'm not sure that's a useful way of looking at it. If Android were never born Apple may have doubled production capacity and still be selling out for lack of a viable competitor.

And even if it's been benign so far, it won't be soon. It's hard to spot the effects of competition in a rapidly growing market like consumer smart phones or tablets. It'll be a lot easier once everyone already has one, and how far away is that? Phones are almost there and tablets probably will be in 2-3 years.