htsh

I know a bunch of sports fans of all sorts but mostly I know me, and I know that I have a DVR & all kinds of netflix videos to catch up on that compete for my (damn-near-zero) entertainment time with the NFL. Personally I gave up the NFL as a result of this -- so maybe I'm a bad example. And I'm done with ESPN too. Really, I haven't noticed in the week that has gone by so far. And I love sports -- I'll watch NBA and MLB games and my life will be quite alright. I'll even play sports videogames & read about sports & watch sports news on television & I will do it without watching ESPN or the NFL.

So I'll give you that the freaks won't switch but I don't think you'll give me that the casual fans will if they associate the NFL or ESPN with these bad things.

Out of curiosity, would you be able to give up ESPN or the NFL or even one of those things? I'm not saying give up everything, but can't you see that if everyone who was upset even chose one company to boycott that it would do something?

You are stating another reason more than refuting his. I'm not disagreeing with your reason but his point is that this is big from Congress' perspective as we can now safely say that there are 0 internet companies in support of this. Whereas before Congress saw a mixed signal they now see unison in one of our country's most important growth industries. And that is big.

And I don't know if you've transfered domains before but I didn't have a good time doing it. Though it was not difficult I think we've seen some tremendous overstatements in this thread as to how easy it actually works out in practice.

And for me at least it's not that it not difficult to not watch ESPN. People don't live in a world without choices -- usually when they buy Battlefield they are also considering MW3 or the Batman game. There are some die-hard fans but also a lot of us that like football but are perfectly happy watching an episode or two of Breaking Bad instead if that's on. The NFL needs casual fans too, and those are the ones we should think about when we think about boycotts. Of course it will seem hopeless if you think about the guy with his face painted blue but I'm asking you to think of the guy flipping channels at home.

You only need to sway opinion a tiny little bit to change things considerably -- this is why boycotts work so damn well. The hardest thing to get over the common cynical attitude that "people won't do it, therefore we should not try."

(you should check out some Gandhi -- he explains far better than I ever can why boycotts aren't just effective but arguably the most effective tool that ordinary citizens have, and also almost always much easier to execute than we think they are)

(i meant "did not" rather than "did" in paragraph 4 above. apologies for the confusion & for posting this but it was past the allocated edit time)

The thing I can't help but wonder is whether the average NFL or ESPN viewer would just sit tight if they knew their internet was about to get a lot more limited and/or expensive?

My point is that if the law is really as bad as we think it is (and it is), then defeating it shouldn't be more than a problem of explaining the law to people. And the Gandhian in me can't help but wonder whether simply informing them is enough?

"Dear America. ESPN & the NFL are about to take away your free porn -- love, Google"

well should is a strong word. and if you are a startup it's very possible that you don't depend on a fair use / DMCA Safe Harbor argument now but will in the unpredictable future so it's unlikely a client will ever get rejected for that potential conflict.

Is it really wise to get in bed with ESPN in the first place? that's all I'm saying. I am not and will not be the first to argue that sharing lawyers with those on opposite sides of important legislation with you is a bad idea.

My point is simply that if a startup is paying a law firm & that ESPN is paying a law firm then maybe the law firm cares more about ESPN's business in case of conflicts. I do not think that is as unreasonable as your hysterical response makes it out to be.

They are not saying "we the firm support SOPA" but they are saying "our lawyer looked at this law for our client and he finds it constitutional though this is not the position of the entire firm." I can understand if you're not disturbed by the latter but I think a simple incentive analysis should make it clear why I'm not the first to argue against sharing law firms with those on the opposite sides of controversial issues facing the court.

A simple hypothetical should explain it: ESPN wants SOPA, they get their lawyer to sign a letter which says the law looks fine. Let's say the law threatens the startup's business at the same time, maybe the law firm isn't as likely to write or sign a letter arguing against the law if it means it upsets ESPN. End result, more lawyers at these firms sign on to SOPA and you end up with what appears like considerably more support for that side from the legal community simply b/c bigger clients support the law than those that oppose it.

Really -- my point is simply that you don't need to hire a 5000 lawyer firm who also represents ESPN & the NFL when a 20 lawyer firm will do. I believe that is in line with the startup ethic as well.

And again that's not my point at all to not work with lawyers who work with murderers -- your statement of my position is a straw man at best and a dishonest mischaracterization at worst. I'm not saying ESPN did anything wrong here -- I'm saying ESPN disagrees with your startup's positions and it is paying that law firm to do what it can to win and hold their position. Maybe it's not a good idea to hire the firm if you don't like the law, you know?

These aren't just employees who signed these letters independently. They were asked by a client to sign onto the letter which agrees with the clients interests. They sign these precisely because the client of the firm paid them to. While I was at a firm we signed onto letters or drafted our own for clients all the time (and it was precisely b/c it helped get the laws through, so call it what you want -- i know I don't mind "support" though I can see how some object to the technicality). In laymen's terms, client shows up and says "we need this law to go through we'd like to hire a lawyer to write an independent legal opinion letter to the court to help them make their decision. Or maybe you guys can sign on to this guy's already written letter? We'll pay you for it, of course."

The techdirt article points this out too. When there's a law up for debate which a client wants to get through they try to get these letters in to make it more likely the law will pass. And yes this is different from official "support" which is saying "we the law firm want this law to pass." This is more like "our lawyer looked at this for our client and he does not think it's unconstitutional though this is not the position of the entire firm." To me, that's still bad but I completely understand if others are okay with it. Reasonable men can and do disagree about a lot of things.

This does not change the fact that ESPN's law firm working with other big law firms wrote large chunks of this bad law just the way their clients wanted it.

Or that lawyers at law firms don't just willy-nilly write or sign these letters for free, they do it on behalf of their SOPA-supporting clients while receiving a paycheck from the law firm who their SOPA-supporting-client has hired.

Again, that's why I made the point about sharing law firms. All it's saying is "I'm not doing business with these lawyers who I think are being paid by clients to help them censor the internet."

And though the law firm isn't saying "our entire law firm supports this law," they are saying "our lawyer looked at this law for our client and she did find constitutional problems with it even though that is not the position of the entire firm." As I explained below I can understand why the latter isn't so troubling to some but I think the incentives these firms face are the same once they are in the business of protecting ESPN's interests.

And it will not change the fact that startups not working with ESPNs law firm will 1 - Give business to lawyers who do believe censoring the internet is unconstitutional & 2 - Remove an obvious and blatant conflict of interest.

I'm just saying, do we really want our startups to be working with the same network of big law firms that helped Disney extend copyright law duration to infinity 100 years ago? These big law firms obviously have their interests in protecting old streams of business -- I would too.

PG, I know you aren't inviting them to your demo day, but I hope you can commit to not not doing business with the law firms on this list and also not sharing law firms with these old-media dinosaurs like ESPN and the NFL.

If ESPN hires a law firm to write this bad law which will likely hurt your business in the future, doesn't it make sense to advise your clients to not hire that same law firm? As someone who has worked with both, it's clear that the Entrenched Big Law model & the Disruptive Startup Model are obviously incompatible and the more we can do to move away from these conflicted monoliths the better we can actually affect real reform.

This will require some work and likely even severing an old business relationship or two, but these small changes from someone like you and a peer or 2 can have immeasurable effect. 1 Paul Graham taking business away from 1 Big Law Firm will do more than thousands of us can.

We've been using the flow control helpers in async.js to help us with the nesting issue: (https://github.com/caolan/async).

We use the waterfall most, as it allows one to run an array of function in a series with a callback at the end of the series.

Also, imho, having a Linux client early helped quite a bit with gaining street credibility amongst hackers/nerds. I know this is the reason I started using it instead of competing services.

Disheartened with technology during the lull after the first dot com bubble burst, I went to law school.

After finishing up and working at a law firm for a year, I realized that I'd rather fail at startups than do that for a living.

Exactly -- feasible, yes. Sustainable, no.

I would not be surprised if AT&T matches the price in the near future. Seems like the least they should do unless they like losing customers..

re: AT&T's plan, I think they mean two gigabytes, not two gigabits?

Agreed, though there's still something to be said about strong default settings.

And there's a huge difference between something asking for a password than something installing something drive-by without any notification whatsoever. From a social engineering perspective, it's a lot harder to get someone to enter a password than it is to get them to simply click on something.

Yes, there'd still be malware because of stupid users, but there'd be a lot less of it.

Perhaps this is something they can get a micro-volunteer to help them with.

It makes sense from a marketing perspective considering how well the Android brand has caught on.

Also, Android is a more fully-featured OS considering it has local apps and storage as compared with the cloud-dependent ChromeOS. It's likely a consumer would prefer Web+apps to just web, especially if it means they can do things like play games while offline.

And whatever happens, this is good for Linux. At the very least, we should see much better drivers...

I couldn't help but wonder whether this has given us good reason to login via oauth with facebook or twitter to these sorts of sites?

After watching how Gawker handled all of this, I think I'd rather leave my security in the hands of the engineers at facebook/twitter/google/etc. To date I've avoided clicking "login with facebook" anywhere, but I may reconsider going forward considering those folks came out unscathed.

The link hasn't worked for me since last night. I can see a cached copy, but that's it.

I thought Digg had it's fair share of right-of-center and Libertarian content, especially in the last couple of years. It was considerably more often that I'd find a conservative article on the front page of Digg than I would on Reddit's /r/politics.

Well Britney is a good example but at the other end I'd offer something like Die Antwoord, who were able to get themselves a big record deal by simply putting their videos on youtube.

Or Justin Bieber, who also only exists because of the internet and youtube. I'm not saying Bieber makes good music, but he exists and thrives because of the internet, not despite it.

Agreed, but is it now possible get established relatively easier by simply writing a better book than the other guy? I mean the ease of distribution brings the harm of piracy but aren't there also some gains?

As examples, I'd offer both Why's poignant guide to Ruby and 2 pretty good books I've recently checked out, Learn Python the Hard Way & A Byte of Python.

1. Speaking tours make money. Conferences make money, etc.

2. Fame, recognition, i.e. non-monetary benefits to being a good writer.

3. At least some people write because they believe what they have to say is important and/or helpful.

4. People will always want to own physical books. This is different than music or a dvd as a book can be passed-on/gifted much easier than a DVD or a CD, which will be obsolete.

I can see both arguments, but I'm definitely not worried about the possibility that people will stop writing books.

The US?

I don't think you're fighting effectively by screaming and calling the person you're talking to uneducated.

Fighting for privacy is great, but you're not always going to be right just because you're on the right side.

I think there's a valid point made here, that bookmarks aren't that much of a worry relative to other information.

Also, xmarks has been quite open about their practice of using these bookmarks to make money to operate. They have never hidden the fact that they were working on a curated search engine with this data.

-h

I came here to say the same thing. This sort of misogyny is exactly why the tech world has difficulty attracting / retaining women.

I'm aware of the Superman movie & I mostly agree with your criticisms, and again, my objection was that I thought you overstated your criticism of the "United States public school system." Obviously, not all public schools are bad.

For example, my hometown of Montville, NJ has a wonderful public school system which has very good outcomes. As does Bergen County, NJ. And many of my friends and family have attended Rutgers University and received outstanding educations. These are public schools, functioning just fine. Rutgers is arguably better than most private universities, and our high school arguably better than most private schools.

Again, I agree that our public schools aren't great for the most part, but I think this is a complex problem and that we should try to remove ideological arguments and drastic, unrealistic solutions (like taking a hatchet to our entire public school system). And again, yes, charter schools are great and more are necessary to meet demand, but I don't think that necessarily means we should ignore efforts to attempt to improve the public school system which many kids are stuck with.

tl;dr: Yes, charter schools are fantastic, and we need more, but we should also try to improve our public education, especially in the poorest of our communities.

Cool, will check it out. And how unanimous are these views amongst sociologists? I'd imagine there is disagreement on the subject?

Curious to see this research. Are you arguing that there's no correlation between school budgets and outcomes?