lusr

“We reached our $15,000 goal in 3 days, and once you launch a project you can’t cap it. You can only keep it or cancel it. It became a little overwhelming.”

Is there a conflict of interest at work here?

For projects delivering physical goods, the more backers there are the more revenue Kickstarter generates, but the greater the risk of the project not meeting its targets (or goals).

While more orders may mean production discounts and economies of scale, it also means more administrative, support, and other overhead costs that were not factored into the original financial plan.

If you do release the source, what's the best way to be notified of this? Your Twitter account looks pretty active? I'm particularly interested in your risk management strategies (this is where my previous efforts fell short).

Well I'm no expert (only what I know from university 10 years ago and working in related areas of finance), but it's the latter.

One further piece of the story is that the positions are in different markets for related (or the same) financial instruments, e.g. if two different markets have different prices for e.g. USD/EUR you have a profitable arbitrage opportunity when the difference is large enough to cover finance/transaction costs.

In other words, we're talking about situations where two markets have priced the same thing differently and obviously both cannot be correct -- therein lies the opportunity for arbitrage, before the prices converge.

In the context they're referring to, the idea is to enter two positions simultaneously (not to enter and exit one position - in that case you'd have to predict which direction the market is going)

1. You buy and sell at the opportunity price (two positions, not one).

2. Prices converge.

3. You close out your positions in #1 and make a profit regardless of which direction the market went.

You're conflating two things here:

1. A messed up culture of rewarded risk taking and management turning a blind eye, turning on their own people when things go wrong in this cut-throat environment; in this sense this guy didn't do anything special and could certainly be seen as a scapegoat

2. A guy who went far beyond these tacitly approved rules of engagement, while being well aware of the game [1]:

- he spent 5 years in compliance when he started his career, so he was not ignorant of ANY of this nor can he claim he was

- he exceeded his authority dramatically and his actions were purposely designed to conceal his behaviour (no doubt advantaged by his compliance experience); it took him 2 years to blow up after becoming a trader, the only reason he pushed so hard was greed

- "skeptics" say the bank's story doesn't make sense and bank management must have been complicit but the accused himself has not defended himself in this way other than to pretty much acknowledge everything

- everybody describes him as pretty much average, is it that hard to believe a greedy young man just plain screwed up?

This is kind of like saying Lance Armstrong should keep his titles, money and receive no fines because everybody else was cheating and he was just one of the guys that was caught. I don't agree with that logic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel

1. Sometimes a bank can have better rates on ONE currency but not another, e.g. my bank, Nedbank [1], has better USD/ZAR rates but worse EUR/ZAR rates than Bidvest [2].

2. Depending on where you're from, some countries won't even grant you a visa unless you show them proof that you have sufficient foreign currency (e.g. Germany requires this of South Africans applying for a Schengen visa)

3. Specialist banks offer you additional benefits, e.g. Bidvest gave me 2 electronic bank cards to access funds in a separate, new, account when I travelled in Europe, which had 4 distinct advantages:

* lose one card I have a spare (my local bank couldn't offer that, nor would AMEX)

* my cards were not linked to my 'real' cheque account, protecting me in the event of theft and ensuring I had a backup plan if something really bad happened.

* I could protect myself from currency fluctuations by choosing to hold an account in a currency of my choice, e.g. EUR; if the exchange rate got worse, I used the EUR card, if it got better I used my local bank's credit card

* managing my budget was easier because I had allocated funds for the trip to my new travel account

[1] http://www.nedbank.co.za/website/content/travel_check/forex_...

[2] http://www.bidvestbank.co.za/foreign-exchange/retail-rates.a...

It would be sad if it were true. But there are too many parts of this story that make no sense and therefore make me doubt its veracity:

- US patent was granted in 1987 and maintenance fees must be paid 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after that i.e. first fees due in 1991; UK patent was granted in 1985 and maintenance fees must be paid 4, 5, 6, etc years after that, i.e. first payment in 1989. So why the hell does a 1988 boardroom dispute result in being unable to pay the small fees required 1 and 3 years later?

- nevermind the chronology, if you have 60 million pounds worth of orders then getting a bank manager to loan you 60,000 pounds for licensing fees is a simple matter; he probably didn't actually have 60 million pounds of orders (there's no citation in the article for verifying this claim either)

- whatever number of orders he did have were clearly not enough to convince banks or investors to pony up the 60k required; now, if he didn't have enough orders in 1989, when the UK maintenance fees became due, which was 3 years after the trade show in 1986, the real problem must be he didn't run his business properly, not patent maintenance fees

- or maybe the 60k wasn't really the full extent of the business's financial issues; either way there's only 2 possibilities here: his product didn't deliver what it claimed to and so he couldn't raise the funding he required, or the product was fine but he ran the business poorly

Reading between the lines, what's sad in this story isn't the patent system, it's the lack of business acumen required to take a product to market. Had the patent been extended it's unlikely he would have been commercially successful (other than perhaps to peddle the patent onwards, which isn't what people seem to be defining as success here) because the problem wasn't a matter of time, it was one of business strategy and execution.

What you said is true if you're young and you don't have much data to assess yourself with, but even if you're not pg and don't have a model of success well backed with data, the fact is that if you're 30 or 40 years old there are plenty of objective third parties you will have encountered throughout life who have assessed you for free.

For example, if you've been through a demanding course of tertiary education and performed better than average that says something. Indeed any endeavour that required a fair amount of intelligence, skill, and commitment where you came out above average says something: starting other businesses and having done better than average comes to mind.

In addition to the flaw pg pointed out, the second mistake the article's analysis makes is to ignore the number of opportunities you have; it seems to assume you have a single opportunity. In reality, you can make some less than optimal choices in life and still sometimes do just as fine in the end.

If you're young I don't see what's wrong with gambling a bit: if you're 20 and have zero data about how well you will perform, I believe it's still completely rational to aim high. If you don't get the $100 million exit by 25, you can reconsider your options. After 5 years of aiming high you'll have more than enough data to assess whether it's time to change your aim or to keep going.

There's a ridiculously vast difference between "a little fucked up" and serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, rapid cycling bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

If you think serious mental illness isn't a real, debilitating reality, I encourage you to spend some time with somebody in a truly psychotic state and see how you feel afterwards. Then imagine living as that person.

There may be no absolute "normal", but there are most certainly people who live in a sad, terrible, frightening state of mental disturbance with no simple treatment.

This "I will have it even so" mindset can work but not forever in my experience. If you want an expanded repertoire of techniques, David Burns' "Feeling Good" has a section on procrastination that pretty much forces you to become aware of the real reasons you procrastinate, and forces you to confront the dysfunctional thoughts at the root of it, making it very difficult to continue procrastinating.

The article is somewhat poorly written with the chronology being difficult to follow, but this is what I made of it:

1. the Edublogs team removed the offending post within the 12 hours, thereby complying with the request.

2. apparently ServerBeach took it upon themselves to double check through presumably automated means and detected the file in a Varnish cache (which would be inaccessible to the public)

3. this led to ServerBeach deciding to shut down Edublog's servers on the grounds of non-compliance.

If my interpretation of the jumbled order of events is correct, it's pretty clear ServerBeach is at fault here - it's not illegal to have a copyrighted file on your server; it's illegal to serve that file without proper rights. Their system is flawed.

What it (kind of, the focal length of the camera notwithstanding) looked like from up there: http://twitter.com/57UN/status/257547773975601152/photo/1/la...

I have to wonder how many of the members of government pushing this also happen to be shareholders of telecoms companies. (I long for the day somebody builds such a graph of all influential people so such questions could easily be answered).

> a preliminary injunction will often involve some sort of bond requirement

So depending on how large that is, it can say a bit about how serious Apple is about this stuff (or how deep their pockets are, maybe)? For anybody who's curious, like I was, the bond amount was $95,637,141.60 (~$95.6 million) [1]. Is Samsung now entitled to get some of that because of the unjustified preliminary junction? Or only if they win?

[1] http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1221082/show_temp.pdf

While I really enjoyed the story, I felt much the same way as you about the ethics. They justify their decision to run business as usual, supporting the same rate of natural growth, etc. by saying they didn't want to raise prices for their customers, but I don't think that's really a fair reason (eminent business failure would be a fair reason). There were other options:

1. freeze registration of new accounts and purchase only the drives necessary to keep existing contractual obligations

2. charge new accounts at a different rate, promising to drop the rate once drive prices returned to normal

3. change plan storage volume limits

The only reason they didn't pick any of these 3 options, as far as I can tell, is because all of them were bad for their profit margins and it would be nice if they were upfront about that as the real driver for their actions. It's not clear that their business would have failed had they chosen one of these options.

So they chose a path that would screw over the little guy needing a new hard drive in San Francisco. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and the timing made it very difficult to act on these other options, or their cashflow couldn't handle it. That too would be nice to know, if it's the real driver of their actions.

Entirely rational behaviour (in the same position I'd do the same), but while an entertaining story, it's a hard to story to feel enthusiastic about even though in every other way it shows great leadership.

I really don't understand criticism of the Samsung document, and I say this as somebody who currently owns an iPhone 4S - and my previous phone was an iPhone 3G. I also own a Samsung television and home theatre system, and plan on buying a Macbook Pro at the end of the year. I like to think I'm pretty unbiased in this matter as I've spent equal amounts of money on products from both companies, at the same time, and I'm happy with all my purchases.

From my cursory review of the document, all I can see it doing is compare the user experience between the two products. To me it's the difference between a clean-room reverse engineering exercise to build a competing product (implement, compare, revise) vs. a cloning manual (nowhere in that document does it instruct Samsung hardware/software engineers to copy Apple's form and function, it simply highlights areas of improvement; there are areas where I'm sure they concluded Samsung's implementation was better but they didn't write "hey guys we're busy cloning here, stop innovating!").

Look at #114 for example, which describes how Apple's phone has an animation when deleting notes. They don't write "we need an animation when deleting notes" (which would be copying). They identify the purpose of the animation ("fun factor") and recommend introducing some kind of "fun factor" in their own product, and leave details to designers to independently arrive at.

In fact, I recommend reading the very last paragraph in that document: "Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design." This is no more sinister than making car wheels round.

Now you could argue that Samsung was just very clever about the way they went and copied things, but there's no concrete evidence of this theory of intent that I've seen presented.

As a matter of practicality, are you honestly telling me if you manufactured [cars, fridges, stoves, watches, laptops, televisions, software, ...] you wouldn't look at your competitor's [cars, fridges, ...] to make sure your design didn't miss anything obvious?

After the first reviews of your new product come in criticizing basic design flaws and viewing it as a "step backwards from competitor A", are you seriously telling me you'd be totally happy to stand there in front of your shareholders and say "Well yeah we could have done some competitive research but that'd be really unfair to our competitors they're actually pretty nice people and we don't want them to be mad!"?

Yes Apple probably spent a fair bit of money researching their UX and Samsung piggy-backed on their research. No more so than Apple piggy-backing on Xerox's work 30 years ago. And their payoff was they were first to market and have become the biggest company in US history. I'm struggling to see where the damage is, or the loss for consumers.

I find it amazing you would write a 557 word reply and not include the following critical statement from the court that completely refutes your entire point about the court's intention in asking that question, and fully supports Samsung's argument:

THE COURT: ALL RIGHT. ANYTHING ABOUT THAT EXPERIENCE THAT WOULD AFFECT YOUR ABILITY TO BE FAIR AND IMPARTIAL TO BOTH SIDES IN THIS CASE? [1, p149:14]

This was a DIRECT question to Hogan. He and his wife both filed for bankruptcy as a result of Seagate's 1993 countersuit and nearly lost his house [2]. It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to wonder if he bears a grudge against Seagate and its currently majority shareholder, Samsung. If I were the judge I'd be furious.

[1] http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/uploadedFiles/Reute...

[2] http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/ViewNews...

There's no need to guess about any of this:

"SAIC's Center for Information Security Technology, an authorized TTAP Evaluation Facility, has performed the evaluation of Microsoft's claim that the security features and assurances provided by Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6a and the C2 Update with networking meet the C2 requirements of the Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) dated December 1985." [1]

Anyway isn't all of this missing the point that the TCSEC C* requirements didn't really amount to much anyway? It's a pity no general purpose operating systems were ever evaluated to A1 criteria, and that that the Common Criteria haven't lead to systems like EROS/Coyotos/Capros receiving more development attention.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20060503192159/http://www.radium....

Hmmm if that's the way it works that's a very positive change, although it's very different from other countries (where you can only apply for permanent residency after a number of years of actual residency) so I wonder if we're seeing the proper picture here. Finding simplified requirements is pretty difficult.

Your first link does indicate that the backlog for EB-3 category applications is 6-9 years. So in that time you presumably must be working and wouldn't e.g. be able to start your own company (which is something I'd want to do by age 35), and you'd still be at the mercy of companies who know you're an emigrant so they can pay you less. It doesn't look like you can apply for residency in the EB-2 category as a programmer unless a masters or above is a requirement for the job (i.e. Google is hiring you).

Overall the situation for older migrants is still not very good and while the US would be my first choice it still seems better to emigrate elsewhere or to wait until I'm more established and I qualify under a category with a much shorter backlog (after which it's another 5 years for naturalisation, whereas in other countries you're looking at 5-7 years TOTAL).

One serious potential problem: apparently the old employer can revoke your I-140 (if you change companies) and you lose your priority date if that happens. [1] Also all of this assume your sponsor is going to file the I-140 on your behalf. What if they promise to do it and then don't? You're still at their mercy.

[1] http://www.immigration.com/faq/us-green-card/form-i-140#t101...

An I-485 is "Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status". You can only apply for an I-485 after 5 years of residency. That means after 5.5 years you may freely change jobs - to a similar position. For those 5.5 years you're still vulnerable to discriminatory treatment. I'm not sure if "similar position" means you could form your own company.

If I were 21 again - no brainer. Unfortunately I'm nearly 30 and would be setting myself backwards if I did it now. It makes more sense to spend time establishing myself locally and using that to put myself into a more favourable negotiating position with a sponsor in the future with respect to emigration. Alternatively I may choose a country with more sensible emigration policies (e.g. Australia, UK if they reinstate their highly skilled migrant quota) and then the US loses out.

You've nailed it. As a highly skilled foreigner who's looking to emigrate, most employment visas in the countries I've looked at effectively force you to become a slave to the company sponsoring you for at least 5 years before you can even begin claiming residence status; the H-1B visa is one such visa [1].

Whilst that may be okay if you're in your early 20s or from a country with very limited options, for an older person with greater skills living a relatively good life (e.g. a high-level contractor in South Africa) it's not particularly appealing as the cost-benefit analysis isn't very positive.

Ironically, these are probably precisely the people you want emigrating to your country - people with a proven track record who are ready to settle down and want to create a future for their immediate family, spending and investing everything they earned in the same country -- not young people who have nothing to lose and will probably send the bulk of their earnings back out of the country to their families in poorer nations, and who will potentially bring the rest of their (non-skilled) family in on family visa arrangements. (Of course this is somewhat a generalization, but I think on average it holds true.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pro...

> Re-read the blog post. He's speculating the attack used DNS. (Though he has no proof.)

You may want to re-read it yourself:

"The attack on Saturday used one such amplification technique called DNS reflection."

> Beyond that the strongest interpretation would be that students with misconceptions are less likely to succeed in traditionally taught CS courses

You don't even have to go that far. When I tutored people in programming (years ago at university I tutored fellow business studies students for 2 years), I found that if I could identify their misconceptions and work through the misconceptions with them that they could indeed resolve their challenges with programming.

At best all these papers can say is that these people were unable to build an adequate mental model of programming by themselves (yes they presumably had access to tutors but that doesn't mean the tutors were sufficiently skilled, or that they used the tutors). There is nothing to suggest that spending some time working on their misconceptions with them couldn't have changed that result.

An excellent point and indeed I see my experiences with depression as a strength I can pass onto my children by teaching them to recognize and handle dysfunctional thought patterns in themselves and others.

Whilst I agree it's dangerous to attempt offering people therapy when you don't have the qualifications to back it up, I think you're conflating therapy with helping depressed individuals to recognize their condition so that they may seek therapy.

Believe me I have no desire to rescue people. Been there, tried that. However, part of the problem with people who are depressed is that they don't realise they are depressed. So when you see somebody struggling with dysfunctional thinking you have 3 options:

1. Pretend you have no additional information that can help them and hope they find the appropriate resources themselves.

2. Decide that (1) is unethical and suggest appropriate resources that may help them.

3. If (2) didn't work the last time, acknowledge that sometimes depressed individuals can be either unaware or in denial of the seriousness of their condition. Since you can't force them to seek help, you have the option of asking them the very same questions CBT taught you to ask yourself in the situation. At this point the person hopefully sees the value in what you're doing and is more convinced in the value of your suggestions in (2). At no point do you take it upon yourself to perform therapy.

CBT is based on the idea that we're ultimately rational creatures but sometimes we're not aware of all the factors influencing our cognition. While you ought to have training if you are attempting to perform therapy, you don't need a professional training to point out dysfunctional thinking in someone and point them in the direction of professionals who can perform therapy.

Absolutely. I haven't seen anybody mention David Burns' book "Feeling Good" but it probably saved my life from a descent into insanity. It's my "bible" now. I knew something was completely and absolutely wrong with my self-destructive thought patterns but didn't understand what until I learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

A sad observation: everytime I encounter a struggling friend with dysfunctional thought patterns, I work through their thoughts using CBT techniques (without mentioning that's what I'm doing). This almost always results in a calmer friend who starts feeling better about the situation, or at least more confident in their ability to deal with it.

I then tell them what I'd done to improve their emotional state and how they can learn to do it for themselves by pointing them to CBT and Burns... and a few months later I find they still suffer from dysfunctional thoughts and haven't bothered following my advice.

Funny thing is I was the same; it took a bout of severe depression and reading "Feeling Good" exactly at the time when I could introspect my severely dysfunctional thought patterns for me to accept my situation (having purchased the book a year previously but being dubious about its claims of my "mild" depression at the time). I don't know if this is social conditioning (only "weak" people get depression) or general ignorance of the fact that the mind needs "maintenance work".

I suspect the most severely depressed in 3rd world countries, to be blunt, end up on the street and die (assuming they don't take their own lives first). That's one reason you may not see depression as obviously prevalent in the general population of a 3rd world country.

1. Cancer: does it matter whether it's cancer or something else? Surely the criteria here is "harm" not "cancer".

2. "Flame retardant" vs. "specific chemical": the article specifically cited recent research regarding PBDEs, why did you not consider this valid evidence?

"Researchers from the Center for Children’s Environmental Health, at Columbia University, measured a class of flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, in the umbilical-cord blood of 210 New York women and then followed their children’s neurological development over time. They found that those with the highest levels of prenatal exposure to flame retardants scored an average of five points lower on I.Q. tests than the children with lower exposures, an impact similar to the effect of lead exposure in early life."

Furthermore, the article made it clear that the ingredients of some flame retardants, such as Chemtura’s Firemaster 550 (apparently one of the most common flame retardants), are trade secrets. The study in (2) makes it clear it can take years to demonstrate an effect. So Chemtura can't even know if their product is safe but they're quite happy to sell it to you! Surely the logical conclusion is: beware.

3. Risk vs. Benefit.

Unfortunately, and this is the crux of the problem, it seems that unless one can afford to commission a couch and pay for laboratory analysis of the foam supplier's product, avoiding these substances is very difficult given the present legal situation. And that definitely seems a point worth fighting given the potential harm identified. If you want to risk poisoning your children for little apparent benefit, that's your choice, but it's unethical to make that choice for me.

Sensationalism. I backed Pebble ($255) because they had a solid product and working prototypes. This article (among a number of other "oh noes Kickstarter will take all our monies" scare-articles doing the rounds lately) misses a number of key points:

1. It's a new product and a new team. Delays are a normal part of any ambitious project and don't necessarily mean the product won't ship.

2. For instance, consider that forecasted sales determine forecasted timelines

Their original shipping dates are based on raising a projected $100,000. At $99 for the cheapest Pebble, one can imagine that their worst case scenario was to ship roughly 1,000 Pebbles within their original timelines. Their Kickstarter actually raised over $10.25 million and consequently they are supposed to ship 85x more Pebbles than that. It's not hard to understand that such a dramatic difference in actuals vs. forecasts will result in a dramatic change in shipping time frames.

3. More importantly, constant communication from the Pebble team shows they are making steady progress (current backers have until the end of the month to make their colour selections, and in the past month their team took advantage of their 70k backers to perform free market research into desired Pebble colours, which is a wise business decision); I really don't see much to objectively worry about.

4. Backers of the project weren't ordering anything, and are naive if they think they were. Anybody know the Latin for "backer beware"?

Very interesting. I'd love to know how many viewers were using proxy servers to view the Olympics from outside the UK. I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). They are almost impossible to interpret correctly without great effort.