muhfuhkuh

I think that Singapore is suffering from almost exactly the same problem as Vancouver, Canada. It's a fantastic city enveloped by the ocean and mountains, has world-class cuisine, and city planning that has a semblance of sanity to most observers.

Yet, the young brains are draining en masse for Montreal and Toronto (not to mention California). It doesn't help that Vancouver hasn't bothered to match the aforementioned cities' tax incentives for small and technology businesses (thus the brain drain). And, lately it seems that mainland Chinese are trading their yuan for Vancouver real estate, thus seriously inflating the bubble and pricing everyone who doesn't own an Android phone factory in Chengdu out entirely.

Singapore is increasingly being known as a haven for the borderless rich to park their jets and their cash, since the tax climate is the envy of most of the developed world. So, the same situation foments: You can't keep the Creative Class without giving them (affordable) space to live and work and play (which for that class is all the same!)

I don't think there was a dedicated one then (at least I never took time to look for them when I was a teen, more focused on whatever piqued my interest at that point) but you could find people requesting and filling requests for them throughout alt.binaries.pictures.erotica and associated subgroups. My teens were mid-late 90s.

I just googled and see there is an a.b.p.e.upskirts one now, but I don't know when that was created. Could've been there all the while.

There are upskirt videos on youtube as well. I remember people trading them on AOL chatrooms, random popular forums, and Usenet before that.

The only way you can stop it is by censoring the Internet, thus human thought. That's going to prove unpopular no matter where you fall politically, but especially bodes unwell here.

When people stop buying cheap bric-a-brac with just-enough-for-youtube-480p integrated graphics from HP and Dell for 499.

Not in the US, I'm assuming.

My "triple play" in NC, US was $140, that's with 6Mbps internet (at the time), HD digital cable with no premium channels, and digital phone with unlimited calling in US and Canada.

I "downgraded" to 30Mbit Internet. Added Netflix and Amazon Prime for TV and Vonage for phone, saving $50/mo. in the process. I still feel gypped.

If that's not a joke, then you seriously need to look to other than 2 feet around you and and your own opinions to analyze a market.

No one is expecting Yogscast to be aired on NBC. But, how many kids you know watch Television in any quantity even approaching how much they surf and watch youtube on mobile and PC? That's the future of entertainment. Kids are getting endorsement deals and doing direct ad sales because they can 360-degree no-scope kill in Battlefield 3 and record it using fraps and voiceover some clever lines or overlay it with dubstep.

On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary).

This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).

The difference is that there aren't 1 out 6 people (50 million) without health insurance in the UK and Canada. Another difference is that no one in the UK or Canada would ever have to go bankrupt trying to get that "fancy heart surgery" or "fancy cancer treatment" or "fancy kidney transplant".

"just in case by the time they are able to get that fancy heart surgery"

And, the 50 Million people who could never, ever hope to get that fancy heart surgery because they can't afford the surgery or the insurance (or don't qualify)? What of them?

Saying they are comparable in any way except "doctors perform treatment on patients in a licensed and regulated manner" is reaching.

"For some reason there is a perception that American schools are failing, but I don't see it in the data."

It's been a linchpin to the ultra-conservative and libertarian arguments for "free market"-izing education in the US. The opinion being "well, school sucks when I grew up and/or for my child currently, and it's because government is involved". They point to other countries and their educational superiority (erroneously thinking that the countries' respective governments are somehow not at all involved in education when, in fact, the top-achieving systems have similar if not identical systems as the US).

Let's not even discuss how little they care for teacher's unions, how much teachers get paid (way too much is the current sentiment), and how all teachers are as lazy as unionized NYC construction workers on their lunch break because schools have summer breaks.

They point to a combination private schools and vouchers for the poor as the ultimate solution to our educational woes, some even going so far as saying let the dumbest, poorest, and difficult kids opt out of school by not making K-12 school mandatory.

And, what if your wife also works? What if she makes, gasp, more money than you?

You know, that's actually a thing, at least in a lot of industrialized countries that allow their female citizens to, you know, vote and learn stuff and drive cars.

Actually you know what all of your talk sounds like? It sounds exactly like someone who hasn't done any of that for more than an hour or two.

And, yet, you seem to be talking about developing for them in the past tense.

There's a reason why Apple and Google are dominant now, and it's not just marketing, luck and timing. They've built fertile marketplaces that (especially) independent developers can leverage to create cottage industries if not empires, instead of simply make a living doing VBA and VC++ CRUD applications.

Oh, XNA and C# may be truly saner to handle than Cocoa and Java, but who truly gives a damn when you can't keep the lights on with your .exe file on Windows.

Definitely. But that's the thing. GP said he only has G+ because he has GMail, but uses those other email workalike interfaces because they are superior products. Just pointing out that they work in strikingly similar ways to email.

"I use Facebook to share and chat about photos."

Which I'm sure you used to do in email. Smaller circle, same user task.

"I use LinkedIn for recruiting."

I still use email sometimes for that. Smaller circle, same user tasks (attaching resumes, getting contact info for screenings, planning meet and greets).

Actually, it was Monster.com + email, so yeah, I guess LinkedIn replaced those.

The irony is that most people use Facebook (and LinkedIn) as glorified publicly-facing email accounts with automatic reply-to-all and attachments set to auto-open and display in-line. The only thing added is a rudimentary voting system.

When the government regulates vice, the criminals go legitimate or get caught/killed doing more outlandish stuff.

Look at California for just a taste of how it could be. Cartels can't push their outdoor mass produced garbage marijuana in Cali when anyone over 18 can walk into a Doctor's office, get a recommendation card, walk a few feet to the dispensary next door, and receive the most quality indoor, top-shelf, out of bounds Cannabis you could buy. This is decidedly not your father's lid of smoke in a sandwich baggie licked shut. The Cannabis has often been tested for anything from potency (THC and cannabinoid or CBD count) to contaminants. Some 3rd parties are actually certifying Organic Cannabis.

Most of that top-shelf Cannabis comes from multi-generational farms in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California (Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity). They have farmers who have passed down seed and clones from generation to generation, along with their breeding, growing, and flowering trade secrets.

Cartels only know bulk pricing and murder. More legitimized drug trade will not only lower cost and increase quality, but would make Cartels seek other forms as their profit margins evaporate. I'd love to see even the biggest cartels try to compete with Anheuser-Busch InBev, Pfizer, or Altria group once Marijuana is legal in the US.

In almost no category that I've sampled has Walmart ever been the absolute rock-bottom cheapest compared to several places (Big Lots, Dollar General, local grocery chains, Amazon... even Target, believe it or not). People, however, can't go to Amazon to get infant formula, a car battery, ammunition, and a jar of pickles at 1AM and have it in hand immediately.

Walmart used to be about "made in the USA", then it was "always low prices", now it's about "live better". It's Walmart's ubiquity, convenience, and momentum that keeps them dominant (and their ability to loss-leader competitors out of business).

"All of them had fan support and all of them failed in the marketplace"

But the people who are most likely to buy it day one just did, on Kickstarter. Ouya just crowdsourced the customer, the product message, and the marketplace.

"The question becomes bigger than, 'How does this console compete with the Xbox?' (which is already a HUGE question), it becomes 'How doe this console compete with Xbox Live?'."

How does Steam compete with Games for Windows or EA Origin if it is orders of magnitude smaller than both? How does the iPod Touch and iPhone compete with (and dominate) the dedicated gaming devices PSP/Vita and 3DS? How did the Wii compete with the 360 and PS3?

Smaller players with cheaper devices that require no initial player investment or outlay can be adopted en masse. Think about where HTC or Huawei or LG or Vizio were before they became near the tops worldwide in consumer electronics. Vizio wasn't even on the radar 10 years ago, now they are the #1 maker of TVs in the largest market in the world.

WSJ has, from what I've seen of it, anyway, a thriving community of lively and animated discussion... as long as they post an article about President Obama or the Democrats.

It lasted less than 6 months before they created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, which instead of creating artificial scarcity bought the stocks and distributed it (some 600 Million pounds of grain, cotton, and meat) to impoverished sectors across the US.

"knowing that if I had a serious illness our cash flow would dry up"

I will never in my life understand how Americans (myself included) can think this is, in any way possible, okay.

Or, how, if we just moved it more toward private companies having more control over our healthcare than they already do, that it'll get better. It's asinine.

Japan does that, too. They have a big book doctors follow for every procedure. Their system is regulated, price-fixed, and universal.

"If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers"

... then he would be Microsoft and Apple, and not an Open Source operating system developer, maintainer, producer, and evangelist. All his years of working openly and freely will be squandered and his life's work beholden to closed-source, closed spec device manufacturers.

Samsung is king, then ZTE, then Huawei, then Apple. But, China is filled with domestic brands that pepper the market with Android phones (Honor, Huawei, Lenovo, Coolpad) that bite at mostly Nokia's well-chewed heels.

So, the masses are stupid, VCs are smart. Stock brokers and investment bankers are the ones who truly caused every recession and the Great Depression. Oh, sure, poor and dumb people getting mortgages wasn't a very good idea, I totally agree. But it would've been a drop in the bucket compared to tarring and gzipping said mortgages into 30:1-leveraged bundles (laughably underwritten by AIG) created by Wall St. They knew they were unsustainable, but pressed on, some not even taking the "five cumulative minutes" of thought to what they were investing in or how much of not-their-own-money they were putting into it, until it burst.

So, you're saying we should still keep all the money in that silo? That we should keep letting "risk modelers" who have exacerbated every speculative bubble since the Great Depression keep investing in Color and Groupon and boo.com and flooz because the masses are too stupid to do it for themselves?

Well, okay. But, I disagree.

I agree with alot of what Cringely is implying, because current VC funding at every level (including YC) has been very cliquey. You simply can not with a straight face say that the only insanely great technology business ideas come out of four places (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley) and basically nowhere else. For example, two cities that have the highest concentrations of baccalaureate degree holders in the US are Seattle, WA and Raleigh, NC. Now pop quiz: Name a YCombinator company in either of those cities.

Oh, I know, it doesn't really mean anything. I just find it interesting that two otherwise academically talented areas are burgeoning hotbeds of neither startups nor even talent for said startups. I guess we can further break down what kind of degrees the citizens of these two Rodney Dangerfield of academic and tech hubs have. I mean, for all we know, they could be in philosophy or advanced basket weaving or, worse, gasp, English.

But the rise of crowdfunding couldn't come at a better time, in my opinion. It's high time the silo gets drained for a more swampy, organic, bubbling ooze sort of scattershot approach of crowdfunding. It'll be spendy, it'll be risky, it'll make outside observers think it's all at best a big gamble and at worst a big liberal boondoggle that will further weaken our country like everything else democrats come up with that dilutes and distributes power into the hands of "the masses".

Further, it'll make professional VCs cringe when successes actually start coming out of these crowdsourced ventures, as they talk of "amateur hour" money crowding out their world of term sheets and share dilution calculations over tapas in Menlo off Sand Hill Rd.

Whatever is going to happen, things like kickstarter and indiegogo and JOBS et al. are going to shake the status quo up big time. In my neohippie indie-and-proud idealistic head, it's not only exciting, it's necessary.

I think the content question will never be solved as long as

a) Cable companies put the squeeze on content owners to give them exclusive rights

b) Netflix religiously clings on to both commercial-free and buffet-style pricing

It's tricky. You have a movie studio that pumps out AAA features that cost upwards of $200 Million to make, then Netflix comes along and says "hey, you mind taking this really low price for your content, hopefully in perpetuity?" What would your response be? So, it may be awhile before Netflix gets the big-budget blockbusters quickly. That is, unless, their subscriber base goes over 50 Million, then by ALL means game on.

I think that, in the interim, a dynamite move for Netflix would be to acquire a music streaming company like Pandora or Spotify, then a streaming game company like Galkai or OnLive. Push it out on a set top box, a la the OnLive console, charge $19.99/month with the opportunity to rent premium newly-released blockbuster movies, hot records, and AAA games on the day of release for the same prices that redbox or gamefly charges to rent them per day.

"Airtime lets you find and make new friends face-to-face, using common interests broadcast over video chat. Mix, flirt, mingle. Get some Airtime."

Believe me, I'd wait a few more seconds for it to do that than it erroring out to a prompt with "UNDEFINED SYMBOL: GTK_BUILDER_NEW", or worse, crash with a core dump where I'll never find it or know what to do with.

So, no more install.sh scripts that you have to chmod +x, no more "undefined symbol" errors from games expecting old library files, no dependency hell (though, admittedly, I don't encounter those as much anymore).

That I can definitely get behind!