wikyd

Good point, sounds like our auto-fill solution was too clever by half in your case. Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

Sorry for the confusion. We currently only have listings active on the west coast in California, Oregon, and Washington. We should definitely make that more obvious, especially when someone searches outside of our current territory. I'll add that tonight.

Your clarification helped me to understand your comment. However, I don't think what you describe is unique to startups in any way. Any industry or business can be described with those terms. In fact, it's probably more apt of a description of public companies, which frequently state their purpose it to maximize shareholder value.

With startups, in fact, failure or "leaving someone behind" is probably less traumatic, because failure is accepted and often valued as part of improving. While the company may be left on the wayside, the people will most likely be back again with a new company soon after.

Traumatic isn't really the right word, but you get what I mean.

It's been my experience that the community is exactly the opposite. Founders and early employees are generally eager to help others, even when they probably don't have the time to spare. I've always tried to do the same and it has paid off easily 10x in terms of the amount of advice and help my startup has received.

But there is a substantive difference between B/C and Social Security. There are many retired people today collecting Social Security (not scrambling for IOUs) who paid into the system from their first day of employment.

That's very far from the truth. If TC was frequently accepting and then breaking embargos, then very quickly their sources of embargos would dry up.

TC very clearly announced to everyone that they no longer were going to accept unsolicited embargos. Their motive was that many of their competitors were breaking embargos by a few hours and then claiming it was accidental. The competitors that were breaking the embargo weren't being reprimanded by the PR firms, etc. at all. There was a clear advantage to breaking the embargo (more traffic, better ranking on news aggregators, etc.) and those who played fairly, like TC, were essentially being punished for it.

A lot of people here are referring to the iPad as a tablet computer, but I think that most consumers and Apple do not think of the iPad as a tablet, slate, or other terms that imply computer. It's an appliance. Apple doesn't highlight or easily make available the typical computer specs like RAM, chip speed, etc. You buy an iPad and you know the software will just work. You don't have to worry about if your iPad can run X program or Y program, etc. Any stress that most people associate with computers aren't even concerns with the iPad.

What surprises me about the PlayBook is that BB can't seem to make up it's mind about how it's marketing the product. They pretty clearly emulate the iPad in that the web, Flash, etc. just work, but at the same time they highlight specs that mark it clearly as a computer. These specs really don't matter when competing with Apple, because only a very smaller portion of the market would even consider the specs when choosing between the iPad and the BB. Even the name can't make up it's mind; Book really labels it as a computer, but Play makes it seem otherwise. I sort of assumed that BB would be targeting mainly enterprise customers at first with their tablet, but naming it Play really conflicts with even that strategy.

In short, the product seems like design by committee and I think it's identity crisis will be a problem for it.

A jingle writer or a sound track artist is basically creating something 'on spec.' Also, you can bet that good jingle writers charge a lot more money than bad jingle writers.

Recording artists (who incidentally are 'musicians', although some rather loosely) contract with the label to promote and distribute their record. The record company pays them an advance on future earnings as a way to sweeten the deal to get the artist to sign with them instead of another label. They aren't paying them to make the music, but rather just paying upfront some of the money from the sales of the album.

Most artists do not make money off of album sales (even big-name artists). They make money off of ticket sales, merchandise (e.g., t-shirts), and licensing their songs for commercials, movies, etc. After they have become very successful, they are in a position with more power to negotiate better contracts (I struggle not to say fairer). Or, sometimes they create their own label and release their music themselves. Usually, though, when an artist has their own label it's really a "vanity" label that is under the major label.

I think big artists (and little ones) have every right to complain about a system where they can sell ~200mm albums and come out of the process bankrupt (the article mentions TLC and Toni Braxton as examples of this). They created ~$2 billion of gross value and probably netted upwards of $1 billion for the record label. The label certainly took a risk on them and should be compensated for that, but shouldn't the artist as well? I'm not arguing that the artist wasn't naive or poorly informed when signing the contract, but they have every right to complain that the contract terms were onerous and others should think carefully before negotiating. Even Apple re-negotiated their deal with AT&T once they had a hit.

Also, you are completely wrong that no upstart artist can afford to sell 2+ million albums for a debut hit (I realize you say 'make', but contract terms aren't changing because it suddenly became cheaper to sell albums digitally). One example of the top of my head is the band Train. They created their first album on their own for very little money and it was certified platinum. With advances in recording software and digital distribution, record labels are starting to look very obsolete. Especially when they charge you for the actual expenses of their promotional campaigns out of your royalties.

No, they don't. The record companies enter into a contract with the recording artist to promote and distribute their next album or X albums. It's more like the artist is hiring the record company. It may seem like the record company is paying the artist, but really they are paying an advance on royalties. This is much the same as how an author may get an advance for agreeing to allow a publisher to publish their next book.

The advance is in some respects like an investment in a startup; the record label fronts some money to the artist to help pay for recording, living expenses, promotional expenses, etc. in exchange for a large percentage of the profits from record sales. If the record doesn't sell well, the artist isn't under obligation to pay the advance back (although it might carry over on the ledger if they owe more albums to the label). The size of the advance is based on the popularity and expected likelihood of success of the record. To continue the analogy with authors, I think Sarah Palin was advanced $7 million on her last book; most tech books authors receive an advance of 4 or 5 figures. This makes sense based on just the size of the market for each book alone.

Anyways, that was a long digression, but the record companies certainly do not hire artists to make music for them. The artists hire the labels to promote and distribute their music. Most artists have already written and created demo recordings of the songs before they even sign with a label.

I've seen the rule of thumb of 10 minutes of homework per grade in school. So, 1st graders would have 10 minutes of homework per night and 3rd graders would have 30m of homework per night.

Where does the 5% figure come from of people being able to understand the author's bullet points?

I think topic-modeling (a la the Latent Dirichlet Allocation article posted about seomoz the other day) will make this difficult to do (at least without confusing the people you want to convert).

I think the opposite will happen for (a). There are still a ton of users who are not very good at using search engines and only do one or two word queries. Suggestions-as-you-type will teach these users how to search more effectively, I think (esp. given your point (b)).

I don't think there's anything in that article that suggests that the techniques only improved memorizing and not your specific definition of studying. Also, there are definitely things that I have learned and since forgotten that I had to think critically about and understand. I think this article is about techniques to improve the retention of knowledge.

Take, for example, the math students who had to apply formulas to find different properties of prisms. The students who learned and practiced all of the formulas at once (which most likely requires critical thinking to determine what each problem is asking for) did much better than the students who just practiced sets of problems for each formula sequentially (which is more like memorization).

I thought the most interesting part of the article wasn't the findings on varied environments or multiple shorter study sessions, but that studying multiple things in one session improved retention. Speculating as to why, the brain subconsciously makes connections between the different topics, strengthening each concept.

Looks like they only received 90 pre-orders and started shipping at the end of March.

http://www.webcitation.org/5ofyB1Y7L

I agree that the disparity is frightening, but I think that the timespan for this problem is way too short to judge. These cases are popping up frequently in the news, most likely because of the sudden ubiquity of digital cameras. The law needs some time to catch up to this sudden shift. Also, we're not hearing of all the times when people are allowed to film the police, but I have watched many videos of just the Seattle police in the past year with no legal repercussion to the videographers.

I think it's pretty clear that nearly everyone (except the police (except when being glorified on "Cops")) agree that citizens have the right to observe law enforcement. The law is just ambiguous about this filming right now because it wasn't a consideration in the past. Some police officers are abusing this situation, but as more and more of these cases pop up, the law will have to be clarified.

Meh, I would guess being snarky over trying to be technically correct. 'American' has always been the preferred (not just colloquial) demonym for people from the United States of America. I hardly think that Americans intended to step on other North and South Americans' toes by taking that name. In fact, I don't know anyone who refers to North and South America as a combined America. It's much more plausible that 'American' was the logical (or at least the easiest to say and recognizable) name to give people from the United States of America, just as 'British' was preferable to 'Greatian' :-)