SkyAtWork

Oh goodness, there were 4.7 million US soldiers in the first world war - out of a US population of 102 million at the time. Surely that must be major?

I wonder how often this would need to be physically replaced/maintained. And for that matter what size is required - would this work for unpowered earplugs / would it be better than conventional foam earplugs?

Hollywood and associated content creation/monetization businesses are historically strongly aligned with the Democrats - though I agree with your ideal, it is not likely that the party will bite the hand that feeds it.

That isn't entirely true. For instance, if you are investing on behalf of a foundation or other nonprofit structure, or a similar non-taxed or tax-deferred entity (like a pension fund), you have a reason to preserve your legitimate tax free status. This is one reason you'll see US hedge funds with both Delaware and Cayman entities even if they only have US subscribers - because some of those US subscribers will be entities outside the conventional person/corporation tax model.

I find that a stretch. Oscar Wilde is at least as quotable, though I suppose the Brits categorize him as Irish instead. How about Orwell? Lewis Carroll? Jane Austen? Emily Bronte? William Blake? There's enough Sherlock clones around that it's hard to overlook Arthur Conan Doyle? Tolkien? Douglas Adams? CS Lewis? Mary Shelley? Virginia Woolf? Heck, Francis Bacon (unless you buy the theory that he doubles as Shakespeare).

Literature is not what the English lack!

You can probably cram them through since they are flexible, but they wouldn't fit without some force; a regulation rim is 18 inches inside diameter and a basketball 9.5 inches diameter.

I think I'm missing what you're saying, can you expound on this? There are records of mercantile law going back to Hammurabi; there's been paper fiat currency in China since the 7th century or so. Coinage and trade has plenty of historical record in Phoenician and Roman era.

I'm somewhat surprised to see that Chrome on my Nexus 10 shows up as unique, based primarily on user agent and screen size/color depth. Both seem to be surprisingly less common than I'd expect inasmuch as they would seem to be identical across all such devices.

I realize this is only anecdata but the ones I know buy EVERY ONE of the toys :)

Though Jeff came out of a hedge fund (DE Shaw) and doesn't seem to have been struggling :)

We're currently doing one. It's been relatively painless, most of the difficulty being simultaneously moving off old myisam tables to innodb -> xtradb

I was there when they did this a long time ago (circa 2000), I believe in conjunction with Greenlight.com - at the time it was a "cars" tab which was basically just third party storefront space. It didn't last as Greenlight (pardon the pun) ran out of gas.

But this certainly seems viable. Costco has a carbuying program that includes baked in discounts and single price point. It is an obvious disintermediation play with nearly-as-obvious existing regulatory complications and entrenched interests.

Presumably it would look a lot like an accelerator, inasmuch as most accelerators don't put in any significant amount of capital but do add a lot of experience around startup growth.

Probably for the perpetrators, probably not for the companies involved (which are likely to have the same set of Delaware and/or Cayman mailing addresses) :-P

But sure, I would expect that white collar crime is unsurprisingly correlated.

Maybe not though - boiler room style phone banks of investor fraudsters are a stereotype for a reason, and those aren't necessarily the high rent end of town.

Anarchism without pacifism is a contradiction

Please expound on this - that statement sounds unintuitive and generally the opposite of what I'd expect

One of those degrees is definitely "sure, that sounds like a turnon." There is certainly legitimate exploitation, but it's not like Paris Hilton did it to make rent.

The Florida highway through the Keys dates to the 1930s and the NYC Catskill aqueduct to roughly 1916 - those are certainly great projects but aren't the last fifty.

Largely agree with the rest of your comment though :)

When the show is initially airing, HBO would rather you subscribe to the cable channel, since the cable company pays them much more than Netflix or Hulu would.

When the season ends, HBO would rather you buy the DVD / Bluray, since the sale of those discs pays them much more than Netflix or Hulu would.

It's certainly possible that one of the digital vendors could offer HBO enough money to change their mind there, but it's a fairly daunting check to write.

We talk a lot about disrupting businesses here; there's a reasonable number of folks in the audience who want to do this to health care. Likely no deeper than that, but understanding the entrenched solutions in a market can be valuable if that's your plan.

I'm sure there's an audience for which that's true, but it would seem like that's an edge case of people who prefer to overpay for nostalgia purposes if they could get the same product cheaper and more conveniently. Wine is often a luxury good though, so I'm probably underestimating the people who are willing to be snooty about it :)

This is one of those stories that only looks good in the distant rear view mirror. Trying this is pure shareholder lawsuit bait and invitation to corporate-veil piercing. (Still makes a good story.)

Generally true but definitely survivorship bias

This seems (to me) more a 1st amendment issue - freedom of speech/press/petition?

Doesn't seem too kooky, there's $163 billion spent every year to do just that: http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispannouncements?article=1590

(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.)

It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy.

If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions.

So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it".

As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)

It's reasonable to have SOME amount of the purchase value vest, but 100% is not reasonable. Common enough to get half or two thirds of it down and the other as earnout milestones.

I have reasonably good background in this with a number of successful exits to various publicly traded firms. Drop me a line per my contact info and let me know what your industry is, as long as it isn't directly competitive with anything I'm working on or invested in, I'll sign an NDA and we can talk - if it is in an overlap industry, then the dance becomes a little more complicated. But I'll give you an hour of time and advice for free, and if you want my help beyond that, we'll figure something out.

Seriously, I'm doing my best to raise angel funding or project financing in Seattle and I can't get the time of day from folks despite having a sizable contract to execute against with the target raise.

I have heard explicitly that angel, private equity and bridge financing deals have dried up.

I figured this was a pure valley bubble but if Fred is encountering the same things - why on earth can't I find even a subset of that? My network is not THAT terrible...