vsl2

I'm all for giving people more liberties to do what they want with their money and I see nothing worse about letting people invest their money in whatever startups they want, though a reputable investment mechanism should be established so as to minimize the risks of scams, etc. There are many other ways for a fool and his money to be parted (casinos, lotteries, booze, overshopping) and those aren't illegal.

Going back to the reputable investment mechanism, I think this is needed not only for investors, but also for startups. No startup company wants to deal with thousands of different ownership voices - its better to have a concentrated voice (e.g. VC fund manager) raising only the largest issues. Rather than encouraging individuals to invest (like Kickstarter), give all individuals the ability to invest in funds created to invest in specific startups (e.g. Turntable fund, Pinterest fund).

I agree - Kiyosaki is full of hot-air generalizations that will just as easily put you into huge financial headaches (e.g. huge investment losses, tax penalties, shot credit) as build wealth.

You can't underestimate the gullibility of the masses when a book starts getting some good initial publicity - the wave becomes its own animal with everyone repeating all of the good things previously said of the book, no matter how right or wrong. Sad to say, I bought and read the book a few years under the same guidance.

Product being up-sold like a time share? Superlative claims like a male enhancement product? Partnering with Donald Trump's hair? Check, check and check.

Conflict of interest where the CEO (or his friends on the board) decide how much to pay him? Say it isn't so.

The key here is the "accredited" investor restriction for funds that invest in anything other than the most vanilla of securities (i.e. stocks and bonds). This is also why most of us cannot invest in hedge funds or private equity funds.

In protecting people from themselves, the government is limiting participation in a potentially very lucrative area of investment to only those with money (the rich get richer). I don't believe that everyone is equipped with the financial knowledge to deal with the risk associated with participating in alternative investment funds, but I'd much rather that everyone have the opportunities to take the risks that they choose. Casinos are legal in many areas, strip clubs are legal in even more areas, and shopping malls are everywhere - all of these cause people to take arguably unnecessary risks with their financial health (and some would say even greater than investing). Particularly with the plethora of financial information available on the Internet, the everyday Joe has more resources than ever.

I'd love to see Congress eliminate the "accredited investor" requirement for investing in alternative funds so that everyone can have the same access to investing in startups, private companies, etc. I'm sure more than enough funds will spring up to meet investor demand, this being a capitalistic sociey and all.

Finally, startups can choose to avoid the problem of many small direct investments by ordinary investors (i.e. too many people to report to). by accepting money only from the investment funds or from few large investors, if such sources are available and willing. If such sources are not available to a startup, then you have to go with the options you have, (e.g. many small direct investors, self-funding, fail), as has always been the case.

I DO think that it is inevitable that Microsoft won't become a threat so I stated my opinion and gave my reasons for it. Your reason that I shouldn't count them out was solely because they have cash to burn and have shown a past willingness to burn it. My reply to you is that such willingness does not mean that they will ever contend in this market.

You make it sound like its inevitable that Bing will be a huge success just because Microsoft can burn money. Its has made inroads, but my guess is that it has reached its peak.

I'm not counting on Microsoft giving up on its products - I just see them as patiently burning through cash (generated from its successful cash cows) without making a significant splash in mobile. Just because they can afford to throw away money doesn't mean that they'll be successful at all of their new ventures.

This isn't exclusively a Microsoft thing either. Look at Google and its multiple attempts at new products (Wave, Buzz, Google+). They can obviously afford it because of their own cash cow, search.

Don't see how a measly (relatively speaking for these giant companies) $250M should have been a major factor for Nokia to choose to focus on Windows Phones rather than Android.

Apple and Google are dominating the smartphone OS market and I don't see how two slow-moving companies will make a serious dent in the consumer market. How many people wold would give up their iPhone for a Windows phone, especially as an early adopter? I'd be very surprised if any Windows Phone gains serious traction with consumers.

The best shot I see for Windows Phone success would be in the enterprise market where easy/free compatibility with MS Office products and other MS products used at work could be a large benefit. But Apple is making headway here as well so it could all be for naught.

Jury nullification has to do with returning a "Not Guilty" verdict in the face of evidence that would suggest otherwise.

What you are talking about it a "hung jury" where the 5% person is able to prevent a unanimous "Guilty" verdict. Depending on the state, the requirement for conviction may be unanimity or something less (11 to 1, 10 to 2, I don't remember if it goes any less). In this cases, the prosecutors may choose to retry the defendant - if you think about it, if the prosecutors decided to try him once, why not twice? The odds are the same the second time around (i.e. the odds of not getting the 5% person on the jury).

Regarding "bogus convictions", the jury only gets to make its decision when a high enough evidentiary threshold is met. Otherwise, the judge must throw the case out for not meeting minimum requirements.

Think of it like this (note that this is my own approximate guesses taken from my law school class on Criminal Law) - "Reasonable doubt" may be a 95% confidence threshold for the jury to convict. For the decision to get to the jury, the judge has to decide that the evidence is at least 75% confidence level in his opinion. Its only 75% for the judge because he is not the finder of fact and the jury can reasonably decide that what the judge views as 75% certainty of guilt is actually 95% in their view.

So to sum up, the situation is not as dire as you would suggest. I agree that jury nullification can be a big problem in the wrong situations (racist communities, etc) and that is why the law tries to minimize its impact (e.g. defense attorneys cannot mention jury nullification to a jury during the trial) while preserving defendants' rights to a jury of peers.

Like seemingly every aspect of law, there isn't a clear cut answer either way.

Yeah, they dropped out because they knew Cornell was going to get it and they preferred to quit rather than lose.

From multiple accounts, Stanford didn't have the same passion/funding/flexibility as Cornell in getting the deal done. Stanford is more prestigious, but that's not the only factor obviously - or why even have an open competiton at all?

Brick and mortar or online, still basically a loan with a very high interest rate (~36% in this case) while also putting up collateral worth more than the loan.

Only use these services in the most dire of financial circumstances. If you're in a situation where you have to pawn valuables, it may be time to start thinking about getting a normal job to reassess and regroup.

From what I've heard from people who work at Google, the environment there is one where there are tons of projects ongoing but seemingly little long-term dedication/passion in making these products successful.

Employees do what's in their job description but don't go above and beyond because they don't know if the project is going to be continued to be supported by upper management. Its a self-fulfillng feeling of inevitable failure. My impression is that management needs to have better vision and commitment other than "let's throw everything half-hearted at the wall and see what may miraculously stick".

However, Google is still the king of search and making gobs of money - at least they're still doing the biggest and most important part of their products right.

As a former associate at a "white shoe" law firm and having been part of the recruiting/interviewing process, I can vouch for most of the observations the article makes.

The Process:

1) HR (and the hiring partner + his helpers) looks through the piles of resumes and decides who to interview or give a full-day callback

Aside: Many top law schools have job fairs where students bid on law firms to interview with and law firms have to accept interviews with those students who bid highest. The schools set this up so that low-GPA students can still get interviews and hopefully impress the interviewer with his/her passion/personality. Surprisingly, this can work out quite well in many instances for the low-GPA students, so long as the stretch isn't too big. Law firms agree to these terms or otherwise, schools deny them access to the job fair. Maybe the recent economic turmoil has changed the dynamic, but I'm not sure.

2) The initial interview (at a job fair or otherwise) is just one person who interviews you and decides whether or not to give you the opportunity for a full-day callback interview on site.

3) On site, there are usually 3-4 one-on-one interviews with a mix of partners and mid to senior level associates. Then its a lunch interview (at a high-end restaurant) with a couple of junior associates.

Any one of the aforementioned people can kill the interviewee's chances with a strong "No", though there are always exceptions when a partner has strong feelings the other way.

From my experience and talking with partners and associates, the only real criteria interviewers tend to consider:

(i) "Gut feel" - meaning whether you like the interviewee and view him/her as an enthusiastic likeable person (remember that you'll likely have to spend lots of late nights working with this person),

(ii) School/grades - knowing how everyone in the legal industry knows how important law school pedigree is in the profession, someone making it into top law schools is considered a huge indicator. Even young associates are very congnizant of law school because we know how hard we tried to get into the top schools because we knew how important it was (much much more important than for undergrad). And don't forget that this is a prestigious law firm with lots of white-haired conservative Yale and Harvard old men.

[Note: This will often have a hard/soft cutoff which will reject an applicant no matter how great the personality or extracurricular]

iii) Exceptional extracurriculars/interests - only things that really make an applicant memorable are worth anything because anyone with half a brain can come up with a list of activities/interests.

iv) Physical attractiveness for women - given that senior management in the legal profession is still dominated by men and that the most attractive women generally don't end up being lawyers, I think this can sometimes come into play (and lets not pretend that it doesn't in the rest of the world).

A big fall after releasing millions of shares to the market isn't surprising, particularly given the small initial float at IPO.

I guess we'll see what LinkedIn's real market valuation is because though its definitely worth something, $10B it is not. And if the overall market continues to decline, tech companies such as LinkedIn are going to get hammered the most as investors start to really ask themselves what companies will make it through the mess the best (probably the big blue chip ones).

I wish him well on his endeavor because I'm not a fan of CC fees, but from a consumer standpoint, I don't see any benefits. CCs provide (i) a line of credit, (ii) fraud protection, and (iii) rewards/bonuses. All of these can be incredibly valuable, particularly (ii) - you never appreciate the no-liability fraud protection of a CC until you discover how difficult it is to deal with situations in which your bank account is affected.

If credit cards were not already the dominant electronic payment mechanism (i.e. VISA/MC were just starting like Dwolla is), Dwolla could possibly win out because businesses could refuse CC's. Not going to happen now, at least with regards to business-to-consumers. And I don't think most B2B transactions were conducted through CC's anyways.

They seem to be doing okay now, but I don't see any secret sauce that's going to make them anything more than a fringe player in the payments industry.

I haven't felt this strongly about shorting a stock long-term in a long time. But I don't know how long the short-term irrational exuberance is going to last - will it wipe out my investment before the stock crashes down?

I haven't seen one pro-Groupon (or general daily deals) analyses that says anything different than "it gets people in the door and generates buzz" which I think is nothing more than fuzzy PR talk since you very rarely hear of businesses that actually received long-term boosts. You read about how businesses don't benefit because mostly cheap non-returning users use Groupon deals (i.e. very few return customers) and it cheapens the businesses' full price pricing power to those who know of the Groupon (i.e. "since X was a Groupon in the past, I won't go there until there is a Groupon again").

My questions regarding Card Case:

1) How is it going to move away from being based on credit cards?

Most savvy people I know use credit cards wherever possible because of the no-liability fraud protections that are not present in debit transactions. Clearly, Square users are younger and savvier than the general population. No way should anyone use bank account-based payments on a mobile device that could be stolen/hacked/lost because you're not going to get the money back that is fradulently charged.

2) Do you really want to have a shopping experience where store cashiers and other customers standing around know your name?

Most people I know would prefer to remain more anonymous than that.

3) Where is the verification of customer payment (e.g. signature on CC receipt)? What happens when there are customer chargebacks?

4) Is it really that hard to pull out and use a credit card?

I'm all for improving the current payments environment where a few major companies (Visa, MC, AMEX) dominate and as such, are able to extract large fees from merchants (which get passed along to consumers), but I don't see Square (or anyone else) as having found the answer yet. Their attempts seem to be more "cool to have" and technologically impressive than actually solving the underlying inefficiencies in the payments industry.

And frankly, the major credit card companies are going to come out with their own NFC apps at some point and if Square is still relevant, they'll be just another player in the oligopoly (but still dependent on the others' back-end processing component).

I see Amazon trying to build itself, at high cost (I'm sure the Prime membership doesn't cover all of the videos/books licensing plus free 2 day shipping), as the major source of digital entertainment content delivered through the Internet.

Once they've become the primary source and particularly if they're able to control access through their own hardware (Kindle devices), they'll be able to negotiate from a position of power with content providers. Without this type of negotiating power, Amazon (or any other digital media medium like Pandora, Netflix) will always be at the mercy of content creators.

Obviously, Amazon also has its dominant Internet retailing business so its in a good place regardless of whether the digital media services are successful. They now just want to rule the Internet world too.

Right, because you shouldn't strongly disincentivize behavior that tries to extort people by abusing the legal system and curtailing information freedom. While we're at it, let's stop looking at anything that stinks of a pattern of immoral business practices (that ruin thousands or millions of lives). Only lock up the small-time thieves and fighters (the old-fashioned criminals). Amen to you brother.

The shame of it all is that the Righthaven lawyers will probably find a way to avoid all personal financial liability (being protected by limited liability of the LLC) and then set up shop again under a different LLC entity to do it all over again.

The underlying problem is a system that doesn't punish this type of behavior strongly enough. I'd endorse serious jail time (in ghetto "don't drop the soap in the shower" type jails) for these types of offenses in order to disincentivize this harmful parasitic behavior.

I agree that there needs to be a balance and furthermore, that finding that right balance is very difficult. Probably why marketing whizzes get paid the big bucks.

In your example though, there is difference in that you're an actual person representing a reputable company on-site, not a random anyone-could-have-created-this advertisement on the anonymous web. From more trusted sources, I'd be interested in hearing the benefits and not necessarily the features. But in an environment where seemingly every third website activates my anti-virus software and I read about data hacks every week, I definitely don't trust Internet ads filled with hyperbole and exclamation points.

My biggest question in response to your points is why the administrator (and not the users) is given the power to set these options. Maybe its much easier from a technical implementation sense? I can't imagine that administrators are more concerned with dictating how their readers see the comments than getting users happy and actually commenting.

I don't know about having "silver bullet" advertisements be your landing page and text ad. It looks suspiciously like spam or some kind of con (think about the majority of "Work From Home" ads). Every reasonably smart person I know wouldn't trust "silver bullet" ads enough to seriously consider paying for the product being advertised. In the particular example, most doctors are supposedly smarter than the average population and so I think the conversion rate would be even lower.

I don't claim to know a better way to garner attention through advertisement than eye-catching (yet suspicious) claims, but I think the described method helps you determine the interest level in your product from a small subset (more trusting or naive, depending on your point of view) of your target audience, not your total target audience. Maybe there's a known "naive-to-total" extrapolator that I'm not aware of.

The underwhelming sales for the 3DS only reinforce for me that there will be no future market for handheld consoles. Pretty soon, everyone and his mother (literally, my 60+ mother who can barely use the internet got a smartphone because it was the same price "free" as a regular phone) will have a smartphone with 1Ghz+ processors and amazing graphics capabilities. Who wants to carry around 2 devices when 1 will suffice for almost everything?

Consoles will continue to have a place in the gaming industry, but everyone who wants a Wii already has one and the technology is outdated and/or surpassed (e.g. maximun 480p resolution in a time when everyone has an HDTV, other systems have motion sensors) that there isn't much revenue left to squeeze from it. The Wii U could be a spectacular success of the same proportions as the original, but those types of successes are pretty rare (and I'm not hearing of any revolutionary changes such as the motion-sensor controls of the original Wii).

Remember that before the Wii came out and had its greater-than-expected success, Nintendo had basically become a distant third place behind Sony and Microsoft. I think its at another inflection point in its history and needs the Wii U to be another smash critical success or its in huge trouble.

I think focusing only on programming skills and what will help you in your first jobs out of college is short-sighted. Being a college dropout entrepreneur may be some sort of badge of honor in your 20's, but unless you do something extraordinary or make FU money, its not something that will help you later in life. Will having that MIT CS degree help you get that lucrative job when you're 40 years old with a family, mortgage and other responsibilities (i.e. not so easy to do risky startups)?

You also learn other skills that come in useful in your career, though I agree some can be worthless. I hated some of my classes in college, particularly the writing class requirements, but even those are helping me today because almost everything requires some sort of clear and coherent writing.

Its only 2-3 years if you work hard to graduate early, during which you'll have many opportunities to try out various ideas and meet many of your lifelong friends and likely, cofounders. If you don't have much money, excel at a state school and graduate with a manageable amount of debt, or better yet, work hard and get a scholarship.

Why do most of the commenters seem to dislike college? Those were the best four years of my life, taught me real skills, programming and otherwise, that I use every day, and granted me that all-important degree which has come in handy for me and probably will for the vast majority of people who don't build the next Facebook or Apple.

Unless you're in situation #5 that the article talks about, spend a few years to get the degree (graduate early if you can because that saves time and money) while working on your projects on the side. And maybe have some college fun in the process.

Aaron, I applaud your principles and enjoy reading your somewhat condescending(because the bureaucratic idiots deserve it) yet still controlled responses. Incompetence drives me mad and I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be if I were in your shoes right now.

Does FaceCash have a legal team or are you doing this all on your own? I imagine you've researched every possible legal angle regarding the situation and you certainly don't need a law degree for that, but professionals could provide some additional insights, just from work experience (e.g. what happens in situations with other similar regulations and stupidity). Having practiced tax law in the past (three years in NY), I know that how certain things work in that field that you can't pick up from reading statutes or cases.

Given that you've gotten the exemption for doing business in other states, are you back to building out your business with the exception of in California? At some point, you've got to move on and do what's best for FaceCash even if that means not completely righting the wrong - unfortunately, incompetence and bureaucracy may be able to stand much longer than you can afford to fight.

Finding a business's wifi automatically - which allows you and the business to know when you're actually in the store (or really close enough) is a really good concept. Eventually, more and more businesses will have wifi and this type of recognition (with user approval of course) could make for an accurate passive experience (i.e. don't have to take your phone out and perform actions to get benefits). Interesting possibilities...

It took me a while to understand the full benefit of people's criticism. My team's initial idea was a to build a mobile product that essentially focused on everything and added a ton of features, thinking that we'd get users from being so ubiquitous and awesome. After hearing the same "you're not focused", "how can you get users" criticism from many in the industry (including multiple YC partners), I finally got it through my head that maybe I couldn't impose my naive vision on the world just because I believed it was powerful.

However, its just as important to never stop thinking about your world-domination vision. I'm sure every one of the most successful tech companies in the world has heard all of the same criticism from well-meaning advisers along the way. Start with a focused smart plan, execute it well, and don't lose sight of the ultimate destination (which may change along the way too as you learn more).

If you like these types of puzzles, the biggest online collection I've found is at:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/hard.shtml

I agree that Facebook and other social networks have a right to make money through their business model. As the article puts it, if they didn't make money, they wouldn't exist and that would be a loss for many people.

However, there's nothing that says Facebook has the right to become a $100B company through extreme invasion of privacy and other distasteful tactics (whatever they may be - I sure don't know what fully goes on over there). Send me some targeted advertising if you have to, but I will protest against you if you make new "share-with-others-additional-information-about-yourself" features a confusing opt-out hassle.

Just recently my wife shared a photo album via Picasa and Google+, and she couldn't figure out how to restrict who could access the album, though it was very simply prior to Picasa's integration into Google Photos. Do you think Google+ engineers couldn't keep the same Picasa privacy functionality as before or is it because they want to force people to share more than they're comfortable with?

No one is saying that social networks shouldn't make money through advertising and most people are probably okay with some personal data being used for targeted advertising. But given past invasive practices and privacy concerns, there are definitely valid concerns with regards to the extent to which social networks are commoditizing/selling users' personal information in an effort to maximize profits. Furthermore, who knows what happens to sold personal information down the line?

Simple question: If changing social networks was as simple as changing your online shopping preferences, do you think Facebook could get away with what it does? Facebook can obviously take advantage of the fact that its users cannot easily leave to appropriate user data that other sites could not.