AretNCarlsen's comments

Did you start it with the intention of profiting? I think the OP is specifically looking for unprofitable-but-awesome ventures. For example, curing AIDS because you want people to not have AIDS is awesome, but curing AIDS because you want to sell AIDS medicine is not awesome.

Paul Allen single-handedly funded development of the private spacecraft SpaceShipOne.[1][2]

He apparently began funding that spaceship, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, around 2001, several YEARS before he told anybody that he was doing so (in 2004). By definition, rich people who are doing things for non-showoff-y reasons are not necessarily showing off about it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen#Assets [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne#Development_and_wi...

And if they do put 2 and 2 together, now you have perjured yourself, not just refused to testify. Much worse.

> Just jerk off to normal porn like everybody else, problem solved.

sigh

First they came for those accused of pedophilia, and I said nothing because I wasn't accused of pedophilia.

That would be perjury, though. You are now a Lying Guy, not just a Fifth Amendment Guy, and no amendment will be able to save you if they figure out that you gave a hidden volume password and claimed it as the "real" and only password.

I'm not saying plausible deniability is bad, just that it would be better not to rely on technical arms races to protect fundamental rights.

The Passive Aggressive Award will go to the guy who freely gives the real password to the feds when subpoenaed, but claims it is just a hidden volume password.

I don't have access to original Bernstein materials; does anybody know how they define "brand appeal"? Apparently Apple has over 66% of whatever that is (such that their fraction is "more than double" the remainder), and yet only half of the respondents "preferred Apple over all other brands".

As AllThingsD certainly doesn't pass along a definition of "brand appeal", in the context of the article that 66% claim is neither fact nor spin. It is nothing at all.

I did not think of that angle, and am now appropriately recalcitrant.

Bernstein Research surveyed consumers to ask whether they would prefer a 7" screen or a 10" screen? That does not have anything to do with iPad branding. Would you prefer a 70" TV, or a 100" TV? You say 100"? Well, since Sony manufactures the only popular 100" TV, I will infer that you prefer Sony brand TVs.

The second half of the Bernstein release states that "Fifty percent of respondents preferred Apple over all other brands." That is EXACTLY HALF, so feel free to spin it the other way: "Fifty percent of respondents would not choose Apple over another brand."

That is a good idea! Like Google advertising, where the ads are selected based on the textual context -- words in your search string or email or website -- but instead of ads as the output, short video clips. For long text blocks, run the videos alongside a scrolling reader such that the video and text stay synchronized. The word "respect" prompts an Aretha Franklin clip, maybe. Appeal to the [people who think they are] multitaskers! You'll have nerd users searching for which Shakespearean passages lead to the most amusing clip playlist!

If the video bandwidth is all Youtube's, and the UI is Javascript, your ongoing cost is mostly the server time to run the text against your corpus and spit out a playlist.

I love when startup ideas spring from a misinterpretation of how someone else summarizes their product.

"Double-edged sword" has never worked for me, as a cliche. Do you often find yourself inadvertently smacking against the dull side of a single-edged sword, such that you stay away from double-edged swords for your own safety? rm is like a double-ended knife, i.e.: http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/4253/425...

(Fun fact: many knife throwers grip the blade end anyway, rendering the cliche to an even simpler "rm is like a knife".)

USPTO states that their trademark database is NOT a superset of the state-level registrations and common law marks: http://tess2.uspto.gov/

At the least, you also need to check each of the 50 state-level PTDLs. USPTO has a list by state: http://www.uspto.gov/products/library/ptdl/locations/index.j...

The other theoretical benefit of a professional search is that they are expected to research similar marks as well, taking advantage of their legal expertise to determine how similar is too similar. (I emphasize 'theoretical'.)

Domain name: $25

Trademark search: $350

Invariably coming up with a better name six months later: priceless.

(I assume that doesn't only happen to me every time.)

Here are two suggestions that we would have seen, if the underlying assumption was not that {increasing the derivative of user count per day} justifies {poor security}:

1.) Implement bulky external security measures -- like client-side certs or VPNs -- and replace them with more scaleable solutions as the user count grows.

2.) Inform your users that they are interacting with an unsecured fledging service, such that they do not have an expectation of privacy. At the very least, warn them not to use this service on an unsecured coffee-shop WAN.

> Once you have the users ... then you should start to think about something more secure. Until then, do all you can, within reason, to get users.

Worked well for Sony!

Seriously, that is an egregious abuse of both ethics and morality, the latter because you are implicitly abusing your users' trust (unless your welcome screen says "NOT YET SECURE" in huge font). If implementing reasonable security before you enter beta testing is such a resource burden that your product will go under before it can get its footing, then your product goes under. Ethics do not go away when your profitability and success are on the line -- that is the specific moment when ethics come into play.

I realize you have already thought through this and have a different POV. Newbies are liable to see this kind of talk however, and think it is an accepted industry-wide practice to treat security as an afterthought until you have scaled, when that is in fact a profitable but unacceptable antipattern.

P.S.- This is like a new small-town restaurant saying "Refrigerators are expensive, so we can't afford to refrigerate our eggs and milk until we get more customers. Otherwise we might go under from the increased operating cost, and then our customers wouldn't get to enjoy our restaurant!" Draw your own conclusion.

> We will note that it is insecure for users, but they won't care. ... I'd rather have it work than be secure.

I would have an easier yet more profitable life if I could manage to adopt that attitude for my projects.

I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.

Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.

There might not be a formal, publicly-accessible market, but two-party short-selling contracts could already be active. This is what an unregulated and anonymous currency feels like: you have no idea whether I have purchased half of the bitcoin market over the last few weeks just to unload all of it at once, in small chunks, before the market can adjust to the reduced value. In fact, you won't even know if that has already happened; you will just see a "market correction" when I sell.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation

How does the browser know the set of pages to be cached for a particular offline app, though? Do you have to provide a static sitemap at a known URL? But to support multiple apps deliverable from a single subdomain, you would need to specify the sitemap's URL in some webpage, perhaps as an attribute to some HTML element. So each sitemap would be a sort of Manifest which controls the Cache for an app.

By the way, the app's cache obviously ought to be isolated from other apps' caches, right? Especially if you let the user grant an enlarged cache as a per-app permission. And the user might want to clear the miscellany browser cache without clearing the app cache, so we had better give this Application Cache a distinct name.

"It was a political decision not to use Busybox, rather than a technical one, he said."

Anybody know what that means? Licensing conflict, perhaps?

OP: > I'm bidding against people who will work for $10/hour or less and do really good work.

Repeated response: > No, you aren't. No programmer does good work for $10/hour or less.

The implication: We are obviously worth more than $10/hour, and the problem is just that employers don't know that or can't find us.

This is a dangerous economic oversimplification. It implies that you just need to keep doing the same thing, but advertise better. That is not the problem here.

Yes, the work you do produces a great deal of actual wealth for your employers, more wealth than is generated by the middle manager they pay $50/hour. Similarly, fresh water is much more valuable to me than an iPhone, yet I can buy hundreds of gallons of water for the price of an iPhone.

We have had several decades during which the vast majority of the worldwide supply of programming talent was excluded from the hiring pool. Even within the U.S., a programmer located in certain states and cities has been able to command a higher wage on that basis. When you have been the beneficiary of artificial scarcity and consequential producer surplus [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus], it is easy to proudly and mistakenly relate your economic value with your actual value.

Don't get depressed when you see your work performed for $10/hour. You have not grown less talented or even less unique than you used to be; you had simply overestimated your uniqueness based on confounded experimental data. The great news is that in the meantime there has been someone exactly like you, someone who happened to exist in a different geography, whose wage has now gone up to $10/hour.

The only fix is niche work. Make yourself more unique. This won't work as well as it used to, since non-Americans can learn new skills too, but that is how capitalism works.

The timeout behavior I describe is only for the Droid X model. For instance, I'm told that variants of the Galaxy S series (e.g. T959) have a 30s delay every 5 tries, but no limit on total tries. That would be a little easier than my 13s/try scenario above: (30+5*3)/5=9s/try, or 13 hours average crack time.

Regardless of whether your device has a limit on total attempts, you ought to be aware that the security of your lockout resides not in the complexity of your pattern, but rather in a subtle facet of your phone's volatile->nonvolatile memory transfer timing.