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The Republican 5 step plan to Global Warming Denial.
1) There is no such thing as Global Warming
2) There is such a thing as Global Warming, but man isn't a cause.
3) Man is a cause of Global Warming, but other causes are more significant.
4) Man is a significant cause of Global Warming, but Global warming is not detrimental to Man.
5) Global Warming is detrimental to Man, blame the (by now incumbent) Democrats for not having taken action sooner.

It should be noted that this does not appear to be original (first appears from 2006) but makes for fantastic karma whoring every time you post it.

Yes, I remember being allowed to take my father's punched card to the bank to get out ten pounds for him when I was ten or so, which would have been 1971. And it was ten pounds in pound notes, neatly folded into a plastic holder. He still has some of the holders somewhere and I wouldn't be surprised if he still had a punched card. According to this timeline Lloyds launched an ATM using a magnetic strip card in 1972.

in reality, not trading for years is the key to making money - forget the dodgy, daytrading, low cap, high risk stocks, and stick to established ones that pay a decent dividend, have decent cover, forecast growth and you can just forget them for years.

As a perfect example, read this about a stock tipping newsletter

or, the Story of Doris, for further elucidation.

It is slowly sinking in. I lurk on a financial site where in teh last 2 years the computer help bulletin board has gone from exactly this 'quality == purchase costs' attitude to the opposite oppinion. Now firefox, AVG and OO.o are the default answer to many questions.

Most of the computer literate fools have moved to a FOSS or shareware application, and informal 'how do I do this' questions get answered quite quickly for FOSS and shareware, whilst IE and MS Office questions may even go unanswered. A few have even moved to Linux, but they seem to disspaear from view soon after (dont need the support perhaps?), although there is still quite a bit of stiff resistance to any 'use linux' answers.

they either sell the movies [they own the rights to LOTS and LOTS of movies, new and old and yet to be made.] or if you to rip the movie while you rent it or have a download in the right format, they will sell you the recorder...they make the bucks at one end or the other...that's the Sony solution to the whole copywrong battle.

"If outsourcing helps to spread the wealth, stabilise the rest of the world and narrow the gap between rich and poor then let's do it."

Let's get one thing straight. Our politicians and business leaders don't give a rats ass about making the rest of the World richer.

And if you really care about poor people in the rest of the Third World, lobby your leaders to open your agricultural markets to them.

Three quarters of India's economy is agrarian, only one per cent is IT related. It would be considerably better for everyone (more money for them, cheaper products for us) if we opened our agricultural markets.

Instead, we have self-interested farming groups telling us it's actually in our national interests to keep our markets closed. (As if some foreign national writing our software is just fine and dandy for security...)

This is why the trade talks at Doha failed recently.

"Protectionism is always self-defeating"

While I agree with you that the threat of outsourcing has been overstated (with the overhead of more management, outsourcing often increases costs), I don't agree that protectionism is always bad.

Malaysia introduced protectionism after the Asian crisis and has done considerably better than its neighbour, Indonesia, which embraced the IMF's dictates to open their markets.

"what better way than to take protectionist measures that will instantly invite retaliation?"

Retaliation??? India and China don't even let white people invest directly in their stockmarkets right now! ( "India's stock market is still largely closed to foreign investors ... unless you are a resident of India [or] a person of Indian origin"). So, I'm not sure what exactly they are going to do for retaliation.

America can afford to have little/no protectionism. It is a huge trading bloc and has the most powerful military in the World. When it comes to contentious issues, it's pretty hard for small and/or poor countries to argue with them. Unless there is a balance of power in negotiations, don't expect these countries to drop their protectionist policies.

What sort of capital are we talking? If it's around $30k or under, you should have no problem funding it yorself (I can easily raise that sort of capital myself through personal savings and personal loans; as a business one can easily receive more from the banks, not counting any business development grants available to you).

If we're talking more, how are you going to pay them back? What are your revenue streams - looks like just ad-driven to me. So as a VC hoping to have made significant profit on my investment in 5 years, what is your forecast? How much do you expect to get from advertising per user? How many users are you going to attract? How many years will it take for this revenue stream to generate $200k profit, to make it worth their while.

As with the parent, my intent is not to be negative, but as someone who is very much involved in the issues of keeping a business afloat, I think you need to come up with viable answers to these questions in the form of a solid business plan before you go asking for VC. And you have to truly belive that the business plan is feasible, else even if you did get VC you'd be opening yourself up for a miserable time.

A more direct answer to your question, though, would be to attend events in the ICT sector. You'll find there are many agencies, all in a close-knit community, with the goal to support ICT companies. They will host events which are of no interest, but you can network, network, network. Once that's done, finding VCs will be no problem whatsoever, as everyone in the community will know everyone else.

Oh, by the way - many people will be displeased that their information is being shared with a tracking company. At the least it looks very unprofessional. You're hosting PHP pages, bite the bullet and write the tracking code yourself.

"India's stock market is still largely closed to foreign investors ... unless you are a resident of India [or] a person of Indian origin" [My italics]

The Motley Fool

Some of you guys might be prepared to sell out your community while chanting the dogma of "free-trade-helps-everyone" that some rich CEOs taught you but I am more circumspect.