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The article clearly states many facts that are questioned or stated as courses of action from the respondents in this thread.

He is explicitly asking how to find a lawyer.
He is not asking for advice technical or legal from Slashdotters, only how to find a lawyer!
He is already an S Corp, that's what a sole proprietorship corporation is.

To the OP. You don't state where you are so, this is the best I can offer.

Check with the EFF.
Look at this Inc magazine article.
Do not speak to these vultures at all. Only your lawyer should contact them.

I'm curious if you are providing WiFi service, using it in your software, or simply have WiFi in your office?

If you have time and want some lulz contact The Oatmeal.

The article has inexplicably vanished. Here's the text from the Google cache while it lasts:

Microsoft needed a great Christmas season. After years of product stagnation, and a big market shift toward mobile devices from PCs, Microsoft’s future relied on the company seeing customers demonstrate they were ready to jump in heavily for Windows8 products – including the new Surface tablet.

But that did not happen.

With the data now coming it, it is clear the market movement away from Microsoft products, toward Apple and Android products, has not changed. On Christmas eve, as people turned on their new devices and launched their first tweet, Surface came in dead last – a mere 2% compared to the number of people tweeting from iPads (Kindle was second, Android third.) Looking at more traditional units shipped information, UBS analysts reported Surface sales were 5% of iPads shipped. And usability reviews continue to run highly negative for Surface and Win8.

PC sales declining

This inability to make a big splash, and mount a serious attack on Apple/Android domination, is horrific for Microsoft primarily because we now know that traditional PC sales are well into decline. Despite the big Win8 launch and promotion, holiday PC sales declined over 3% compared to 2011 as journalists reported customers found “no compelling reason to upgrade.” Ouch!

Looking deeper, for the 4th quarter PC sales declined by almost 5% according to Gartner research, and by almost 6.5% according to IDC. Both groups no longer expect a rebound in PC shipments, as they believe homes will no longer have more than 1 PC due to the mobile device penetration – the market where Surface and Win8 phones have failed to make any significant impact or move beyond a tiny market share. Users increasingly see the complexity of shifting to Win8 as not worth the effort; and if a switch is to be made consumer and businesses now favor iOS and Android.

Microsoft’s monopoly over personal computing has evaporated

From 95% market domination in 2005 share has fallen to just 20% in 2012 (IDC, Goldman Sachs.) Comparing devices, in 2005 there were 55 Windows de

So you are saying that Samsung deliberately planned on losing $1bn?

No, just that Samsung recklessly chose to go beyond the bounds of copying that other manufacturers, including their operating system developer Google thought reasonable. So it's hardly surprising that a jury had the same reaction that Google did.

Because Samsung's designs already were original. They shared a few design cues with Apple phones, but nothing that should constitute a violation. If these kinds of standards were imposed universally, all the tech we use would be completely incompatible and randomly different.

In the trial, evidence was produced that Samsung actively studied Apple's designs and tried to imitate them, so it's hardly surprising that a jury agreed with Apple that Samsung's designs are not original. And certainly other manufactures have managed to come up with perfectly functional phones that do not infringe upon Apple's design patents (indeed, the jury found that some of of Samsung's devices avoid infringing on some of Apple's design patents). Compatibility among different devices is assured by standards to which Apple and other manufacturers have contributed. But compatibility does not require, for example, that icons be the same shape, use a similar color screen, and be similarly arranged to those on the iPhone. So it is perfectly possible to construct a fully functional smartphone that does not infringe upon Apple's patents.

And why? Because it now also searches Google. No mention of Google Voice Search.

Now, who's making stuff up? Siri doesn't use Google results according to this SEO.

Who cares if it doesn't, unlike you I was quoting Woz from the article. If you want to slam your own witness ...

And why? Because it now also searches Google. No mention of Google Voice Search.

Now, who's making stuff up? Siri doesn't use Google results according to this SEO.

The second article is basically just the video from the first.

My bad. I lost the original article I wanted to link to. That article contained about a dozen questions where Woz compared the iPhone Siri against Google Voice Search.

Here is a completely different article with the same kind of test. This one is not performed by Woz but Gizmodo, but it's actually much more comprehensive with 1600 questions! Enjoy.

1600-Question Test Shows How Bad Siri Really Is
Jesus Diaz

Pitting Google search against Siri using a monster 1600-question test shows how useful Siri really is: not at all. Google answered correctly 86 percent of the time. Siri achieved just 68 percent accuracy. At that point, it's not much better than a crystal ball.

We knew that Siri isn't very good. But this intense test shows just how ridiculous the gimmicky voice assistant could be.
The fact is that even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been saying this since the day Apple introduced the iPhone 4S with Siri. It just sucks. Siri as an independent product, before Apple acquired it, the Woz told us at the Gizmodo Gallery:

It was really accurate, but now it's full of marketing-driven answers that are not correct.

How bad is it now? Here are some good examples from the test, which was conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, a character who is well-known for his pro-Apple view of the tech world:

When did the movie Cinderella come out? Responded with a movie theater search on Yelp.

What spices are in Lasagna? Responded with a Yelp search with lasagna on the menu.

I want to go to Lake Superior? Responded with directions to the company Lake Superior X-Ray.

Clearly, Woz is right: Apple's version of Siri is tainted because it's marketing driven, giving preference to commercial sites like Yelp or companies over actual, useful results.

Of course, you can argue that Siri is labeled as beta by Apple. But, to Woz's point, how did it end up being worse than it was as a standalone app available at the App Store? The one Apple bought when Steve Jobs was still running the company?

Which brings me back to a earlier point. Jobs' authorized biography says that he was at diminished capacity when Siri was being tested, too weak to come into the office. He only tried the current form of Siri at his last board meeting. He briefly played with it and, understandably given the moment, didn't show much interest. That was it. It's hard to believe that he would have let software with 68% accuracy to ever be installed in a shipping product.

A new version of Siri is coming in the new iOS 6. It looks a lot more useful, but I just hope that Apple ditches the commercialism in favor of giving the answers you actually need. [Fortune]

http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/facts-of-facebook-ipo-filing-that-will-boggle-your-mind.html

FB is evil, and it's users are stupid assholes.

Don't be a stupid asshole.

Some would:
http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/07/mens-sexual-harassment-claims-on-the-rise.html

According to most of the news Google could find on the subject, men file approximately 15% of all sexual harassment suits, and that number is growing.

You did miss a memo.

Report: Facebook Is Most Hated Social Media Company .

That's a survey of mainstream folk, not just tech geeks like us.

Facebook has basically become like a utility company. Yes, millions of people use it, for hours a day, but not because it's some cool dotcom social media site that they like, they use it because there's a perception that one "needs" to in order to stay connected.

Actually, its not a valid concern.

Google shuts down projects that have no clear path to making money, like Wave, Buzz and Others.

As far as I know none of these had any monitization mechanism other than pushing ads in your face.

Compute has a price schedule published right up front, and its about the twice the cost of the electricity to power a comparable computer, but with zero capital investment. Their data storage prices and bandwidth prices are also published, and are reasonable. You really couldn't afford to even put your legacy machines into production at these prices.

Clearly they expect this project to cover its own costs, and make use of excess capacity in their data centers.

Google can build a processor in house cheaper than Dell or any white-box company. With a gazillion of them on hand, they can provision them fast, swap them in when there is trouble, and they do it day in and day out. So chances are they are simply reselling the in house expertise they already have. None of this is going away any time soon, and they always need to maintain excess capacity for their own needs, so why not market that.

With a clear path to making money on this project baked in at the start, the only thing that would kill it is lack of customers. Hell I'm thinking of renting a couple cores just for playing around with.

yep, it's a myth. But there was a time when there was hardware development, but the chip companies didn't sprout up in the orchards by themselves, http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inconvenient-history-of-silicon-valley.html

I heard this before, and then of a presentation at local INCOSE meeting in November by Sam Araki who worked on the Corona program for Lockheed. He presented and showed how much effort was pumped into developing the electronics needed for these new recon satellites. And there was is serious need since we had not much knowledge of USSR military buildup. Unlike USSR, USA efforts resulted in huge turnouts of civilian products and uses. He also showed charts of why our economic recovery system is broken. Unlike previous economic downturns we were able to recover. In early 70s Lockheed Missiles and Space in Sunnyvale employed 28,000 people. Now this same place (LockMart) it is 8,000.

Guy Kawasaki on Angel Investors

Who exactly are angel investors, and how do I know if they are an appropriate funding source for my company?

Guy Kawasaki's response:

Broadly defined, angel investors are high net-worth individuals who invest in entrepreneurial companies, usually at an early stage. Like institutional venture capital firms, many angel investors provide cash to young companies and take equity in return. One difference is that angel investors typically invest smaller amounts of money in individual companies than venture capitalists do, making them a possible resource for companies that have exhausted their "friends and family" financing options but are not ready to approach VCs for capital

Hospitals have strict budgets and have to penny pinch. The software vendors charge a ludicrous amount for their software - so much that the hospital admins cringe and have a very hard time finding the money. And with these hard times, hospital revenues are in a huge slump

REALLY? Have you seen the average hospital bill lately?

Let's look at HCA for example.Their profits are a bit up and down from quarter to quarter. But, there are always profits and they are always substantial.

Hospitals crying the poor mouth and pointing at software companies is a tough pill for me to swallow.

Oh here we go again. The "broken windows" fallacy has fooled someone again.

Somewhat related; very recently on Reddit, there was an article about a much safer kind of saw called 'SawStop' (the promotional video is quite amusing). It stops spinning in 1/1000th of a second if you touch it, and saves many fingers/hands a year.

It turns out that the economic cost of table-saw injuries is around $2 billion. Meanwhile, the entire table-saw market is only $175 million (interesting read), or 10x less. In other words, if the big makers (Bosch, Black & Decker and co) used this tech, we'd save tons of money, pain and Unnecessary Surgery (which yes, is featured in Itchy and Scratchy's horror theme park).

Oh dear, but now we've put all those surgeons out of work repairing countless fingers that the previous inferior saws cut off!! Such a shame!

And hence why people have got to start equating higher unemployment as often being a good thing, instead of a bad.

all of our medical costs are paid for by the government.

False. Your medical costs are paid for with your taxes and the taxes of your neighbors. That is partially why your tax rate is so high compared to the U.S.

For a quick comparison of the differences in tax rates between the two countries, the following link shows that Davor Sutija, in 2009, had an effective tax rate in Norway of 43.9%, compared to 33% in Massachusetts (a high tax state) and 28.3% in Florida (a low tax state).

Link

Healthcare isn't free. Someone has to pay for it and that someone is you.

Google [had] a score of 80 out of 100, although that is down from 86 last year. Microsoft’s Bing search engine "makes a strong first showing with a score of 77," according to the report. It was followed by Yahoo (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).

These don't match the press release from the second link at all:

All major competitors improve, with Google in the lead, jumping 4% to 83. While Google remains below its all-time high of 86 from 2008 and 2009, its present score is the highest among all e-business websites. One year ago, Google plunged 7% in ACSI, but the company now appears to have a better handle on its expanding range of Internet services. Microsoft’s search engine Bing, however, is close behind Google with a score of 82 following its 7% surge.

Surpassing even Bing’s sharp upswing, the 10% gain posted by Ask.com is the largest in e-business. With an ACSI score of 80, Ask.com is chased closely by Yahoo! and MSN—both showing sizeable ACSI advances of 4% to 79 and 78, respectively. Unlike other search engines and portals, Ask.com offers a question-and-answer format that garners a smaller, but increasingly loyal, following. As Ask.com, Yahoo!, and MSN rise, AOL is left behind, gaining a mere 1% to an ACSI score of 75.

Perhaps they used numbers from a year or two ago for the Inc.com article. In any case, is there, somewhere, a discussion of the methodology used and a summary of results that's not spoon fed to the press? These are almost arbitrary numbers to me, with a surprisingly small spread: 66% to 83% is the range from very low satisfaction to very high, out of 100%?

This sort of thing happens in education. Software producers know they need to plan for future users so they give it to the kids who they hope will buy it. Some coworkers of mine at an advertising agency said their professor called Quark (makers of QuarkXpress) asking for educational discounts for 30+ licenses and were told there was no discount. At the time the license cost was something like $1200 per seat. So they called Adobe and asked for educational discounts on InDesign, new at the time, and Adobe just gave them everything they wanted at no cost.

Worked in their favor too. When those kids hit the working world they only knew InDesign and their employers were forced to switch. We did. And never looked back.

"Then Adobe hit the market in 1999 with a program called InDesign (now used by Inc.). In 2003, Adobe launched its Creative Suite, which rolled in products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with InDesign. Quark couldn't come close. Its U.S. market share tumbled from 95 percent to just 25 percent ."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100401/can-quark-turn-the-corner.html

If you want to sell your product give it to the educators.

And yet all of those kids coming out of college knowing linux hasn't forced companies to switch to it. The reason that your example worked was because companies were not entrenched in QuarkXpress or InDesign at the time and therefore the kids coming out set the standard, not the companies. Apple tried the same approach with education - giving steep discounts to schools and universities on their equipment, but that didn't change the business market, at least not much. Why, because for all practical purposes, companies where the difference in price between a Mac and PC or QuarkXpress or InDesign, aren't big enough to influence the market. Now, a fortune 500 company making that decision is a different story and they will look at more than just the initial cash outlay.

This sort of thing happens in education. Software producers know they need to plan for future users so they give it to the kids who they hope will buy it. Some coworkers of mine at an advertising agency said their professor called Quark (makers of QuarkXpress) asking for educational discounts for 30+ licenses and were told there was no discount. At the time the license cost was something like $1200 per seat. So they called Adobe and asked for educational discounts on InDesign, new at the time, and Adobe just gave them everything they wanted at no cost.

Worked in their favor too. When those kids hit the working world they only knew InDesign and their employers were forced to switch. We did. And never looked back.

"Then Adobe hit the market in 1999 with a program called InDesign (now used by Inc.). In 2003, Adobe launched its Creative Suite, which rolled in products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with InDesign. Quark couldn't come close. Its U.S. market share tumbled from 95 percent to just 25 percent ."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100401/can-quark-turn-the-corner.html

If you want to sell your product give it to the educators.

When confronted with something I don't know, I do exactly what you did, I go and look it up. I can and do conversions from "English" to Metric and back again all the time. It's not terribly difficult. But I don't have myself convinced that I know absolutely everything about measurement systems. I'm not that arrogant.

I think asking for conversions to be inserted is asking a bit much, considering the quality of most Slashdot summaries. We're lucky when we get a cut-and-paste first paragraph without editorializing. Also, I don't see Americans on Slashdot asking for Fahrenheit, Pound, Foot conversions from articles dealing in metric.

> Some Americans have a tendency to think of anything other than an exact copy of their poilitical system as 'repressive' or 'not free' or even 'socialist' (or at least, what they think socialism is)

We think these people are stupid here too. I tend to wave a copy of this article from a business magazine in the faces of these people. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html

When there's a social safety net, people are more willing to take the chance and start a business. As if this was not obvious.

--
BMO

Point your boss at this article by Joel and have him search for "death march": http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071101/how-hard-could-it-be-five-easy-ways-to-fail.html?partner=fogcreek

Actually it looks like PayPal is trying this again as of the last week: http://www.inc.com/tech-blog/ebay-says-paypal-only-please.html

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/innovation-taking-aim-at-gas-guzzlers.html

And clearly we have plenty of room to improve current efficiencies.

Dinky company, perhaps, but quite successful at a personal level. In less than ten years, Joel took his company from zero to seven million dollars per year by my accounting.

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
$700 per employee in the original office

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
"built for 18 employees" = about $12,600/month

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be-adventures-in-office-space.html

"When we moved into our current offices, our rent had been equal to 15 percent of revenue, which was high. But the company grew, and today our rent is only about 2 percent of revenue."

So revenue was $84,000/mo ($1,008,000/yr) and is now about $7,500,000/year.

So he's not a complete waste of space. And he may not be God but that doesn't mean he's never right and/or never worth listening to. READ THE F ARTICLE about rewrites--plenty of Slashdotters (you included) have been here long enough to know that at least, his example about Netscape/Mozilla is 100% accurate. They lost YEARS because they chose to rewrite everything.

And judging by the comments here, I think a lot of people are reading the title and thinking he's saying "never make any changes." That is 10000% NOT what he is saying. He's saying "never throw away 100% of your code and start over from scratch." If you actually read his original article (I know, I'm new here) you'll see a lot of really good points.

Joel isn't God, but he isn't just some stumbling moron either. There IS a continuum between those two extremes, you know.

Just for a little perspective - a $1M revenue company is a teeny-tiny company. We're talking mom and pop stores in a strip mall here. $1M in revenue is not hard to achieve - in fact if you don't care about profits it is very easy to achieve. (A business selling $2 bills for $1 will have all the revenue they can handle but will also be incredibly unprofitable) When these companies make $1M in profits, I'll be significantly more impressed. If you ever look at magazines like Inc they will always quote revenue figures in their articles and ads because it sounds impressive but really is pretty meaningless.

That said, its nice to see some traction in open source businesses even if it is small.

My employees have two rules to follow: 1. Get the job done. 2. Don't embarrass the company.

Seems reasonable, but Number 2 may be harder than you think.

You left out the part where, after being rebuffed by the manufacturers of tablesaws, he actually petitioned the government to force them to license his technology.

With the big tool companies declining to participate, SawStop is seeking other ways to make sure its technology is adopted. In April 2003, the company filed a petition with the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make SawStop-like technology standard on all table saws.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050701/disruptor-gass.html#

Gass had given the same dog-and-pony show a dozen times, mostly for woodworkers, contractors, and a few industry executives. But this audience was different. It consisted of lawyers for the Defense Research Industry, a trade group for attorneys representing the power-tool industry. SawStop could help prevent thousands of serious injuries caused by power tools each year, Gass believed -- if the industry would license it. He returned to his seat thinking he had made his case.

Then Dan Lanier, national coordinating counsel for Black & Decker, stepped to the podium. His topic: "Evidentiary Issues Relating to SawStop Technology for Power Saws." Lanier spent the next 30 minutes discussing a hypothetical lawsuit -- in which a plaintiff suing a power-saw manufacturer contended the saw was defective because it did not incorporate SawStop's technology -- and suggesting ways defense counsel might respond. Lanier recalls it as a rather dry exploration of legal issues. Gass heard something different. To his ears, Lanier's message was this: If we all stick together and don't license this product, the industry can argue that everybody rejected it so it obviously wasn't viable, thereby limiting any legal liability the industry might face as a result of the new technology. (Lanier denies this was his point.)

He Took On the Whole Power-Tool Industry: Why wasn't anyone else interested in building a safer saw?

I suspect that this article was read by many a lawyer...

A working safety feature exists, so why is it not implemented?

Take at look at this article, seems like their motivations was "If [they] all stick together and don't license this product, the industry can argue that everybody rejected it so it obviously wasn't viable, thereby limiting any legal liability the industry might face as a result of the new technology."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-how-i-learned-to-love-middle-managers.html?partner=fogcreek

America is, and pretty much always has been, a fascist nation. I think the recent bailouts of the banking giants and car manufacturers should prove that it is fascist now; Andrew Jackson himself was fighting fascism when it came to central banking back in the 1830's. War and weapons define the American economy. Boeing and Raytheon and Xi could be considered the ultimate achievement of which a fascist society is capable.

Then why is ovrer 2/3rds of the American economy based on CONSUMER spending[1] instead of WAR or WEAPONS? And of that, most of it is spent by women.[2] (See the numerous articles on ecomomics and how they are all worrying about women not spending more but vowing to spend the same and live more frugal lives for the evidence.)

Not to mention that the USA spends only about 4% GDP on Defense[3] at the national level last I was aware.

Hmm...not much of a leg to stand on for your claims, now is there?

[1]2009-10-11 USA Today Article
[2]dated article on consumer spending (2003), but matches what I've recently read in the last month per the point and a more recent article on women being frugal. and yet another article on frugal consumerism in the USA
[3]Wikipedia USA Military budget - with reference links

This brings to mind an article I read way back in Inc magazine where the author talks about how employees will figure out how game any system that rewards them.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-commissions.html

Clemson is just gaming the system, I imagine other schools that change quickly change their ranking probably are doing the same. Even if US News and World Report changes their ranking methodology, I guarantee that schools will simply change their tactics to beat the system agian.

Xerox is about to announce a "solid ink" machine capable of 11x17 sizes that is waaaay more environmentally friendly.

Furthermore, what also never gets mentioned is the evolution "endgame". Only the fittest survive, will eventually result in the survival of a single species. We have no idea what type of species that will be, whether it might be us, or some other species. However, in the (very) long run evolution theory is quite clear : there can be only one.

Citation needed. I know evolution says only the most adaptable, fittest, or strongest specimens within a species are supposed to survive but can you point out where evolution says only one species will survive? That theory, that only the fittest survive, also overlooks some things. Such as mutual survival.

Furthermore economics 101 yields the trivial result that economic migration is a net-negative influence for both the country accepting the migrants *AND* the country losing it's people. The best economic migration policy is to outlaw migration alltogether, and only allow for tourism and business travel.

Citation needed again.

Since I asked for citations I'll provide some myself. Studies show Immigration Fuels Entrepreneurship. Immigrants are more likely to start their own businesses thus increasing employment which benefits everyone.

Falcon

Covered in Joel Spolsky's article Sins of Commissions. He went to a shoe store where they "sold" him a $12 can of show spray for free by giving him a discount on the shoes to cover the price.

"I can picture the M.B.A. who worked at corporate headquarters. I bet he reaped a big bonus for coming up with an incentive program that dramatically increased the sales of the high-profit silicone spray. Meanwhile, did anybody notice that the sales of shoes fell by about the same amount?... incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can't. It's not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense."

(Dear Slashdot, why can't I use <i> or <em> tags inslide <blockquote>? Or is my system just not showing it right?)

Required reading: How Hard Could It Be?: Thanks or No Thanks

"Simply because one programmer's idea translated visibly and directly into a lot of money didn't mean that the other team members weren't adding just as much value to the business, albeit in a less direct way."

I read this article a few days ago in Inc. Magazine, and it reminded me of an important lesson that I learned the hard way, in the course of selling Linux to small businesses:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/legacy-james-benson-1945-2008.html

Benson had no luck until a prospect explained that the $200 software seemed too inexpensive to do what it claimed. "He raised the price to $2,500, and [it] started to sell like hotcakes," says Peter DiGiammarino, Compusearch's current CEO.

So I agree with you about adjusting expectations. I believe I'll be adjusting my salary expectations upwards.

When Bobby lost the tip of his finger in an unfortunate band saw accident, you can bet your ass that everyone perked up and paid attention. Nowadays, nobody respects the machines. Everyone depends on the "safety features" to keep them out of harm's way.

I agree with you -- and so do the power tool manufacturers, in a sense.

Anyone remember Friendster? It was MySpace before MySpace existed. Then the founder tried to intrusively control how people related to each other. Result?: Friendster died, and MySpace, amongst a host of impersonators, but one that wasn't so intrusive (at least socially, nevermind MySpace's instrusive assault on your sense of web aesthetics) catapulted into popularity. Read all about it in detail.

So if I were a betting man (no pun intended), I would abandon Second Life now, and look into the most promising of Second Life's impersonators that doesn't intrude on your freedoms like Second Life.

People do not like unnecessary intrusions on their freedoms, in real life or on the Internet. However, unlike real life, people can vote with their feet a lot more effectively on the Internet, and simply leave and encamp somewhere else, en masse. Carpe Diem, Website investors.

The promise of Second Life, if there is any at all, is that it would allow you to do things you can't do in real life. So what does Second Life do? Make it more just like real life, and kill off what would make Second Life attractive to anyone who would want to go there in the first place, and/ or stay there. (Smacks forehead.)

In Second Life's defense, perhaps they are under political pressure to abandon online gambling, which would make sense owing to being based in the USA and the USA's current retarded attitude towards online gambling.

Well then relocate your servers to Antigua.

Or make a poor policy choice, piss off your users, and wither and die.

Study the Friendster warning example carefully, dear Second Life executives.

You're probably just trolling, but since you mentioned Mitchell Baker I feel compelled to call bullshit on your little rant about her. Here's a very good piece on the history of Mozilla and her involvement throughout its existence: Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox. I'll leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

Yes, she is a woman, with no technical experience. I don't see how that makes her incapable of running the Foundation, though. It's actually an important point mentioned in the piece I linked. If you read her blog or (again) the article I linked, you'll realize that she's a woman of incredible ideas and great sense on how to run a community. Like it or not, the Firefox community sets the bar in the open source world, and that makes Mitchell Baker one of the most influential individuals in software history. Well, that's my take on it.

The best one I've seen is inc.com. It's got real articles, written by real people with real experience running real companies (as opposed to people whose only "business" is sucking VC's dry).

Social lives, mind wandering = not at work.

Funny, I thought that when I was sitting at my desk, I was at work. What I'm actually doing at my desk has nothing to do with whether or not I am at work.

Oh, and by the way, open your eyes and read this:

What's Next: Stupid Productivity Tricks

You say you don't care if people walk around for a bit? Eat your words:

"recreational Web surfing has become a kind of mental floss for workers who spend their days sucking in a stream of work-related data that now comes in at a firehose pace--it's the information age equivalent of a walk around the block."

As usual, Brazil is ahead of the rest of the world in social things. Ricardo Semler has been doing open source business for 20 years, as Chief Happiness Officer. Here's a review of his book, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works. Some people are extremely enthusiastic about Semler's ideas: He's my idol.

Normal CEO's are Chief Unhappiness Officers. They steal everything they can, and act out their anger toward everyone they can.

One of the most important examples of a business run in an adversarial way is Microsoft, of course. After all this time, major media outlets are starting to get it right. Here are quotes from the CNN article Microsoft security--no more second chances?:

"By now, Chertoff's people must be thoroughly frustrated that Microsoft still turns out poorly designed products."

"Here's something to consider: If bridge builders or airplane designers applied the same standards to their labors, do you believe that the public would so easily forgive the regularity with which bridges would collapse and airliners fall out of the sky?"

If you like the CNN article, don't forget to D I G G it.

Well, the Thinking Machines story is a little more complicated than that.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html

Basically, IBM and Cray got caught by surprise when the MPPs, of which TMC was just one, came onto the market. Eventually they got their act together and put out the SP and the T3D, which were both good products. Thinking machines got hit by the same post-cold-war lull in supercomputer buying that hit everyone else, and they just weren't big enough to ride it out. Even at their peak, they were a $100million/year (inflation adjusted) company. The corporate landscape is littered with the corpses of supercomputing companies that rose and fell, particularly those that rose in the late 80's, and disappeared in the 90's.

I hate to break it to you but the last small republic Republicans died out with Goldwater in the 70s. Ever since the Reagan (proto neo-con) era the Republicans have represented big governments (deficits increased under Reagan), increased domestic ebulliences, and increased foreign intervention that the founding fathers correctly warned us was such a bad idea. And no the Demolames aren't better, since Clinton and the DLC took over the Dems they have "triangulated," i.e. copied the Repigs worst moves. Most people think that it's under the Clinton error that the NSA expanded at the most rapid rates, and far from having a few next boxes they most likely had a Danny Hilis connection machine by the early 90s. Hint connection machine equal tens of thousands of processors in a massively parallel configuration:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

"Thinking Machines sold seven CM-1s, but only because DARPA brokered and subsidized most of the deals. If the company was going to stay in business, it would need a machine that could pull its weight outside AI research. Unfortunately, according to Resnikov, the decision to tailor the CM-1 to the AI "nonmarket" cost Thinking Machines three years in the real-world marketplace.

In April 1986, Thinking Machines announced the arrival of the CM-2, a machine the scientific community actually could use. The CM-2 was able to run FORTRAN and to do floating-point operations. It was also a piece of work artistically: a five-foot cube of cubes -- done up in what Thinking Machines employees called "Darth Vader black" -- in whose innards red lights flickered mysteriously. But the machine's exotic massively parallel technology still needed special software, which meant its users had to learn new programming techniques. The CM-2 might be more like the human brain than a sequential computer like the Cray was, but scientists knew how to write programs for the Cray. Many of Thinking Machines' first customers, says Dave Waltz, who ran the company's AI group, did most of their computing on the floating-point processors, ignoring the 64,000 single-bit processors."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html

For anything. They demand control into your business, especially when you get loans from them. Avoid them like the plague. inc.com is a good place to start

Here's a start. You don't need slashdot's help!

I read an article about Cornice a while back (upon further googling, here it is). They were approached by Apple to be the exclusive supplier of HDs for the iPod Mini. They ended up turning Apple down in order to focus on the phone hard drive market. Time will tell how smart of a decision that was, but if there's one thing you can say about their CEO it's that he's got some brass ones. I think it was a pretty stupid move, but then Apple would be done with this tech by now (only flash in the Nano, bigger HDs in the 5G iPod) so maybe they will sell a lot of phones with hard drives and become rich.

Strict liability torts, which do not require a finding of intent or negligence, are primarily confined to ultrahazardous activities and product liability cases.

An activity is ultrahazardous if it is so inherently dangerous that even the highest degree of care will not eliminate the risk of harm. If someone is injured because of such activity, the defendant is liable regardless of the level of care he or she exercised.

Many people don't realize that the relatively modern addition of variable speed windshield wipers were invented in the early part of the previous century. I forget the exact year.
Now, however, that the patent has expired this is a standard feature on most automobiles.

It appeared on most automobiles long before the patent expired. A family friend sat on the jury when it went to trial with one of the big auto companies. According to this: http://www.inc.com/magazine/19971201/1374.html he's collected about $30M so far from Ford and Chrysler.

I wonder how this guy Tom Charlton would score on the test.

Yeah, sure. We've heard that one before. If highly parallel operations were some kind of silver bullet, then Thinking Machines wouldn't have gone out of business a decade ago.

Thinking Machines didn't die because there was no demand for parallel processing, they died becausethey didn't look for business world applications for their systems, which IBM, Intel, and all the other supercomputer vendors were doing. Instead they relied exclusively on DARPA funding.