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With so many Apple customers acting like cult members and refusing to acknowledge that Apple products can be faulty, I wonder how many broken phones there are out there.

In the end they will probably blame the telcos anyway... Seriously, I've seen it:
"Don't discount AT&T's role in this. They are Windows programmers, therefore used to users having to tell the computer what to do rather than the computer doing things for people."
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/11/the-great-iphone-3g-ifail-a-retrospective-with-videos/#comment-873332

They do call themselves the Facebook of China
http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/30/xiaonei-the-facebook-of-china-raises-430m-better-funded-than-facebook/

This article says the window treatment for the dye alone would run around $300-$400 per square meter of glass. The solar cells would cost extra. The process requires vapor deposition which adds to the cost and it alters the light color passing through the window which may or may not be acceptable to the end user. And then there's this:

Oddly enough, a number of reports appearing today (for example, in the Associated Press) suggested that Covalent's concentrators would be of use in actual windows, but cofounder John Mapel made no mention of that possibility when we talked last week. That's no great surprise -- it would be difficult to get high-intensity light into vertically-positioned windows, much less windows placed on the wrong side of a building.

As a number of other posters have pointed out - wait for an actual product to see what it actually is and what it's capable of.

On Vkontakte, your social data owns YOU!

"Who invests money in 12 year olds? ... I wouldn't trust a 12 year old with 6.5M $"

Maybe someone that wants to lose 6.5M?

I love the end of the article "No word on when PlaySpan will be launching."

His entire company is a website describing a great idea and that's all it is. The software will never launch. Why would it? He has 6.5 million, technically owned by his parents because children don't really control anything unless they're emancipated, he can't even sign a contract.

If I was his parents I'd take the money and say "ok play time's over, here's a ps3, wii, xbox360 and new gaming PC, go have fun, mommy and daddy's going shopping". And what could the venture capitals do? Go to court and tell a judge "We gave 6.5 million to a 12 yr old for something that doesn't exist and we want it back!" Pretty sure the judge would say "You're retarded, go home, courts don't pay people for being stupid"

UPDATE: apparently his dad actually runs the company, the kid is just there as a gimmick and wasn't actually mentioned in the official press release.

Here is the link that corresponds to your summary: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/19/playspan-run-12-year-old-ceo-gets-65m-in-venture-capital/

Makes slightly more sense with the correct link..

http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/19/playspan-run-12-year-old-ceo-gets-65m-in-venture-capital/

Which is not to say that investing $6.5M in a company run by a 12yo makes much sense but stranger things have happened at sea.. or so they say.

The actual article is here.

Apparently the kid isn't an actual co-founder, nor the CEO. It's his father running everything, the kid is just a sensationalist marketing tool.

Really, I highly doubt these kids even know a tiny fraction about the technical aspects of what they're selling or how it's done. They'll get lots of money for sure, and also learn a whole lot along the way, but they're definitely not the brains or management behind the operation at the moment.

Apologies if it's in bad taste to reply to my own post, especially because it's about the product I'm working on, but here are some of Dropbox's differences/improvements over what people typically hack together themselves:

- syncs continuously/watches the FS for file changes (no cron jobs needed -- things usually sync as quickly as they can be sent)
- does binary diffing and only sends deltas (compressed & over SSL)
- transparently archives past versions of all files (i.e. undelete/infinite undo)
- syncs across any number of machines
- lets you get to your files from the web
- some more info @ http://venturebeat.com/2007/08/16/the-y-combinator -list/

We made it after hacking together our own rsync-based abominations and getting really annoyed that no one had solved this genre of problems in a way that normal people could use.

Okay, I can stop shilling now. I was just excited that other people run into these problems.

I knew people who did that, too.

In some sense, we might be headed that way again (although I'm too pessimistic to expect it to catch on) --
WB catalog free on imeem

True, but wouldn't it be cool to combine the best of both worlds; increase comprehension and reading speed (micro pattern recognition) as well as structure (macro pattern recognition)?

Perhaps fewer columns is the way to go: http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/10/live-ink-offers- better-way-to-read-text-online/#more-10459

It's not false at all. Google pay the Mozilla foundation for each search that's made using that search box, just as Yahoo pay them for each search made on the Asian version of Firefox, which has a different default.

Sources: Here and here.

I'm glad to see that
. . someone is paying attention to
. . . . the Live Ink text formatting.

It makes text
. . so much easier
. . . . to read!

Here you go, Patrick. Check this out.
http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/19/elementeos-13-ye ar-old-ceo-highlight-of-tiecon/#more-12504

This 13-year-old kid has developed what I would call a graphical language which is designed to teach knowledge of the chemical elements and how they interact with each other. I don't think he realises that this is exactly what he's done - he only wanted to create a better way to learn this subject - but it looks to me like there's no question he's achieved the development of a special-purpose graphical language. If it turns out that people can learn this aspect of chemistry faster and more thoroughly, and that they can remember what they learn longer, then this validates one of my assertions, that we learn faster when using a graphical language (provided that it even exists, of course) than we do when using a spoken language, or the written form of a spoken language.

If this holds true, then another of my assertions is validated, that graphical languages will naturally spring from the minds of children and others who are dissatisfied with the status quo, and that there's no need for older people to figure out how to learn new ways to teach children - that children themselves will solve this difficult problem.

At any rate, I'm impressed.

Your example is quite different from the example shown in the article. There is no identation, your line breaks appear to be random, and all words are formatted equally.

The real example can be found at: http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/ beforeafter1.jpg

Your example sort of sounds like a William Shatner monologue in my mind. It's annoying and has no flow, but the Live Ink example is easy to read and flows like haiku.

... who finds the example much harder to read than the "non-enhanced" version?

Maybe my brain is wired differently than most or something (I have always been a very quick reader, even when I was young), but I find the need to have to shift my eyes from line to line VERY TIME CONSUMING. I also find that breaking up the sentences like this makes me insert artificial breaks in the narrative.

See, the thing is, you're supposed to read text the same way you listen to it. Hence the existence of punctuation. Sticking these artificial line breaks in the middle of sentences introduces pauses in places the author did not intend.... it makes a concise paragraph about cell biology read like a poem or haiku - which is not the best way to converse when you're talking about a technical subject.

I noticed several things that make it difficult for me to actually evaluate the difference. First each uses a different font, then the one that is supposed to be inferior ends with an incomplete sentance "A cell is" - making it gramatically inferior, if you zoom in you'll notice that the inferior sample didn't compress well in the jpg, the fonts are different sizes, and finally live link labeling the new sample as "Section 1:" provides more contextual information making it in fact more informative. While these changes are subtle each by themselves they are all time tested methods for improving text. Don't blur the text, add contextual info, complete your sentances and use standardized grammar. If this is the standard output from their software then this is truly not impressive. Aside from these issues, haven't people used collumns for a long time too?

When looking at their example on how to "best" format text for comprehension, I was amazed at how much space it took up. Clearly a cabal of paper and timber industries are behind this study, hoping to produce widely space-inefficient books.

To add insult to injury, I found the new version to look like evil dada poetry, essentially incomprehensible. The bright red bold words made my brain hurt even more.

I for one am welcoming our new automatic hayku generatting overlord's!

• The 40MW press release would be the largest Solar PV plant, but the Solar Thermal at Kramer Junction is 354MW and has been operating for over 20 years along with the other SEGS style systems. Nevada Solar One is 64MW and will be completed soon.
• Solar Thermal Electric Generation was not included in the $0.42/kWh (only Solar PV), any solar thermal or hybrid installations under this program would only be eligible for the $0.11/kWh and the rules have several wordings around hybrid systems that make it unclear whether a solar thermal/geothermal hybrid would even qualify at all
• After some more looking and reading the rules, they have blatantly advertised 40MW to claim "The Biggest" and get mediots to post their press release and create hype for their company, but the rules are clear on a 10MW limit.
• OptiSolar doesn't actually have a commercial thin film PV product yet, but they have been hiring.

but Bucky Fuller said it best:

Disclaimer: everything I am saying below is common sense and I am posting as an individual, not on behalf of ReputationDefender, despite my affiliation with the company. And I'm definitely not qualified or authorized to make legal comments about a User Agreement.

Right.

So here's a blog comment by a lawyer:

"As an attorney, there are several troubling issues with this start-up. Since the trigger for removal of negative information is that information being slanderous/libelous, determining what is slanderous/libelous is in the realm of legal practitioners not corporate entities. This may mean that the start-up could be practicing law without a license. Certainly, issuing any "cease and desist" letters on behalf of 3rd parties would have to prepared by attorneys, and these attorneys would not be able to be part of ReputationDefender's staff.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the cost of services rendered by outside counsel would most likely fall out of the price of $15.95 per monthly subscription, making ReputationDefender destined to the great web 2.0 graveyard. (Assuming they don't get charged with practicing law without a license first)"