Re:If this shipped with Lindows instead...
on
AOL's $299 PC
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· Score: 1
Because that's not their business. They already got rid of that other GPLed product of theirs, why in the world would they want to get involved with a new one? Especially a new one that will piss off Microsoft. They don't need to declare war on Microsoft. They're a media company, not an OS company.
"You won't be drowned by the deluge of unimportant information because you'll use software to filter incoming advertising and other extranneous messages and spend your valuable time looking at those messages that interest you." - Bill Gates, The Road Ahead.
Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet -- in the sense offered by the media -- is just silly.
And to believe that the media claimed that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is likewise silly.
"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - Dan Quayle
I'd say it's 3 and 4. The moon isn't made of oil, but a base on the moon could potentially be used to create an awful lot of cheap power, especially if we could find a nice source of radioactive material, but alternatively, through solar power. Then there's 4. Without a permanent presense, that flag up there doesn't mean shit. The moon could be very useful. We've gotta take it before anyone else does.
I thought this person was talking about people with poor eyesight, but apparently he's talking about people who are blind. Vision impaired? Give me a break. What the hell is wrong with the word blind?
Would USA Medicare and/or private insurance pay for such a medical device?
No. It's not medically necessary.
Just because something improves your vision doesn't mean it's covered by medical insurance. Contacts generally aren't covered, and neither is LASIK (vision correction surjery).
One more thing that came to my mind... theoretically, you don't save ANYTHING by doing the managment yourself. The reason is because YOU have to be compensated. YOU, acting as an overseer/manager/whatever, should be paid for your services.
This seems to me like two different ways to say the same thing.
So, you really have to have a competitive advantage of some sort (as I mentioned in my previous post).
My competitive advantage would be that I have $10 million, and most people don't.
What's a triplex? Anyway, I guess you can get a small building or something. I was thiking of larger ones (ones that I've lived in in Toronto).
A triplex is a three family house (three separate entrances, three kitchens, etc). I live in one right now, on the third floor. I wouldn't really call it an apartment building, though. I'd put 4 or 5 as the minimum to call something that.
Management cost probably isn't THAT much.
Management costs are fairly high. My friend owns several apartments, and I almost went in on a 5-unit building with him (it fell through at the last minute), so I've done a lot of research into this. Management costs are about $100/month per unit. Less if you have a whole lot of units, but still very far from being insignificant.
Instead, it will be attractive if YOU have more skills, expertise, knowledge, etc to do it. If you like doing it, if you know how to do it, etc then you'll have an advantage. It seems like you are interested and probably somewhat knowledgeable so that's one plus:)
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. It'd be a job, just like anything else, except I'd be working for myself, not for someone else. So I'd be taking in 100% of the profit, not 5 or 10%.
Of course if I had $10 million I couldn't do all the management myself, so I'd only be making 80 or 90% of the profit, and giving the rest to my employees. But still, that's good enough for me:).
This is an argument against VoIP, not an argument against regulating VoIP. We don't force people to have telephones, after all, so regulation is irrelevant.
Personally, I have no need for a land line, but it has nothing to do with VoIP. In an emergency, I can just use my cell phone. I do have a land line, but that's because my ADSL service requires that I have one. The only place I've ever given my land-line number to is my bank, who wouldn't accept my cell phone number as it was located in a different state.
Funding and effectiveness of 911
The solution to that is simple. Fund 911 some other way. Property taxes makes the most sense.
And remember that when you call 911 from a landline (and in more and more areas, cellular), they know where you are. VOIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability.
Again, not an argument about regulation, an argument against VoIP. However, it's not a very good argument. VoIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability because VoIP is extremely far away from happening. In fact, I doubt it will ever happen. It doesn't have any real advantages. For long distances, switched networks can be cheaper, but it's easy to digitize the call at the CO and send it over a switched network from there. In fact, it's being done already, and for international calls sent over satellites it has been done for many years.
Funding of Universal Access
Screw universal access. You want to live out in the sticks, you can pay extra.
I'm not suggesting that any of the problems described above are unsolveable for VOIP, but I think it's awfully unlikely that "market forces" will magically provide the answers.
"Market forces" already have provided the answers. Except for limited situations (basically as an alternative to a large PBX system), VoIP is stupid, and it isn't succeeding.
suddenly, it's all software.. adn hooking people together for voice stuff no longer needs ANY kind of centralizing....
The centralizing is in the network itself. You're not going to run a phone line from your house to every single other house in the world. That would be silly. Instead you'll run a whole town full of houses to a CO, and then run a bunch of towns into a common area for a metropolitan area. For local calls perhaps you could use direct wireless connections, but this is the exception, not the rule.
it won't be regulated, as ultimately, it can't be.
However, the internet connections themselves will be regulated.
Now, all these telecom taxes exist because the PSTN (public switched telephone network) is a monopoly - you can't have multiple PSTN networks.
How so? We do have multiple PSTN networks. Both for long distance, and for local (only one land-line based local, usually, but many mobile based lines). Are you saying that it's all part of one system? Isn't the internet the same?
PSTN, as stated above, is bulky and not practical when we have efficient packet-switching networks that can easily replace it at 60 percent of the cost.
Packet switching doesn't really solve any problems. Most of the time that you're on the phone with someone someone is talking. And packet-switching requires aggregation, which is only reasonable for long distance. And we already have packet-switched networks carrying PSTN data across long distances.
I would also like a module to interface with my home phone system.
Asterisk, as mentioned in the article, is this interface.
The difference is that P2P file sharing companies aren't in the business of stopping copyright infringment. There's nothing wrong with creating hardware which is useful for sending bulk mail. There's nothing wrong with creating software which is useful for stopping spam. Doing both, however, creates a conflict of interest. One of the two products will suffer from that conflict of interest. My guess is that it's going to be the spam blocking software, because selling hardware to spammers seems like it would be more profitable.
This is a human-based review system of millions of junk messages... without the users, there is no Spamcop, and Ironport bought nothing.
They didn't buy nothing, they bought the death of Spamcop. If IronPort really is dependent upon spammers, then such a buyout makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint.
If this turns out to be the case, you can thank Julian again, for selling out the constant vigilance of many users to the highest bidder.
Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure.
Ironbase makes a computer that can be used to send lots of spam. They certainly don't "enable the spread of" spam.
It would be more like if the creator of Kazaa sold software to catch copyright infringers, and claimed that Kazaa users are not copyright infringers but legitimate downloaders of legally distributable indie music.
They don't have to be super fast (like the one in this article), but imagine how much fuel/electricity we could save if we could all easily commute by train.
The only way to build a system where we could all easily commute by train would be to make trains which could go from any location to any other at any time we wanted them to. In other words, we'd have to make taxicabs, and call them trains. We wouldn't save fuel, and we wouldn't save electricity.
The United States is built upon the idea that people have freedom of where to live, where to work, and when to travel between those two locations. You just can't do that with a commuter rail system, except perhaps in the most dense of cities. Even then you lose convenience. Try getting from one random apartment to another in New York City at 3 in the morning. Even if you call a cab you've gotta wait for it to come pick you up. Otherwise it's walk to the subway station, wait for half an hour for a train, then walk from the station to your destination. And that assumes both locations are near the same train route. If you've got to switch trains 2, 3, or even 4 times, you can forget about convenience.
Your experience in Japan may have been better, but chances are most of your destinations were places that a lot of other people were going to as well. I've worked in New York city, and took the train every day. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than driving, but on those times when I really had to get there fast I took my car (and sucked up the ridiculous parking fees). Actually, the fastest way when I was coming from Jersey is usually to drive to the PATH station, park there, and then take the PATH. When coming from NY State driving usually was the best. And this was before the mandatory carpooling in the tunnels. If you can afford to pay some homeless guy to travel through the tunnel with you that might turn out to be even faster.
"Hold a private conversation with a family member in a fashion not approved of by the US Government and we'll throw you in jail"? That'll go over real well with the likes of Ashcroft, but not too many others, and certainly not the Supreme Court.
As long as the legislation was limited to interstate commerce, the Supreme Court wouldn't have any problem with it.
And anyway, you still didn't answer the question.
Yes I did.
Skype comes to mind; it's a VoIP program that relies an a P2P phone book and encrypts the contents. I imagine it would not take too much effort to remove app-specific characteristics from the plaintext part of the stream.
I don't see that ever catching on, but if it did, then the government would obviously need to change its tactics.
How do you enforce a law whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators?
You've shown a way that it's possible for people to break the law while being invisible to everyone but the perpetrators. But basically every law can potentially be subverted. The question is whether or not it would be subverted on a regular basis.
Historically, every attempt to do so has been a dismal, often disastrous, failure.
Almost all taxes can be subverted in this way. The income tax, for example, is a tax on a behavior whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators. Same thing with the sales tax. Sure, individuals who sell directly on eBay generally avoid the tax, but to call sales tax a dismal failure is an overstatement.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the government should have a sales tax or even an income tax, but to say it's unenforcible is simply incorrect. Yes, it won't be enforced 100%, but taxes don't need to be enforced 100% to generate revenue for the government.
Quaint old idea? When was it that we had this idea? Maybe you're thinking of your own ideas, when you were an idealistic youth. But society as a whole has never had the idea that it is a company's responsibilty to babysit its customers.
Your computer company is not your mommy. If you screw up your computer by installing spyware, it's not their responsibility to come and fix it for you. Maybe we need to start turning off the ability to install (unsigned) software for all but those who enable "expert mode."
I don't see you out there volunteering to help millions of people uninstall their spyware. Dell can only go so far. I think this is a good policy. I've been tasked with uninstalling spyware on computers before, and it was a whole lot more complicated than "download this from download.com." The free software out there doesn't do things automatically, and I'm not sure I'd trust it if it did. We're talking about a process that takes hours on some systems. Maybe people need to start buying several hours a month of tech support from a local provider. Maybe we need computer owner insurance kind of like AAA has for road hazards. Or maybe we just need to stop letting end users install software without enabling expert mode. I don't know.
First of all, apartment buildings are probably well over $10m (at least the ones I have in mind).
Well, that really depends on the number of units. 5, 10, 20, 100, aparetment buildings come in all different sizes. It's not what I had in mind for $10 million, but if you're willing to go down to a triplex it could run closer to $250K.
If people could profit as you are implying, then everyone would do it.
Well, there's still opportunity costs. And I would want to do a lot of the management myself, so that would save a lot of money. I wasn't saying anyone could just decide they want to do this and do it. I just said it's what I could do (and I'm not even sure that's what I would do with the money, but I'd definately put a chunk of it into real estate). Of course, some peole want more risk, some people want less risk, some people see different opportunities, some people are just stupid. Real estate certainly isn't for everyone, so everyone isn't doing it. I'm just saying it's something I'd strongly consider doing.
The interesting thing to me is that although we're talking "startup", how many people in the conversation are only thinking "dot com"?
In this thread, I was specifically not thinking only about "dot com." You want to start a coffee shop, or a video store? That takes money, and quite a bit of it. And even then, you're not going to get any good locations, because all the huge chains have worked out exclusive deals with all the land owners in the best retail locations.
I encourage people to read something like "The Inventor's Notebook" which has much the same entrepreneurial spirit, but definitely does NOT take the stance that it takes money to make money, or that all the big companies have already become entrenched in all the big markets.
There are certainly exceptions, but for the most part, it does take money to make money. If you make a particularly unique invention, and you get lucky, you're one of the exceptions.
On the contrary, it's usually the silly stupid inventions that catch on as a fad and become million sellers because somebody does NOT think "Oh well, a big company probably already did this."
The vast majority of businesses don't involve inventions at all. Banks, casinos, resturants, utility companies... These things were invented a long time ago, and you're not going to own one without a lot of startup costs.
The only way the phone companies are going to let you use phone numbers is if you end your call in the POTS. And I wouldn't call that VoIP. I fully agree that phone numbers will be here for a long time, but so will the Plain Old Telephone System. The phone company already has telephone lines run to basically every house in the country. Sure, the companies will digitize the data at some point, and packet switch it, but there's no reason to digitize it before it comes out of a single family dwelling. Maybe for really large apartments or businesses, then you can use digital phones and a PBX, but that's still not VoIP. As long as the telephone companies are involved, there's no reason to use IP at all. And for those who manage to avoid the telephone companies, you can bet they're not going to be allowed to use telephone numbers.
Possibly true, but not useful thinking, because that causes everybody to assume that their idea will take a million dollars.
Anyone that stupid will soon be departed from their money anyhow. This thinking comes from the fact that a million dollars is pretty much the minimum you need to make a decent return without doing any real work.
I've long held the theory that although everybody (well, every geek) wants to run a startup, most of us are either too scared or lazy to do it and just in incredible denial.
I've done it. Twice. During the dot com craze I was making $5000 a month on a free homepage site before our main advertiser backed out. Stupidly, I abandoned the site when myself and two others were given $4 million in VC funding to work on another project. With only a small portion of the stock and only one seat on the board of directors, we were completely powerless over the fate of the company. After a year and a few months of fighting with the top management, I finally quit in disgust.
So while planning our startup we are on the lookout for the first insurmountable obstacle that we can point to and say "Woop, oh well, guess this can't happen." The easiest has always been "I need more money than I have", followed rapidly by things like "I need more time" and "I'll probably get crushed by the big players if I even attempt it."
The thing is, that's basically the case. Starting a business is very risky. Most people can't afford to take that risk. And big business just makes things even worse. The barriers to entry of the vast majority of already established businesses are insurmountable to most. If you have a unique idea or perfect timing you can eliminate a lot of these barriers, but for the most part, it takes money to make money.
I think he was referring to the high rates that credit cards offer anyone who wants a loan.
0%. 2.9%. 9.9%. It's a travesty.
So if you don't mind paying 20%+ per year then go our and get a couple hundred credit cards (not that hard) and buy whatever you want.
I have $30,000 in credit available to me on my three credit cards. Whenever I apply for new credit cards I am declined due to this fact. No credit card company is going to loan me $10 million, not even at 20%. If they would, I'd take it. With $10 million I could make well over 20% by buying up a bunch of multiunit apartment buildings. Hell, I'd settle for $100K, to get me started. $30K isn't enough, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's not their business. They already got rid of that other GPLed product of theirs, why in the world would they want to get involved with a new one? Especially a new one that will piss off Microsoft. They don't need to declare war on Microsoft. They're a media company, not an OS company.
I'd hardly consider Wired a real part of the media. They're almost as bad as Slashdot.
"You won't be drowned by the deluge of unimportant information because you'll use software to filter incoming advertising and other extranneous messages and spend your valuable time looking at those messages that interest you." - Bill Gates, The Road Ahead.
Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet -- in the sense offered by the media -- is just silly.
And to believe that the media claimed that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is likewise silly.
"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - Dan Quayle
I'd say it's 3 and 4. The moon isn't made of oil, but a base on the moon could potentially be used to create an awful lot of cheap power, especially if we could find a nice source of radioactive material, but alternatively, through solar power. Then there's 4. Without a permanent presense, that flag up there doesn't mean shit. The moon could be very useful. We've gotta take it before anyone else does.
Yeah, you're right.
I thought this person was talking about people with poor eyesight, but apparently he's talking about people who are blind. Vision impaired? Give me a break. What the hell is wrong with the word blind?
Would USA Medicare and/or private insurance pay for such a medical device?
No. It's not medically necessary.
Just because something improves your vision doesn't mean it's covered by medical insurance. Contacts generally aren't covered, and neither is LASIK (vision correction surjery).
One more thing that came to my mind... theoretically, you don't save ANYTHING by doing the managment yourself. The reason is because YOU have to be compensated. YOU, acting as an overseer/manager/whatever, should be paid for your services.
This seems to me like two different ways to say the same thing.
So, you really have to have a competitive advantage of some sort (as I mentioned in my previous post).
My competitive advantage would be that I have $10 million, and most people don't.
What's a triplex? Anyway, I guess you can get a small building or something. I was thiking of larger ones (ones that I've lived in in Toronto).
A triplex is a three family house (three separate entrances, three kitchens, etc). I live in one right now, on the third floor. I wouldn't really call it an apartment building, though. I'd put 4 or 5 as the minimum to call something that.
Management cost probably isn't THAT much.
Management costs are fairly high. My friend owns several apartments, and I almost went in on a 5-unit building with him (it fell through at the last minute), so I've done a lot of research into this. Management costs are about $100/month per unit. Less if you have a whole lot of units, but still very far from being insignificant.
Instead, it will be attractive if YOU have more skills, expertise, knowledge, etc to do it. If you like doing it, if you know how to do it, etc then you'll have an advantage. It seems like you are interested and probably somewhat knowledgeable so that's one plus :)
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. It'd be a job, just like anything else, except I'd be working for myself, not for someone else. So I'd be taking in 100% of the profit, not 5 or 10%.
Of course if I had $10 million I couldn't do all the management myself, so I'd only be making 80 or 90% of the profit, and giving the rest to my employees. But still, that's good enough for me :).
Emergency use
This is an argument against VoIP, not an argument against regulating VoIP. We don't force people to have telephones, after all, so regulation is irrelevant.
Personally, I have no need for a land line, but it has nothing to do with VoIP. In an emergency, I can just use my cell phone. I do have a land line, but that's because my ADSL service requires that I have one. The only place I've ever given my land-line number to is my bank, who wouldn't accept my cell phone number as it was located in a different state.
Funding and effectiveness of 911
The solution to that is simple. Fund 911 some other way. Property taxes makes the most sense.
And remember that when you call 911 from a landline (and in more and more areas, cellular), they know where you are. VOIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability.
Again, not an argument about regulation, an argument against VoIP. However, it's not a very good argument. VoIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability because VoIP is extremely far away from happening. In fact, I doubt it will ever happen. It doesn't have any real advantages. For long distances, switched networks can be cheaper, but it's easy to digitize the call at the CO and send it over a switched network from there. In fact, it's being done already, and for international calls sent over satellites it has been done for many years.
Funding of Universal Access
Screw universal access. You want to live out in the sticks, you can pay extra.
I'm not suggesting that any of the problems described above are unsolveable for VOIP, but I think it's awfully unlikely that "market forces" will magically provide the answers.
"Market forces" already have provided the answers. Except for limited situations (basically as an alternative to a large PBX system), VoIP is stupid, and it isn't succeeding.
It plugs into your USB port, you insert the CD, plug in a handset (complete with dial) into the device, and away you go.
Wow. Good thing I have USB ports throughout my house. Oh, wait a second.
suddenly, it's all software.. adn hooking people together for voice stuff no longer needs ANY kind of centralizing....
The centralizing is in the network itself. You're not going to run a phone line from your house to every single other house in the world. That would be silly. Instead you'll run a whole town full of houses to a CO, and then run a bunch of towns into a common area for a metropolitan area. For local calls perhaps you could use direct wireless connections, but this is the exception, not the rule.
it won't be regulated, as ultimately, it can't be.
However, the internet connections themselves will be regulated.
Now, all these telecom taxes exist because the PSTN (public switched telephone network) is a monopoly - you can't have multiple PSTN networks.
How so? We do have multiple PSTN networks. Both for long distance, and for local (only one land-line based local, usually, but many mobile based lines). Are you saying that it's all part of one system? Isn't the internet the same?
PSTN, as stated above, is bulky and not practical when we have efficient packet-switching networks that can easily replace it at 60 percent of the cost.
Packet switching doesn't really solve any problems. Most of the time that you're on the phone with someone someone is talking. And packet-switching requires aggregation, which is only reasonable for long distance. And we already have packet-switched networks carrying PSTN data across long distances.
I would also like a module to interface with my home phone system.
Asterisk, as mentioned in the article, is this interface.
The difference is that P2P file sharing companies aren't in the business of stopping copyright infringment. There's nothing wrong with creating hardware which is useful for sending bulk mail. There's nothing wrong with creating software which is useful for stopping spam. Doing both, however, creates a conflict of interest. One of the two products will suffer from that conflict of interest. My guess is that it's going to be the spam blocking software, because selling hardware to spammers seems like it would be more profitable.
This is a human-based review system of millions of junk messages... without the users, there is no Spamcop, and Ironport bought nothing.
They didn't buy nothing, they bought the death of Spamcop. If IronPort really is dependent upon spammers, then such a buyout makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint.
If this turns out to be the case, you can thank Julian again, for selling out the constant vigilance of many users to the highest bidder.
Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure.
Ironbase makes a computer that can be used to send lots of spam. They certainly don't "enable the spread of" spam.
It would be more like if the creator of Kazaa sold software to catch copyright infringers, and claimed that Kazaa users are not copyright infringers but legitimate downloaders of legally distributable indie music.
They don't have to be super fast (like the one in this article), but imagine how much fuel/electricity we could save if we could all easily commute by train.
The only way to build a system where we could all easily commute by train would be to make trains which could go from any location to any other at any time we wanted them to. In other words, we'd have to make taxicabs, and call them trains. We wouldn't save fuel, and we wouldn't save electricity.
The United States is built upon the idea that people have freedom of where to live, where to work, and when to travel between those two locations. You just can't do that with a commuter rail system, except perhaps in the most dense of cities. Even then you lose convenience. Try getting from one random apartment to another in New York City at 3 in the morning. Even if you call a cab you've gotta wait for it to come pick you up. Otherwise it's walk to the subway station, wait for half an hour for a train, then walk from the station to your destination. And that assumes both locations are near the same train route. If you've got to switch trains 2, 3, or even 4 times, you can forget about convenience.
Your experience in Japan may have been better, but chances are most of your destinations were places that a lot of other people were going to as well. I've worked in New York city, and took the train every day. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than driving, but on those times when I really had to get there fast I took my car (and sucked up the ridiculous parking fees). Actually, the fastest way when I was coming from Jersey is usually to drive to the PATH station, park there, and then take the PATH. When coming from NY State driving usually was the best. And this was before the mandatory carpooling in the tunnels. If you can afford to pay some homeless guy to travel through the tunnel with you that might turn out to be even faster.
"Hold a private conversation with a family member in a fashion not approved of by the US Government and we'll throw you in jail"? That'll go over real well with the likes of Ashcroft, but not too many others, and certainly not the Supreme Court.
As long as the legislation was limited to interstate commerce, the Supreme Court wouldn't have any problem with it.
And anyway, you still didn't answer the question.
Yes I did.
Skype comes to mind; it's a VoIP program that relies an a P2P phone book and encrypts the contents. I imagine it would not take too much effort to remove app-specific characteristics from the plaintext part of the stream.
I don't see that ever catching on, but if it did, then the government would obviously need to change its tactics.
How do you enforce a law whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators?
You've shown a way that it's possible for people to break the law while being invisible to everyone but the perpetrators. But basically every law can potentially be subverted. The question is whether or not it would be subverted on a regular basis.
Historically, every attempt to do so has been a dismal, often disastrous, failure.
Almost all taxes can be subverted in this way. The income tax, for example, is a tax on a behavior whose violation is invisible to everyone but the perpetrators. Same thing with the sales tax. Sure, individuals who sell directly on eBay generally avoid the tax, but to call sales tax a dismal failure is an overstatement.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the government should have a sales tax or even an income tax, but to say it's unenforcible is simply incorrect. Yes, it won't be enforced 100%, but taxes don't need to be enforced 100% to generate revenue for the government.
Quaint old idea? When was it that we had this idea? Maybe you're thinking of your own ideas, when you were an idealistic youth. But society as a whole has never had the idea that it is a company's responsibilty to babysit its customers.
Your computer company is not your mommy. If you screw up your computer by installing spyware, it's not their responsibility to come and fix it for you. Maybe we need to start turning off the ability to install (unsigned) software for all but those who enable "expert mode."
I don't see you out there volunteering to help millions of people uninstall their spyware. Dell can only go so far. I think this is a good policy. I've been tasked with uninstalling spyware on computers before, and it was a whole lot more complicated than "download this from download.com." The free software out there doesn't do things automatically, and I'm not sure I'd trust it if it did. We're talking about a process that takes hours on some systems. Maybe people need to start buying several hours a month of tech support from a local provider. Maybe we need computer owner insurance kind of like AAA has for road hazards. Or maybe we just need to stop letting end users install software without enabling expert mode. I don't know.
First of all, apartment buildings are probably well over $10m (at least the ones I have in mind).
Well, that really depends on the number of units. 5, 10, 20, 100, aparetment buildings come in all different sizes. It's not what I had in mind for $10 million, but if you're willing to go down to a triplex it could run closer to $250K.
If people could profit as you are implying, then everyone would do it.
Well, there's still opportunity costs. And I would want to do a lot of the management myself, so that would save a lot of money. I wasn't saying anyone could just decide they want to do this and do it. I just said it's what I could do (and I'm not even sure that's what I would do with the money, but I'd definately put a chunk of it into real estate). Of course, some peole want more risk, some people want less risk, some people see different opportunities, some people are just stupid. Real estate certainly isn't for everyone, so everyone isn't doing it. I'm just saying it's something I'd strongly consider doing.
The interesting thing to me is that although we're talking "startup", how many people in the conversation are only thinking "dot com"?
In this thread, I was specifically not thinking only about "dot com." You want to start a coffee shop, or a video store? That takes money, and quite a bit of it. And even then, you're not going to get any good locations, because all the huge chains have worked out exclusive deals with all the land owners in the best retail locations.
I encourage people to read something like "The Inventor's Notebook" which has much the same entrepreneurial spirit, but definitely does NOT take the stance that it takes money to make money, or that all the big companies have already become entrenched in all the big markets.
There are certainly exceptions, but for the most part, it does take money to make money. If you make a particularly unique invention, and you get lucky, you're one of the exceptions.
On the contrary, it's usually the silly stupid inventions that catch on as a fad and become million sellers because somebody does NOT think "Oh well, a big company probably already did this."
The vast majority of businesses don't involve inventions at all. Banks, casinos, resturants, utility companies... These things were invented a long time ago, and you're not going to own one without a lot of startup costs.
The only way the phone companies are going to let you use phone numbers is if you end your call in the POTS. And I wouldn't call that VoIP. I fully agree that phone numbers will be here for a long time, but so will the Plain Old Telephone System. The phone company already has telephone lines run to basically every house in the country. Sure, the companies will digitize the data at some point, and packet switch it, but there's no reason to digitize it before it comes out of a single family dwelling. Maybe for really large apartments or businesses, then you can use digital phones and a PBX, but that's still not VoIP. As long as the telephone companies are involved, there's no reason to use IP at all. And for those who manage to avoid the telephone companies, you can bet they're not going to be allowed to use telephone numbers.
Possibly true, but not useful thinking, because that causes everybody to assume that their idea will take a million dollars.
Anyone that stupid will soon be departed from their money anyhow. This thinking comes from the fact that a million dollars is pretty much the minimum you need to make a decent return without doing any real work.
I've long held the theory that although everybody (well, every geek) wants to run a startup, most of us are either too scared or lazy to do it and just in incredible denial.
I've done it. Twice. During the dot com craze I was making $5000 a month on a free homepage site before our main advertiser backed out. Stupidly, I abandoned the site when myself and two others were given $4 million in VC funding to work on another project. With only a small portion of the stock and only one seat on the board of directors, we were completely powerless over the fate of the company. After a year and a few months of fighting with the top management, I finally quit in disgust.
So while planning our startup we are on the lookout for the first insurmountable obstacle that we can point to and say "Woop, oh well, guess this can't happen." The easiest has always been "I need more money than I have", followed rapidly by things like "I need more time" and "I'll probably get crushed by the big players if I even attempt it."
The thing is, that's basically the case. Starting a business is very risky. Most people can't afford to take that risk. And big business just makes things even worse. The barriers to entry of the vast majority of already established businesses are insurmountable to most. If you have a unique idea or perfect timing you can eliminate a lot of these barriers, but for the most part, it takes money to make money.
I think he was referring to the high rates that credit cards offer anyone who wants a loan.
0%. 2.9%. 9.9%. It's a travesty.
So if you don't mind paying 20%+ per year then go our and get a couple hundred credit cards (not that hard) and buy whatever you want.
I have $30,000 in credit available to me on my three credit cards. Whenever I apply for new credit cards I am declined due to this fact. No credit card company is going to loan me $10 million, not even at 20%. If they would, I'd take it. With $10 million I could make well over 20% by buying up a bunch of multiunit apartment buildings. Hell, I'd settle for $100K, to get me started. $30K isn't enough, though.