While I generally agree with you, the billion dollar figure is an *average* cost per mission, not a marginal cost per mission. On the margin, the incremental mission cost is about $60M dollars. If you "cost" out some smaller fraction of the fixed costs to a marginal shuttle mission added to service Hubble, you might be able to justify saying it "costs" a few hundred million.
Anyway, the cost of the Hubble was $1.5B at time of launch (excluding all the operating and maintenance costs since then). If we assume the replacement cost would be about that much (less design cost, but in 2006 dollars it would be costlier - let's figure that's a wash), then another shuttle mission would be well worth it over a replacement Hubble telescope.
Of course the flip side of this is that if you are using Hubble service as the *justification* for running the shuttle program in the first place, then it would be legit to assign all the current fixed costs incurred as part of the Hubble maintenance bill, in which case it probably would just be cheaper to replace the damned thing.
Personal anecdotes are not neccessarily scientific data- in fact, eyewitness reports may be OK in court by they're considered to be extremely bad *science*.
Umm, that was supposed to be vaguely humorous, I do know the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific proof. My point was that economics is quite useful even if it seems fast and loose with its assumptions, and this is why it has been so successful. However, the aggregate behaviors of humans and markets that economics seeks to explan and understand are not particularly prone to running repeatable experiments, so we are forced to make inferences from what we can observe, which is quite limited.
In that sense it's very similar to astronomy (another area I have been involved with as a researcher) - you sometimes have shitty data and it can be very frustrating that you are limited to the events and quality of data that nature has seen fit to let you see at any point in time, and you are forced to build models based on what you know. The process of testing and adjusting those models, as a result, takes many, many years, not a few weeks of tweaking around in the lab.
And what is the source of that "g" in your force diagram on the sail?? Is the sail adding energy to the wind blown at it by the fan? The point is the fan+sail system is still less efficient at collecting and reflecting to extract energy from the wind then the sail itself would be, so that g must be smaller than the G that would result from the natural forces of the wind on the sail itself. If your argument hinges on the ability of the fan to "collect" from the outside system then you are just saying the fan is a supplementary sail or collector for the sail. In reality, I would imagine the losses due to inefficiency would far outweigh any such effect.
If I am misunderstanding part of your argument or the GP poster's argument please explain how.
Ricardian equivalence and trade deficit debates aside, I do understand your point about macroeconomics - there is a lot of messy data and crazy assumptions, and you can make two different arguments about the same issue and reach opposite conclusions and it's hard to tell which is right without empirical evidence.
But there is also quite a bit of beauty in macro, like the IS-LM-FE model.
However, microeconomics is substantially less "bullshit-y". In the sense that I have directly applied many principles learned in my micro class to make more money. Which I count as the ultimate sort of scientific validation.
Right - my guess is (I don't know this for sure) there is no "Spamhaus-owned" server in the US at all. Just a server run by some company or organization that chooses to mirror the Spamhaus list.
And the people involved in all the mentioned countries are not employees of Spamhaus - they are just volunteers who donate some time to do stuff for a UK organization.
Just because an organization has volunteers from another country or companies in another country that mirror its free data does not mean the courts of that other country automatically have jurisdiction.
If they are actually hiring full time employees or leasing server space in the US themselves, then they might have an issue.
Absolutely. There are cases in civil law where by *responding* in a certain way in a jurisdiction you actually are acknowledging the jurisdiction of that court.
My guess is their UK lawyer told them it was lower risk to just ignore the whole thing, default judgment and all, then to spend all the money on a US lawyer to contest the jurisdiction and run a chance that they could lose a real case.
My guess is that the problem was that no lawyer showed up to say "Hey, my client doesn't think you could possibly have jurisdiction because it is a UK organization with all business activities in the UK, and if you don't like the fact that US users choose to download my client's IP list, tough tits to you".
The question is did they just fail to adequately notify and did Spamhaus accidentally not show, or more likely, did they not have a lawyer there because their UK lawyer told them in advance that a default judgment that would inevitably be entered against them is probably unenforceable in the UK.
My vote goes for the latter. They probably figured the expected cost and risk level were lower by just not showing up to even contest the jurisdictional issue and just saying "stuff it" after the fact to the entire proceeding.
Um, from my several readings of posts by the Jin author, that is *NOT* the case. He does not use sockets to communicate with Jin, he planned on doing that at one point in time but now simply uses Jin "directly". I assume this means he is linking to it as a DLL or something comparable.
So I think your critique of the guy as a whiner is unwarranted. I agree Maryanovsky's posts are a bit confusing at times, but then, I don't think any of these guys are native English speakers so you have to cut them a break.
Agreed, these people don't have a leg to stand on with respect to buyers. Theoretically, if they can show the person actually used the design to sew something, then the thing they sewed could be questionable in legality if there is a trademark involved (I don't see how that could be covered under copyright law, but I guess I'm not familiar enough with this industry to comment).
But there is no way that just looking at a copyrighted data file, assuming that's all that's being done here, by a person who happened to purchase a copy from a person who didn't have the rights to distribute it, could possibly be in violation of copyright law. Or trademark law. Or any law.
Same thing with MP3s - it's always the "sharing" part of file-sharing that gets people. Just having an MP3 on your hard drive that you can't produce a physical CD for does not automatically mean you have broken a law, and I'm not aware of any cases in court where a person has been subject to penalties unless they were distributing copyrighted materials.
My guess is that they agreed to a settlement that the RIAA knew the company didn't have the funds to pay. This will force them into a Chapter 7 liquidation under which the RIAA recoups a fraction of the 30 mil, and lines up with other creditors based on their priority in the capital structure of the firm.
The goal of this is probably to prevent the equity shareholders from getting any return on their dime.
I doubt that eDonkey had greater than 30 mil in cash on hand, and I doubt they even had that in total assets. This is based on my knowledge of the workings of other similar P2P developers and of small tech firms in general.
If I am wrong and they have sold hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and were sitting on a huge nest egg, I'd be very surprised.
You seem to have an obsession about this topic, posting essentially the same message in thread after thread. The fact is most poeple see a distinction between posting information in their profiles to be seen by anyone who cares to look and broadcasting the "deltas" or changes they make in a Wikipedia-changelog-like fashion.
Clearly you see no such distinction. Obviously, a sufficiently motivated monitor could discover the exact same data by running an automated polling script and monitoring for changes. However, doing that on your friends' social networking pages can best be described as a "creepy" activity for stalkers.
The fact that they have now built this creepy stalking feature into Facebook is what people are reacting to.
It's not that the information wasn't already public, it's just that this feature makes what would normally be considered an anti-social, obsessive level of interest in your friends (using an automated script to monitor somebody's social networking site for every little change) and renders it a trivial matter of looking at your mini-feed.
The fact that you are the only person who doesn't see the difference here should indicate to you that perhaps you are missing something on a social level, and that most people don't see this as an information-theoretic problem.
While the groups you reference could all legitimately be described as supporting some limited form of terrorist attacks, most of them do not have a stated goal of mass murder of millions of people, they simply use violence to support a domestic poltiical agenda. Certainly this description applies to the ETA, IRA, Ulster Unionists, Tamil Tigers, FARC, clinic bombers and JDL. Even the neo-Nazi groups in Europe and the KKK may talk about race wars and the like but most of their violence, actual or planned, is on a very small, local scale. And the Unabomber was just a crazy man who thought he could get through to the world with some sort of message by sending around mail bombs - I don't think including a lone psychopath in this list is very informative.
Aum Shinrikyo is closer to the mark - a crazed religious doomsday cult that may have goals of committing mass murder. I don't know enough about the organization to comment intelligently, but this is the only one on your list that seems at all comparable to radical Islamist terrorist organizations that talk about obtaining weapons to kill millions of infidels, and tell us that we must convert or die. To the best of my knowledge, Aum Shinrikyo only targetted domestic attacks against their own country, Japan.
So, I fail to see your point. In the cases you reference where there is a clearly differentiable ethnic group associated with the terror organization, in the relevant countries, I would expect plane passengers of the relevant ethnic backgrounds to undergo extra scrutiny. This is common sense, not racism. Since here in the US, the people that want to blow up our planes seem to be primarily Muslim, when we can pick somebody out as likely Muslim, it makes sense to give them extra scrutiny.
If you want to call this "profiling", be my guest. I call it facing statistical realities.
Which is on a random guy's personal site on the Harvard Computer Society web server, run by a volunteer student group. Nothing really to see here.
Any school that has an area where any student can put up arbitrary PHP code is going to have tons of sites with vulnerabilities.
It's not on an official school server, and presumably the hosting on such sites is set up with sufficiently tight permissions to prevent any serious damage from being done if people run arbitrary, crappy PHP code.
Nuff said on that vulnerability. It sounds much worse when it's presented as "the website of a major Ivy League university".
Some creative person might think to set up a company that follows ISO-9000 procedures, take a bunch of Free/Open Source Software projects, manage a particular build or version of them, and offer them to companies as ISO-9000 certified versions of said software. They'd be exactly the same software, only accompanied by detailed documentation/audits of the code. For the service of having hired a few people to audit the software and document the hell out of it, you could charge companies all sorts of money to offer them ISO-9000 certified Open Source solutions.
BTW, I hereby patent this business model so you can't steal my brilliant idea.:)
There is no group I loathe as much as these animal activist nutcase fuckers. I love animals more than any human being ought to, and I think these people are fucking insane. I have a family member that runs an investment firm that invested in a company they didn't like - it didn't matter that they were trying to put a management team in place to clean up the operation. They immediately moved to the threatening-my-family's-life stage.
I would shoot these fuckers on sight without even the slightest of qualms, long before I would harm an animal. These people have lost any shred of humanity they once had. Threatening people's lives and their family's and friend's lives doesn't make them support your cause, it makes them capitulate. But they also end up carrying guns and wouldn't think twice about wasting you on sight, and no sane person would blame them either, including any judge or jury.
These people are terrorists. They get about as much sympathy as Al Qaeda and friends in my book, which is to say I cheer when somebody shoots them.
A lot of it is due to Chinese nationalism. It's not clear to me that Yao is primarily a crazy egomaniac, though he clearly has a strong interest in his own legacy, but I do know that the sense of Chinese nationalism and cultural superiority is an absolutely huge, defining factor in much of Chinese science. I think this factor and its influence was underestimated in this article as an explanatory factor for some of the Chinese professor's actions - this is exactly *why* being able to claim credit here translates directly to political and economic power back in China.
There already is such a product on the market called the CarChip. I am a partner in an exotic car rental company and we use them to scan for potential abusive driving of cars if cars are returned with mechanical damage.
You can set the CarChip to monitor RPM, acceleration, speed, etc. They record data at 1 second intervals, store 300 hours of drive-time data, they are absolutely tiny and thus can be surreptitiously placed in cars, they plug into the industry standard OBDII port which all model year 1996 or newer cars have, and they report incidences of being disconnected so you know if somebody has tampered with them.
You just disconnect them and plug them into a USB port to download all the data to the included software.
The fully featured models cost about 300 bucks.
Not perfect, but it's a pretty damned good solution if you want to monitor your teenager's driving. I would recommend disclosing it to them and just telling them that if they disconnect it you will consider it just as bad as if you catch them doing 120 on the highway, and that you will see any disconnect events in the log.
Seriously, check out the bios. Only one guy even has a bachelor's degree in engineering on their management team, and that's the CEO. And we have no idea what his background really is because the description is so vague - he worked in "projects" for "the energy sector" in several different continents.
They have no CTO or Chief Scientist or anything that would tend to go along with a company seriously researching energy production technologies. The CEO fills the role of "Chief Technical Architect" according to his bio blurb. Which would be more credible if we knew anything about anything he had done previously.
It unfortunately reeks of scam or publicity stunt or something equally unpalatable.
Umm, that's not the way most VC firms work, you know. While some modest number of firms are basically VC family offices, the majority are investing OPM - other peoples' money - in a series of raised funds that deliver better returns than investing in public markets, and thus attract investors who'd rather go for the average 25-30% returns in a venture fund than the 8-10% in the S&P 500, in exchange for a longer term lockup and somewhat higher volatility of returns.
Then why not start out by filing some patents and then publishing a whitepaper or journal-quality explanation of what the hell they are talking about on their website?
I challenge you to find anything other than marketing drivel on their website. You won't. You'll find an invitation to apply to be one of 12 people to review it. This is marketing hype and viral BS at its worst.
I know several physicists whose opinions I respect that I was going to send such a whitepaper to and ask for an opinion, but when I realized there was nothing there, I wrote it off - I'd never insult the intelligence of anybody I respect by sending them to a website that does nothing more than spread marketing drivel all over the place.
While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight.
Clearly the page is partially tongue in cheek, but I do think it's a fair point.
Slashdot Mirror
While I generally agree with you, the billion dollar figure is an *average* cost per mission, not a marginal cost per mission. On the margin, the incremental mission cost is about $60M dollars. If you "cost" out some smaller fraction of the fixed costs to a marginal shuttle mission added to service Hubble, you might be able to justify saying it "costs" a few hundred million.
m .
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_progra
Anyway, the cost of the Hubble was $1.5B at time of launch (excluding all the operating and maintenance costs since then). If we assume the replacement cost would be about that much (less design cost, but in 2006 dollars it would be costlier - let's figure that's a wash), then another shuttle mission would be well worth it over a replacement Hubble telescope.
Of course the flip side of this is that if you are using Hubble service as the *justification* for running the shuttle program in the first place, then it would be legit to assign all the current fixed costs incurred as part of the Hubble maintenance bill, in which case it probably would just be cheaper to replace the damned thing.
Personal anecdotes are not neccessarily scientific data- in fact, eyewitness reports may be OK in court by they're considered to be extremely bad *science*.
Umm, that was supposed to be vaguely humorous, I do know the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific proof. My point was that economics is quite useful even if it seems fast and loose with its assumptions, and this is why it has been so successful. However, the aggregate behaviors of humans and markets that economics seeks to explan and understand are not particularly prone to running repeatable experiments, so we are forced to make inferences from what we can observe, which is quite limited.
In that sense it's very similar to astronomy (another area I have been involved with as a researcher) - you sometimes have shitty data and it can be very frustrating that you are limited to the events and quality of data that nature has seen fit to let you see at any point in time, and you are forced to build models based on what you know. The process of testing and adjusting those models, as a result, takes many, many years, not a few weeks of tweaking around in the lab.
And what is the source of that "g" in your force diagram on the sail?? Is the sail adding energy to the wind blown at it by the fan? The point is the fan+sail system is still less efficient at collecting and reflecting to extract energy from the wind then the sail itself would be, so that g must be smaller than the G that would result from the natural forces of the wind on the sail itself. If your argument hinges on the ability of the fan to "collect" from the outside system then you are just saying the fan is a supplementary sail or collector for the sail. In reality, I would imagine the losses due to inefficiency would far outweigh any such effect.
If I am misunderstanding part of your argument or the GP poster's argument please explain how.
Ricardian equivalence and trade deficit debates aside, I do understand your point about macroeconomics - there is a lot of messy data and crazy assumptions, and you can make two different arguments about the same issue and reach opposite conclusions and it's hard to tell which is right without empirical evidence.
But there is also quite a bit of beauty in macro, like the IS-LM-FE model.
However, microeconomics is substantially less "bullshit-y". In the sense that I have directly applied many principles learned in my micro class to make more money. Which I count as the ultimate sort of scientific validation.
Right - my guess is (I don't know this for sure) there is no "Spamhaus-owned" server in the US at all. Just a server run by some company or organization that chooses to mirror the Spamhaus list.
And the people involved in all the mentioned countries are not employees of Spamhaus - they are just volunteers who donate some time to do stuff for a UK organization.
Just because an organization has volunteers from another country or companies in another country that mirror its free data does not mean the courts of that other country automatically have jurisdiction.
If they are actually hiring full time employees or leasing server space in the US themselves, then they might have an issue.
Absolutely. There are cases in civil law where by *responding* in a certain way in a jurisdiction you actually are acknowledging the jurisdiction of that court.
My guess is their UK lawyer told them it was lower risk to just ignore the whole thing, default judgment and all, then to spend all the money on a US lawyer to contest the jurisdiction and run a chance that they could lose a real case.
My guess is that the problem was that no lawyer showed up to say "Hey, my client doesn't think you could possibly have jurisdiction because it is a UK organization with all business activities in the UK, and if you don't like the fact that US users choose to download my client's IP list, tough tits to you".
The question is did they just fail to adequately notify and did Spamhaus accidentally not show, or more likely, did they not have a lawyer there because their UK lawyer told them in advance that a default judgment that would inevitably be entered against them is probably unenforceable in the UK.
My vote goes for the latter. They probably figured the expected cost and risk level were lower by just not showing up to even contest the jurisdictional issue and just saying "stuff it" after the fact to the entire proceeding.
Um, from my several readings of posts by the Jin author, that is *NOT* the case. He does not use sockets to communicate with Jin, he planned on doing that at one point in time but now simply uses Jin "directly". I assume this means he is linking to it as a DLL or something comparable.
So I think your critique of the guy as a whiner is unwarranted. I agree Maryanovsky's posts are a bit confusing at times, but then, I don't think any of these guys are native English speakers so you have to cut them a break.
Agreed, these people don't have a leg to stand on with respect to buyers. Theoretically, if they can show the person actually used the design to sew something, then the thing they sewed could be questionable in legality if there is a trademark involved (I don't see how that could be covered under copyright law, but I guess I'm not familiar enough with this industry to comment).
But there is no way that just looking at a copyrighted data file, assuming that's all that's being done here, by a person who happened to purchase a copy from a person who didn't have the rights to distribute it, could possibly be in violation of copyright law. Or trademark law. Or any law.
Same thing with MP3s - it's always the "sharing" part of file-sharing that gets people. Just having an MP3 on your hard drive that you can't produce a physical CD for does not automatically mean you have broken a law, and I'm not aware of any cases in court where a person has been subject to penalties unless they were distributing copyrighted materials.
My guess is that they agreed to a settlement that the RIAA knew the company didn't have the funds to pay. This will force them into a Chapter 7 liquidation under which the RIAA recoups a fraction of the 30 mil, and lines up with other creditors based on their priority in the capital structure of the firm.
The goal of this is probably to prevent the equity shareholders from getting any return on their dime.
I doubt that eDonkey had greater than 30 mil in cash on hand, and I doubt they even had that in total assets. This is based on my knowledge of the workings of other similar P2P developers and of small tech firms in general.
If I am wrong and they have sold hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and were sitting on a huge nest egg, I'd be very surprised.
You seem to have an obsession about this topic, posting essentially the same message in thread after thread. The fact is most poeple see a distinction between posting information in their profiles to be seen by anyone who cares to look and broadcasting the "deltas" or changes they make in a Wikipedia-changelog-like fashion.
Clearly you see no such distinction. Obviously, a sufficiently motivated monitor could discover the exact same data by running an automated polling script and monitoring for changes. However, doing that on your friends' social networking pages can best be described as a "creepy" activity for stalkers.
The fact that they have now built this creepy stalking feature into Facebook is what people are reacting to.
It's not that the information wasn't already public, it's just that this feature makes what would normally be considered an anti-social, obsessive level of interest in your friends (using an automated script to monitor somebody's social networking site for every little change) and renders it a trivial matter of looking at your mini-feed.
The fact that you are the only person who doesn't see the difference here should indicate to you that perhaps you are missing something on a social level, and that most people don't see this as an information-theoretic problem.
While the groups you reference could all legitimately be described as supporting some limited form of terrorist attacks, most of them do not have a stated goal of mass murder of millions of people, they simply use violence to support a domestic poltiical agenda. Certainly this description applies to the ETA, IRA, Ulster Unionists, Tamil Tigers, FARC, clinic bombers and JDL. Even the neo-Nazi groups in Europe and the KKK may talk about race wars and the like but most of their violence, actual or planned, is on a very small, local scale. And the Unabomber was just a crazy man who thought he could get through to the world with some sort of message by sending around mail bombs - I don't think including a lone psychopath in this list is very informative.
Aum Shinrikyo is closer to the mark - a crazed religious doomsday cult that may have goals of committing mass murder. I don't know enough about the organization to comment intelligently, but this is the only one on your list that seems at all comparable to radical Islamist terrorist organizations that talk about obtaining weapons to kill millions of infidels, and tell us that we must convert or die. To the best of my knowledge, Aum Shinrikyo only targetted domestic attacks against their own country, Japan.
So, I fail to see your point. In the cases you reference where there is a clearly differentiable ethnic group associated with the terror organization, in the relevant countries, I would expect plane passengers of the relevant ethnic backgrounds to undergo extra scrutiny. This is common sense, not racism. Since here in the US, the people that want to blow up our planes seem to be primarily Muslim, when we can pick somebody out as likely Muslim, it makes sense to give them extra scrutiny.
If you want to call this "profiling", be my guest. I call it facing statistical realities.
The Internet Not for Old People
Of course not. We all know that the internet is for porn.
Which is on a random guy's personal site on the Harvard Computer Society web server, run by a volunteer student group. Nothing really to see here.
Any school that has an area where any student can put up arbitrary PHP code is going to have tons of sites with vulnerabilities.
It's not on an official school server, and presumably the hosting on such sites is set up with sufficiently tight permissions to prevent any serious damage from being done if people run arbitrary, crappy PHP code.
Nuff said on that vulnerability. It sounds much worse when it's presented as "the website of a major Ivy League university".
Some creative person might think to set up a company that follows ISO-9000 procedures, take a bunch of Free/Open Source Software projects, manage a particular build or version of them, and offer them to companies as ISO-9000 certified versions of said software. They'd be exactly the same software, only accompanied by detailed documentation/audits of the code. For the service of having hired a few people to audit the software and document the hell out of it, you could charge companies all sorts of money to offer them ISO-9000 certified Open Source solutions.
:)
BTW, I hereby patent this business model so you can't steal my brilliant idea.
There is no group I loathe as much as these animal activist nutcase fuckers. I love animals more than any human being ought to, and I think these people are fucking insane. I have a family member that runs an investment firm that invested in a company they didn't like - it didn't matter that they were trying to put a management team in place to clean up the operation. They immediately moved to the threatening-my-family's-life stage.
I would shoot these fuckers on sight without even the slightest of qualms, long before I would harm an animal. These people have lost any shred of humanity they once had. Threatening people's lives and their family's and friend's lives doesn't make them support your cause, it makes them capitulate. But they also end up carrying guns and wouldn't think twice about wasting you on sight, and no sane person would blame them either, including any judge or jury.
These people are terrorists. They get about as much sympathy as Al Qaeda and friends in my book, which is to say I cheer when somebody shoots them.
Next week on Slashdot - Cowboy Neal proves P==NP!!
A lot of it is due to Chinese nationalism. It's not clear to me that Yao is primarily a crazy egomaniac, though he clearly has a strong interest in his own legacy, but I do know that the sense of Chinese nationalism and cultural superiority is an absolutely huge, defining factor in much of Chinese science. I think this factor and its influence was underestimated in this article as an explanatory factor for some of the Chinese professor's actions - this is exactly *why* being able to claim credit here translates directly to political and economic power back in China.
Heh, major moderation abuse - this post is not flamebait at all, but is a very reasonable response to an absurdist generalization about Americans.
Thank you, ScrewMaster, your point is extremely valid.
There already is such a product on the market called the CarChip. I am a partner in an exotic car rental company and we use them to scan for potential abusive driving of cars if cars are returned with mechanical damage.
You can set the CarChip to monitor RPM, acceleration, speed, etc. They record data at 1 second intervals, store 300 hours of drive-time data, they are absolutely tiny and thus can be surreptitiously placed in cars, they plug into the industry standard OBDII port which all model year 1996 or newer cars have, and they report incidences of being disconnected so you know if somebody has tampered with them.
You just disconnect them and plug them into a USB port to download all the data to the included software.
The fully featured models cost about 300 bucks.
Not perfect, but it's a pretty damned good solution if you want to monitor your teenager's driving. I would recommend disclosing it to them and just telling them that if they disconnect it you will consider it just as bad as if you catch them doing 120 on the highway, and that you will see any disconnect events in the log.
Seriously, check out the bios. Only one guy even has a bachelor's degree in engineering on their management team, and that's the CEO. And we have no idea what his background really is because the description is so vague - he worked in "projects" for "the energy sector" in several different continents.
They have no CTO or Chief Scientist or anything that would tend to go along with a company seriously researching energy production technologies. The CEO fills the role of "Chief Technical Architect" according to his bio blurb. Which would be more credible if we knew anything about anything he had done previously.
It unfortunately reeks of scam or publicity stunt or something equally unpalatable.
Umm, that's not the way most VC firms work, you know. While some modest number of firms are basically VC family offices, the majority are investing OPM - other peoples' money - in a series of raised funds that deliver better returns than investing in public markets, and thus attract investors who'd rather go for the average 25-30% returns in a venture fund than the 8-10% in the S&P 500, in exchange for a longer term lockup and somewhat higher volatility of returns.
Then why not start out by filing some patents and then publishing a whitepaper or journal-quality explanation of what the hell they are talking about on their website?
I challenge you to find anything other than marketing drivel on their website. You won't. You'll find an invitation to apply to be one of 12 people to review it. This is marketing hype and viral BS at its worst.
I know several physicists whose opinions I respect that I was going to send such a whitepaper to and ask for an opinion, but when I realized there was nothing there, I wrote it off - I'd never insult the intelligence of anybody I respect by sending them to a website that does nothing more than spread marketing drivel all over the place.
Also, from the page in question:
While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight.
Clearly the page is partially tongue in cheek, but I do think it's a fair point.
I think you meant "ridiculous", not "rediculous". :)