Viewing profile — maconic

I think the pragmatic answer is that unless the country cares about the stick (sanctions, tariffs, military conflict) or the carrot (financial aid, access to markets, military alli…

They all do engage in some form of it... show me a modern Western country that doesn't have long sentences including death for sedition, subversion, or treason against "the State?"…

I think the second idea is the correct one, there are many counterpoints to the first one: you can see the same thing in any culture with the right ingredients, such as Germany in …

Being banished from social circles is certainly one reason, but in this case I think it's fear of life or liberty by an authoritarian regime that has complete discretion to do so i…

I'm a little late to the conversation, but this seems to be hijacked into an anti-Israel/anti-Semitic discussion rather than about spying, so I'd like to suggest one (hopefully obv…

I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In Ch…

We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever. > "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke c…

Didn't he make enough money to follow his honest convictions? I take it at face value he wants to achieve the mission because he believes in it.

I believe it was Sam Altman who had proposed a good solution to this, which is that you start off with a high number like that for employee #1 with decreasing numbers as the employ…

I don't agree with that... I would want all the early employees to be rewarded for taking a chance on that. I would want to go the other direction and give restricted stock (which …

Well, but then don't look for generic cookie cutter startups that everyone wants to work at :) Go after the startup where you as employee #1 are uniquely positioned to negotiate fo…

I would recommend making a distinction between a startup that manages to get acquired as a small team for building a good product (Instagram is an extreme example... but I know of …

That doesn't have to be true, there are many decent and honorable people that decide to start companies. But I do certainly think you need to walk away as soon as you feel a founde…

I am not religious so I won't make any comment on that part, but I do hope we can culturally somehow figure out how to avoid someone like Mr. Rogers being considered a pedophile (a…

Time for a decentralized blockchain of code commits...

Exactly :)

Fair enough, but there is still a hosted solution, it's just hosted email instead :) I know Linux used that approach, which is seemingly ironic since Linus made git, and previously…

Independent of Gitea (which I have nothing to do with nor have any relationship with anyone involved). Your comment "It is worth stressing that you need no software to 'host' git. …

There are a lot of bootstrappers on the Lean Startup Circle discussion group ( http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/topics ).

Disclaimer: I'm just speculating Mike Arrington presumably wanted to reduce Jason Calacanis' stake because most of the revenue was coming from TC50 and AOL didn't want to buy them …

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments, Scribd just announced they are making changes: http://blog.scribd.com/2010/09/21/the-scribd-archive-an-apol...

From an ethical perspective, I think it just depends on how you will use the leads. If you make sure you're giving the leads to a scrupulous company who will offer the customer a v…

Supplier fraud (sourcing using sites like alibaba.com) is also a big problem on the Intenret. It's hard to establish trust on the Internet, especially when dealing with people from…

I'm using Amazon EC2 to host a web server, but Amazon EC2's IP address space is blocked by Trend Micro MAPS DUL (http://securecloud.com/help/en/about_the_dul.html). Given that send…