I don't really care one way or another. Sure, if you make me live in a technological enclave of IT geniuses, we might discuss the intellectual beauty of different ways of classifying and sorting domains, but in the "real world"...just leave it alone and let people register achievify.app and successly.mobile if that's what they want to do.

I don't want to downplay the effort it takes to get funding, but based on the experience I had talking to VCs, as well as the experience of colleagues and friends who got VCs for horribly structured deals, I find it very hard not to lose respect for some part of the community.

If I invest in something, I'm not looking for vague, emotional attributes like "leadership DNA" or "burning desire" (I've seen Amway conventions), I'm looking for meaningful, tested models, facts, tactics - like the "Moneyball" approach, even if the founder is a bit goofy and I have to ask a couple of times before I get the right response.

Sadly, that's not the approach I'm seeing, and it very rarely is the approach I see other people having success with. I can enter a room, present a marketing plan that has made me money for years and after a while people will go to the bathroom and not come back, or I'll get complaints about how boring those numbers are. On the other hand, if I get an expensive executive board, make a lot of interesting although meaningless claims and choose a hyped-up market, somebody will pay for my shitty deal. Sure, the reaction is understandable - we're hard wired to react more strongly to new or potentially life-changing information and the best approach would consist of the best of both worlds. Still, given the choice, I'd expect people handling serious amounts of money to train themselves to look behind the hype and focus on the data, not "Hey I like that guy I want him to succeed", if only because of all the cash that has been burned by interesting people on crappy business ideas.

Now, to hedge some of what I'm saying: There are lots of great VCs who understand their field much better than I ever could, and if you're looking for capital, there's no excuse for making a boring presentation. But, and this is just my PoV, some VCs display a lot of overconfidence when it comes to judging personalities and a distaste for dealing with the - sometimes boring - data points that are more useful in deciding whether a business is feasible or not.

Seven, but none with a photo of me.

"Consumer products" is a bad choice of words, I'm using it as !=public goods, not !=B2B/B2G

If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?

If you can't get the thing properly patented, you're not going to fund it with social media in or out. The trouble isn't social media, it's that monetization is a really limited incentive within an industrial society where lots of great ideas fall into the category of public goods or reduction of externalities that just aren't incentivized properly and hence never get realized.
Say you come up with a great project to revolutionize education, health, energy or transportation - it might be to disruptive for governments to fund it (assuming there's a budget), but if there's no way to exclude non-buyers from benefiting, you're not going to get private funding either.

If there's revolution of thought within this century, I'm predicting it'll be in economics. I'm fine with a market economy for consumer products, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.

If the VCs you're talking to are all switching to social media now, you're probably talking to the wrong guys anyway. Sure, there might be a few who understand the risks and opportunities, but blindly following trends smells like ignorance, and ignorant investors are the worst you can get. If you have to follow the Silicon Valley model, concentrate on the folks who specialize on deals within your particular industry.

Also, VC doesn't appear to be the smartest choice here anyway. Apply for grants, talk to people who understand the problem your startup is going to solve, start a Kickstarter, go to banks (rarely works, but when it does, it does) and if that's not enough, try VC. I'm not saying VC is always a bad choice, but it's real usefulness is in rapid business development, not starting a brand new, R&D-intensive enterprise, which is kind of implied by will pay me nothing for ten years.

Hoping for the same regarding depth. After playing D2 for years (Hell, I'm building a summoner right now), I'm a bit afraid of a Godfather 3 scenario. The beta seemed nice, but I'll lay off the game until someone gives me a thumbs up about replayability and all.
Strangely, I never got into Torchlight at all. I don't think it's a bad game and there's nothing that really bugged me, as was the case a few times with Titan Quest (which I liked and finished a couple times, though), I just can't get myself interested.

1) Lift weights.
- It saves time: 30-60 minutes 2-3x a week suffice for a decent workout.
- It trains your whole body: Don't waste time on machines, you don't need 'em. Let a good trainer show you the popular full-body exercises and practice with low weights until you can do them correctly. It's all you need to bulk up or lose some kg.
- It's not as gruesome as it sounds: Most of the time is spent recovering from the last set, and the short bursts of pushing yourself to the limit are actually enjoyable, once you get into it.
- Increase weights regularly, change exercises and intensity when you hit a plateau.
- Some additional cardio doesn't hurt, obviously.
2) Fix your nutrition
- Don't eat too much crap.
- If you're trying to bulk up, eat something with protein every few hours.
- If you're trying to lose weight, reduce your calorie intake. Complex carbs will keep you from feeling powerless and low-calorie foods will keep you from feeling hungry. Sure, there's always the sense of "I must eat more", but that's just part of the process.
- Generally, complex carbs, fish/poultry & vegetables are good things to put in your face.
3) Sleep 7-8 hours a night

There's really not that much more to it, unless you're a pro-bodybuilder who's despairing because of a slight asymmetry of his pecs. I've met a dozen folks in the local gym who have used very simple workout and nutrition plans, look great, and still get results.

Maybe. No. Yes. No. Yes.

As the other AC said, the terms aren't specific. If you want something more meaningful, try the political compass (or grid), which splits the usual left/right range into two lines, one each for social and economic views. A pro-market social conservative would be upper right, while a left-libertarian would score in the lower left. It would also take care of the problem with the word "libertarian" which has been claimed by Ayn Rand's crowd, much to the chagrin of libertarians outside the US.

Don't care about the troll, but for anyone who doesn't want to look it up:

"Liberal" in Australia's Liberal Party refers to economic liberalism, not center-left politics. They're pretty firm in right-wing territory, including the obligatory hate against homosexuals and women's rights. Add gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers and you'd have the GOP*.

*I'll refrain from making the obvious "Remove gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers from the GOP and you're left with nothing" joke. Well, maybe not.

Come on, what's innovative about Dropbox?

Yes, the interface is all cute, it runs smoothly and doesn't spam the hell out of me. Still, filesharing isn't new. Syncing isn't new. Coming up with something similar is just what is supposed to happen in a competitive marketplace.

If Google launched a smear campaign against Dropbox and came up with some severely restrictive and sloppy alternative, maybe the comparison would make sense. But so...meh. Btw, I heard Google's financial statements are hard to read. They're totally the new Enron.

I wouldn't care that much if DRM allowed me to actually use the files I purchased.

As an ex-member of Audible, in order to actually listen the books I bought, I'd have to get an mp3 converter, get it to accept the codec I pieced together from Audible's software, which then would change every few months, rendering the old "hack" useless. Now I just pirate everything and save myself a few hours of work.
I'm not that much into piracy and I wouldn't mind paying $15 for the privilege of having someone read a book to me, but going through all the hassle just so I can open the files on the OS I want in the player I want doesn't sound like a worthy investment of time.

Same principle applies to ebooks. When I want to re-read the tome on corporate marketing I bought seven years ago, I head over to the study and pick it up. If I buy an e-reader with its own proprietary format now, will I still be able to read the book after a decade has passed? I'm not too sure, I kinda envision myself browsing the web for a kindle-to-google-glasses-converter.

Revolution seems like a surefire way to end up in another totalitarian nightmare.

I'd be more interested in economic research that dares to leave the mainstream of market theory and private parties. Even accounting for all that is wrong with capitalism, it does a pretty good job evaluating goods and services and providing decentralized incentives for people to engage in the economy. Of course, some of these incentives suck and the pricing mechanism tends to ignore social, environmental and future costs and effects.

Still, there should be a way to take all that we know about economics, game theory, psychology, etc., and distill it into a useful groundwork of a sustainable, scalable and fair economy that can be tested and validated on a small scale. After that, if people want to, they can still pick up torches and pitchforks, or simply move to a place that doesn't use 18th century economics as its M.O.

Considering that we're in a pretty tech-savvy crowd, disruptive innovation like this shouldn't seem too outrageous.

Imho, mind uploading seems the most reasonable of all, given that we'd "just" have to figure out how to translate our neurological wiring into bits and bytes and/or artificial neuronal networks. Extinction isn't too inconceivable, but unless induced by some extraordinary strong event, e.g., an asteroid turning the whole planet uninhabitable for us, I don't think we'd manage to destroy all humankind with the typical tools of dystopian sci-fi (war, pollution, etc).

It makes me wonder what would be most interesting to have, though.
Teleportation, assuming reasonable energy costs per use, might be useful to solve transportation problems and make a global economy easier to grow and sustain, and the same could apply to FTL-travel, considering all opportunities for space exploration and new industry. This begs the question, however, whether massively increasing productivity in our current economic modus operandi would really be an unequivocally good thing. I'd rather wait until we sort environmental and social problems out and arrive at some sort of M.O. that matches the elusive criterion of being both efficient and humane.
World peace sounds a bit vague. Is a society with an all powerful and wealthy overlord and a pacific, yet impoverished population considered peaceful? If so, I could envision multiple scenarios in which war might actually be preferable to living in impotence.
Extinction would be pointless, unless we manage to turn ourselves into something other-than-human first (which might be interesting as well) and get rid of the flabby rest; that leaves me with immortality, to which some of the aforementioned criticisms still apply - power staying longer in the hands of those who hold it, making it harder for progress to occur - but it would also fulfill the selfish need of staying alive, allowing one to learn and master more skills, experiment more, and so on.
So, all in all, I think I'll keep rooting for Aubrey de Grey and >150 year lifespans and leave mind uploading to those who think one version of themselves isn't already enough. And anyone interested in "augmented" masturbation, of course.