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Comment I have an iPhone 1 (Score 0) 152

I have an iPhone 1; it was given to me in 2007 as part of the Apple iPhone giveaway to employees.

It is now 8 years old. And using the original battery, and not having charge or capacity problems.

The only people who care about removable batteries are the people who want to have multiple batteries so that they can replace them in order to maintain a more or less continuous duty cycle for the device.

For those people, there are cases with integrated batteries they could use as an external power source.

Comment Re:The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States (Score 1) 305

You gotta explain how the ""straw that broke the camel's back"" occurred in the third year of the war.

It was more or less a series of border skirmishes (including a few port cities), until the proclamation.

This map animation demonstrates it better than I could with just words:

http://storymaps.esri.com/stor...

The proclamation more or less gave a mandate to penetrate deeply into the Southern states in order to enforce it.

Comment If my church were being torn down for a telescope (Score 4, Informative) 305

If my church were being torn down for a telescope, I would of course protest.

However, I would protest when they were first tearing it down in 1967, and not wait until 37 years later, in 2004, to start protesting.

They've only been protesting about how holy the site is since about 2004. When it benefitted them in ways other than piety for them to do so. This is about trying to garner international attention for the monarchist movement in Hawaii, who would like to bring back the Kingdom of Hawaii, and are still pissed off about the deposition of Queen Liliuokalani, and the effective annexation of Hawaii in 1893.

Protesting a telescope gets media attention, even though there are already 13 telescopes on the site, operated by 11 nations, and they are in fact already the largest astronomical observatory on the planet. The only thing new about this one is that it was easier to latch onto the media attention, since the telescope in question was going to be very large, and was therefore already getting media attention.

Of course, assuming this was granted (thus setting the precedent for all non extinct indian nations to reclaim their lands within the U.S. as well), there would immediately be internecine warfare as to *who*, of the 10 groups claiming to have the "rightful" king or queen among their members, got to be the "official" one.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States (Score 2) 305

The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States

http://www.civilwar.org/educat...

The specific primary issue was whether or not slavery would be prohibited in new territories when they became states, changing the balance of power between slave-holding and non slave-holding states. Prior to the election of Lincoln, the balance was maintained by inducting one non slave-holding state and one slave-holding state at the same time (paired statehood grants).

The South was not fearful of the existing slave states losing their slaves, they were fearful in a change in relative power between the two power blocks, and the election of Lincoln made this inevitable.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was in fact a punitive action relative to the secessionists only, and only applied to the ten states then currently in rebellion. It is widely regarded as the proverbial "straw that broke the camels back", and was issued under the president's war powers, and thus necessarily excluded those areas not in rebellion. In other words, of the 4 million slaves currently held at the time, about 1 million of them were *not* freed by the proclamation, as they were within states not in open rebellion.

But nice try on your straw man argument.

Note: as a technical note, free persons who commit criminal acts *could* in fact be made slaves today through court action, since you may deny someone their liberty through due process of law. We just don't use this particular loophole within our justice system.

Comment Once all the data is in the cloud... (Score 1) 91

Once all the data is in the cloud... the only data breaches will be to the cloud itself. Because it becomes a tasty, tasty target.

I'm also positive that government regulators couldn't possibly find financial irregularities by grabbing you documents from the cloud service provider, since there's no such thing as contradictory laws which make it impossible to not be in violation of one or the other of them...

Comment "Sorry, Timmy..." (Score 1) 141

"Sorry, Timmy... we see here that you were eating unhealthy food in 3rd grade which, even if we didn't know it at the time, was later determined to be a primary cause of hepatic liver failure 35 years later; under the provisions of the ACA 17.3, we're sadly going to have to deny you that new liver. If only you'd eaten the lime, instead of the cherry jello..."

Comment Actually, imagine a world... (Score 2) 141

Imagine a world where Wesley Snipes cuts off your poor innocent child's thumb to get a free lunch, instead of stealing their social security number and taking out a loan for a house, or something!

Actually, imagine a world where children are effectively indoctrinated from a young age to assume an unreliable and insecure technology is a valid means of personal identification, and therefore fail to question the validity of its pervasive use in later life.

Kinda like bank cards and PIN numbers, or using your credit card at Target, or assuming that chip-and-pin will fix all avenues of fraud and abuse.

Comment Re:WTF???? (Score 1) 346

Not just Cuban:

https://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/99491/dry-bubble-may-means/

Check out the charts.

All this means is that someone is willing to series 'B' a company for some absurd amount, which pumps up the TVPI, but since the companies feel no need to exit from their privately held status via IPO or allowing themselves to be acquired, the VCs are unable to cash out.

Typically this is true ... but it's also an excuse the GPs (general partners, the people who control the financial decisions for the VC fund that did the backing) give to the LPs (limited partners, the people who fronted the money into the fund in the first place).

In general, this ignores two things:

(1) Private placement of the equity held by the fund.

Because the VCs are either seed round (typically, VCs are not seed round; they leave seed rounds to angel investors, unless they really believe in the team, have worked for them before, and think they can leverage the product they're working on to -- god, you made me say it! -- build synergy) or series A.

If they are series A, a private placement will net them a large profit. On the other hand, they have preferred shares, and if they can structure an acquisition or IPO exit, they can expect a 5-50X return compared to a private placement of the equity, because they get paid at whatever higher rate that can structure for their stock class.

So VC fund GPs are really reluctant to exit via private placement when they believe they have a huge payday on the horizon.

(2) Private fund equity exchange by one or more LPs.

In general, an LP is permitted to find someone to buy out their equity in the fund. This lets them realize a smaller return earlier, while allowing the GPs to keep the equity in their pocket until an IPO/acquisition exit. I am not aware of a fund LP agreement that doesn't permit this, but practically speaking, I'm sure there's some first time investors who have been snookered into this without having consulted a lawyer or an accountant. In practice, however, the LPs can get out, and realize some of the equity from the so-called "dry bubble gap", as a replacement LP comes in to assume the latency of the GPs waiting around. The catch on this is that most fund LPs are all-or-nothing, meaning you can only exit the fund, you can't exit only the unicorn part of the fund, and the GPs may not like you doing this enough that you are not asked to participated in the next fund.

So practically speaking, there's really no such thing as a "dry bubble gap"; the only reason they exist (and are called "dry") is that the funds are illiquid until such time as the GPs agree to exit, by whatever method. This prevents them from investing in new things, so a unicorn can soak up all of the theoretical equity value (as opposed to the initial fund value), preventing them from releasing DPI, and taking their LPs into the next fund so they can do new investments.

This is not a bubble. It's no fun for the VCs because they can't go out hunting new things to invest in because all of the LP capital they could theoretically spend is tied up ... because of the decision by the VCs (fund GPs).

How exactly does the revenue destruction leverage calculation work as a business model? Blackmail?

How about "We'd like to get more customers out of India; we're willing to partner with you to deliver limited Internet service to a lot more people, which you can then use the fact that they now have mobile devices to upsell them on full Internet service, and to upsell them on SMS/MMS services. Alternately, our other option for increasing our customer base is to decrease the cost of WhatsApp in order to attract more customers. This would have the unfortunate side effect of you losing even more SMS/MMS revenue than you've already lost".

So ... "That's not blackmail; that's such a dirty word; that's just smart business! Plus, you know, they have a choice, and we offered to partner with them!".

The fact that it's pretty obvious that they control something that's cost the companies (not Reliance specifically, and not just in India) a collective $9B in revenue last year (in the same way that RIAA/MPAA "lose" money for everyone who fails to buy the new Britney Spears album/watch the latest Pauly Shore movie because they suck) is what gets them in the door to make the partnership offer in the first place, rather than being told "go pound sand".

Before Facebook bought WhatsApp, they would not give Zuckerberg a meeting.

WhatsApp is, of course, destructive of SMS/MMS revenue, given they way they've structured their profit centers around SMS/MMS and not Internet service, so it basically commoditizes their services as very close to "dumb pipes". This is the same thing that anyone who has put a bandwidth cap on someone in the U.S. is familiar with (and which the cap is designed to combat). But the writing is on the wall with things like Google fiber, and the direct satellite Internet projects that several companies are now pursuing: connectivity will be commoditized, and if it has to be over their dead bodies, then it'll be over their dead bodies.

And yeah, I've analyzed some of the other "monster/unicorn valuations", and there is similar reasoning behind their value as acquisitions, as well, or just their value sitting out there with the VCs GPs unwilling to part with their "as yet unrealized dry bubble" profits. You just have to look sideways at these things. :)

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