I think it is a sad sign of the times that basic science IS in fact a partisan political issue for some. Making a joke about that fact in a post, isn't the issue in my opinion.

But with Kickstarter, the owner doesn't have to give up any equity or give contributors any voice in decisions. A VERY big difference. With Kickstarter, they basically get free money to try something if people think it is a good idea.

Absolutely. That would already be illegal with current regulations unless done in a way to basically copy existing VC structures and thus not be public. If you want to market you company publicly you are free to do so, but that is an IPO. If you don't yet want to go public, then you do private deals. You can do a private deal with any one you choose (even private investors), just there isn't much of a market to privately approach a ton of small investors who only bring a bit of cash to the deal for hopefully obvious reasons.

As others have said, Kickstarter has no relation to an IPO as it isn't even an investment. More confusing is reference to small investors blocked for IPOs. IPOs are by definition public to all investors. Do you mean pre-IPO? If you do mean pre-IPO what government regulation do you think stops you from investing pre-IPO? You are in fact more than free to find any private company you like and invest in it (assuming they are interested in your investment). Those are obviously risky investments, but has you say can have a lot of upside. No government restrictions however on any individual investing in any private company I'm aware of. On restriction I'm aware of is a private company cannot generally publicly market pre-IPO offerings (at that point you go IPO).

The real restriction to small investors for pre-IPO investments is the market. No company wants to take on thousands of small investors who really bring nothing to the table when they can find one (or a small number) of large investors who besides their cash also bring industry/government connections and experience in building a pre-IPO company toward IPO.

Top of the head reasons to keep windows at home and work

At home:
  - Visual Studio/.NET (do work from home)
  - SQL Server (do work from home)
  - Windows Media Center integration with XBox 360

At work:
  - Visual Studio/.NET
  - SQL Server
  - Exchange
  - Active Directory/Group Policy/etc
  - System Center

I'm still forced to have BB for work, but my wife has android. She has had a few voice apps and not sure which one she is currently using, but I think it may be called something like vlingo (or at least one of them was). She now does just about everything by voice. When she is in the car she turns on a setting and whenever she receives a text the phone announces who sent the text and reads it to her, etc, etc, etc.

Haven't seen Siri, but seems Android has "had some apps for that" for some time.

I'm wondering if the bigger mistake is the message to handset makers that if you use Andriod you get sued and products get blocked. Not just apple of course as there seems to be new suit against an Android maker every other day, but really have to wonder if at some point this becomes counter productive. Yes, Apple wants to beat Android, but what happens if you scare all the handset makers away from Android? Obviously they aren't going to stop making phones. Don't own one myself, but with good review the reviews of the latest windows phones, knowing MS will protect from any lawsuits, etc. Have to wonder how long until some of the phone makers doing well with Android find it too risky and just switch over to Windows phones? These suits from Apple could possible end up helping an even more powerful enemy gain traction.

 

I live in the Cayman Islands so this could be useful here. When a huricane hits, there are no options to drive somewhere that has electricity.

I think you can take off the tinfoil hat on the sabotage thoughts. For one LSE's own quote providing solution is experiencing the same issue. So unless they have some diabolical plan to sabotage themselves, I think that fact should rule that out. Also, this is effecting large players. These are billion dollar companies whose sole propose is to provide accurate data and provide it fast. Without that they simply don't exist. You'd have to live in a very conspiracy theory driven existence to think they'd all really all throw their own companies and livelihoods away in some dark plan to get the LSE or Linux.

Now would all these large players all have made the exact same errors in their interfaces so they are seeing these same issues while the smaller players seem to have got it right? Sure. But the simplest explanation, of course is they are all experiencing the same issue because of some upstream problem with scaling to their large volumes. Those actually involved seem to point to some caching issue. Is that true? No clue, but they are certainly in a better position to offer analysis of the issue than you or I. That doesn't mean Linux is bad for christ's sake (so you don't have to go on some crazy conspiracy hunt to explain it away). If it is true (and we certainly don't know that it is, though the information currently available may point that way), you know what? There is software which just happens to be running on Linux, which may have an issue. No big deal. Happens every day on every platform. Not some big black eye on Linux if some software that happens to run on Linux has issues and no need to start jumping to conspiracies to explain it away.

I'm curious what Google will do if MPEG-LA is successful in creating a patent pool for WebM? Will they actually pull support for their own codec and abandon it if patent issues arise? Will be interesting to see what happens if MPEG-LA succeeds.

Microsoft won't provide a warranty on your new Linux install either. Now your PC provider may support Linux and your hardware warrant may still be valid, but that isn't what is being discussed. This is about Microsft's warranty on their software.

The article is about MS voiding the warranty on their software. Presumably a separate warranty would exist with the hardware provider. Now smartphone hardware providers currently tend to only support one OS (though hopefully this will change), so I'm guessing it may end up voiding their warranty as well, but that is a separate issue. The hardware issue would likely be like installing Linux on a Dell PC 10 years ago. Sure you can do it, but it wasn't officially supported by Dell so good luck calling Dell for support.

One would assume that is correct. The article is just about Microsoft's warranty on its software. Any warranty on the hardware would presumably be a separate issue entirely to take up with the hardware supplier.

Honestly I don't as I'm not much of a gamer :-) When I think of "Mod" in the context of game consoles, I think of three things: - ability to create your own software to run on the console which is available on the Xbox (though there are restrictions) - Mod chips, etc which allow running pirated games, etc which obviously aren't permitted - Creating custom content, maps, etc within a game which is really an issue for the game itself and not the console Honestly, that is all I could think of so I must be missing something. What do you mean by mod in the context of games?

After you jailbreak a phone there are a lot of things you could do to break it. For example, if you mess around and overwrite critical system files MS won't be responsible for fixing it for you.

Once you jailbreak a phone though there is a lot more you can do than simply install unapproved apps.