Yeah, but it's nearly free money. Sure, it feels like you just won the lottery, and then found out that the jackpot is only 60% of what they claimed if you take it now, and then Uncle Sam is going to treat it as oridnary income and draw of another 35%, leaving you with just 40c on the dollar.

But, really, if you had stock a month ago, it was worth $16/share. Through the magic of irrational exuberance, it was worth 2.5x that on Friday. In six months, even if it drops to half of the ipo price, it's still worth more than you thought it would be worth more that you thought it would be.

I doubt that FB will drop to a penny stock in six months. I doubt it will go below $18-20/share (~40 P/E ratio, I think, which is probably more reasonable for a company that is just now figuring out how to really fleece it's customers and users).

Thank you for your response.I've tried to find if it was possible to capture iMessage data on my LAN. Encrypted, huh? Better to know now not to beat my head against a brick wall on it.

On the contrary, while you are int explicitly private in such a setting others have noted that there is a high degree of anonymity as well as a reasonable expectation that legal actions taken will not be permanently recorded (security tapes are rotated, for example), nor will anyone outside of the people in the bar be aware of your presence.

Though not a perfect analogy, it like the free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech comparison. No, you're not alone; No, nobody is going to remember who you are or what you did, or even that you were there unless you make an effort to be memorable.

If you want to know why your taxes are so high you only need to look at the deals which are given to major corporations to attract and retain their business. It's getting to be a bit like CEO compensation packages. Will the best ones make you money - sure. But that money is collected from everyone else - essentially a tax increase on the everyman.

The fact that governments are pitted against one another just means that the downward spiral will continue, as each locality offers to unlevel the playing field to favor their locality.

It need to be available as an aggregator or automatic service, too. I didn't realize how much this mattered until I had DirecTV, Hulu+, iTunes, and Netflix all at the same time. It's a royal PITA to find your stuff and then download it and watch it (or pray that the streaming service will work).

Then I got Sickbeard and none of it matters any more - who, what, where - I just tell it the shows I want, it passes them to sabnzbd, sorts and saves them into Plex-friendly folders, and when I want to watch something I go to one place. Would I pay a subscription price for that (I'm already paying for usenet, though it's a pittance)? Yeah, if it were cheap. $1 a show isn't going to cut it. Maybe $0.50 a show as a single, $1-2 a month (weekly vs daily content) while it's running. And I want it on my computer where I control it. Not streamed, so I can't see it if I'm someone else is surfing the net. Not time limited - there are times when I may not get to see TV for 2-3 weeks (or longer) at a time. Not DRM'd so I can't re-code it for a portable device to take with me.

I still say they should go to each representative in the house and senate and require that they eliminate $2B/yr of Federal funds that flow into their district. That's just a bit over $1T/yr, which is most of the way to a balanced budget. Now, that's going to hurt some of the President's priorities, but remember that that same rep is going to have to account for those cuts in the next election. That's when you see just how popular your ideas really are.

It's easy to cut money from other peoples programs, much harder when it comes out of your own backside.

In social networking, as with many things, there can be only one premier service. Sure, there can be products which cater to a special niche, or as an alternate, but few people are going to keep two Facebook like sites going at once. Google+ offers no real compelling reason to leave the #1 player, Facebook, for the majority of users (hint: if you're reading slashdot, you're not one of those people).

Until everyone moves, nobody will. Google was jerking off with Wave and Buzz while Facebook was getting everybody and their brother on. Most people just want a social site, and Google tried to make it "more" and didn't realize that my mother, and the 13 year old kid down the street don't want "more."

Google is too late to the party, and there's too much momentum right now. In 3-4 years, if facebook starts to decline (as MySpace did), then there will be an opportunity again. Right now, though, I think it's Facebook's market to keep or screw up and it's going be difficult and take a long time to make enough people switch so that it gains momentum.

That's where the money is going, I'm certain. market research and online branding is a large undertaking, even if the heavy lifting has already been done by the marketing firm that has the marketing budget for the main line.

Not only are they about double that, but since they are probably using outside marketing firms, you have to add another 50-100% on top of that for the firm overhead and profit. I wouldn't be surprised to see billing rates from $60-200/hr ($120k-400k/yr) for the range of people who might be working on this stuff for a national account like GM. Sure, the ground level employees are still making $35-75k, but that's nowhere near what they cost to GM.

That's interesting. I am considering a Facebook push for a local organization (an a cappella chorus) in hopes of targeting a specific demographic (location, age, sex, interest in vocal/a cappella music). The people we tend to find aren't looking for us; our best recruitment has been in direct contact with people we run into that happen to enjoy singing. They don't know they want to join a vocal group until they try it. Putting general advertising out there is pretty spotty (and expensive, even in our small market), and most of the younger people I know don't even read traditional print anymore.

I'm hoping that FB can help find the people who don't know they need to be found. If we could get 2% of active click-throughs to come out for a night as a guest, it would be a rousing success.

I think for continuous email marketing by people for events is great, but for me there's a limit to the number of times I can see an advertiser show up in email and it's much lower than a facebook status. I'm okay with 1-2 updates a month on facebook, whereas if I get an email from a business more than once every 2-3 months, I'm likely to relegate it to the auto-sweep for advertising (I keep it around for 2 months in case I need it, but normally I don't even look at the folder).

I think photographers will become luxury services, even moreso than they were a decade or two ago. When the barriers to entry get too low, you see a flood of poorly trained practicioners who don't have anything better to do with their time. It degrades the median quality significantly and pushes people to do it themselves. The top will always exist, but the middle and lower market may start to fail, leaving nothing but $10,000/day jobs and hobbiests.