The Geek Chic people who went on Shark Tank recently have an ongoing business. They've been in business for several years, attend BGG Con each year, and have sold incredibly expensive tables to several people I know.

On the other hand, they have like an 18 month backlog, and once you order and make your down payment they'll ignore your emails for about a year until they're ready to deal with you, and ask you for your customizations. You can customize /everything/ on the table, even though it's marketed as a modular system, and it takes a while to figure all that out.

I suspect they went to a VC because they believed that they could be a bigger and more successful business, but they don't have anyone on board that knows how to become that business. Making the person who gives you the money have a stake in the company helps ensure that they'll actually help you succeed. I think they took $300k for a 25% stake or something like that.

Of course, when you walk around not talking to yourself with a bluetooth earpiece in place, everyone will still look at you funny..

My impression from the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) is that the laptop is erased by power cycling its RAM, and the hard drive you are wondering about was erased by being removed from the machine last month and never used again.

Booting from a live CD and pulling data from a thumb drive to read it, there is no need for a hard drive whatsoever. Only RAM and processor registers ever see the data, and nothing usable is retained from them.

Now, how they secure that thumb drive, however, is a mystery solved presumably by reading the article, which I won't.

Where does the first amendment grant you the right to limit your liability towards debt, or to not have to pay taxes per the income tax tables? Or not have to pay any taxes at all?

I agree that a union PAC, or the NRA PAC, has freedom of speech, assembly, and to petition the government. A corporation, however, could be asked to voluntarily relinquish those rights in exchange for their limited liability and favorable tax status. You know, the way that non-profit organizations are already required to for their tax status.

rsilvergun didn't state that his proposal would survive Constitutional muster, but it could help solve our political mess as a Constitutional amendment.

I could tediously reply to all the people who replied to my post, but instead I'll just reply to this one at random.

I'm chuckling at how naive you all are thinking that you're somehow smarter than advertising. Hehe.

That's what I tell all eight year olds who spends their allowances at McDonald's. It's clearly their own faults they let themselves be brainwashed by advertising, and the only thing they can blame is their undeveloped brains.

Maybe you missed Richard Garriott's story?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1611990/

He showed up to the premiere a few years back in a space suit. I have a picture of him and his wife that I took on a hard drive somewhere.

1/a dozen is a higher ratio than for most other tourists. And remember - most of these people are pretty damn rich. They [i]don't care[/i] about bragging to plebes about how awesome the thing they did was.

The mechanics of a game aren't subject to copyright. They might be patentable, if novel, such as the original CCG patent for M:TG.

On the other hand, creative elements of a game are copyrightable. This includes not only flavor art, but also board layout - such as Scrabble's arrangement of double and triple letter and word scores. That's one reason why a game like Words with Friends uses a different board layout.

I would argue that the specific selection of blocks for a game like Tetris is a creative element and hence covered by copyright. If a clone made a similar game, except with 12 spaces on the bottom row instead of (10?), and lacking a few of the basic shapes but substituting a few different ones, it would probably differ enough to escape copyright infringement. (It would be a derivative of the mechanics, and would get sued if there was a patent, but shouldn't have a problem with copyright derivative protection.)

It's a quote from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

At our after-work beer party today, there was a guy who, upon us talking about how crazy the week had been, said "why?"

He doesn't read internet news, doesn't get cable, and his sister had a premature baby earlier this week who might not make it. He honestly did not know that either the Boston or West explosions had occurred.

An organization that wishes to engage in political speech immediately should lose any favorable tax status. This is already the law for non-profits, and it should be the law for corporations as well. For a corporation, losing such tax status would mean the individual shareholders would then be directly responsible for risk and tax burden, as if it were a partnership.

Not everyone has an informed opinion on everything. Also, a party that 100% represented my views would only have one member. Some amount of compromise is necessary whenever two or more people associate; to have a successful party able to implement the ~80% of things that everyone agrees upon, everyone will disagree with the party on something. Perhaps the party's technology manager wants to learn where the majority disagrees with his personal views, so that he can discover where he could compromise for the good of his party overall?

IEEE Spectrum and Popular Science are my remaining paper magazines. I liked the IEEE Technology and Society magazine but they went digital only this year.

A dollar will pay $1 worth of my income taxes. That's its exact value, and in that regard is immune to fluctuation.