That's not really fair. The people who run corporations have a fiduciary responsibility. (There are of course caveats, and we can argue all day over whether or not SOPA is unconstitutional or otherwise illegal, but you get the point.)
If you are a movie studio, SOPA is a great idea for your bottom line.
I don't think it's fair to call everyone who is in favor of SOPA either evil or stupid, even if SOPA itself is both. I can understand why YC wouldn't want them around, but I can't necessarily say they wouldn't be good investors.
Corporations that are pro-SOPA don't make PR statements saying, "We are pro-SOPA because it will make us money."
Instead they say, "SOPA is good for America! Anyone opposed is a misinformed basement dweller!"
When pg says, "Anyone pro-SOPA is stupid" why don't you interpret it as pg discharging his fiduciary duty?
Why do you apologize for sociopathic lies in large corporations, but then criticize self-interested statements from small corporations?
I'm questioning the basic assumptions you take toward this issue. I find your attitude here baffling and, honestly, horrifying.
If corporations are supposed to tell PR-friendly lies to benefit their bottom line, shouldn't Paul Graham be telling PR-friendly lies to benefit his bottom line?
By extension, when you write that, are you telling PR-friendly lies? Which fiduciary duty are you discharging when you write that? Does SOPA benefit your bottom-line?
If SOPA benefits your bottom-line, shouldn't you be going around telling sociopathic lies to stop it? That's what the CEO of Pfizer is doing... you are your own CEO and you have a fiduciary duty to yourself.
If it's socially acceptable for corporations to tell profit-motived sociopathic lies, then it must be made socially acceptable for individuals to tell profit-motived sociopathic lies, and any appeal to "you're not being fair!" must be recognized as pure rhetoric designed to fool the gullible.
"Guuuuyyyys! Be nice to the SOPA supporters! They're only acting like Democracy-destroying sociopaths for their own personal profit! It's just not fair if you call them mean names!"
"Fiduciary" derives from latin words meaning "faith" and "trust". You could reasonably rephrase it as "duty of good faith". It's just as vague as it sounds. It does not mean you have to do everything that's best for "the bottom line", either in the short or long term.
In fact, absent actions that amount to fraud or deception, or that clearly breach laws, bylaws, or contractual arrangements, it is virtually impossible for shareholders to sustain an action for breach of fiduciary duty.
Not supporting a bad law that is not in the best interests of the world is not even close to a breach of fiduciary duty as normally applies in a corporate context.
I suspect OP (both here and at Reddit) would be interested in pointers to some providers who share PayPal's low cost of entry with hopefully much better service. I know I would be :-)
WePay has a dead simple to use stores product and we just released a new API (with iframe checkouts - https://stage.wepay.com/developer ). Our goal is to be the 'anti-paypal' by providing over the top support, and making it really easy to get integrated.
PayPal will re-evaluate your rolling reserve periodically. Assuming steady volume and low charge backs they will lower it.
Rolling reserves are not uncommon for merchant accounts. PayPal didn't event them. 30% is on the high side but if PayPal feels the merchant is risky they should have the right to ask for it. There are other merchant accounts out there this guy can use.
The server was down initially until I upgraded my EC2 instance from micro to small. Now it's running, but yeah, I didn't test in Opera so I'm not surprised.
Opera is better than Chrome on one and only one point: Opera will load multiple pages in multiple tabs swiftly, while Chrome gets bogged down in some known and unfixed race condition.
I find that reading news aggregator content like Google Reader or Hacker News is much easier and faster in Opera than in Chrome.
Apart from that, Opera seems to have many bugs where pages that other browsers load just fine, load incorrectly.
But yeah, even now, Opera won't display your site.
Well, I can't find the right report now, but yes, if you google thinks like chrome slow multiple tabs, or chrome freezes multiple tabs, you'll find lots of reports that chrome is almost unusable when opening multiple tabs at the same time (like clicking on a series of HN links).
About a month ago, I was researching this, and I found then, (but cannot find now), some threads that said this was a long outstanding problem created by some race condition. Another said it was caused by too much priority given to processing the Chrome spinner in each tab.
I don't know what the case really is.
I do know that Opera does a much better job of opening multiple tabs at the same time as Chrome, so I use Opera when working with feed readers and the like.
For my Epic 4g I was able to buy 2 batteries and a charger for less than $8 on Amazon. The charger even has a USB port on the bottom so you can charge an external battery and your phone at the same time. I find it not too inconvenient to just keep a couple backup batteries around at all times.
I don't get this one. I would assume that you'd have to be extremely wealthy to be Steve Jobs's neighbor. As a result you'd think bumping into other extremely wealthy, successful people would be routine.
there's a mix of housing in Palo Alto - a fair amount of students and young persons intermingled with home owners of (very) expensive homes. I lived in a $1500/month place on Everett (cheap) and across the street there were million dollar houses, but a block in another direction were a few places that looked like 1920s era sharecroppers houses.
Tablet apps are generally not consumable, books are. I use maybe 5 apps on my iPad that weren't free and I keep using them. If I only purchased 5 books on my Kindle it would have become worthless to me after about 2 months.
I feel like selling printed photos is a lot like selling CDs. You know at some point nobody will ever use these anymore. You don't know when, exactly, and they'll probably outlast the CD, but I personally already get annoyed when someone gives me a non-digital version of a photo. If I like it enough I scan it and throw it out, if I don't I just trash it directly.
Every day a bunch of people who want printed photos die, and a bunch of people who will never want one are born. That's not a good spot to be in for the long term.
Prints are just our first venture into the space. We'll use this to create a place where people store their best photos. We think there's a good opp to be had if we're in that situation.
Printed photos and CDs differ in that printed photos are useful without a computer, whereas CDs hold no sentimental value and are used only as a transfer medium.
My parents would greatly disagree with you. They're fairly computer literate, but for them photos don't "count" unless they're on paper. I always feel guilty because they never get to see many of my good photos locked away in Aperture. I think that's exactly the market here.
My wife feels the same way, actually. But isn't that the market here. It is computer literate people with lots of digital pictures (me), with relatives that want prints (my family).
I don't think this startup should worry about the demise of prints any more than Netflix worried about the demise of the DVD when they started. (Of course, they've since worked hard to transition to digital, and been very successful at that, but not at the beginning.)
Well we're obviously just talking about anecdotal evidence here, but I'm a young-ish hacker-news-reading programmer, and I am really excited about this service because I love having prints. I also want to sign my brother up for this so I can get pics of my nephew but only 15 per month, not the usual 150-per-facebook album.
Maybe I'm an outlier here - but I actually prefer physical photos. It's too easy for someone to just spray digital photos everywhere - when they're physical, you have constraints that mean I'm seeing the photos you decided were worthy of being printed.
Apparently my market is supposed to shrink - but I know among friends as well, a printed photo still carries a lot more weight than a digital one ever will.
Yeah I'm certainly not suggesting there's no demand for this now. I just think the demand will shrink over time. I don't think I'd want to try to build a long term business in a market that will certainly shrink.
You get annoyed when someone goes to the trouble of giving you a photo they considered important enough to print and share with you? I understand that living simply is a goal, but that sounds a little silly. Your comment makes me wonder if you stab these unlucky photos with a pencil and burn them before "trashing it directly" — presumably before the jerk can leave the room so that they understand the existential crisis they have narrowly averted. :)
It's safe to say that humans are a sentimental and even nostalgic bunch. We crave individuality and expression, and photos are the ultimate simple expression of our life and times. Getting prints back is a joy greater than Christmas (for those into that sort of thing) any day of the year. It's actually kind of addictive, and having physical copies of those moments trumps online sharing for all of the obvious tactile reasons.
As long as people have kids and crushes, books-in-progress and wallets there will be printed photos... and thank goodness for that.
