About Me 0072: December 2010

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Making Money Easy

According to the affidavit, the investigation included the co-operation of authorities in Canada, France and Germany.

As for code, the LOIC DDoS software believed to be used by Operation Anonymous remain available on the social code site Github and on SourceForge. Thousands of people have downloaded it from those sites. The software allegedly makes it easy for a user to donate their computer's bandwidth to repeatedly messaging a target server until it is rendered inaccessible by other users.

The ephemeral group Anonymous, or Operation Payback, co-ordinated a series of such attacks earlier this month against Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and others. These global leaders in money transfer were criticized for preventing their customers from donating money to the controversial website Wikileaks, despite the site having been convicted of no crimes.

Clearly a sufficient number of people in the FBI believe the denial of service attacks may constitute felony-level damage to computer systems, but others have argued that the campaign falls broadly within the tradition of non-violent civil disobedience and political protest.

FBI Agent Allyn Lynd, whom The Smoking Gun reports signed the affidavit, has been in the technology news media before. He lead a 2009 raid on at least two Texas web hosts over an alleged federal crime concerning unpaid bills to AT&T and Verizon. Those raids disrupted a number of co-located but unrelated businesses, including some that allege the disruption cost them millions of dollars.

In this latest affidavit, Lynd argued again that he may need to disrupt some other servers temporarily in order to achieve his goal of determining which servers were relevant to his investigation. Due to the document's incomplete publication, whether any sense of irony was appreciated is unclear.

No information has been made available to date regarding any FBI or other law enforcement investigation of the denial of service and other technical attacks made against the Wikileaks website.

We don't have enough public market acquirers to sustain the start-up ecosystem.
That was the real back story that explains why Google failed to close a deal to buy
Groupon. Groupon wanted to
sell to Google for $6 billion. Of course they did, that is a huge amount of money – real cold hard cash – for a 2 year old
venture. Do you really think they turned that down for the vague possibility of
making more from an IPO in the distant future? Yes we all hear the stories of
visionary entrepreneurs who are such bold risk-takers and some of that is true but
most entrepreneurs don’t love risk, they love eliminating risk on the way to
building a venture. The real story is that Groupon only backed off due to worries that the deal
would fall into AntiTrust
hurdles.

If we only have a handful of acquiring companies (basically today it is Google,
Amazon and Microsoft, now that eBay and Yahoo are wounded), the AntiTrust hurdle becomes more real. Even
if there is no AntiTrust
issue, Google, Amazon and Microsoft simply cannot buy all those venture-backed
companies.

So we need Groupon to go public and use their public
currency to buy other ventures working on local advertising/ecommerce. That will be
good news for lots of ventures. And a Groupon IPO success
will spur on other ventures that are getting ready for IPO.

I don’t know if Groupon really have the solid
financials to go public. We won’t know until they issue their prospectus to the
SEC. Until then we only have rumor and speculation. But if I were a betting man, I
would bet on Groupon being able to go public before
Twitter. And, this will be more controversial, before Facebook. But that as they say is another story. I am not trying here
to compile an actual list of ventures that could IPO in 2011. This is more about the
general environment for IPOs.

This has been what Steve Blank calls the “lost
decade” for tech IPOs. So why do I think that 2011 will be the year this
changes? There are 5 reasons:

Private
markets are under SEC scrutiny. This takes away the easy option of getting
liquidity without either selling or going public. If you have more than 500
shareholders you have to make your financials public, it is the law.

There is a
backlog of great companies that have the financial strength to IPO. The IPO market
has been pretty well closed for a couple of years (some notable exceptions prove the
rule). So the companies that have the potential to IPO have had more time to grow and
get their act together.

Investors
are hungry for growth outside emerging markets. GDP in America and Europe seems to
have a ceiling at 3% and the Chindia and BRIC stories of
emerging markets growing at 8-10% has created too much capital flowing to those
markets (generating fears of a bubble). So investors want companies in the developed
markets that can grow at really fast pace (at least 30%, ideally 60% plus) from a
base of at least $100m revenue for a long time to come. That has to come primarily
from tech/media ventures.

The
macroeconomic picture is improving. Yes, there are always worries and another
crash is always possible, but "markets always climb a wall of worry" and the general
trends seem positive. But cycles don't last forever, so the people making these
decisions (Boards and their Investment Bankers) will look at 2011 as a good window of
opportunity.

The bean
counters have figured out how to live with Sarbox. For a long time, Sarbanes Oxley ("Sarbox") regulatory overhead has been seen as a reason why you cannot
run a public company. Baloney, as they say in Brooklyn. It is a simple bit of
operational overhead, a rounding error for a great company.

IPO is still the golden ticket. Real entrepreneurs want to IPO. Getting acquired
is a great way to build capital, but it is not the dream of the really driven,
talented entrepreneurs. There are logical reasons for this. The valuation at IPO is
usually (not always, plenty of exceptions to this rule) higher than you can get from
an M&A exit. And more importantly for the
entrepreneur, it is actually often easier to manage public market investors than a
bunch of VC with different agendas. But logical reasons be damned, an IPO is simply
the big badge of honor for the entrepreneur and the investors who back him/her.

It is not clear what we will call the decade that starts in a few days time
– the “teens” maybe – but it will possibly be one where we
get a sustainable IPO market for tech ventures. By “sustainable” I mean
that it cannot be a return to the Dot Com bubble years. Only great companies with
really solid financials will get through the IPO gate. And the valuations will have
to remain grounded in reality (short sellers will ensure that is the case).

Here’s hoping. Happy New Year folks.

surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters rock tops surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters surface encounters complaints surface encounters review surface encounters review surface encounters review surface encounters complaints surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters complaints surface encounters complaints surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops

Salvatore A. Giunta to Drop the Times Square Ball and 5 Other New ...

Salvatore A. Giunta, the first living person to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War, is this year's Times Square ball drop guest of honor. Surge Desk offers 5 facts about the famous New York tradition.

Keith Olbermann: 'Fox News Is 100% Bullshit'

Keith Olbermann is anything but hesitant when it comes to a battle with Fox News, and the MSNBC anchor took to Twitter Wednesday to share his views on the TV network he probably wouldn't even call a rival. "Fox News is 100% bullshit," ...

Stubborn Joblessness Among Vets Darkens US Economy - AOL News

The newly reported drop in jobless claims belies continued rough going for America's Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, who are experiencing 10 percent unemployment.

surface encounters review surface encounters complaints surface encounters rock tops surface encounters review surface encounters surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters surface encounters rock tops surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters review surface encounters rock tops surface encounters surface encounters complaints

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Start Making Money

From the diaries by Erick

Investing in math and science is the way to solve the economy. A great idea. And somehow liberals have co-opted it to make it sound like their own.

Today’s Los Angeles Times for instance contains an article entitled, “Fixing the Economy the Scientific Way,” arguing that the federal government must spend more money on math and science education. They point to the fact that over the last 40 years the government’s support of science has declined 60% as a portion of GDP. They then argue that Republicans will only make the problem worse, pointing to their pledge to reduce federal spending on nondefense-related science research to pre-stimulus levels.

There is a lot wrong with this argument. For instance, given that the stimulus was a one-off, emergency spending measure, I’m not sure you can call a return to pre-stimulus investment a “reduction.” If we simply kept all stimulus programs intact forever and ever it would be akin to adding $800 billion to our deficit annually, not exactly a financially or politically sound proposition.

The bigger problem is that liberals’ argument ignores the reason governmental support of science funding has been declining relative to GDP. The problem is that the government over the last four decades has been forced to spend on other things. Our mandatory spending, on such things as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, has been driven upwards, leaving less and less to be spent on discretionary budget items. Moreover it is not going to get better without major changes. The CBO predicts that “federal spending on major mandatory health care programs will grow from roughly 5 percent today to about 10 percent in 2035 and will continue to increase thereafter. “

As the following chart from the Heritage Foundation shows, the increase in costs of entitlements and anti-poverty programs are forcing reductions elsewhere.

If we want to increase our investment and math and science as a pathway to future prosperity we must understand one thing: we are not working with unlimited funds. We can’t simply increase science investment because it is a good idea. A budget requires prioritization. Making math and science a priority means making something else less of a priority.

Sadly, prioritization is even difficult given that our budget is being tyrannized by entitlement spending. Now, and especially in the future, these programs are taking up such a large slice of the budgetary pie that there simply isn’t enough money to pay for core government functions, much less science grants. That is why fiscal conservatism, through principled spending, is the true path toward promoting scientific advancement.

For an example as to why, look no further than Texas. Doing research for this post, I googled “math and science investment” in an attempt to find long term trends in how much the government spent. To my surprise one of the top returns was an article entitled “Perry announces math and science investment.” The Perry the article is referring to is the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry. As it turns out, in 2009, right in the heart of the recession, Texas announced it was investing $160 million to expand Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Math academies. But how!?! After all, Texas doesn’t have an income tax and has one of the nation’s lowest overall tax burdens. Yet through shrewd spending and their ability to attract businesses to the state, Texas has weathered the economic storm better than most, even managing to maintain an $8 billion “rainy day “ fund. This financial flexibility, accomplished by keeping government spending relatively low, is what enabled them to increase their science and math spending in response to a need. The federal government lacks that flexibility.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that solving our economic issues are as simple as giving more money to math and science. It would be a good start and a great investment. But Medicare and Social Security, programs liberals love, are stopping us from doing so.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/12/28/investing-in-math-and-sciences-first-requires-entitlement-reform/

Hey, you! Yeah, you — you, with the remote on the coffee table in front of the TV. So you think cooking from scratch is scary? Doesn’t have to be. Cooking can be as simple or as complex as you like; it’s up to you.

I’m going to address these remarks to the guy (or gal) out there who is eating a typical American diet, didn’t grow up knowing how to cook, needs for whatever reason (be it health, saving money, or some other reason) to learn, and would like to learn to make foods in the American canon. What I plan to do is to start off with some of the basics — the things that form the backbone of Western (or at least North American) cookery. And in my own opinion, there’s no better place to start than in the making of soup stock. (Vegetarians take note: This is geared toward making meat stocks, but is easily adapted to vegetarian cooking just by leaving out the meat — which, by the way, simplifies the process considerably.)

Let’s say you ordered too much chicken at KFC but you don’t want to try saving the leftover pieces because they inevitably dry out in the fridge and become inedible chicken jerky. Or you have some beef stew meat that’s not quite enough for a main dish. Or you’ve got some ham or luncheon meat that’s about to go bad and you need to use it up. Or you bought a roasted chicken from the store and have a big chicken carcass with some meat attached after a big meal. Or you’re cutting up a whole raw chicken and have no idea what to do with the wings and back. Or maybe you want to make a gallon or two of soup stock and you went out and bought a whole bird to be dedicated to that purpose.

Have I got a deal for you!

That extra bit of leftover meat you can’t bear to simply throw away can be repurposed to a higher calling, and serve as the basis of many different dishes. And doing so is so easy, even Cris Collingsworth could do it. For all you multi-taskers out there, this is a great thing to do on the weekends if you’re at home watching the game and doing the laundry. Start it in the morning after you’ve done the shower-and-breakfast thing, then check on it every so often to make sure the liquid level’s OK; by the time the last game’s done, it should be ready, or at least at an acceptable level of completion. Most of the work will be at the beginning of the process; once the veggies go in, it’s a matter of letting everything simmer for at least three hours.

Before we get started, you should have the following items:

– a stock pot (a slow cooker or Dutch oven will do; or as large and deep a pan as you have on hand)

– a strainer (4″ will do fine, but bigger will also work)

– at least two ice cube trays

– a nice sharp knife such as a santoku; “sharp” means “can cut the skin of a ripe tomato simply by resting on it with only the weight of the knife itself pressing down on it”. Yes, I know your knives aren’t that sharp. Use the steel or stone that came with them after each time you use them, and they will be.

– a pair of kitchen shears (my tool of choice for cutting up chickens and cracking bones; a good utility knife will do)

As for the soup ingredients themselves, they can be, as the Good Witch said, whatever you want them to be: just click your heels together and wish really hard. Any type of meat, fish, or vegetable is suitable for soup stock. Hell, citrus can be fun to add to chicken stocks towards the end of cooking, just for that added zing — though freshly sliced ginger root, which you add right at the beginning with the other ingredients, is my own stock-zinger of choice.

(A word of caution: Do Not Add Salt. (This is especially true if you’re using any precooked or preprocessed meats, which will inevitably have lots of salt anyway. Try to avoid using preserved meats with lots of nitrites as well.) If you do add salt, the end result, especially if added at the beginning of the process, will be extremely salty — which for those folks on low-salt diets is not a good thing.)

If your chicken carcass looks to be mostly bones, don’t worry: The flavor of stock can come from the meat, but where it really resides is inside the bones, in the marrow. This is why the older the bird, the more flavorful the stock. (This is also why you want to crack open the bones before you toss them in the water. The funny little semi-circular notch near the handle in the kitchen shears’ blades is designed for just this purpose.) Lightly-flavored stocks have their place — they’re useful for when you want to complement but not overwhelm any delicately-flavored ingredients, such as leeks or morels, with which you might be cooking, and they’re an excellent substitute for water when boiling rice. And most any chicken carcass will provide a hearty stock if heated long enough, or if roasted beforehand. But if you want a really tasty, deep-charactered, full-bodied stock worthy of being a chicken soup base without the meat’s having to be roasted first or simmered for eight hours, your best bet is to get an old stewing hen or rooster and use that. (The good news for those with little money: If you go to groceries catering to Asian or Latino communities, you can find whole stewing chickens for around $2 each. These are typically pullets from egg farms, and so have been allowed to hang around until their egg-laying days are done, which is far longer than most chickens attain.)

Okay, so you’ve got your meat, be it chicken, beef, fish, or whatever. You’ve got whatever bones that are in it cracked to extract the flavor therein. How much stock you’ll be making will depend on the following: The amount of meat and bones you have, the amount of veggies you have, and the size of the pot you’ll be using. If you only have a few ounces of meat or bones — less than a quarter of a chicken carcass — and a similar amount of vegetables, you can probably get away with a small 2-quart pan, pot, or slow cooker. If you’ve got a chicken carcass, you’re going to need a 4-quart pot or slow cooker. And if you’ve got a whole bird, you need to use a stock pot, a Dutch oven, or a really big slow cooker, because nothing smaller will work.

Put whatever amount of meat and/or cracked bones you have into whatever cooking receptacle you’ll be using, then add cold water until it cover the meat by at least an inch. (Now you see why you need a bigger pot. Now you also see another reason for cracking the carcass bones — to make them lie flatter and thus take up less space in the pot.) Why cold water? Because cold water extracts the flavor better, as well as the collagen that will give the stock thickness and body. Let it sit in the cold water for about fifteen to twenty minutes before you turn on the burner (or turn the dial to the “low” setting, if using a slow cooker). Use the fifteen minutes to chop up your veggies.

What sort of vegetables to use, and how much? For much American and European cooking, particularly French cooking, the holy trinity is onion, carrot and celery, or celery root (celeriac) if available. That will serve you well for starters, though I like to put in ginger with my chicken stocks and garlic with my beef ones. You can, if you don’t mind really spicy (as in four-alarm) stocks, throw in a chile pepper pod — though really, just a few seeds will be great plenty as far as spicing things up goes. Now the other question: How finely should we chop the veggies? The answer: Not finely at all. In fact, one-inch chunks are ideal. If you’re doing a whole bird, one or two chunk-chopped yellow onions, three to four chunk-chopped large (at least one inch thick and eight inches long) carrots, and four chopped celery stalks (or half of a celeriac root) will suffice; scale up or down accordingly for different amounts of meat.

Okay, now to turn on the heat. Bring the water up to almost (but not quite) a boil, skimming off any scummy foamy residue that reaches the top so you don’t risk it being cooked into the stock by boiling, as it will leave a bitter taste; when you stop seeing fresh foam (this should be after about five minutes or so), add in the veggies. (If you’re using a crock-pot or other kind of slow cooker, you can add in the veggies along with the meat right at the beginning, as even on high it won’t get hot enough to sustain a true rolling boil; just remember to skim off the residue when you’re done cooking and before you strain.)

Once the veggies are added, that’s it. You can turn the heat down to a slow simmer and go on about your business for the next few hours (three to four if doing a stovetop method, eight on low if using a slow cooker) with no need to do anything other than checking the water level every hour or so to make sure it’s still above the level of the meat and veggies. (If you’re using a slow cooker, you won’t even need to do that. Plus, you can safely leave it on when you leave the house, something I hesitate to advocate for stovetop cookery.) You may want to add in some herbs and various other aromatics, but for most of those there is a danger of overcooking the herbiness right out if added too soon; wait until about an hour before you plan to stop cooking before adding any herbs to the mix. (Garlic and ginger are different in that they’re tough buggers that take a lot of abuse, which is why they’re added early on in the process.)

When three to four hours (or eight in the slow cooker) have elapsed, pull out a piece of meat or veg, let it cool, and taste it. If there’s still some flavor to it, cook a little while longer if you can; if not, you’re done cooking — all the flavor in the meat or vegetable has been transferred to the liquid, which is now officially stock. Goody!

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Wednesday Worries – Ireland “Fixed” – Who’s Next?

The key to sales funnel success

Putting theory into practice

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

InDinero

Rapportive

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

WikiLeaks and Newspaper Profits

WikiLeaks and Journalistic Ethics