With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization? Yes, these are great choices if you're looking to become an expert on, say, physics. But not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be.

The point of the books on that list is that they are applicable to _many_ situations. You're not going to get oodles of "hard knowledge" from them, and I think people who go into them with that expectation are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Rather, they present some anecdotes -- some interesting, and some not -- and say "Okay, now think about these, and see if any of them can affect the way you do things." If you read a business book and don't bother to do the thinking/applying afterwards, you are, indeed, wasting your time.

The books on your list are ones that you go through, finish (though honestly, if you're just reading those books cover to cover and enjoying yourself, you're a better person than me... I'd use them as a reference at best) and can say "okay, I've learned something." The books on the original article's list are ones where once you've finished the book, you've only started learning.

MY PROJECT IS NOT A JOKE. ;-)

Something is broken in this country.

The 3D chart at the end is an awful way to present the data - at the first data-point (1996), you can visually compare the graphs easily. After that, it becomes pretty much impossible.

I notice that Safari is hilariously missing, especially since it would match IE8 on a number of the features they're claiming are exclusive to it.

The whole endeavor is rather scurrilous, since they've clearly glommed separate features together for no real purpose other than to put a checkmark next to IE and not next to FF or Chrome (particularly the "reliability" item).

What a joke.

This is why people hate Microsoft. It's not that FF fanatics don't spread FUD too. It's just that Microsoft seems to think that we're too dumb to recognize their obvious machinations.

If they only spent as much time and effort making their products not suck, as they spend trying to pretend that they don't suck, then maybe they'd get some respect.

I'm so tired of this netbook argument. They're apples and oranges. One is a dedicated ebook reader and the other is a multifunction ultra-portable computer. Just because one is capable of doing something the other is capable of does not necessarily make them comparable. I've used netbooks and e-ink ebook readers. The ebook experience on a netbook does not compare. This is like saying cell phones are a rip off because you could use a $40 pair of walkie talkies without a monthly fee instead.

Not to mention, we have no idea what the cost is on a Kindle. Netbooks use commodity components that are widely available from numerous manufacturers. The same is not true of e-ink displays. This is at least partly a factor in the perceived high cost of an ebook reader.

We also don't know what kind of arrangement Amazon has with Sprint. Amazon gives a few cents to Sprint when you purchase something using Whispernet. Maybe Sprint also gets a flat fee every time a Kindle is sold. We simply don't know.

There's also the issue of limited competition in the ebook market right now. There are only a few manufacturers of quality e-ink readers and on top of it all the Kindle is the only game in town if you want to buy ebooks from Amazon. This is relatively new technology and the price will go down. We've seen it before with the components that go into a $250 netbook. This is economics 101.

My seven year old has watched me slog through many pieces of a startup. What's fun is how much kids listen, even when they don't seem to. I remember when he stopped in the middle of dinner and said "Daddy, what's 'google'?"

And my favorite story is when he stopped me as I was carrying him to bed, looked me straight in the eye and asked, completely seriously:

"Daddy, how does LuckyCal make money?"

If you haven't already done so, I recommend refining your revenue plan to the point where you can explain to a savvy seven year old.

As a former analyst at a venture capital firm, with all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Regulation doesn't make VC any less attractive for LPs, who provide the funds. As long as there are people who want to commit to the asset class, there will be VC funds willing and available to take their cash.

Furthermore, registration with the SEC increases paperwork, but not in a way that does anything other than provide additional transparency. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, and maybe it means the CFO has more work to do, but to say this is dumb or will kill innovation is misguided. It's the same damn paperwork that every mutual fund has to file. It won't make or break any decent-sized fund.

Everything the NVCA says in their position paper is right (http://www.magnetmail.net/images/clients/NVCA/attach/VCandSy... [PDF]), but excluding VC funds from regulations when you want to look at PE and hedge funds - which can and do pose systemic risks, as we saw with LTCM - is impossible given that all three share the same basic legal structure: LPs and a GP, where the GP is the manager of the fund.

The societal cost of overextending mere registration requirements to VC funds is far outweighed by the cost of not having greater transparency into their PE and hedge fund siblings.

#1: Your pricing is at the worst possible point on the curve. You charge ten times more than what the inveterate cheapskates want to pay. You charge ten times less what a middling domain name is worth. You are opting to do business with a lot of "pathological clients" this way -- they will want the moon and stars because you cost TEN TIMES MORE than GoDaddy. (There will be, inevitably, comments in this thread to that effect. Do you want to wake up to a mailbox of them every day?)

#2: Let's talk inventory. It will cost you, for the sake of argument, $10 to hold a domain for a year. That means, to break even, you need to sell one out of every ten you register. Since you're going to be dealing in 3 word domains primarily, that is going to be a bit of a stretch. Let's say you branch into bingo for a day and start thinking up domains -- you can count to 500 just by starting with Xbingocards.com and filling in topics for X. Are you going to be able to unload 50+ of those?

#3: You need to do a heck of a lot of manual gruntwork here. Presumably you'll automate the actual purchasing, but you'll have to think up hundreds or thousands of domains and then sift down to the ones which are actually salable.

(If you doubt this, I will give you a list of 500 Xbingocards.com domains and you can time how long it takes you to winnow it down to as narrow a field as you think is winnowable. My guess is just the filtering would take most SEOs I know upwards of two to four hours to do if they did it systematically. And then, of the 46 or so you end up with, will you actually be able to sell them?)

Do this poorly and you'll be out money. You'll find that you're eventually spending a lot of money and effort to buy yourself a retail job, if that.