This reminds me of my favourite VC story from the height of the dot-com bubble. A few months prior, I had announced my distributed computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi, and the concept of doing computations using unused CPU capacity from around the Internet was getting a lot of attention. A VC asked me to look at a company they were thinking of investing in and give my opinion as someone with experience in the field.

Stripped down to its core, the company was pitching technology which would allow it to do "useful" internet-wide computations once global communication latency dropped below a certain threshold. Going along with this was a graph showing how internet round trip times had been steadily dropping for the past two decades, and projecting into the future that some time around 2006 the latencies would become short enough to make their solution work.

Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004.

I pointed this out to the VC in question. They decided to invest anyway. My understanding is that the company raised $10M before going bankrupt.

Conviction rates are a career metric for prosecutors.

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoin is more like cultural revolution. It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach, but surely the Bitcoin revolutionists like to place themselves above the rest, and don't see themselves as a part of the "old" world (legal, financial system etc.).

For example, the currently highest-voted comment on /r/bitcoin for the story [0] says "I disagree with him [mitsuhiko]".

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

I do not normally rant, but tip4commit and its ilk are some of the most infuriating people in the world to deal with, since they're opting other people's projects into something that has all sorts of legal/taxation consequences and think that "we have no way to remove you once you get opted in" is an acceptable answer.

I'd push complaints further up to GitHub, since I'm sure something in the way this works violates their ToS, but ultimately that wouldn't do anything except cause them to self-host their code and keep running the "service".

What was not mentioned in this article is how awful talk radio is these days. Especially morning-zoo radio [1] where they have the exact same 3 person radio show in every city: 1) the old school radio guy, 2) the young "edgy" dude who goes too far, and 3) the girl who never contributes anything, except to tell the guys they are being too "crazy and wild".

The shows use something called 'prep burger' which is prerecorded or prewritten comedy bits that multiple stations reuse, such as fake prank calls (real ones are illegal now). They buy access to a database of them and shameless reuse comedy bits with zero originality.

It's like mainstream pop music, the corporations have focus-grouped all the creativity out of the shows and keep everything within the safe confines of control and management. And I won't even get into their obsession for political correctness.

The days of Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony style talk shows are gone. Even XM Satelite radio talk shows have all been neutered.

This is why podcasts are new and interesting. The personailities are free to do and say whatever they want. They dont have management or producers telling them what audiences want to hear. So they create authentic and original content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_zoo