I don't believe that at all. Google doesn't need Skype. Microsoft bought Skype because they have large amounts of cash in Europe that they cannot repatriate without taking a huge tax hit. For some strange reason, Ballmer has that obsession with hyperactively pursuing the same consumers that Google and Apple have. That's why he didn't see anything else to buy in Europe (Actually there isn't a whole lot).

But there is something: SAP. What Microsoft should do is take on Oracle and IBM instead of Apple and Google. They should make an offer to that large number of companies who want one thing more than everything else: Peace of mind based on an integrated stack. They are ready to pay up. Microsoft is the master of integration (some call it lock-in). Together with SAP, Microsoft has the most complete enterprise stack imaginable. All of a sudden even Windows Phone would have a place in this world as a BlackBerry successor.

Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.

Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.

Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.

Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space

Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.

It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.

One of the things that he's critically missed is that it's unfair to only compare the price of buying vs. the price of renting today. When you purchase a house, your mortgage is set for the term of the mortgage. Rent is usually only set for a year at a time and does go up.

The NY Times buy vs. rent calculator in the article that he links, uses 3% as a baseline rent increase per year. So, after 5 years, a $1500 rent could be expected to cost $1740. That's not too impressive if you assume it's a place worth $375k and at his 2% taxes and maintenance price, you'd have $625 in costs in addition to the mortgage - well over the $240 that the rent had risen. However, after 15 years, that theoretical rent would have risen to $2300 and eclipsed the cost of taxes and maintenance. Now, as home values rise, taxes would rise with it, but then you own something that you can sell for more money and have made a good investment so it isn't a good argument to say, "well, one's home could go up in value a lot every year which would mean more taxes."

It depends on what you're buying a property for. Frankly, the NY Times calculator (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...) is going to be a lot better than my crude calculations. However, if you're buying a property to stay in for a good while, it can be a better idea to buy. The costs of selling don't matter that much when you've stayed in a place for a long time. It also depends on your market. I've priced things out in the Boston area against rent (more urban than Greenspun), and it really depends on how long you're going to stay in that place. Most of the cities here offer you a homestead exemption on your property taxes if you live there and it's usually around 200k - meaning that if you buy a place for $400k to live in rather than rent, you're actually only paying half the property tax rate. The towns tend not to have that exemption. So, if you want to be in one place for a decade, the calculator shows that buying can be a nice option.

Buying a house isn't something to go in for like buying an iPhone and getting a two-year cell phone contract. It requires a careful look at the costs and that you're relatively settled in life. It isn't a panacea of money, but it can be cheaper and can be stabilizing. While it isn't everyone, there are people who really like an area, have a job that won't see them have to move, and would stay in that house for 20-30 years.

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Plus, if you look at Trulia's rent-vs-buy index (http://trulia.movity.com/rentvsbuy/), you'll see that Greenspun has cherry-picked the worst cities to buy to do his calculations. Trulia notes that in 36 out of its 50 cities studied, it is "much less expensive to buy than rent". That includes real cities like Chicago, Wahsington DC, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. He's used a buy-to-rent ratio of 30:1, but the average for the 50 cities shown is 14.22. So, we live in the Boston area and buying here is an expensive proposition that might not make sense. However, there are many places that have much more favorable ownership conditions. If you're in a market where the buy-to-rent ratio is below 15:1, the NY Times calculator will show you how favorable buying is. And, frankly, that's most of the country. Where Greenspun and I live seems to be the exception, not the rule and his calculations are based on data that doesn't apply to most people. It applies to him and it applies to me based on where we live, but it probably isn't something that one should generalize to the country.

You're completely wrong.

"The average physician's net income declined 7 percent from 1995 to 2003, after adjusting for inflation, while incomes of lawyers and other professionals rose by 7 percent during the period."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/business/22doctors.html

"...none of this really matters, because doctors' salaries aren't a large enough chunk of health care spending in the United States to make a difference. According to Reinhardt, doctors' net take-home pay (that is, income minus expenses) amounts to only about 10 percent of overall health care spending. So if you cut that by 10 percent in the name of cost savings, you'd only save about $26 billion. That's a drop in the ocean compared with overhead for insurance companies, billing expenses for doctors' offices, and advertising for drug companies. The real savings in health care will come from these expenses."

http://www.slate.com/id/2227965/

The rest of your comment is incorrect as well. The AMA does not license physicians, state governments do. Many physicians don't even belong to the AMA. The AMA lobbies for physicians, but it's not in any way like a union (not that there's anything wrong with unions).

Resident physicians in particular would probably lead better lives if in fact there were something like a union to limit hospitals and training programs that have traditionally worked these young physicians upwards of 100 hours a week for what amounts to minimum wage. Resident physician hours and primary care doc hours are still onerous, and most are paying education debut averaging $150,000.

Physicians can practice without any involvement with a hospital, and many do. In any event, the idea of using hospital CEOs or CFOs to determine "good" doctors is about as misguided as asking British Petroleum to determine "safe" drilling engineers.

There is a reason for (some) licensing. We tried the adolescent libertarian fantasy of letting the "free market" drive things like medical training and licensure back in the early days of the 20th century. You could characterize the vast majority of medical education in that era as training in quackery, before people like Abraham Flexner got involved:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9366625...

When the argument is that C++ has too many features that interact in unpredictable ways and are virtually impossible to get right, arguing that C++ is superior because it has more features is perhaps a fine argument in some hypothetical universe in which the primary objection to C++ is that it is missing features, but by failing to grapple with the points raised by the opposition in the real universe, you will fail to convince anybody. Everybody already knows all of these features, they're practically in the canonical Introduction to C++ pitch, and they still don't think C++ is great. Maybe you need to spend a bit more time listening more carefully to why; you certainly need to if you expect to talk anybody out of it.