I'm guessing it suggests that those who are truly paranoid about others snooping into their tarsnap-saved data may want to make their tarsnap payments anonymously as well.
I think the point was that now that so much of our interactions take place through our phone it is very easy to migrate to new platforms. Think of how quickly Snapchat or Instagram spread for example. I doubt they would have been nearly as popular if they were web apps.
I started out using vim because when I first looked at it and emacs, vim seemed like the more elegant of the two. I tried both out one afternoon, and the commands in vim made more sense to me than those in emacs. But after taking a class where we were basically forced to use emacs, I've really come to appreciate it more and have found myself much more productive in it than in vim.
Just a nit-picky thing, but I thought it would be nice to get a heads-up. In the third sentence of the first paragraph it should be "your senators" rather than "you're senators"
The only problem I see with this is that value isn't always proportional to time. Sometimes I spend a long time reading an article because it is written in an inscrutable style and it takes a long time to see what the author is saying. Other authors write so well that I can follow their arguments as fast as I can read. All other things being equal, the later article is more valuable, but I spend more time on the former article.
See how that entry says "usu. with negative or in questions"? The usage in this case is neither negative nor a question, and so many, like the gp and myself, found it confusing.
A similar thing happened to me. I picked it up, read 200-300 pages and thought I could see where the book was going but found that it took such an agonizingly long time to reach its conclusion that I put it down.
My guess would be this is more for capital reasons than legal ones. It is extremely expensive to form a company of either type. I think the standard drug pipeline costs somewhere between 10s of millions to billions of dollars per drug. I'd imagine that the cost for medical device development and approval is similar.
Medical devices are 1-3 years vs. 5-15 years (orphan drugs are actually pretty fast now), and 1-2 orders of magnitude less capital.
Medical devices would be just on the upper bound of what I think YC could do. The right way is probably to do an unregulated "fitness" or "convenience" product, which later has regulated-medical-device functionality. Defer the compliance parts until the product itself is proven.
There are plenty of "small business" ($1-5mm in personal-recourse debt) type medical device entrepreneurs. US and Israel seem to be the two big markets for developing them. Surprisingly, a lot come from people outside the medical professions.
There are ways to fast-track in the US and other countries.
A medical device which had applicability to the military (specifically, IEDs, TBI, PTSD, eye/hearing protection or remediation of damage, traumatic amputations, or prosthetics) would largely avoid the FDA, too. There is going to be so much money in improving the lives of wounded veterans from Iraq/Afghanistan for the next 50 years, and it's going to be one of those cases where money you earn is also related to a societal benefit.
If I were in biotech/biomed or robotics, that'd be what I'd want to do; the only comparable-scale problems are reducing cost of care for everyone and dealing with an increasingly elderly population.
For medical devices that are based on modern mobile platforms, the average FDA clearance time is down to 67 days. It's not nearly as capital-intensive as it used to be and there are going to be plenty of predicate devices to base your filings on.
The ubiquitous computing plus sensor environment is making healthcare hardware startups the norm—we're seeing more and more applicants in this space at Rock Health. We don't think the FDA process is that onerous, and just published a report outlining the process for entrepreneurs who are new to the space.
I've heard that almost the entire flight can be/is automated now, including the landing and that most commercial pilots have to land the planes by hand just so they can keep their skills up. But I doubt the salary of pilots is really such a significant cost for airlines compared to their other expenses, otherwise we'd probably be seeing a push for autonomous aircraft.
Also: think of how much the TSA would love autonomous aircraft, you never need to worry about them being hijacked because they'll only go where the computer tells them too.
Salaries are not significant for bus drivers, but would be significant for taxi cab drivers. Automated small planes could really revolutionize the sector, especially if we could figure out how to make them fuel efficient and even electric.
Salaries are in fact a dominant expense of bus and rail fleets. In my area, WMATA pays out 78% of operating budget for buses towards personnel, and 72% of operating budget for trains towards personnel. Operating budget does not include capital expenses like rolling stock or infrastructure.
