I'm surprised so many people are clamoring for this. While the system seems excellent overall, the lack of a rewards program on the card seems like a deal-breaker for day-to-day use. Why would I use this instead of a credit card that gives me 1-5% cash back?
1. Unless you're doing an absolute ton of spending on your rewards credit card, any fees you pay on your credit card probably wipe out any cash you're getting back. If you're not paying fees yourself, merchants or other institutions may be subsidizing your rewards in ways that aren't sustainable. Many rewards programs have been slashed during the financial crisis of the last several years.
2. Cash-back rewards make your personal accounting more complicated. If you really want to set and meet financial goals, you need to be keeping close tabs on what you spend on what card, how much you're getting back in rewards, what fees you're paying, and where those reward dollars are going so that you're actually accumulating wealth (saving account, brokerage account, etc.). Our model combines an interest-bearing account with the ability to easily track your financial goals. Keeping it all in one place is, in our experience, way easier.
We're not crazy about the idea of rewards programs, but it's also not something we've completely ruled out. If we can find a way to do a rewards program that has clear incentives for our customers, merchants, and our partner institutions, we'll explore that.
1. I pay no fees on my credit card. My full balance is paid automatically and 1-5% is refunded (depending on where I spent the money). To put that in perspective, if I spend $50,000 I get back $500-2500, which is not an insignificant amount. You are absolutely correct that rewards are subsidized by merchant and banking fees. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but don't merchants have to pay fees when accepting Visa debit cards as well?
2. Cash-back rewards only make personal accounting more complicated if you calculate them on an ongoing basis and pay additional fees for the credit card. If you do neither of these you'll stay within your budget and be rewarded with a substantial bonus every month that you can then spend or invest.
With all that said, I agree that keeping it all in one place would be much easier and I would love to try Simple myself. I just can't imagine replacing my day-to-day purchases with a debit card, no matter how awesome the system that surrounds that card may be.
And if you're not into credit cards just by principle, there's always Perkstreet's debit card. As their tagline goes, "No fees, just perks." (Perks being gift cards or cash back.)
EDIT: Nevermind. I found it. Rule 502(c) of federal Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 prohibits advertising or general solicitation for investors. http://www.sec.gov/rules/interp/33-7516.htm
A big portion of the JOBS act is dedicated to changing this. Try putting something about money or funding into your Angel List status update and they'll tell you that you can't talk about seeking funding publicly, and that any message that sets off their trigger will be reviewed.
Why did you list Ruby/RoR users as developers but list everyone else as programmers? I'm learning RoR so I'm curious if there's a specific reason for your wording.
I would have never noticed I did that if you didn't point it out, it wasn't intentional so I'm not sure how that happened.
FWIW I use programmer and developer (and coder, and...) interchangeably so that wasn't meant as a slight on Ruby programmers or to imply that they are somehow different from anyone else on the list.
If he said it "kills the battery" would you say that it trivializes actual, no-kidding murder? I doubt it.
Also, men can get raped too. I don't just mean women raping men; men rape men too. (Would a "Don't drop the soap" joke be too inappropriate here?) It could be argued that assuming only women can be raped is the misogynistic position.
Last, saying that we've got to cut this out "if we want a world with less rape in it" is, frankly, ridiculous. Nobody is going to read the "battery rape" comment and subsequently be more likely to rape someone.
A referral link to Dropbox.com hidden behind a URL shortener. :/ Unfortunately, I don't have enough karma to downvote you. Hopefully someone else will oblige.
I think it should have been prominently labelled as a referral link, but in GilK's defense the URL shortener is Dropbox's own one and that's what all their referral links look like. I don't think you can visually distinguish a referral links from a file sharing link.
The year is supposed to be the first year the work was created. You can do 2008-2012 if you want though (and let the end year automatically update). But since that's the assumption if you don't include the end year, there isn't any reason to do it.
The content of Facebook wasn't first created in 2012, so I'm not sure if you're correct. In fact, I've noticed that the majority of sites don't include a date-range. Regardless, thanks for the info.
Things aren't as cut and dry with legal traditions. I'm sure there are tons of scraps of legal language that remain in use only because it's traditional and few people know any better. Like some kind of legal shibboleth.
Like coderdude said above[1], whenever you see "All Rights Reserved"[2] you're seeing it in action.
It appears that you're correct, but I'm still having a hard time believing that the legal departments of almost every major company make the same mistake. That makes me think that there is something we're missing.
IANAL but for web pages, especialy dynamic ones, "the year of first publication" seems to be a flawed concept. You could as well say the page is first published everyday.
About the presence of rogue engineers playing with copyright notices at will in big companies, some yahoo properties go through the hassle of manually updating the copyright notice every year under the explicit request from the legal department.
Not unless it's the same content. Arguably if some of the content is old (old blog posts, tweets, etc.) then you should use a range of years.
As many others have pointed out the whole thing is just a signalling mechanism, and not a strict requirement -- "(c) 2012" says, "Don't steal this stuff, it's copyrighted, and we have actively maintained this page through 2012 so we aren't a company from the stone age."
And when the legal department noticed the error they didn't want to go through all the hoops to get it fixed, as legally it has no meaning. Also, as we see many people seem to think that you need to update the year, so they might have done it on purpose even.
Copyright is automatic where it is automatic. In the United States you don't need a copyright statement. Also, no matter where you're from, "all rights reserved" is meaningless (post-Berne Convention).
It's (as I understand it) legally meaningless, but it's not "meaningless": it's a socially acceptable way to express the sentiment of "this is not open source or in any way something I am sharing with the public". Avoiding confusion is a good thing. It's like the opposite of a GPL COPYING file.
