For 50k they take 10% equity, valuing your startup at a tiny 500k, plus you have to leave the country. You give up a lot.

Why not just pitch to Dave McClure's 500Startups? You can get started with $10k for 1% equity, valuing your startup at $1M. More funding is possible, plus space, mentors, ...

http://500startups.com/

At ~$20k for ~6% equity, YC would seem to be an even smaller valuation than $500k, right?

I am a two-spacer too.

Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it.

The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.

Perhaps claims of arsenate-based DNA will go the way of "cold fusion" when some control experiments (as described in the blog post) show the bacteria had phosphate-based DNA after all.

I agree with your comment about jurisdictional arbitrage (lovely phrase). Look at Google, Microsoft, and Linkedin using Ireland as a tax haven. Not only do they play arbitrage, they flex their economic muscle by telling Ireland, if you raise corporate taxes (above the current 12.5%) we'll leave. Instead, Ireland cuts the pay of all govt employees.

Waiter: Here is the wine list. Please let me know if you'd like any help with your wine selection. (later) Have you selected a wine?

This common example uses "select" (correctly) with a list of items on a menu.

A quick look at their pricing suggests 6 cents a page, but a $60 setup fee. For 10 books at 100 pages each, that is effectively 12 cents a page (averaging in the setup fee).

Self-publishers might want to consider Lulu.com, with low per-page costs, and apparently no setup fee.

Can you have a puppy and a startup?

Yes, of this I know what I speak!

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2007/09/jasonheartb...

super cute!

After following your suggestion, I dove into the WordPress index.php and followed the flow for how it routes you to a particular page.

I found that I can insert my own PHP code to scrutinize the REQUEST_URI, QUERY_STRING, etc, so I can pull out the parameters needed for my app, and then edit the REQUEST_URI so WordPress is none the wiser, ... and simply displays the proper page. ... then my app code gets invoked, ... plus it has access to my parameters. Solution found.

I tried that, and it gets me part way there, but the internals of the WordPress index.php come into play to prevent this being a solution.

1. WordPress wants the "Page" name to come last, so I followed your suggestion, but with "app" moved to the end. Same idea as your rule, but rearranged. See .htaccess appended below.

2. The REQUEST_URI is "alpha/beta/app", and the QUERY_STRING "p1=alpha&p2=beta", ...

but the WordPress index.php comes into play and seems to do a REDIRECT (so my app never gets a chance to run)

so that REQUEST_URI becomes "app" and QUERY_STRING is empty. My app code runs, but now it is too late; the parameters are gone.

Any further suggestions?

  # .htaccess
  
  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/app$ /app/?p1=$1&p2=$2 [QSA,L]
  </IfModule>
  
  # BEGIN WordPress
  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </IfModule>
  
  # END WordPress

What do you mean by "Page name"?

Also, I should go ahead and tell you that I know very very little about Wordpress, and how it handles things. Would it be feasible to move this part of your project away from Wordpress?

In WordPress, ... in addition to your (blog) "Posts" you can create a "Page". The typical example would be an "About" page.

In my case, I created a paged called "app". What is nice about this is I can use WordPress as a content management system, I can change Themes easily, etc. ... but embedded inside the page I can put vanilla PHP code.