It will be very difficult unless they change the laws. These properties are purchased by the attorneys of corporations owned by other corporations with multiple owners which are other foreign corporations and communicated by a non-owner party. Is it worth it to spend a lot of money tracking the true owners down into foreign countries through this complicated web of corporate companies?

Anyone know how to find out who wrote the bill?

Per the article, their advertising budget is $300 million for the first year, and they spent $25 million on marketing last month.

Instead of an oil pipline, why not a water pipeline?

If you look at a map you'll see that there are large mountains and long distances between where the (fresh) water is and California's Central Valley.

more than 1 pipe?

Previous dev did mention he would of wanted to re-write site in RoR...

product is complete and just needs maintenance or is there multiple technical things that are on the feature-list?... ...Right On. Yes, core created and usable (I use it pretty regularly).

Elon Musk isn't Tony Stark, Tony Stark is Elon Musk!

A lot of people do this.

Okay, so they own a patent... It takes $ to enforce, protect, and win a litigation for. Once won, they then have to collect... Taken voice - "Good Luck"

Hey Dan, Was always curious what you were doing there... Do you think there is a place in the market to launch another sparkbuy-esque site being that it doesn't seem like anyone has done anything "great" in that same space?

Feel free to respond to: chris@clientbiller.com

Quick heads-up: Dan Shapiro's HN handle is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danshapiro

We just happen to have the same three first letters on our first names. Dan is actually active on HN.

Amusingly I only found this because someone tweeted angrily at posting such self-promotional content to HN.

To the parent: Sparkbuy's secret was that underneath the UI was a data set that was really, really good. Folks at Amazon and Bing confirmed it was orders of magnitude more complete and accurate than anything they had.

I think that opportunity is still there, although I haven't kept up on consumer electronics data quality lately. But if you can produce a real time feed of accurate data about products on the market, I think you'd still find a buyer for that.

The actual business model of running a comparison shopping UI on top of said data feed is much harder, and we never proved it out (because we weren't around long enough).

Thanks for the response! I was also curious as to when startups get acquired or acqui-hired - why they don't just come back out and do it all over again to prove it out? I actually did that, lol.

Also, to your point, you never proved it out, so doesn't part of you want to prove it out?