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A losing party should not be allowed to drag out the proceedings hoping to force the opposition to spend money.

You are assuming that SCO is the losing party, but the case has not yet been tried. The jury trial isn't scheduled to begin until next February.

The system is deliberately set up to allow both SCO and IBM to file crossclaims, bring in parties that are necessary for full resolution of all the issues, and conduct thorough discovery. It emphasizes thoroughness over speed.

It is expensive and time-consuming, which is why most businesses would prefer not to bring lawsuits. SCO obviously brought suit because they realized they couldn't survive without a successful lawsuit. It was a desperate gamble, but before discovery, nobody actually *knew* that IBM would prevail, which is why it survived a motion for summary judgment. The facts were very much in dispute. Everyone talks about it as if at the moment the original complaint was filed, we all had the facts at our disposal to disprove the SCO case. But what if during discovery, SCO had come up with a "smoking gun" of some kind?

My point is that the judge's role is to be an impartial referee in the fight between SCO and IBM. A judge who decided the case before trial would have his decision reversed in a heartbeat.

If we operated under the so-called "English Rule", which is used throughout most of the world, the loser would pay costs. This would cut down on frivolous lawsuits, but it could also potentially stifle legitimate use of the courts by parties. There is serious and ongoing debate as to whether the English Rule system actually reduces the cost of litigation or leads to a more "just" outcome.

IANAE (I am not an economist), but I vaguely remember my economics professor saying something last semester about why rebates exist.

Something like if a manufacturer wants to stimulate sales, they can't just lower the price they charge retailers. Due to the monopolistically competitive/oligopoly market the retailer participates in, the retailer often can't change the price they sell the product at much, even when they get a much lower price from the manufacturer. Therefore the manufacturer offers a rebate which bypasses the retailer entirely.

I believe it is due to a kinked demand curve (which arises in certain oligopoly models) that essentially gives the retailer the same profit-maximizing price for a range of marginal costs.

This abstract seems to confirm this. I didn't read the paper itself.

Interesting. Have you ever visited China? The mainland Chinese are so depressed they make Americans look happy-go-lucky. Mainland Chinese don't have enough money to be obese.

The link you provided is not correct. Maybe this one is? Obesity and the Rate of Time Preference: Is there a Connection?

There are legitimate encyclopedia citations... These citations include simple, unamibguous facts,

I am sure it is possible to do encyclopedia citation but in the academia you just won't do it. When you cite a fact or definition it is expected that you cite (at least) a book that is considered the standard in the subject.

As an example, I remember I was working with a person who had a PhD on Neural Networks, and, I was doing an implementation of the CMAC NN on C++/Java.

I had to make a presentation and one of the initial slides talked about the general Neural Network definition etc. I remember I made a reference to some book (read, an actual book) which I used to get some basic definitions of neural networks. When I showed the presentation to my boss he told me to change the reference because "that is not a reference you would use for definitions" and gave me the reference to an author which was supposed to be the author on NN.

Back then, I though, bah!, what is the difference, but now I understand it quite better. I am currently making a PhD on Multiagent Systems, and I know that, when giving a definition of an "Agent", I should provide a reference to Norvig & Russel [Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach], and when giving a definition of Multiagent systems, Wooldrige would be OK, or Jennings.

Maybe you do not understand it, but the quality of your references say a lot. And, also, if you give those references you are helping the reader by providing him a reference where he could read more about it.

As an actual example, let me quote the following:

""...professional investment may be likened to those newspaper compe-titions
in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces
from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competi-tor
whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences
of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor whose choice
most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors
as a whole: so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which
he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch
the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the
problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing
those which, to the best of one's judgement, are really the prettiest,
nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest.
We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences
to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to
be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and
higher degrees."

And now, I could provide you with 2 references:
@TECHREPORT{RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm346,
AUTHOR={Stephen Morris and Franklin Allen and Hyun Song Shin},
TITLE={Beauty Contests, Bubbles and Iterated Expectations in Asset Markets},
YEAR=2004,
MONTH=Jul,
INSTITUTION={Yale School of Management},
TYPE={Yale School of Management Working Papers},
NOTE={available at http://ideas.repec.org/p/ysm/somwrk/ysm346.html},
NUMBER={ysm346}
}

And:
  Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1936.

You tell me which of the two references is more relevant (and therefore correct) for the previous quote.

Cheers,

Me.

http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wpawuwple/990700 1.htm

Bah, nothing suggests in the entire interview that he had ethical or moral issues with it (against his conscience). I actually applaud him for his honesty and non post revisionist political correct fluff. You ever notice how any German you talk to in Germany that lives W.G. always fought on the E. Front and all the Germans living in E.G. always fought on the West Front even though if you think about it, this doesn't really make sense. How nobody over that age of 50 ever supported US segregation, how every S. African you talk to was against apartheid. These are the folk I despise. I am fine with folk changing their opinion but to deny you had one in the first place bothers me to no end. The man felt what he did was right and doesn't need to apologize for it regardless of the modern PC movement.

As for thinking this attitude brought the Nazi regime or made WWII possible, give me a break and go read some history books. The repression of Germany by France and England brought about WWII more than anything the Nazi's did. The general population of Germany supported the Nazi's, just like folk supported Stalin, the Japanese Emperor, and Lincoln.

As for your last comment, not quite sure I understand what you are asking or how it applies to the do what you are told argument. Soldiers get paid to die, it is what they do. Nobody anywhere involved in the planning for those tests felt bad for the soldiers at the time. The felt those soldiers lives were worth the greater medical good and containing communism. As a good argument on the morality of this, read the article by Carlos Escude titled "Reflections on Cultural Superiority and the Just War: A Neomodern Imperative" (http://ideas.repec.org/p/cem/doctra/278.html"). While I don't agree with the conclusion (he would call me a follower of Prop A) it makes a good read and argument on why these actions (DoD exposing its own soldiers to radiation, being happy you made the bomb) might be moral.

Michael J. Meurer wrote the book on settling to avoid litigation of the issue of patent validity.

Otter Tail Power Co. v. United States, 410 U.S. 366, 368 (1973) the power company maintained monopoly by using litigation to prevent rival's entry into the market

Wal-Mart sued shrinking rival K-Mart in Federal court over little rotating carousels that hold plastic bags at the checkout lane.

The research referenced by the article: Computers and Student Learning: Bivariate and Multivariate Evidence on the Availability and Use of Computers at Home and at School.

as to have set these potential students up for this? Sort of an extra "admissions test?" With the rampant ethics violations recently, they may have found this to be a good idea. Weed the baddies out early, not with a tough 101 class, but with a slick ethics test.
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goofy Oliver Stone conspiracy theory, but the Ivy League has been dirty before.
Course, maybe Brown has their admissions department on the line with these cats as we speak (er, as I write and as you type).

as to have set these potential students up for this? Sort of an extra "admissions test?" With the rampant ethics violations recently, they may have found this to be a good idea. Weed the baddies out early, not with a tough 101 class, but with a slick ethics test.
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goofy Oliver Stone conspiracy theory, but the Ivy League has been dirty before.
Course, maybe Brown has their admissions department on the line with these cats as we speak (er, as I write and as you type).

Some interesting papers on the subject can be found using: RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) Here's a breakdown of their resources.

Some interesting papers on the subject can be found using: RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) Here's a breakdown of their resources.

When "chaos theory" (better to call it "field", or "approach to complex systems", maybe?) broke upon the world in 1970s, it's not like finance people yawned and ignored it! Au contraire, there was tremendous interest for the subsequent decade, as everyone searched for power laws, fractal dimensions and attractors. But now 30 years have passed, and the conclusion that was reached after research, and not in ignorance, as Mandelbrot suggests, is that financial markets are not predominantly chaotic. In other words, the "randomness" that we see in financial series is unlikely to be generated by underlying repeated actions of some simple nonlinear system; instead, it's really stochastic, really comes from un-anticipatable non-deterministic shocks. And if you really think about how the world works, with companies cheating and countries defaulting on debt, you'll find that intuitive, as well.

Here's one overview of the current state of the matter: Barnett and Serletis, 1998 (disclaimer: found after a 5 minute search of RePEC, there are likely even better papers).

Or maybe it's based on seeing what happens to areas when their main industries are destroyed by cheaper foreign competition, such as much of the north of England during the '80s.
Transition is tough, there is no doubt about it. But we cannot ignore progress because it is uncomfortable. The coming of industrialization left millions of European artisans out of work. Yet, it ultimately turned out better for everyone. It must be noted that North England was one of the areas that chiefly benefited from the industrial transition earlier this century. If they have not been able to handle this wave of transition, then though nuggets. It is just plain hipocracy to support capitalism only when its convenient for you.

Whether you believe competition is a basic fact of life or not, that doesn't particularly comfort the millions (yes millions) of people out of work as a result.
Its not a matter of believing that competition is a basic fact of life. Its a matter of believing that free competition is what has gotten us this far. Free trade has done wonders for countries around the world. It has been instrumental in making Europe the economic power that it is. It has greatly benefited countries like China, Argentina, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc, that have embraced it. Hong Kong, for example, went from having a per-capita GDP 1/3 that of the US a few decades ago, to having a per-capita GDP 80% that of the US. Post-facto studies on NAFTA have shown that it has been benificial to both the United States and Mexico, and just as the economists had predicted, did not have a significant effect on the US labor market.

I do feel for those out of work, and support measures to make it easier for them to handle the transition (better welfare programs, better retraining programs, cheaper eduction), but I think its utterly stupid to halt progress because people cannot handle change. If we had taken that attitude, we'd all still be hunters and gatherers, living in the jungle!

any finance prof worth his salt will tell you that there's no difference in how you finance your company (ie, debt, equity)

Any incompetant finance prof, that is. The Modigliani-Miller theorem has that premise, but it can be broken down because of tax differences, risk preferences, and of course efficient capital markets. In theory, different types of firm have different optimal capital structures (and in practice there are differences between different types of firm).

If you're interested in the theory then check out the paper Miller wrote in retrospect.

It used to be 50/50 just 2-3 years ago, but if you go check working paper repositories like IDEAS, which is LARGE, you ll'notice that most recent working papers are written using some version of LaTeX.

Apart from the inherent qualities of LaTeX, it's just an example of "network effect": the more people adopt a technology, the more costly it becomes not to follow suit. For instance, all publishers but some minor ones nowadays recommend submissions in LaTeX. It has worked just like this for microsoft products in many cases, here it's working the other way around.

Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey -- which supposedly found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack" -- that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime". Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, "Mary Rosh," and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a "false identity for a scholar," charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. "In most circles, this goes down as fraud."

And according to Ayres and Donohue who extended Lott's data through later years, Lott mostly managed to discover the start and end of the crack epidemic -- Crime rose and dropped just as much in urban areas without any changes in right-to-carry laws.

So you've answered my second question, and I thank you. You do have research to back up your claims; it's not good research, but at least it is research. Now how about getting rid of your straw man and dealing with what Clark actually said rather than what you find easy to argue against?

FWIW, you can find more of Levin's work at various places. Prof. Danny Quah also has some thoughts on the subject.