Not only that - if the law isn't so fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away, how the hell are the lawyer vampire class ever going to justify being a drain on society by requiring you to consult a lawyer before doing anything?
The hidden "laws" (which is a bad description, what is really privately-copyrighted are standards which are referenced in regulations authorized under law) don't benefit) don't benefit lawyers particularly, who they benefit are the industry groups that make the standards and the firms that are members.
Regulatory capture was invented by the lawyer class.
No, it wasn't. Delegating the regulation of an industry to established players in that industry has a long history independent of the "lawyer class".
That's why the first thing a sane society would do is outlaw lawyers.
Outlawing lawyers will make the law better in the same way that outlawing computer programmers will make computer programs better.
It should be simple: what the research funded fully, or even partially, by the public? Then all the results from it should be fully available to the public. If researches don't like that
Researchers do like that, which is why the boycott of Elsevier by researchers is happening.
Certain scientific publishers (e.g., Elsevier) don't like it, but that's not the same thing as researchers not liking it.
Why would anyone want to buy a stock that doesn't pay dividends?
The same reason as anyone would want to buy any other asset that doesn't provide payments during the period of ownership: the combination fo use value of the asset during the period of the ownership (for a stock, this is voting rights) and appreciation in resale value during the period of ownership. People buy lots of investments without the expectation that the investment will pay them money during the period they hold it.
Even when you aren't talking about publicly traded companies, that's frequently why people buy equity shares in a business.
(The basic thing underlying value is the claim that stockholders have on the net assets of the corporation in the event of dissolution; for a healthy going concern, the stock value will often be significantly higher than the current net assets of the corporation, representing the belief of investors that the corporation is likely to improve its net asset position before dissolving.)
But the price of the stock is a result of people wanting to buy it.
Yes, market value -- of any asset -- is based on the expectation of utility by potential purchasers. So what?
Which brings me back to my first question: why would anyone "invest" in a company that is not going to pay you back for your investment?
Which brings me back to the answer to your first question; the same reasons people invest in any other kind of asset.
Where is the money coming from?
The money to invest is coming from the people investing, the same as with any other asset.
No, it wasn't true 15 years ago, nor was it ever true.
The basic concept was true before the HUGE gain in stock prices. Investors noticed when the DOW went from 3,000 to 15,000 in just 10 years! That growth corrupted them and now expect it.
The "basic concept" that profit-sharing was the sole purpose of stock ownership has never been true as anything other than a gross and misleading oversimplification of a complex topic useful, if anything, as an introduction from which people would learn more -- i.e., a lie-to-children; sharing in net profits -- i.e., profits after reinvestment -- has always been a feature of joint stock companies, but a preference against reinvestment over redistribution has frequently been common throughout the history of joint stock companies, particularly ones where shares were readily tradeable assets, as is the case certainly with publicly traded companies.
Investors noticed when the DOW went from 3,000 to 15,000 in just 10 years! That growth corrupted them and now expect it.
Leaving aside tax treatment, for publicly traded stocks with an active market, increases in market value are essentially interchangeable with dividends, since with a an increase in stock market value investors can sell a proportional share of their stocks and extract the increase in value, and with a dividend investors can spend the dividend to acquire new shares to increase the total value of their holdings in the stock in question.
Investors came to prefer appreciation of stock value to dividends much longer than 15 years ago (I remember stories about this in the 1980s when I was in my teens) because dividends was taxed as normal income whereas income derived from stock value increases was taxed as capital gains (particularly, when the stock is held for more than one year, is taxed as long-term capital gains.)
As a result, management -- out of fiduciary duty to investors -- over time more and more sought to return value to investors through stock appreciation rather than dividends. So, instead of volatility in dividends based on market performance, you see more constant (and usually zero) dividends, and more volatile stock prices.
In 2003 tax policy changed to temporarily tax dividends as capital gains, but even though that change has been extended its always been a temporary cut with a programmed end date, and so predictably has had little effect on long-term strategy, though it does reduce the disincentive to one-time dividends.
With those growth rates of course dividends looked paultry. In reality low interests and borrowed money inflated those prices from actions of the FED and no real wealth was created.
Stock market bubbles due to factors like the ones you cite (without regard to whether they are accurate for the bubble you are trying to explain) demonstrably occur even when it is more usual to pay out dividends, since all they require is having a market in the stock. Dividends or the lack thereof are a minor factor, since the whole issue of bubbles is that the appreciation of market value is much greater than anything then is justified by assets on hand (including retained profits), so the choice to reinvest profits or distribute them as dividends is immaterial in the formation of market bubbles.
So if you do not pay a dividend but your shares gain 300% in value then who cares if you make money? That is the age and stuff that is taught in finance today and why wages are declining.
No, its not. None of that has anything to do with wages. (Sure, the total share that is returned to investors limits the amount available for any other costs, including wages, but whether it is returned in stock value appreciation or dividends is immaterial.)
When I was a boy of 11 or 12 years of age, I asked about how publicly traded companies and shares work. I was told that you own piece of a company through the shares, and so you receive a share of the profits, as well.
Somehow, this basic concept got completely wiped out by most hi-tech companies since then.
That's not a "basic concept", its a misrepresentation that probably was intended as a lie-told-to-children but which failed in its own basic purpose.
It's a damn thought crime - it's only a crime if you're thinking the wrong thing when you do it
Using that definition of thought crime, most crimes (speaking here of the US system, though the same is true of lots of other systems of law) are "thought crime", as most crimes require a specific mental state as an essential element (the exception would be "strict liability" crimes, but those are pretty rare.)
The sentence structure and order of ideas is identical, and many phrases are the same or nearly the same. A high schooler should do better. Minor rephrasing is not sufficient.
It could be that ZDNet was copied by TFA, but...
That said, both articles are pretty much advertisements.
...suggests that it may just be that both articles are slightly rewritten versions of an Incapsula press release posted as "news", with one of them using more of the release.
Hate crimes legislation equals "kill your own race and we'll punish you less".
No, it doesn't. First, because "hate crimes" legislation doesn't require the victim and defendant to be of different groups along the axis of hate, though that's probably usually the case in practice, second because the axis of hate for hate crimes isn't limited to just race, and third because you can be sentenced to the maximum penalty for killing someone without it being a hate crime, so the absence of a hate crime charge does not, for certain classes of homicide, reduce the potential penalty.
Most people don't understand just how long 10 years really is. That punishment would not nearly fit the crime.
The upper limit of the range of punishments for a given category criminal offense is intended to fit every offense in the category. It's intended to fit the worst possible instance of the category that is not in a more severe category.
nothing really positive is going to come out of putting Ravi in prison for 10 years.
Well, that's true for a number of reasons, the most significant one of which is that Ravi is unlikely to be sentenced to 10 years in prison (much less put in prison for 10 years, since the length of the sentence and the actual time that will be served often aren't the same thing.)
10 years is the longest possible sentence for the offense he was convicted of. Under the applicable sentencing guidelines (as stated in TFA and even TFS) Ravi is not likely to get anything close to the maximum sentence.
Plus, the main browsing advantage of brick and mortar stores isn't browsing a single chosen item before buying it, its side-by-side comparison of competing items.
I'd argue that's actually the main benefit of online shopping. They provide way more details about the item than a tiny postcard in front of a shelf.
Side-by-side product data (including price) comparison is an advantage of online research; side-by-side look/feel/ergonomics/etc. comparison is an advantage of in-person browsing.
The relative importance of each depends on the class of product.
Its the final nail in brick and mortar retails coffin.
I dunno, it doesn't really affect the one compelling advantage of brick and mortar retail -- walk in, walk out with the product today.
There will be no reasons to even visit the local shop to have a look at something you are going to order on New Egg or Amazon later.
People doing that (unless they change their mind and buy at the store) are a burden, not a benefit, to brick and mortar stores.
Plus, the main browsing advantage of brick and mortar stores isn't browsing a single chosen item before buying it, its side-by-side comparison of competing items.
Plus, compared to the ToS posted for YBUY, in-store browsing (even if you are unusually prone to impulse buying under those circumstances) involves less financial risk than YBUY's delivery liability and chargeback-recovery policies.
I doubt this. Encarta wasn't all that useful to me when it could have been.
Depite the headline on TFS, TFA (and even the body of TFS) says the PC displaced the print encyclopedia, not that electronic encyclopedias, or any particular one of them, did. Encarta is mentioned as one factor that helped Microsoft promote the Windows PC in this niche, but the contention isn't that Encarta displaced Britannica as a source of knowledge but that the personal computer displaced the print encyclopedia as a parental purchase.
Migraines are a different matter that I covered separately in that same post BECAUSE they are nothing to do with headaches and because they have unique drugs that can combat them quite effectively if taken at the onset.
"Headache" is a vague symptom. Migraine is one of many conditions which produces a (very distinct kind of) headache as a symptom.Yes, it has distinct drugs which are effective at treating the condition or mitigating the symptom.
Fevers also cause headaches (which are very different than those produced by migraines), and there are drugs (many of which are over the counter) that relieve fevers (and drugs that treat the underlying conditions that produce some fevers, but many fevers that produce headaches don't require treatment of the underlying cause of the fever.)
Allergies also can produce headaches. There are medications which effectively treat allergies, both in the short and longer term, and many of these are over-the-counter.
One could go on in this vein for quite a while.
but if you are ROUTINELY taking paracetamol when they hit and they have little to NO effect, you're trying to self-medicate where medical advice should be sought.
Most OTC drugs have labels indicating that if they fail to relieve the symptoms are must be continuously used for a long time, medical advice can be sought (the exact phrasing varies considerably from OTC drug to OTC drug, because the conditions which indicate something other than the situations the OTC drug is meant to address are different.)
So, if your contention is that you should use OTC drugs according to their labels, then, yeah, that's pretty obvious. But that seems pretty different than your earlier suggestion that if you have OTC drugs kept handy "just in case", you ought to throw them out.
If you have a headache that a headache tablet gets rid of, or helps, you don't have a need for the tablet, it's just convenience.
Many common headache tablets are (among other things) fever reducers, and that's one of the key mechanisms by which they reduce common headaches. Reducing a dangerously-high fever is often more than a convenience.
But, yes, most OTC drugs aren't for treating conditions that are immediately life threatening, which appears to be the distinction you are making between "need" and "convenience". So what?
Yes, Google has been sending out notifications encouraging sites to fill more of the screen with Google ads.
You made two separate but related contentions, with their own links.
The response here is not relevant to the contention regarding layout and its relation to the link cited in support of it that was challenged in GP, but to the other contention which GP did not challenge.
Why? Because if Yahoo collects, say, $50 billion from Facebook and forces the social networking company out of business, consumers will revolt and demand patent reform.
If Facebook were to be destroyed as a going concern because a verdict in Yahoo!'s favor exceeded Facebook's ability to pay (which is fantastically unlikely, but let's ignore that for a moment), its assets (including software, databases, and domain names, trademarks, etc.) would be sold off to pay its debts -- most likely sold to the same buyer, because they'd be most valuable together. And that buyer -- because its the best way to get value out of those assets -- would almost certainly continue to use them to operate the social network called "Facebook", with no break in continuity. Sure, if they didn't change anything they'd either have to (a) get a license from Yahoo!, or (b) be Yahoo!, but even if liability from past infringement was enough to wipe out the existing Facebook corporation, the value of future use would almost certainly justify any purchaser of the assets securing the needed licenses to Yahoo! patents (unless Yahoo! acquired the assets directly, in which case they wouldn't need a license.)
So, from a consumer perspective, the social network known as Facebook wouldn't be destroyed by the lawsuit, even if the business entity currently known as Facebook was destroyed by it. So consumers are unlikely to care.
The big question is, will she be required to work to the Google+ Social Media agenda or free to pursue whatever bluesky projects she wants?
The thing I've seen her most praised for in her work at DARPA has been specifically shifting away from blue-sky projects to projects that rapidly provide value to business end of the organization the research arm serves (warfighters, for DARPA.)
I can't imagine that she would be brought to Google to drive more effort behind pure blue-sky projects, rather than finding a way to keep innovation going in a way that rapidly returns value to the business end of the organization, as defined by the organizational leadership.
Finding the balance between the openness that keeps innovation active and the focus that gets it returning value and doen't sink lots of resources into things that aren't relevant to the organizational mission is tricky (the "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach was obviously a reaction to the perceived lack of focus, but the perception that it has so far been unbalanced in the opposite direction may well be valid.) Expertise in managing that balance is something Google may well benefit from.
Google's advice to their AdSense advertisers is both funny and pathetic. Google suggests that the content should be a tiny box in the center, surrounded by Google ads on all sides.
No, it doesn't, at least not in the advice page you link. That page provides a "heat map" that shows what Google believes are, in general, the relative values of different placements of ads on a page relative to a typical "nav bar across the page near the top, primary content in the middle both vertically and horizontally, footer across the page near the bottom" layout, it doesn't recommend placing ads in all of those locations at once.
They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
This relies on a misconception of what Google+ is. Google+ isn't a distinct set of pages on Google that presents a Facebook like interface (though that's part of it, though its rely the tip of the iceberg.) As Google reps have said many times, Google+ is "the next version of Google", and the focus for Google+ is integration of data across Google services and integration of social features with existing Google services.
So, while Google is relying on Google+ to compete with Facebook, its not the "Google+" that you seem to be thinking of, its the Google+ that leverages all the advantages that you cite in your post as Google's natural advantages outside of what you think of as "Google+".
hen Google took over search engines- there were other companies at play- but no-one had an emotional attachment to them.
Now Google wants to take over social media- but Facebook is entrenched.
Google doesn't want to "take over social media". Google wants to retain its position in online advertising. Social media position is a means, not an ends.
Actually, I think they are very much interested in innovation, just perhaps not in areas that might seem quite so obvious. Why else would they hire Regina Dugan, the outgoing director of DARPA? Somehow, I don't think it's going to be for the use of UAVs as an advertisement delivery mechanism...
I think Regina Dugan's reputation at DARPA relates directly to the focus Page has been seeking at Google with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach (which has, no doubt, been disruptive to many Googlers and is a change of focus.) Dugan's reputation has been one of fostering innovation, but focussing on quick return of value to the core mission from innovation, rather than blue-sky projects.
Only if you imagine some fantasy land in which capital-intensive research happens without patent protection.
Actually, no, that's irrelevant to whether the behavior at issue is "rent-seeking". It may be relevant to whether allowing the monopoly whose rents the company involved is seeking is justified by countervailing public policy concerns, but it is not relevant to whether the behavior is "rent-seeking".
Seeking eternal monopoly on IP (as seems to be the case with copyright) is rent seeking
True.
but an invention that was recently cleared for legal sale? No so much.
No, wrong. Any time you seek to extract monopoly rents (which are defined as the price above and beyond the market price without the monopoly) you are engaging in "rent-seeking" behavior. That's what the word's mean, and they are descriptive, rather than normative. There may be valid public policy reasons for governments to tolerate rent-seeking behavior and, therefore, to grant allow certain private monopolies, but that doesn't transform the behavior into something other than rent-seeking. (And its very hard to see any public policy reason for any government to permit a private monopoly which causes a useful good not to be available at all in their jurisdiction when the monopolist's rent-seeking behavior leads them to not sell the product in that government's jurisdiction to protect monopoly rents in another jurisdiction.)
How can you possibly describe a producer who invents a product (recently) and is offering it for sale to the public as "rent seeking"?
The extra price you can charge above the natural market price for a product due to a monopoly is called a "monopoly rent".
Seeking to extract such a price is "rent seeking".
Patents are legally-granted monopolies.
Seeking to protect monopoly rents in one market by refusing to sell in another market because, even with the monopoly, the prices received in the second market would be so low that flow from the second market back into the first market (and flow of purchasers from the first market into the second market, which amounts to the same thing) would reduce monopoly rents in the first market is a pretty obvious example of extreme rent-seeking behavior.
If it significantly makes a particular equation or formula easier to read
Its not that it makes a particular equation easier to read, it is that it makes pretty much all the specific equations in which pi is used have a clearer relationship to more general principles.
Not really. Its very simple: Fair use rights as explicit statutory rights have existed for decades longer than DMCA, and reflect rights that have been ruled to be Constitutional limits on copyright law due to the First Amendment.
It is indefensible to say that the DMCA created fair use rights (whether illusory or otherwise), since it didn't create them at all, since the rights were created (depending on exactly how you want to look at things) either by the adoption of the First Amendment, by the court rulings that the limits on copyright were mandated by the First Amendment, or by the adoption of explicit fair use rights in statute, all of which predate the DMCA by (at least) several decades.
It is true that this chapter of the law does not grant fair use rights, but it is part of Title 17
Yes, it is true that the DMCA is part of US Copyright law (which is the subject of Title 17 of the US Code), but the claim wasn't that US Copyright law, or the US Code more generally, created illusory rights, it was that the DMCA did. The problem here is the fallacy of division.
The DMCA did not create any of the rights related to fair use, it merely rendered rights that had existed for some time before the DMCA illusory.
Which, just to be clear, is far worse than if the DMCA had created illusory rights. A law creating illusory rights doesn't take away anything you had before the law was passed. A law rendering existing rights illusory denies established rights. The argument that the DMCA created illusory rights is an argument that it did nothing substantive. This minimizes its negative impact.
Slashdot Mirror
The hidden "laws" (which is a bad description, what is really privately-copyrighted are standards which are referenced in regulations authorized under law) don't benefit) don't benefit lawyers particularly, who they benefit are the industry groups that make the standards and the firms that are members.
No, it wasn't. Delegating the regulation of an industry to established players in that industry has a long history independent of the "lawyer class".
Outlawing lawyers will make the law better in the same way that outlawing computer programmers will make computer programs better.
Researchers do like that, which is why the boycott of Elsevier by researchers is happening.
Certain scientific publishers (e.g., Elsevier) don't like it, but that's not the same thing as researchers not liking it.
The same reason as anyone would want to buy any other asset that doesn't provide payments during the period of ownership: the combination fo use value of the asset during the period of the ownership (for a stock, this is voting rights) and appreciation in resale value during the period of ownership. People buy lots of investments without the expectation that the investment will pay them money during the period they hold it.
Even when you aren't talking about publicly traded companies, that's frequently why people buy equity shares in a business.
(The basic thing underlying value is the claim that stockholders have on the net assets of the corporation in the event of dissolution; for a healthy going concern, the stock value will often be significantly higher than the current net assets of the corporation, representing the belief of investors that the corporation is likely to improve its net asset position before dissolving.)
Yes, market value -- of any asset -- is based on the expectation of utility by potential purchasers. So what?
Which brings me back to the answer to your first question; the same reasons people invest in any other kind of asset.
The money to invest is coming from the people investing, the same as with any other asset.
No, it wasn't true 15 years ago, nor was it ever true.
The "basic concept" that profit-sharing was the sole purpose of stock ownership has never been true as anything other than a gross and misleading oversimplification of a complex topic useful, if anything, as an introduction from which people would learn more -- i.e., a lie-to-children; sharing in net profits -- i.e., profits after reinvestment -- has always been a feature of joint stock companies, but a preference against reinvestment over redistribution has frequently been common throughout the history of joint stock companies, particularly ones where shares were readily tradeable assets, as is the case certainly with publicly traded companies.
Leaving aside tax treatment, for publicly traded stocks with an active market, increases in market value are essentially interchangeable with dividends, since with a an increase in stock market value investors can sell a proportional share of their stocks and extract the increase in value, and with a dividend investors can spend the dividend to acquire new shares to increase the total value of their holdings in the stock in question.
Investors came to prefer appreciation of stock value to dividends much longer than 15 years ago (I remember stories about this in the 1980s when I was in my teens) because dividends was taxed as normal income whereas income derived from stock value increases was taxed as capital gains (particularly, when the stock is held for more than one year, is taxed as long-term capital gains.)
As a result, management -- out of fiduciary duty to investors -- over time more and more sought to return value to investors through stock appreciation rather than dividends. So, instead of volatility in dividends based on market performance, you see more constant (and usually zero) dividends, and more volatile stock prices.
In 2003 tax policy changed to temporarily tax dividends as capital gains, but even though that change has been extended its always been a temporary cut with a programmed end date, and so predictably has had little effect on long-term strategy, though it does reduce the disincentive to one-time dividends.
Stock market bubbles due to factors like the ones you cite (without regard to whether they are accurate for the bubble you are trying to explain) demonstrably occur even when it is more usual to pay out dividends, since all they require is having a market in the stock. Dividends or the lack thereof are a minor factor, since the whole issue of bubbles is that the appreciation of market value is much greater than anything then is justified by assets on hand (including retained profits), so the choice to reinvest profits or distribute them as dividends is immaterial in the formation of market bubbles.
No, its not. None of that has anything to do with wages. (Sure, the total share that is returned to investors limits the amount available for any other costs, including wages, but whether it is returned in stock value appreciation or dividends is immaterial.)
That's not a "basic concept", its a misrepresentation that probably was intended as a lie-told-to-children but which failed in its own basic purpose.
Using that definition of thought crime, most crimes (speaking here of the US system, though the same is true of lots of other systems of law) are "thought crime", as most crimes require a specific mental state as an essential element (the exception would be "strict liability" crimes, but those are pretty rare.)
It could be that ZDNet was copied by TFA, but...
No, it doesn't. First, because "hate crimes" legislation doesn't require the victim and defendant to be of different groups along the axis of hate, though that's probably usually the case in practice, second because the axis of hate for hate crimes isn't limited to just race, and third because you can be sentenced to the maximum penalty for killing someone without it being a hate crime, so the absence of a hate crime charge does not, for certain classes of homicide, reduce the potential penalty.
The upper limit of the range of punishments for a given category criminal offense is intended to fit every offense in the category. It's intended to fit the worst possible instance of the category that is not in a more severe category.
Well, that's true for a number of reasons, the most significant one of which is that Ravi is unlikely to be sentenced to 10 years in prison (much less put in prison for 10 years, since the length of the sentence and the actual time that will be served often aren't the same thing.)
10 years is the longest possible sentence for the offense he was convicted of. Under the applicable sentencing guidelines (as stated in TFA and even TFS) Ravi is not likely to get anything close to the maximum sentence.
Side-by-side product data (including price) comparison is an advantage of online research; side-by-side look/feel/ergonomics/etc. comparison is an advantage of in-person browsing.
The relative importance of each depends on the class of product.
I dunno, it doesn't really affect the one compelling advantage of brick and mortar retail -- walk in, walk out with the product today.
People doing that (unless they change their mind and buy at the store) are a burden, not a benefit, to brick and mortar stores.
Plus, the main browsing advantage of brick and mortar stores isn't browsing a single chosen item before buying it, its side-by-side comparison of competing items.
Plus, compared to the ToS posted for YBUY, in-store browsing (even if you are unusually prone to impulse buying under those circumstances) involves less financial risk than YBUY's delivery liability and chargeback-recovery policies.
Depite the headline on TFS, TFA (and even the body of TFS) says the PC displaced the print encyclopedia, not that electronic encyclopedias, or any particular one of them, did. Encarta is mentioned as one factor that helped Microsoft promote the Windows PC in this niche, but the contention isn't that Encarta displaced Britannica as a source of knowledge but that the personal computer displaced the print encyclopedia as a parental purchase.
"Headache" is a vague symptom. Migraine is one of many conditions which produces a (very distinct kind of) headache as a symptom.Yes, it has distinct drugs which are effective at treating the condition or mitigating the symptom.
Fevers also cause headaches (which are very different than those produced by migraines), and there are drugs (many of which are over the counter) that relieve fevers (and drugs that treat the underlying conditions that produce some fevers, but many fevers that produce headaches don't require treatment of the underlying cause of the fever.)
Allergies also can produce headaches. There are medications which effectively treat allergies, both in the short and longer term, and many of these are over-the-counter.
One could go on in this vein for quite a while.
Most OTC drugs have labels indicating that if they fail to relieve the symptoms are must be continuously used for a long time, medical advice can be sought (the exact phrasing varies considerably from OTC drug to OTC drug, because the conditions which indicate something other than the situations the OTC drug is meant to address are different.)
So, if your contention is that you should use OTC drugs according to their labels, then, yeah, that's pretty obvious. But that seems pretty different than your earlier suggestion that if you have OTC drugs kept handy "just in case", you ought to throw them out.
Many common headache tablets are (among other things) fever reducers, and that's one of the key mechanisms by which they reduce common headaches. Reducing a dangerously-high fever is often more than a convenience.
But, yes, most OTC drugs aren't for treating conditions that are immediately life threatening, which appears to be the distinction you are making between "need" and "convenience". So what?
You made two separate but related contentions, with their own links.
The response here is not relevant to the contention regarding layout and its relation to the link cited in support of it that was challenged in GP, but to the other contention which GP did not challenge.
Again, reading comprehension is useful.
If Facebook were to be destroyed as a going concern because a verdict in Yahoo!'s favor exceeded Facebook's ability to pay (which is fantastically unlikely, but let's ignore that for a moment), its assets (including software, databases, and domain names, trademarks, etc.) would be sold off to pay its debts -- most likely sold to the same buyer, because they'd be most valuable together. And that buyer -- because its the best way to get value out of those assets -- would almost certainly continue to use them to operate the social network called "Facebook", with no break in continuity. Sure, if they didn't change anything they'd either have to (a) get a license from Yahoo!, or (b) be Yahoo!, but even if liability from past infringement was enough to wipe out the existing Facebook corporation, the value of future use would almost certainly justify any purchaser of the assets securing the needed licenses to Yahoo! patents (unless Yahoo! acquired the assets directly, in which case they wouldn't need a license.)
So, from a consumer perspective, the social network known as Facebook wouldn't be destroyed by the lawsuit, even if the business entity currently known as Facebook was destroyed by it. So consumers are unlikely to care.
The thing I've seen her most praised for in her work at DARPA has been specifically shifting away from blue-sky projects to projects that rapidly provide value to business end of the organization the research arm serves (warfighters, for DARPA.)
I can't imagine that she would be brought to Google to drive more effort behind pure blue-sky projects, rather than finding a way to keep innovation going in a way that rapidly returns value to the business end of the organization, as defined by the organizational leadership.
Finding the balance between the openness that keeps innovation active and the focus that gets it returning value and doen't sink lots of resources into things that aren't relevant to the organizational mission is tricky (the "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach was obviously a reaction to the perceived lack of focus, but the perception that it has so far been unbalanced in the opposite direction may well be valid.) Expertise in managing that balance is something Google may well benefit from.
No, it doesn't, at least not in the advice page you link. That page provides a "heat map" that shows what Google believes are, in general, the relative values of different placements of ads on a page relative to a typical "nav bar across the page near the top, primary content in the middle both vertically and horizontally, footer across the page near the bottom" layout, it doesn't recommend placing ads in all of those locations at once.
Reading comprehension is useful.
In fact they do make a product like that; its called the Google Search Appliance.
This relies on a misconception of what Google+ is. Google+ isn't a distinct set of pages on Google that presents a Facebook like interface (though that's part of it, though its rely the tip of the iceberg.) As Google reps have said many times, Google+ is "the next version of Google", and the focus for Google+ is integration of data across Google services and integration of social features with existing Google services.
So, while Google is relying on Google+ to compete with Facebook, its not the "Google+" that you seem to be thinking of, its the Google+ that leverages all the advantages that you cite in your post as Google's natural advantages outside of what you think of as "Google+".
Google doesn't want to "take over social media". Google wants to retain its position in online advertising. Social media position is a means, not an ends.
I think Regina Dugan's reputation at DARPA relates directly to the focus Page has been seeking at Google with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach (which has, no doubt, been disruptive to many Googlers and is a change of focus.) Dugan's reputation has been one of fostering innovation, but focussing on quick return of value to the core mission from innovation, rather than blue-sky projects.
Actually, no, that's irrelevant to whether the behavior at issue is "rent-seeking". It may be relevant to whether allowing the monopoly whose rents the company involved is seeking is justified by countervailing public policy concerns, but it is not relevant to whether the behavior is "rent-seeking".
True.
No, wrong. Any time you seek to extract monopoly rents (which are defined as the price above and beyond the market price without the monopoly) you are engaging in "rent-seeking" behavior. That's what the word's mean, and they are descriptive, rather than normative. There may be valid public policy reasons for governments to tolerate rent-seeking behavior and, therefore, to grant allow certain private monopolies, but that doesn't transform the behavior into something other than rent-seeking. (And its very hard to see any public policy reason for any government to permit a private monopoly which causes a useful good not to be available at all in their jurisdiction when the monopolist's rent-seeking behavior leads them to not sell the product in that government's jurisdiction to protect monopoly rents in another jurisdiction.)
The extra price you can charge above the natural market price for a product due to a monopoly is called a "monopoly rent".
Seeking to extract such a price is "rent seeking".
Patents are legally-granted monopolies.
Seeking to protect monopoly rents in one market by refusing to sell in another market because, even with the monopoly, the prices received in the second market would be so low that flow from the second market back into the first market (and flow of purchasers from the first market into the second market, which amounts to the same thing) would reduce monopoly rents in the first market is a pretty obvious example of extreme rent-seeking behavior.
Its not that it makes a particular equation easier to read, it is that it makes pretty much all the specific equations in which pi is used have a clearer relationship to more general principles.
Not really. Its very simple: Fair use rights as explicit statutory rights have existed for decades longer than DMCA, and reflect rights that have been ruled to be Constitutional limits on copyright law due to the First Amendment.
It is indefensible to say that the DMCA created fair use rights (whether illusory or otherwise), since it didn't create them at all, since the rights were created (depending on exactly how you want to look at things) either by the adoption of the First Amendment, by the court rulings that the limits on copyright were mandated by the First Amendment, or by the adoption of explicit fair use rights in statute, all of which predate the DMCA by (at least) several decades.
Yes, it is true that the DMCA is part of US Copyright law (which is the subject of Title 17 of the US Code), but the claim wasn't that US Copyright law, or the US Code more generally, created illusory rights, it was that the DMCA did. The problem here is the fallacy of division.
The DMCA did not create any of the rights related to fair use, it merely rendered rights that had existed for some time before the DMCA illusory.
Which, just to be clear, is far worse than if the DMCA had created illusory rights. A law creating illusory rights doesn't take away anything you had before the law was passed. A law rendering existing rights illusory denies established rights. The argument that the DMCA created illusory rights is an argument that it did nothing substantive. This minimizes its negative impact.