jforman

A TOS is a contract between Google and its users. The "CPU" in this case should then be the two parties to the contract (as these are the people meant to directly consume the contract's contents), not the legal system.

The legal system is more like an attached debugger. You wouldn't want different code being interpreted in the runtime and the debugger. Similarly, there should not be a different contract being agreed to and being litigated.

The license is much broader than this:

"By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the contributor). The license has no restriction as to the medium, dissemination method, type of Service we may offer, or the type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

You can revoke the license by removing your content, which is a silver lining.

Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a failed career, on the other hand.

(it's worth noting that Harvard has actually changed tack recently, such that they're increasingly promoting junior faculty...the above is still true regardless, at least for the time being)

Press releases for untested scientific conjectures (further nerd-rage inducing by calling it a "theory" in official communication) raises a red flag for me: it suggests that the investigators aren't fully skeptical of whether their conjecture actually represents the real world, and increases the probability that they'll introduce bias in their investigation.

The article (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...) is 100% hand-waving imo:

"Could it be, we wonder, that cancer’s predilection for a hypoxic environment reflects the prevailing conditions on Earth at the time when multicellularity first evolved, before the second great oxygenation event?"

"Wondering," alas, is not science! We need a model, a hypothesis, and a well-controlled experiment to actually discern truth.

As for Parker's absurdly long article, I dug into one of his more verifiable defenses and found that he's full of it:

"The media reported that this fish was an “endangered” species whose spawning ground was a creek near our wedding site. Yet a simple Google query of “steelhead trout” reveals that this fish is not, as the media had reported, a truly “endangered” species, but rather a fancy variant of the common “rainbow trout” that is abundant across North America — so abundant, in fact, that it is sometimes considered a pest species. "

Steelhead/Rainbow Trout is listed here on the NOAA website:

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/fish/steelheadtrout.htm

This web page says that 1 "distinct population segment" is endangered, 10 are threatened, and 1 is a species of concern. And they kindly point to a report listing which is which:

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/fr/fr71-834.pdf

Lo and behold, the Steelhead along the Northern and Central California coasts are on the "threatened" list. So the "pest" bit was just empty rhetoric.

Economics is far worse since we have such a poor understanding of psychology.

I don't get your negativity here. The fact that a major green tech company working with government support is able to shift financing over to the private market is, indeed, a remarkable feat and is absolutely something they have a right to crow about. The government, too — it's an example of a progressive system working as designed.

As for PR's impact to stock price...TSLA is 70% institutional owned. Anybody with a material stake in the company is savvy enough to know that they're not suddenly self-sustainably cash-flow positive.

This is how the rest of our culture works. If you leave your door unlocked and somebody robs your house, we charge that person with robbery and put them in jail. We might shake our head at your naivete, but you won't get in trouble for having lax security.

If the tech community wants this standard to change when dealing with intellectual property, we need to articulate why and get people on board, because it's certainly not the default in either our current culture or our current laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination#Multistate_Bar_...

However, as mentioned in another comment, what you learn in law school and what you need to learn to pass the Bar exam have relatively little overlap.

"An isolated DNA coding for a BRCA1 polypeptide, said polypeptide having the amino acid sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:2"

Now, in order to perform any medical analysis on your DNA, you need to make copies, so this is essentially the same as patenting the gene itself, but it does make the argument a little bit more subtle. Still a ridiculous thing to patent — I don't see any novelty in an vitro copy of something that occurs in nature — but not as obviously a product of nature itself.

Also, the author says that the "genes in question, BRCA1 an BRCA2, often appear in cancer patients." In fact, every human being always has those genes, but they become mutated in often stereotyped ways in cancer patients.

Back in my Ph.D. days the scientists I worked with were pretty much unanimous in thinking these patents should be overturned — they very strongly hinder basic scientific study and medical analysis. And they're not a patent on a method, or a type of analysis, or anything like that — just a patent on a straight-up in vitro copy (and not the method for copying!). I don't see any economic value in protecting that at all when a first-year grad student had the skills to do that from a human DNA template decades ago.

This is an important and legitimate way to estimate broad-sense heritability. It won't control for environmental effects within the womb, or cultural effects, but it's pretty strong science absent those criticisms.

This is more than "should." In an LLC, co-mingling finances can expose you to personal liability, which can result in personal financial disaster if you get sued.

> LLCs do not require the record keeping that corps require

We're both sort-of wrong on this one: the LLC record-keeping burden is far lower than a corporation, but the burden is not strictly limited to your list:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/llc-record-keeping-ru...

...in general, the law is much more complicated than one would expect. If you want to be safe, you should either be spending time reading NOLO's documentation or money paying a lawyer.

There needs to be a strict separation between the corporation and the people behind the corporation. As part of this, the LLC's finances need to be kept rigorously firewalled from personal finances — never pay a corporate bill from your own pocket, for example, or vice-versa.

You also need to follow the formalities of a corporation by keeping formal records (minutes, shareholder acts, etc.).

If you fail to do either of these things you, in addition to the LLC, can be sued, and you can lose personal assets. It's called 'piercing the corporate veil'. A great run-down is here:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/personal-liability-pi...

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

This blog describes a scenario in which JSTOR blocked Aaron's IP, then MIT blocked his MAC address, then JSTOR blocked an MIT IP range after he kept circumventing their attempts to cut him off. Ultimately, "Swartz broke into a closet in the basement of a building at MIT and connected his computer directly to the network — hiding his computer under a box so no one would see it."

However, judicial discretion was an important check against prosecutorial zeal, and the unintended consequence of reducing arbitrariness at the judicial level has been an increase in control at the prosecutorial level. Systemically, prosecutors are incentivized to put people away, as their careers aren't shielded like those of judges. We may be more a "nation of laws" than before 1984, but combined with punishments most people would consider unjust we've drifted toward being a police state.

In my opinion, if there's one thing to take away from this terrible tragedy, it's that we need a commission to study this systemic effect and recommend ways to make the justice system more just. I can't make myself blame the prosecutors involved when most federal prosecutors are similarly heavy-handed (and, quite possibly, were acting within a reasonable interpretation of the the law).

Take a real property, rather than intellectual property, example: my house is private property. If you open my door and walk into my living room, you are trespassing, which is a crime (or you could be breaking and entering depending on your intent). However, if I put a sign up saying "come on in, JohnsonB!" then you have my consent to enter, and you have therefore not violated the letter of the law.

See how consent to use private property is the crux of whether a criminal violation occurred?

A TOS defines the boundaries of how an intellectual property owner consents to your use of that property. Go outside the bounds of that TOS and you are no longer operating with consent, and may indeed be committing a crime.

I'm not saying that this is how it should be. Just that this is how the law is generally interpreted.

You're thinking in terms of a civil suit, where an aggrieved party sues to restore their property/rights/etc. This was a criminal suit where the process is very different: the party suing is always the government in criminal cases, and the only matter at hand is whether the defendant violated the letter of the law. Aggrieved parties don't even have any authority to press or drop charges in criminal cases: that authority rests solely with the government (and the government will often continue cases when the parties involved just want it to go away).

In this case we're talking about extremely savvy investors who were given an offer that they accepted eyes wide open. If this was a bum deal, any anger should be directed at the directors/board rather than the government.

In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause crime at all: maybe something else causes crime that also happens to correlate with lead exposure. Who knows, maybe a certain pesticide was used at the same time that lead gasoline came into vogue, and that's really the true cause of the rise in crime rates.

In research like this, when you can't do a manually controlled experiment, you have to control for hidden variables by some other means. And that's precisely what the investigators in this article did: they varied the input data to try to "shake out" other variables that might be behind the correlation. They looked at different time scales, different geographies, and different demographics, in an attempt to control for hidden variables that might be related to any one of those things. Every time you vary the input data and keep finding a correlation, your evidence of a causative relationship goes up.

The gold standard, of course, would be to expose two random, double-blind sets of infants to lead and to a control substance and see what happens. But since that would be unethical (as we have reason to think lead is bad for you), we're stuck with animal studies or retrospective studies. Personally, I find the evidence in this article impressive, but it would take quite a lot of looking into their specific methods to come to any real conclusion.

That's not to mention the store.

I mean...imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but I draw a line at copying Otto the Octopus.