Play-by-mail games are a pivotal part of John Darnielle's novel WOLF in WHITE VAN. Some of these games sound like ones depicted in the book. Very interesting!
Generally speaking. For example, Nicehash, which had been chugging along for a long time, went belly up yesterday after what seemed like a regular maintenance period.
Coincidentally, EXTROPY magazine and its associated brand of techno-libertarianism was more reflective of where we have actually ended up. I have an old issue from 1995 that focuses on digital money that more or less advocates what we know now as cryptocurrency, including an imaginary monetary unit called Hayeks. With that said, stuff like cryonics and immortality is still pretty marginal.
The first question that came to mind upon reading this was: "are lawyers involved in the contest letter filing process? If not, I wonder if they may have a problem re: unauthorized practice of law in CA.
The best analogy re: address info on mail is to garbage that you leave on the curb for the trash collector. You probably don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that garbage because you exposed it to the public by leaving it out on the curb. There is case law to back this up. Similarly, if you hand over a letter to a postal carrier, you arguably wouldn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the info on the envelope since that info can be gleaned by anybody who looks at the letter. Email would be different since that is presumably store on your computer or a server or some other place or thing that would fall under the 4th Amendment protections (and require a warrant).
I guess that the government's legal justification for this is that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment re: the info on the outside of the mail (name, address, etc.). That is why the need a warrant to actually open the mail.
Actually, if the target of a DMCA notice files a counter-notice, the ISP has to reinstate the content within 10 days unless the person/entity filing the DMCA notice alerts the ISP that an injunction has been filed within a specified period of time. See 17 USC § 512(g)(2)(A)-(C).
I have read almost 1/4 of this guy's book--Trust Me, I'm Lying--and it is actually interesting. He rather explicitly describes the process by which he has manipulated the news media for various clients, including American Apparel (he is the guy who makes those "controversial" ads), by feeding or leaking info to blogs (his definition of a "blog" is very broad) and then working those stories up the media food chain. There is lots of puffery and some of it will trigger any reasonable person's b.s. detector, However, a lot of it rings true and he definitely presents a lot of interesting nut-and-bolts ideas--that may or may not actually work.
As to financial results, I can recall one instance where he specifically identified a link between a campaign and financial results. Whether you believe it is another matter . . .
I think the impact could be bigger than you suggest. Communications between Stratfor staff, clients, and sources are buried in this data dump. There is an entire spreadsheet of non-US media contacts who had agreements of some kind with Stratfor. There is correspondence between Stratfor executives and their attorneys that was most certainly subject to attorney/client privilege before it was posted. This only scratches the surface.
One of the more interesting things to emerge from this is Strafor's failed attempt to create a hedge fund that would use their intelligence to invest in government bonds, currency, etc.
There are many opportunities for practical learning at law schools. Yes, you can go through 3 years of school without learning out to draft a contract. You can also sign up for a clinic or internship or a drafting course.
For better or worse, law school forces students to take responsibility for their learning. Many professors just aren't good at teaching so students often end up teaching themselves a subject. Thus, the gigantic market in study aids. This all hits home when you have to absorb tons and tons of material to take the bar exam.
My biggest issue with Dropbox, and I am probably not alone in this, is still security. After the lapses earlier in the year, I still store most files in a TrueCrypt share in my DropBox folders. Since I can't access the TrueCrypt volume from my phone or other mobile devices, it limits the portability of the data.
HP publicly announced they were killing the Touchpad after only a few months on the market. What is the likelihood that they developed an entirely new business strategy around webOS within 3-4 weeks after announcing the death of their flagship webOS product? HP is clearing the channel at fire sale prices, and I think new Touchpads are being made solely is to satisfy commitments to manufacturing partners. Once these inventories are exhausted, Touchpad is dead.
The irony is that a multi-national corporation is profiting from the mask that many people associate with a protest group that attacks, among others, multi-national corporations.
I listened to this show during an out-of-town drive this morning. It is an excellent piece of journalism that digs into the business of patent trolling. The section about how the shell companies with empty offices in Marshall, Texas was particularly insightful.
One interesting thing that the show up brings up is this. Intellectual Ventures (IV) sold Lodsys the patents that they are currently using against indie mobile developers. At some point, the chief counsel for IV mentions that their usual practice is to sell the patents AND get a percentage of the royalty streams from licensees. The link between the Lodsys sales and downstream revenue for IV wasn't explicitly made, but I would bet that is the case.
State and federal court opinions are freely available from the courts themselves. Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc. gain much of their value from tools they provide for analyzing the opinions. These companies manually produce headnotes, case histories, and citation history (i.e., "shepardization"). Collating this value-added data would be vastly more difficult than automatically pulling opinions out of the PACER database (or even JSTOR). Not that I wouldn't like to see somebody try it . . .