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rp

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Attorney and writer. Website: http://wwwfilmesq.com

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Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal" your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.

"a great deal of apple's strength is that they don't follow trends. if they listened to what the industry thinks, they would license osx for plain-vanilla pcs, compete against ugly low-cost hardware from their competitors, etc etc etc, until they were indistinguishable from dell or hp, and therefore completely uninteresting."

They did exactly this a year before Jobs came back. In spite of Jobs's claims to the otherwise, the experiment did not last long enough to indicate whether it would have been viable in the long term. What is clear is that the clone makers where releasing computers more expandable and powerful than what Apple actually had on the market.

Please remember that the only thing that is "free" is the fee that you would pay this company to do your paperwork. You will have to pay business organization fees to the state of formation no matter what you do (check your state). As noted by others, most states also charge yearly franchise taxes, which is in addition to any federal taxes you are liable for if you see revenue.

Linking free speech to property rights carries a bunch of political and philosophical assumptions that are divorced from the legal history and realities of 1st amendment law in the U.S. Thats not just not how it works from either a legal or policy standpoint.

The one thing that stands out in this analysis is the author's almost casual statement that Flicker users regard "Flickr as their property and are resistant to change of any kind." Given the recent flap over adding video to the site, which is an individual user's choice, what would kind of noise would people make if ads started popping up on Flickr even if people could opt-out? The issue of how user's seemingly arbitrary whims may obstruct monetization of community sites seems to begging for further analysis.

Apple fans have always been fervent even during the very long period where the computers very obviously underpowered and overpriced. Apple was putting out 040-based computers at high prices when the PC industry was knee-deep in comparatively cheap Pentium systems. It was only until the Power PC came along that Apple started to release systems where the hardware was hefty enough to match the quality of the interface. I also challenge anybody to argue that the OS, as opposed to interface, was anything but creaky for many years. OS 10 (not OS X) was garbage.

Its important to remember that market for Internet skills was completely different back in 1994. Working sweatshop hours, and jumping to unknown VC-backed companies for a shot at an IPO was just part of the game.

I will also note that the ad is promoting explicit high-level programming skills and states that "[F]amiliarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary." This would have cut-off a lot of people who were riding the "web development" bandwagon (rudimentary HTML, perhaps some CGI scripting) and gotten the attention of lot of skilled people looking to catch a quick IPO.

You can certainly recycle incorporation papers, etc. You can also bear the brunt of the legal problems that may arise if those documents are defective.

I think one really has to understand the legal implications of forming a corporation (what you can and cannot do, what you will and will not be liable for) before one can accurately assess the necessity of having a lawyer handle that task. Lawyers don't make money filing papers; they make money suing people who screwed up the paperwork.

What are you shooting with that specs comparably against the RED Scarlet that can be had for under $1.5K (Scarlet < $3K)? The Scarlet technical specs seem to far beyond anything currently within the $1500-$3000 price range. Unlike others here, I think this is pretty impressive.

Wouldn't the declining value of Yahoo over time have something to do with it? Yahoo stock was as high as $30 in early 2007 and was trading at under $20 when Microsoft made the announcement. Certainly the stock price has bumped up but imagine what Microsoft would have to put up if Yahoo was trading at $30 before this potential deal was announced.

Also, we have yet to see what price the Yahoo board would actually sell at. In light of their saggy long-term growth outlook and numerous attempts to run away from the deal (deals or mergers with Google or AOL) a decent stock bump from a News Corp/Microsoft combination would test their sincerity re: a higher price.

As stated in the release, if the YHOO board does not accept within 3 weeks, MSFT is going hostile and will try to take over the YHOO board. A corporation does not make such public statements if it does not intend to follow through. YHOO is in trouble.

I agree with this statement and will make an additional comment.

I wonder to what extent Warren Buffett's treatment as a oracle by the financial press creates a non-helpful feedback loop where complex financial activities that can't be reduced to simple homilies (i.e., buy low, sell high) are immediately viewed as inevitably catastrophic and diabolical.

I say this with particular focus on the notion, which is once again stated in this article, that if Buffett doesn't understand it, who does? Apparently, a whole lot of very very smart people understand these systems (exotic financial instruments, electronic trading systems) enough to make them a significant part of the modern economic structure. Certainly, there is something more complex and nuanced going on here but you would not know it from the way the press (via Buffett) is presenting it.

The probable answer is that there is an existing business/financial relationship between the VCs and the law firms. I bet if you examined the VC's past investments, you would see the paw marks of specific big Northwest "white shoe" law firms like Perkins Coie, DWT or Stoel Rives all over them.