Law is a Seamless Web (Published in 4 Volumes) Tweeted at Twitter

Just tweeted Law is a Seamless Web as published in four volumes at http://bit.ly/1vWaSen  http://bit.ly/1GqQZ7t  http://bit.ly/1uUSBiy  http://bit.ly/1ACxR2i 

Money and Investment Questions: Berkshire Beyond Buffett at the Stanford Rock Center

We retweeted
Berkshire Beyond Buffett

Corporate Governance and Stanford Directors' College 2015 for Corporate Heavyweights (Directors & Senior Executives of Publicly Traded Firms)

The ultimate corporate governance conference for corporate heavyweights....

The 21st Annual Stanford Directors' College for directors and senior executives of publicly traded firms will take place June 21-23, 2015 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California.

See for background The Directors College and The Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, also at Twitter's StanfordRock.

New Stanford Lawyer Features "IP Law and Innovation with Mark A. Lemley and A. Douglas Melamed"

For those readers out there interested in intellectual property law,
the new Fall print Issue (#91) of the Stanford Lawyer
features
"IP Law and Innovation - with Mark A. Lemley and A. Douglas Melamed"
(it is online at that link).

Definitely worth an IP scrute.

Wearable Technology and Wearables are Strong in Coming

Wearable technology and wearables are strong in coming.

We have created the Wearable Technology Wizard blog,
mirrored at WeTechWi.

Take a look.

Clear Recent Searches and Individual Search Items from Keyword Drop-Down Box in Mozilla Firefox

A significant irritant in Mozilla Firefox is the "keyword history box" which persists on dropping down previously entered words identical or similar to the one the user is entering, thus detracting the USER from what the USER IS DOING.

There may be people for whom this feature is useful, fine, but those of us who find it a greatly distracting nuisance should not be forced to put up with it!

Why the people at Mozilla Firefox seem to prefer tyrannical force rather than providing democratic and simple toggles to turn features on or off is a mystery to this writer, and that applies to the entire software programming industry.

The whole original idea of the Mozilla Firefox browser was to let the USER do what he wants! Search options and full customizability are essential!

Our solution: We disabled the "remember history" function, but keywords kept appearing.  We then held down the up and down arrow buttons while the cursor is focused on the search bar, then pressed and held down the delete button and that gets rid of the individual stored search keywords and phrases quickly.

See online Clear recent searches from the Search bar and especially at the bottom there, the how-to material on "Clearing individual search items".

The serious user wants full and easy "toggled" personal customizability.
Why not create a separate "Beginners" Mozilla Firefox for the rest of the world?

How to Disable the Invasive Search Bar in Mozilla Firefox 34

The people at Mozilla Firefox continue not to get the basic fact that many users do not want invasive browser popups or messages of any kind disturbing their work.

The newly introduced search box confusion is just another example of veritable incompetents at work who ignore user wishes.

THE USER's WORK should be in the foreground,

not what some adolescent programmer wants!!!!!

AskVG.com explains how to get rid of the abomination quickly.

Use Method 2 there by changing your about:config settings via the address bar.

Change

browser.search.showOneOffButtons user set boolean true

to

browser.search.showOneOffButtons user set boolean false

and you remove the nonsense thought up by someone with time on their hands.

The search bar now works as before.

Effective January 1, 2015 New VAT Rules in the European Union for Electronic Services, also eBooks, etc.

European Union Value Added Tax (VAT) Rules (and corresponding record keeping) for telecommunications, radio and TV broadcasting and electronic services supplied in the EU Member States change starting January 1, 2015.

Under the new rules, the location of the customer is determinative for the VAT applied.

For example, we today received an email notice from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) about the new rules, which informed us, inter alia:

"On January 1, 2015, European Union (EU) tax laws regarding the taxation of digital products (including eBooks) will change: previously, Value Added Tax (VAT) was applied based on the seller’s country – as of January 1st, VAT will be applied based on the buyer’s country. As a result, starting on January 1st, KDP authors must set list prices to be inclusive of VAT.  We will also make a one-time adjustment for existing books published through KDP to move from VAT-exclusive list prices to list prices which include VAT. We'll put these changes into effect starting January 1st; you may always change your prices at any time, but you do not need to take any action unless you wish to do so."

Accordingly, one can see that the new rules have very broad implications.

See the European Commission website page on VAT on electronic services.

For practical aspects of implementing the new rules in daily business,
see Tax Briefing at Revenue.ie
and
Taxamo.

New Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University to Study the Problem of Deficient Science Research and Optimize Practices

John P. A. Ioannidis at the Scientific American in Science Research Needs an Overhaul writes that he has co-founded a new center at Stanford University -- the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) -- to deal with the costly problem that most mainstream research is wasted, for example, 85% of medical research, according to The Lancet. He writes that the METRICS center:

"[W]ill seek to study research practices and how these can be optimized. It will examine the best means of designing research protocols and agendas to ensure that the results are not dead ends but rather that they pave a path forward. The center will do so by exploring what are the best ways to make scientific investigation more reliable and efficient."

We applaud this development.

We have been confronted for years by gullible, uninformed, and opinionated people in and out of science proclaiming the near infallibility of mainstream ideas and research methods.

Having taught research ourselves at the university level, we know from experience, of course, that exactly the opposite is true.

Most of what is researched in science and published as a result is a costly waste of time and often leads science in the wrong direction.

One main reason for these follies of "scientific research", as we have written time and time again, is that science in the past has been predominantly "authority-based", whereas "evidence-based" research must be given priority.

Outdated memes must be abandoned.

That is our quest.

Common Sense and Innovation Prevail in Ultramercial III: Is Federal Circuit Finally "Getting" the Supreme Court Patent Decision Reasoning in Alice etc.?

As written by James M. Singer, Fox Rothschild LLP, at Mondaq.com,

Federal Circuit Reverses Course In Ultramercial v. Hulu;
Finds Method Of Delivering Advertisements To Be An Abstract Idea.

At Patently-O, Dennis Crouch posts on the Federal Circuit decision in

"Ultramercial III" at

Novelty in Implementation of an Abstract Idea Insufficient to Overcome Alice.

Daniel Nazer correctly cheers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in

Victory! Court Finally Throws Out Ultramercial’s Infamous Patent on Advertising on the Internet that:

"This is a big victory for common sense and innovation."

Absolutely.

Due to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 573 U. S. ___ (2014), the "Ultramercial III" case referred to above finds the Federal Circuit NECESSARILY reversing its path on a case in which it was twice previously and horrendously on the wrong side of understanding patent law.

Judge Lourie, who wrote the majority opinion in the latest and last Ultramercial decision,  reluctantly overturned the sinking ship of previous Federal Circuit patent decisions, a general patent-friendly reluctance he previously voiced in a previous Ultramercial concurrence:

"It is our obligation to attempt to follow the Supreme Court’s guidance in Mayo rather than to set forth our own independent views, however valid we may consider them to be...."

Judge Lourie -- a 1970 Temple Law School graduate -- will be 80 in January and it is surely high time that not only he but all other judges on the Federal Circuit acknowledge that they must follow U.S. Supreme Court precedents, a general jurisprudential and hierarchical truth presumably learned by every first-year law student in all law schools. That this kind of "sour grapes" judicial thinking about precedents still exists in higher court opinions among those who should know better is astonishing.

Judge Haldane Robert Mayer (J.D. 1971, Marshall-Wythe School of Law of The College of William and Mary) in concurring writes in his opinion what we consider to be the future of the patent law world, that:

"The Supreme Court has taken up four subject matter eligibility challenges in as many years, endeavoring to right the ship and return the nation’s patent system to its constitutional moorings.  See Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2357 (concluding that “generic computer implementation” did not bring claims within section 101); Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2107, 2117–18 (2013) (“Myriad”) (concluding that claims covering naturally-occurring DNA segments were patent ineligible); Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1302 (concluding that claims describing a natural law but “add[ing] nothing of significance” to that law fell outside section 101); Bilski, 561 U.S. at 611 (concluding that a method for hedging against economic risk was a patent ineligible abstract idea).  Rejecting efforts to treat section 101 as a “dead letter,” Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1303, the Court has unequivocally repudiated the overly expansive approach to patent eligibility that followed in the wake of State Street, 149 F.3d at 1373.  See Bilski, 561 U.S. at 659 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (explaining that State Street “preceded the granting of patents that ranged from the somewhat ridiculous to the truly absurd” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted))."

That is correct.

Slowly, but surely, the sinking patent ship is being righted, even if it is against the reluctance of some Federal Circuit judges to follow judicial precedents and against the myopic reluctance of many legal beagles -- just read the comments at Patently-O -- to understand the enormity and importance of swinging the patent pendelum in exactly the oppposite direction of the last 60 years.