Facebook Faces Lawsuit for Scans of Users' Messages

NBC News has the story at
Facebook Must Face Lawsuit Over Scanning of Users' Messages.

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.