In the US, a copyright assignment is not valid unless done in writing. (Google up copyright assignment writing, for instance http://www.copyrightcodex.com/... ). So either tvtropes is clueless, or that doesn't mean what you think it means.

I think that item #2 not only isn't the fauly of Wal-Mart, it's not a problem at all. It's true that someone who pushes costs onto suppliers may end up with suppliers going out of business. But all they're doing is pushing costs around. This moves around the identity of exactly who goes out of business, but it doesn't really increase the quantity.

In other words, if Wal-Mart were replaced by other stores that couldn't push costs onto suppliers, the stores would bear the costs instead of the suppliers. In the long run, this would increase the chance of the stores going out of business by exactly as much as the reduced chance of the suppliers going out of business.

Oh, please.

Someone already pointed out that the studio has no reason to make this offer instead of normal streaming, but even if they do decide they want to make that offer, the next question is what price the studio wants to charge. The studio would charge a price for the streaming agreement that is less favorable to Netflix than the price for the DVD agreement, because Netflix can't resort to first sale. They may even charge a price that Netflix feels isn't worth it. (If Netflix then refuses to buy, it's a standoff which is bad for both the studio and Netflix, but standoffs don't get resolved instantly.)

Furthermore, studios have marketing and marketing does not always mean "sell things whenever someone wants to buy one". There are all sorts of reasons why a studio might want to limit sales, ranging from "we only want to sell this in odd years to increase demand" to "that movie was produced under a company president who was replaced and having it make a lot of money would be really bad for our office politics".

Studios can't do any of these things for physical DVDs that are covered by first sale.

After Columbine, with reports (true or not) that the killers had been bullied, nobody took that to mean that the anti-bullying crowd is dangerous or that people who claim to be victims of bullies are really just misanthropic killers. "Geeks who don't like to be bullied are part of a murder culture".

(Well, I'm sure some people took it to mean that, but we recognize that they're being assholes about it.)

But replace "bullied" with "rejected by women" and all of a sudden it means there is rampant misogyny among angry geeks. No, it's not, it means that if a lot of people are rejected by society, a few of them will become killers. This doesn't mean that the complaints about rejection are wrong, or that geeks with such complaints are dangerous, any more than Columbine showed that complaints about bullies are wrong, or that a higher murder rate when unemployment goes up shows that we should ignore unemployment. (What's the unemployment equivalent to rape culture?)

You can reverse it and say that about politicians--trouble is, if you say it about politicians in the West, it will be false. Much of the Middle East is dependent on a tribal culture that is based around nepotism. We don't have anything like it in the West, even if there is more than one Kennedy in politics.

There's an Islamist group in Nigeria right now, Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sinful". Their stated goals are to end education of girls.

"They hate our freedom" is very appropriate.

Middle Eastern cultures of the type that produce terrorists use family ties as a way of cementing political connections anyway. By Western standards terrorist organizations are at insane levels of nepotism. Even if you just kill terrorists and magically save all innocents, you'll still have killed someone's nephew, or cousin, or brother-in-law, or other family member for whom they'll feel a need to take vengeance.

Suicide terrorists are not leaders; they're low level employees. Terrorist leaders expect a good portion of their 72 virgins now just like CEOs; Osama bin Laden had five wives, and he didn't have to wait to be blown up in order to get them. It's sort of like an actual CEO and low level employees; the CEO makes a lot more money and the employees suffer in ways the CEO might not.

The problem with this is that failing to attack terrorists who hide among civilians give terrorists greater incentive to hide among civilians. You end up with fewer innocents killed from attacks on terrorists and more killed by terrorists. The people killed by the terrorists have their own life stories which are just as sympathetic as those of the innocent bystanders when the terrorist is caught at a wedding.

We don't need crowdfunding to advance meaningful discoveries in theoretical research. This project only went to crowdfunding because it doesn't have enough merit that it can get funding through the normal channels. You think any big company wouldn't be all over this if it actually had a chance of success?

I doubt that. Kids learn to escape their parents to go to a concert is that the concert is right there. Escaping their parents has an immediate, obviously visible, effect.

The type of surveillance described above is a lot more insidious, with respect to children. They're being surveilled for data mining. The kids aren't going to notice any obvious effects of the surveillance--it's not as if being surveilled means that the teacher will catch them saying naughty words and punish them. Any effect on them they either won't recognize (like buying more of some toy because marketing can target them better) or will be so far in the future and about such different things that they won't know about it (such as 20 years later someone deanonymizing the data and refusing to hire the guy because people who use lots of adjectives in childhood are statistically more likely to steal).

Let's just bypass all the Slashtards saying "heh heh, the US military doesn't have any ethics anyway" and ask a more fundamental question:

Have you ever seen a robot medic that can treat a wounded person at all without a human micromanaging its every move? Even in a hospital or another non-military situation? Have you ever seen a robot that can vacuum a floor *and* can put small objects aside, use an attachment to reach under narrow spaces, and follow instructions like "stay off my antique rug"? Have you ever seen a robot that can be placed in a kitchen, be told "cook a hamburger for me", and do it?

Of course not. Just being able to do everyday tasks that can be expressed in a couple of sentences to a human is still the stuff of science fiction, and will remain so for a long, long, time, even though there sure are an awful lot of them in movies.

Are they refusing to support the third party application itself, or are they refusing to support Red Hat Linux when it is used to run a third party application?

The article is badly written, but it sounds like #2, which is indeed bad. It's just the flip side of the manufacturer who won't fix a hardware fault because you ran Linux on your computer. Or with a car analogy, if you install a radio, the car manufacturer isn't responsible if the radio goes bad, but they are if the rest of the car does.

Where in the article does it say that Samsung caused the cancer?

So they apologized for it. Companies apologize for things that aren't their fault all the time. That's not a confession of guilt, that's a public relations ploy, and is solely based on whether people blame them for causing cancer, not whether they really caused any cancer.

Besides, if you read the apology carefully, it's not even worded as a confession. It doesn't say 'we apologize for giving people cancer'. They're just apologizing for making people upset--something they could do whether the cancer is caused by them or not. If a bully thinks you kicked sand in his face, and if you don't apologize he's going to beat you up/cost you millions in bad publicity, you apologize, regardless of whether you did it.

They need to know when they get in one that it's going to be the best possible service.

Why do they need to know that it's going to be the best possible service? What if they prefer to not have the best possible service, in order to pay less?

Your reasoning makes as much sense as banning McDonalds so that restaurant customers get the best possible food.