Doesn't matter if they are or aren't. If they are in-house, they want this case to be over so they can go out and sue other people. If they are outside, they want to keep a decent won/loss record, so other people will hire them to pursue their cases. The US doesn't have such a deficit of lawyers that it can't afford to jetison a few who don't preform.

Not mine; I'd have just recognized it as Mitt changing his tune--again--because the flavor of the week has changed.

Mitt's opinion on copyright reform would depend on when you asked him:

--The Mitt Romney of eleven months ago might have argued for copyright reform, if he wasn't too busy railing against immigrants, abortion, and his own healthcare law.
--The Mitt Romney of two months ago wouldn't have, though, because that Mitt Romney never met a corporation he didn't like, and entertainment companies count in that.
--The Mitt Romney of one month ago was desperately trying to say everything he thought a moderate Democrat would say (tentative support for immigration reform and abortion, retaining everything about Obamacare except the name, etc), and since he believes that Democrats are shills for the liberal media that Mitt wouldn't have supported copyright reform.
--And the current Mitt, the one from this week that's gone on a bitter tirade about how Obama won the election because he promised to give away a bunch of money to poor people instead of the rich people who deserve it, that Mitt would be for copyright reform, because it would punish one of the evil members of the evil conspiracy that kept him from his birthright of being President.

Patents and copyrights. You can't build an open-source smartphone today because smartphones are covered by thousands of patents; you won't be able to build a robot in the future because they will likewise be covered by thousands of patents. Those poor fake paper-people have to maintain their profits, after all.

And the plutocrats know it. That's the reason they turned to the right wingers in the first place: they're kinda dumb and they're easy to mold into giving the plutocrats whatever they want (tax breaks for their rich trust fund babies, busted unions, incentives for shipping jobs overseas, etc). All you have to do is pander to them about repealing Roe v. Wade and they're yours.

As he should have; recessions are precisely the times when you need the government to step in and keep the evonomy moving, because the banks aren't adding liquidity and private citizens are busy digging themselves out of unemployment.

The unexcusable, fiscally irresponsible moves were made during the previous decade, where we racked up huge deficits in the middle of a market boom. 2001-2007 should have been a time of budget surpluses, where the country built up a rainy day fund to pay for the next market downcycle. Instead we gave the money away to trust fund rent-seekers like Romney, in the hopes that these "job creators" would trickle down jobs on the rest of us.

No you wouldn't; you just wouldn't bother with the news. If all you're doing is skimming the headlines for 30 seconds a day, then if GNews goes away you'll get your news from the radio or TV, or Twitter feeds or Facebook; you're not going to go to a news site and put up with their ad-infested drek. You, and those like you, are not a part of a newspaper's ever-shrinking audience: people who actually read the news, rather than get spoon-fed ten-second soundbytes and think that makes you informed.

Except that Google News doesn't have ads. They just have the world's biggest virtual storefront, and they include an ad-free newsstand just so people drop by every day.

The only "ad" on Google News is the word "Google" at the top.

Well let's think about that:

1) Google News has no ads. The search engine side has ads, but realistically how many people use Google Search to find a specific newspaper article?
2) Newspapers have a whole lot of ads surrounding, and in some cases layered into, their content.

The net result here is that the newspapers will be paying Google. I don't think that's what they had in mind with this little cartel shakedown scheme.

It's pretty simple: they see a golden goose, one who lays them golden eggs, and they want to cut it open to get more gold out of it.

Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.

...Verizon would be receiving an anti-trust conviction a few hours after admitting something like this.

Not even a little. The lab I work in doesn't care one whit about PD or DA "pressure", whatever you think that is. We do what they order, just like we do whatever the defense (or even the defendants themselves, when they choose to defend themselves) orders, but only so far as doing the tests they want. Our methods determine our results, not anything ridiculous like "politics" or "pressure".

God, what a nightmare that would be. Can you imagine the chain of custody issues that would result from evidence criss-crossing the country, especially when a lot of evidence has a limited turnaround time in order to meet constitutional requirements for a speedy trial. The OJ trial was decided, not because of any forensic science "problems", but because the chain of custody had holes in it, and that was just within LAPD and the LAPD's crime lab; imagine the problems with evidence criss-crossing the country with "annonymizing" tracking numbers and the like; you'd never be able to convict anyone of anything.

Not to mention the enormous expense of building a secure courier system the size of UPS to package, transport, and store evidence travelling all over the place like that.

We do better than that: evidence is always made available for the defense, whenever it is asked for, to be sent to whatever outside, independent labs they want to use. This happens dozens of times a year, and only once has the outside lab come up with anything that contradicts what the crime lab itself came up with (it turned out that the unaccredited outside lab was at fault)

As for anonymously re-analyzing everything... how much money do you think is out there for redundant tests? The LAPD alone does 15,000 cases a year, just in the narcotics section; it would require the full-time work of over a dozen highly trained professionals, in a second state of the art lab, to redo all their work. That's millions of dollars a year, spent in what will be a futile effort to find fault with the first set of analyses, which will then proceed to be denegrated for also not being "independent" enough for you.

Now you're just galloping on to incresingly irrelevant points. Corruption and over-zealousness on the part of the police has nothing to do with forensic science labs, nor does the war on marijuana, even if it is an assinine waste of time.

They've blocked the AT&T - T-mobile merger.
They forced Verizon to actually follow the net neutrality guidelines they agreed to as part of the spectrum auction.
They approved really weak net neutrality guidelines, though this last one will take years before it really affects anything.

That's mostly it. They've had a rough four years: most government agencies are still understaffed, since so many high-level government positions are still vacant thanks to Republican fillabusters.

"Can you name ANY ISP that blocks traffic from any competitors domains as you claim?"

Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service. Phone calls are free, but Skype counts against your bandwidth cap. Watching live TV doesn't slow down your internet connection, but streaming a video through Youtube does.

These are the beginnings of non-neutral networks. These are the beginnings of telcos and cable providers cracking down on possible competitors on the content side by leveraging their last-mile assets. At the same time, these large incumbants have multi-billion dollar legacy networks and content assets that prevent any new startup gathering enough cash and clout to make a go at competition on the last-mile end.

We're already seeing where this road leads: the US is falling further and further behind the leaders in the internet race, since the incumbants would rather spend their time cashing out on their legacy networks and strangling (or merging) startups to death rather than compete by building out new technology. This is what happens when you spend 10 years "letting the market govern itself": it doesn't work, and continuing to do nothing is just going to mean that we continue to fail as we have for the last decade.

Oh well, at least the ISPs didn't manage to cock up the stock market, like what happened when we let the banks "govern themselves."

Why do companies outsource their factories to China? Why did AIG and several other companies leverage themselves to several times what they were worth?

Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Pointy-haired bosses gotta sacrifice the future for a monetary bonus today.