Yup, but I don't think any were worried that suddenly looking for and then telling the truth would burst the bubble. They just knew that promotions, endowed chairs, year end bonuses, etc, were not going to be handed to the pessimists saying "you know that thing we're doing that's making all the money? Stop it. Right now."

I don't know about now but when/where I was growing up it cost about half as much to take a limo home from the airport as a taxi.

When exactly does it become retransmission/rebroadcasting?

1. Neighbor lets you rent antenna on his roof, you and he run a coax cable from it to your TV.

2. Same but more neighbors/antennas.

3. Same but digitally encoded.

4. Same but using internet connections as opposed to a cable between the houses.

5. Same but with a cloud based DVR.

6. Aereo.

Where does the "corporate intermediary" show up in the law? Is it still rebroadcasting if the corporation rents/sells me an antenna and a coax cable and that's it?

Now you know who the actual "workahol" addict is. I.e., not the worker.

Hydrogen powered cars would almost certainly be electric cars. Whether or not chemical batteries prove the best option for average size/average trip cars, other types of storage might prove more efficient for larger/long haul vehicles.

The problem is charging the battery that quickly wears it out much faster. That's fine for rare cross country trips, but not frequent ones or every day use. The model X will be heavier and use the same battery packs as the model S.

If the data brokers/hospitals want to prove my consumer information is actually health information and thus HIPAA rules should bar the data brokers from selling it to most of their other clients ... sign me up.

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/consumers/index.html

So when does it become copyright infringement/ public performance?

1. Neighbor lets you rent antenna on his roof, you and he run a coax cable from it to your TV

2. Same but more neighbors/antennas.

3. Same but digitally encoded.

4. Same but using internet connections as opposed to a cable between the houses.

5. Same but also includes a cloud based DVR.

6. Aereo.

Nothing really, so long as different charges and levels of access aren't used to put competing content providers at a disadvantage. If your electric company was also a distributor for Anheuser Busch would you object if they charged more for electricity and let the voltage wander when your refrigerator was full of Stone smoked porter instead of Michelob? Charge more for better service by all means, but a utility (which is how broadband should be classified) shouldn't play favorites.

This analogy is falling apart, but: It's not a demand that all entrees be equally priced. It's whether the guy who owns ALL of the restaurants in town can charge more for fish and deliver it cold and 20 minutes after the other seafood entrees sent to the table if that fish was sourced from a competitor instead of from his own fishing boat like the other seafood items. Not really a problem in a competitive market, but a big problem in monopolies and duopolies.

Lots of folks express that exact feeling about the NIH's efforts to get into translational medicine, which is establishing centers to do preclinical and clinical development. I'm pretty sanguine about that too. I could see some payouts happening though even if not many new drugs get made: 1, having publicly funded (and disclosed) research into how to conduct pharma R&D might improve the whole industry; 2, a stable funding source could allow really, really long clinical trials, which could be critical for areas like dementia; 3, an extra carrot for orphan disease drugs in addition to the ones supplied by the FDA.

Shareholders are hard to avoid. A new drug approval might cost just $200M (Optimer's Dificid), but on average companies are racking up ~$4B in R&D per new drug. (by new drug I mean new molecule, not new dose/formulation/indication for an old one). If you take venture capital they will be looking for a payout well before a drug is approved, probably by either selling the company or its ideas to a big pharma. Keeping it closely held has worked in the past - but you may need vasty deep (10 figure deep) pockets willing to stay the course for a decade.

But the stock price moves based on the latest clinical trial results and letters from the FDA. What's a CEO to do?

ILOS: in license, out source. It's much faster to buy a promising drug candidate (in license) then to herd your own to phase II. It may also be less risky. Hence Valeant trying to buy Allergan. For your remaining pipeline outsourcing R &D to contract labs can cut your R&D budget nicely, and it's the investors looking at R&D spending as a black hole into which their money disappears that makes the CEO nervous. Though you will also lose all of the insight and acumen accumulated by the specialists you laid off when you closed that department.

You can also try lots of management tricks: give everyone metrics to measure up to so that they always look busy, the pipeline looks full, the competition creatively destructed. Just don't tell anyone the truth: the candidates you are advancing are actually shit, but you have to advance some to keep your bonus. Hey, that sort of thing worked for the Veterans Administration, should work fine for pharma.

Hepatitis C.