"Economists also tell us that 75 percent of a company’s value is attributable to its intellectual property (IP) — and that IP-intensive industries contribute $5 trillion per year to the U.S. economy. These industries account for about 35 percent of gross domestic product and 40 million jobs, including 28 percent of the jobs in the United States."

The report linked in the article discusses copyright, trademark, and patent-intensive industries. Patent-intensive industries are the *lowest* employer of the three, around 4 million as opposed to the 40 million jobs cited. It's misleading to lump all three industries together.

The same report lists another interesting metric, which is percentage of self-employed workers for each industry. Patent-intensive industries have the lowest number of self-employed workers, at 2.2% (vs 16% for copyright-intensive industries). This indicates to me that patent-intensive industries do not support capital-poor startups very well.

Of course I would expect counsel for the top patent recipient in the U.S. for two decades running to have differing opinions from my own.

Source: http://www.uspto.gov/news/publications/IP_Report_March_2012.pdf

Don't worry, they point out that use of the system is completely voluntary. Just like owning a mobile phone or participating in interstate commerce.

Xtifr, my somewhat-cheeky comment was just pointing out that speech can be censored as a side-effect of these takedowns. And we have seen that whenever government gets a new capability that makes certain things more convenient, they tend to push it as far as they can (e.g. pen register requests). I think the torrent tracker was included here as a trial balloon to see just how bright that line is.

I'd like to know what would happen to a site that is 50% torrent search and 50% political speech.

I'm very confused why a computer couldn't just iterate through millions of iteration of the equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert's_problem) and pick the best.

Heck you could even use my old game: http://code.google.com/p/exoflight/

Probably not, because many domains don't have Twittering experts. Go look for experts on programming language research, for instance. The terms used won't even appear in search results. If it can't be marketed, it won't be on Twitter.

There's not enough eigenvectors in this thread...

http://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/index.php/Occasionally_dishonest_casino:_crimes_or_just_noise%3F

"Spacecraft might one day refuel on the moon or Mars using plain old ice."

Isn't there not a lot of water on the moon and Mars? In fact isn't there not even a lot of hydrogen?

I'm sure excessive booze and partying takes its toll (if only to leave less time for exercise) but I believe the cancer stats about NOLA. My dad who was in the ANG down there talks about how many of his friends were lost way too early to cancer. I'm sure there's as much money spent keeping it "anecdotal" as there is money spent covering up the illegal waste dumping.

Cry me a river .. Back in the day we had to port arcade games with real sprites and dedicated sound chips to computers with 1 bit per pixel graphics and 1 bit sound (seriously). Oh, and controllers? You'd get the "key down" but not the "key up". Now get off my lawn :)

Including any kind of active circuitry in the credit card would severely impact the cost of shipping dozens of "free credit cards" to those who shouldn't be trusted with a lemonade stand.

Can any law-talking folk explain how the $290 million figure is derived? And if the state of Texas collects tax on this award? Not being conspiratorial, I really don't know much about the follow-the-money aspect of these cases.

Not surprising ... the political will barely existed to get us to the Moon in the first place, even though we had the fear of the Red Menace pushing the program along and fast-tracked it to take place within a decade. The biggest problem with Constellation is that it requires a Moon shot as a prerequisite. We've learned everything we need to from that dusty old rock, visiting it again is just an excuse to keep aerospace dollars following for another couple decades.