I think it comes from the tax paid by the company, actually.

At any rate, I have no problem with part of my tax money being used to ensure people aren't screwed over. Of all the things tax money goes into, this one seems very reasonable to me.

No, they don't lose. France isn't the US. The AGS guarantees the employees will get paid.

I don't know how things are in France since I can't read French, but I checked the Spanish regulations for that.

In Spain if the company is insolvent there is a public organization that will pay the severance you're owed.

So no, there really isn't a problem. Neat, isn't it?

Sure, it's a net win. The assets will be sold, and the employees will be paid their severance package. They also get paid for unused vacation days, and after the vacation days are over they also get paid unemployment benefits.

You seem to be suggesting that failing to pay what is owed to some (and maybe more than the initially laid off people if they would have run out of money later anyway) would somehow have been better.

The most likely reason why they got sued and lost is because they screwed up something related to the layoffs.

My impression is that in Europe people are generally less litigious than in America, but the employment laws have big, sharp teeth and it's very unwise for employers to try to ignore them.

If that was it, they didn't have much left to live. Sure, if you ignore laws and costs, you can make a business profitable that otherwise wouldn't be, but you don't get to ignore what you owe.

Now I'm not familiar with the laws in France, but in general I expect this was something like not paying a severance package, or not giving adequate advance notice. Those things are part of doing business and any employer should know about them. You can't just pretend they don't apply to your company.

The art is unusable for any real purposes, as it's clear copyright infringement. No competitor would touch this with a 10 foot pole, and would be even less likely to use it for anything.

A few curious people will poke around and that's about it.

Steam has to handle payments, deal with the mod authors, do some kind of policing and support (minimal as it might be), host the mods on their servers, and somebody had to develop the functionality to support this.

30% might be excessive, but as far as Steam taking a cut at all it does make sense.

The Microsoft assets used are minimal? Look at Wine and how much work it took to get to a point where it can be halfway useful. You know why that is? Because the things that Windows provides to the application are far from minimal.

A game might not care much about the Windows UI, but many years of work went into making the Windows kernel and DirectX into what they are today. Those are not simple bits of code.

Steam taking a cut is fair enough.

Bethesda already got paid for those textures and so on when I bought Skyrim. I see no reason why they should get 45% of something they didn't have any hand in developing, they don't host, and they don't provide any support for.

Invitations were a mistake in the first place.

It works for email because any email provider interoperates with any other. Having an account on gmail when nobody else does doesn't create any problems for the user.

On the other hand the very point of social media is that everybody you know is there. Being alone on something like Google+ is completely pointless. Such a service should be grown in the completely opposite way of the "have people invite each other" idea, using any excuse possible to get people to sign up.

Er. What?

Darknets have nothing to do with fiber optics

I understand the idea, yes. But:

1. Most of the time, it doesn't work. Let's face it, at least 95% of the people looking to buy a laptop don't understand this issue. A good amount of people doesn't care about spying either, because they think they have anything to hide, or because the US government is doing it so it must be good, or because the US government doing it makes it impossible to avoid anyway, or for a myriad other reasons. I think Lenovo would have to be in a very weak state for this to do them under.

2. If it worked, it wouldn't be a good thing anyway. The laptop business is a very expensive to enter and competitive one. If people ran a company out of business every time it displeased them enough, despite trying to rectify their mistake, nobody would want to enter the market. Who would want to risk their money in such a way? So the market would eventually stabilize with 2 or 3 remaining companies which are too big to bankrupt, or who people won't boycott because there's too much inertia and not enough alternatives.

If the market settled for instance on Dell and Apple, boycotting one would require rebuilding your entire infrastructure and way of doing things. This won't happen, so if such a situation is reached they can basically do whatever they want.

If we want a consumer friendly environment we need plenty of competition, and this means that bankrupting a company should be the absolute last resort.