Agreed, I can't say I have the feeling they lost their focus. When it comes to their core products (Search, Maps) they're still miles ahead of the competition. And for the rest they offer a very decent offering (Gmail, Docs, Google+, Android, etc). Not much better or worse than the competition there, they still manage to stay at the top.

Can't say that of Microsoft - falling behind with Windows (they still have the critical mass though), IE caught napping by FF and Chrome, totally lost the mobile market, and the rest of their products are generally faltering and also-runs at best. Office is arguably the best in it's league but the competition is catching up quickly, with "more than good enough for the home user" type products. Not much room for innovation in Office too.

Amazon is a company that relies on two core businesses, and doesn't seem to expand much beyond that.

The first is being an online retailer. Started with books, added a host of other products - yet essentially it's still the same kind of business. Whether you sell books or CDs or furniture or houshold electronics or whatever doesn't matter very much - the products look different but the process is the same.

The second is their cloud computing business. They have numerous offerings there, from dedicated servers to computing power for hire to various cloud storage services - however in essence it is the same kind of business, and their various offerings often rely on one another. And of course their cloud computing business is a great support for the online retail business, which also needs a lot of computing power and networking.

Outside those two businesses, I don't know what Amazon is doing. They seem to be pretty much limited to those two pillars.

Google's and Microsoft's behavious are very similar.

Google makes heaps of money with their search engine and advertising business; MS makes heaps of money with their Windows and Office products.

Both are extending into all kinds of related and not so related ventures.

Only difference there is that MS tends to go for already established business (XBox gaming console, Bing search engine, Zune music player) while Google is searching for new opportunities (networking with balloons and dark fibre; advanced automation with self driving cars, etc).

the basics are the same: make a lot of money in one product, use those massive profits to extend into other businesses, or simply to have some fun (not all of Google's experiments seem all to serious from a pure commercial pov).

Agreed, but that's a whole different issue.

As you're talking about China, are you talking about pirates that are commercial businesses reselling those works? Or just individuals that like to share their stuff with friends and friends of friends?

No issue there. Changing a few letters in Harry Potter doesn't make it your work, either. Under copyright, copies don't have to be exact (otherwise taping a song from radio would never have been an issue), it has to be very similar. Likewise a band playing covers of another band: they're different, some notes are wrong, rhythms are slightly off, yet it's still the same song.

Furthermore it's fully legal to get inspiration from someone else's work - and use elements of copyrighted works in your own works. You just have to make sure it is obviously a different work.

That just targets the theaters where the offending recording is made, not the person making the recording. All it does is making theaters more vigilant against people smuggling in cameras.

And then I don't get the point of those cam rips. I've downloaded a few, but didn't get further than five minutes into the movie as the quality is so terrible. Low res, poor sound - just not watchable.

Please let them patent it! Then no-one else will use anything like it for fear of patent infringement.

That sounds like broker fees - when you or me order a broker (or your bank) to buy or sell a stock.

AFAIK these HFT are commissioned by the banks/brokers themselves (using money from depositors of course), not ordered by some third party, and as such there is no-one but themselves who could pay for a transaction fee.

I think that's a serious chunk of cash to be paid just to use MPEG-2 decoding.

Considering there are billions of DVD players on this planet, plus billions of general computing devices (such as PCs, laptops, tablets, phones) and TV's that can decode MPEG-2 out of the box.

To those MPEG people really rake in several billions a year just in license fees? Or is that 2.40 including a serious overhead fee from the Raspberry Pi resellers?

Now just hope that my devices can handle the VP9 decoding... it does handle H264 just fine (likely has some special hardware to decode that). And just have to see whether VP9 decoding hardware will be included.

And that commission of course comes out of the profit the trades make (the money comes from somewhere - and the only source of income for HFT is the margins they make on their transactions), and a transaction tax lowers profit, with that the room for such commissions.

A tax on every transaction would do the job. It doesn't have to be much, 0.01% or so will do - it eats away most if not all the profits made by HFT. And create a nice extra income for the government - must be welcome nowadays, especially as it's an easy sell of "taxing those evil bankers!"

Indeed HFT trades with HFT, there is no money in that. Or at least not much, as they all chase the same fractions of a cent.

The flash crashes as I understand are partly caused by all HFT systems using essentially the same algorithm, and as a result movements amplify really quickly. If there would be several radically different decision making algorithms in the market this shouldn't be much of a problem, as wrong decisions by one are taken advantage of by another, so the other can make a profit (directly punishing the bad decision of the one algorithm), and such market movements are smoothed out.

Which takes me back to original: why bother? It seems that in this respect both codecs are equivalent. VP9 is marketed as "not patent encumbered" but there almost certainly are patents that cover bits and pieces of the codec, just considering the sheer amount of patents out there.

So now the status appears to be that both are equivalent in patent coverage, both have similar performance in video quality and compression, but H264/265 is widely used and well supported by most modern hardware, while V9 needs a heavy lifting software solution making it virtually useless on lower powered systems like mobile devices. From consumer/end user pov that means H264/265 has the clear edge over V9.