Is Vice Media the Coming News Platform?

In a rare but surely not totally unprecedented move for a top lawyer

-- but even noted at Above the Law --

James H. Schwab, see also here,

chairman of the Paul, Weiss law firm media and entertainment group,

is to leave the law firm to join Vice Media as Co-President.

We read about Vice Media at Wikipedia:

"In June 2014, it was reported that Time Warner was negotiating to acquire a minority stake in Vice Media; among the company's plans were to give Vice control over the programming of HLN—a spin-off network of CNN which had recently struggled in its attempts to re-focus itself as a younger-skewing, social media-oriented news service. However, the deal fell through as the companies were unable to agree on a proper valuation,[6] and VICE chose to partner with A&E Networks — a joint venture of Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company, for a 10% minority stake in Vice Media for $250 million, keeping VICE independent."

DealBook at the New York Times has the story at Vice Poaches a Lawyer from Paul, Weiss as Co-President.

Law is a Seamless Web as Published in Four Volumes Tweeted at Twitter

Law is a Seamless Web tweeted at Twitter for the 4 books of the series at http://bit.ly/1vWaSen  http://bit.ly/1GqQZ7t  http://bit.ly/1uUSBiy  http://bit.ly/1ACxR2i 

Investment, Money and Berkshire Beyond Buffett at the Stanford Rock Center

We retweeted
Berkshire Beyond Buffett

Corporate Governance Conference at Stanford Directors' College 2015 for Directors & Senior Executives of Publicly Traded Firms

The ultimate corporate governance conference, the  21st Annual Stanford Directors' College for directors and senior executives of publicly traded firms, will take place June 21-23, 2015 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California.

See for background The Directors College and The Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, also at Twitter's StanfordRock.

Italy's Head Man Renzi Seeks to Reform Italy and Pays U.S. President Obama Economic Compliments

If we pay attention carefully to Italy's new 39-year-old head of state,
many people in America may be judging U.S. President Barack Obama wrongly.

We have just been reading Roger Cohen's perspicacious article in the New York Times Sunday Review at Trying to Reinvent Italy.

Cohen writes (excerpted statements):

[as regards America] "I asked Renzi why the [new Italian economic] legislation has an English name. “Because I like what Obama did,” he said. “The most interesting things he’s done have been on the domestic front. He took an economy in crisis in 2009, intervened, relaunched growth, and created jobs, all things that Europe has not succeeded in doing.” ...

[as regards Britain and France]  "[Renzi is] the only new game in town, with Britain caught in a debilitating debate over a possible exit from the European Union and France turning in circles under weak leadership." ...

[as regards Germany] “Here a lot of people have accused Merkel of being the guilty one in the crisis,” Renzi said. “But the fault is not hers. It’s ours. We got ourselves into this. If we had done labor reform 10 years ago, when Germany did it, we would have been a lot better off.” 

[as regards Italy] ... “First I must put my own country in order,” Renzi acknowledged. “Otherwise I will never be credible.”

Check out the article to get a different look of the world than you may be used to. Read Trying to Reinvent Italy.

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Stanford Lawyer Features Intellectual Property Law and Innovation

For those readers out there interested in intellectual property law,
the new Fall print Issue (#91) of the Stanford Lawyer
features
"IP Law and Innovation - with Mark A. Lemley and A. Douglas Melamed"
(it is online at that link).

Wearables and Wearable Technology are Strong in Coming

Wearables and wearable technology are strong in coming.

We have created the Wearable Technology Wizard blog,
mirrored at WeTechWi.

Take a look.

Clear Individual Search Items from Keyword Drop-Down Box in Mozilla Firefox

A significant irritant in Mozilla Firefox is the "keyword history box" which persists on dropping down previously entered words identical or similar to the one the user is entering, thus detracting the USER from what the USER IS DOING.

There may be people for whom this feature is useful, fine, but those of us who find it a greatly distracting nuisance should not be forced to put up with it!

Why the people at Mozilla Firefox seem to prefer tyrannical force rather than providing democratic and simple toggles to turn features on or off is a mystery to this writer, and that applies to the entire software programming industry.

The whole original idea of the Mozilla Firefox browser was to let the USER do what he wants! Search options and full customizability are essential!

Our solution: We disabled the "remember history" function, but keywords kept appearing.  We then held down the up and down arrow buttons while the cursor is focused on the search bar, then pressed and held down the delete button and that gets rid of the individual stored search keywords and phrases quickly.

See online Clear recent searches from the Search bar and especially at the bottom there, the how-to material on "Clearing individual search items".

The serious user wants full and easy "toggled" personal customizability.
Why not create a separate "Beginners" Mozilla Firefox for the rest of the world?

Removing Invasive Search Bar Additions in Mozilla Firefox 34

The people at Mozilla Firefox continue not to get the basic fact that many users do not want invasive browser popups or messages of any kind disturbing their work.

The newly introduced search box confusion is just another example of veritable incompetents at work who ignore user wishes.

THE USER's WORK should be in the foreground,
not what some adolescent programmer wants!!!!!

AskVG.com explains how to get rid of the abomination quickly.

Use Method 2 there by changing your about:config settings via the address bar.

Change
browser.search.showOneOffButtons user set boolean true
to
browser.search.showOneOffButtons user set boolean false
and you remove the nonsense thought up by someone with time on their hands.

The search bar now works as before.

New Electronic Services Value Added Tax (VAT) Rules (and Record Keeping) in Effect in the European Union Starting 1 January 2015

European Union Value Added Tax (VAT) Rules (and corresponding record keeping) for telecommunications, radio and TV broadcasting and electronic services supplied in the EU Member States change starting January 1, 2015.

Under the new rules, the location of the customer is determinative for the VAT applied.

For example, we today received an email notice from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) about the new rules, which informed us, inter alia:

"On January 1, 2015, European Union (EU) tax laws regarding the taxation of digital products (including eBooks) will change: previously, Value Added Tax (VAT) was applied based on the seller’s country – as of January 1st, VAT will be applied based on the buyer’s country. As a result, starting on January 1st, KDP authors must set list prices to be inclusive of VAT.  We will also make a one-time adjustment for existing books published through KDP to move from VAT-exclusive list prices to list prices which include VAT. We'll put these changes into effect starting January 1st; you may always change your prices at any time, but you do not need to take any action unless you wish to do so."

Accordingly, one can see that the new rules have very broad implications.

See the European Commission website page on VAT on electronic services.

For practical aspects of implementing the new rules in daily business,
see Tax Briefing at Revenue.ie
and
Taxamo.