He was one of the youngest professors ever at his University and was one who was experimented on by the CIA. There are some novelties here that exist other than him being a random school shooter.
Yikes! I just interviewed at Zume Seattle less than 3 months ago and they had over 100 head count open with plans for an office move that doubled the space. Wasn't the right place for myself at the time and I seemed to have dodged a bullet. Seems they banked a little to hard on their relationship with SoftBank and the promise of future funding.
Most legal plans offered, even through third parties, explicitly do not cover employee-employer disputes. This has been the case at both Microsoft and Amazon that I have seen.
Lets say you have a $100 stock with 100 shares outstanding.
The company can issue a dividend of $5 to all 100 shares costing $500. This results in a $95 share price and $5 of realized gain for each share.
The company could also buyback 5 shares at $100, also costing $500, and also increasing the share value. This is canceled though as the company loses approximately 5% of its value by spending that $500. The effect is that the share price is still worth $100, with each share now holding 5% more of the company than it did previously.
As someone at a google alternative, your second paragraph really hits home in nutshelling some experiences I have been through. It can feel dystopian when reality doesn't matter because the machine is big enough to keep turning on its own.
Looking back at the keynote where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, the progression from the iPod served as huge leverage and represented one of the core three components of the phones marketing strategy.
The iPhone was about combining your music player (that everybody already owned) and with your phone and then adding an incredibly smooth web experience. Without the iPod functionality, it would have still been a revolutionary phone, but the mass adoption and hype surrounding it would have been reduced.