Dear goodness. And there are tens if not hundreds of people involved in trying to prove/disprove this case and they're all getting some hefty money. What a waste of human intellect and time.
I wonder if it's possible to measure energy spent in court cases? One of the things that amazed me about spam was how many resources we spend just transmitting it across the internet, it's kind of tragic when you think about the waste, but also kinda awesome that everything still works, despite relatively poor resource allocation.
You'd have to define what you mean a lot more carefully. Certainly any sort of network transmission costs would be dominated by, say, climate control in the court room.
I think the parent commenter was just using spam as an example of an activity that uses a disproportionate amount of energy compared to it's value.
The court room climate control costs would likely be dominated by energy expended for every involved individuals' commutes, which would likely be dominated by the opportunity cost of all of those individuals doing something more productive (if you want to go that far)
When you have to draw the borders between two giant companies, you are going to spend significant resources drawing those borders, but the total time spent may be a very tiny amount of effort compared to what the companies are worth, or the long-term costs of just letting the borders be undefined.
> They're all getting some hefty money. What a waste of human intellect and time.
Unfortunately, the purpose of human intellect and time has become to get more money, so what they're doing is by definition not a waste, but the only possible outcome.
