My response to the parent was intended to point out that members of congress sending letters to foreign leadership is most certainly illegal because congress does not have the authority to negotiate with foreign leaders. It wasn't intended to be a comment on the intellectual dishonesty of the Obama administration.

Negotiating treaties is the sole purview of the executive branch. The constitution gives the Senate the right to RATIFY a treaty with a 2/3rds vote but not the power to negotiate them.

The main rationale behind wedding the eBook price to the physical price is the publishers relationship to their physical distributors. In the same way that the video game industry is dependent on the marketing, and promotion of GameStop the book publishers are dependent on their relationship with their brick and mortar store. This was one of the reasons behind the publishers motivations for their price fixing scheme with Apple. It was at the behest of the book stores.

The thing is they are kind of stuck. A significant portion of their profits are still made from physical media because they make more per sale off of those goods so they can't afford pissing off their retailers and having all of their new releases relegated to the back shelf by the bathrooms.

The thing is that at the scale Google and co operate at even a minute different in tax rates can make it economically viable to hide the money offshore. If you lower the tax rate to accommodate their demands you create a race to the bottom as every country trying to get those tax dollars lowers their tax rate to less than their "competitors." And who are the losers in this arrangement? We are. The people who have to foot the deficit created in the governments budget on account of lost tax revenue.

As for the statistic about tax laws and regulation the US has over 660,000 pages. The UK should be weak sauce compared to that!

This is just dumb. Firstly this is in Nevada. A place with precious little water to spare for a hydro system as well as a myriad of obscenely complicated water rights dating back over a hundred years. Even looking crosswise at the local rivers for use in hydro generation would cost you more money than the railroad system proposed here, and that doesn't even begin to describe the outcry environmentalists will have in the US over the construction of a dam. All said and done a new hydro system will probably cost as much as a nuclear plant.

The elastic layer itself is supposed to contained under another normal layer of material that supposedly breaks away in the event of an impact to expose the adhesive layer underneath. I don't believe that they just sprayed the top of the car with glue.

A statement made with no understanding of section 230 of the DMCA at all. The section that clearly states that platform providers are NOT liable for copyright infringement on their site so long as they were not found to be willingly complicit in its uploading. The case against Mega Upload hinges on secondary liability, a concept that doesn't exist in the current copyright statutes, and the fact that Mega employees were uploading copyrighted content to the site.

So long as no one can prove that actual Google employees were explicitly aiding the infringement of copyright on their service then YouTube is protected by section 230.

I see this argument a lot around Slashdot, and while I would agree that this is typically correct for the top end of the labor pool it fails to take into account that an influx of cheap labor impacts people who are still gaining experience. Even if you are completely amazing at your chosen profession I would wager that your abilities, like everyone else's, where built up through time and experience. Time granted by a manager who had faith in your ability to grow.

If an influx of cheap labor prevents the more inexperienced people from gaining their expertise then the country will eventually be left barren of skills as the imported labor takes their skills and experience home with them at the end of their tenure.

This doesn't just apply to people coming straight out of college either. Even people who have some experience will be affected if they are replaced with a foreign visa holder before they can make the move from technical expert to leadership role.

Hate to break it to you but this is false. Since the 90s shareholders can sue the senior executives for failing to maximize the profit of the company. There are certain types of incorporation that will allow you to bypass this, such as incorporating as a B corp as opposed to an S corp, but this is not common.

Contracts have limitations on what they can allow a party to do. Contracts are found to have unenforceable conditions all the time, and there are also limitations on what rights can be signed away. Just look at Illinois, which is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against Facebook for its attempt to tag people in photos without their permission.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

A clause in a contract stating that Apple has the power to take your music permanently in exchange for using their service temporarily is almost certainly unenforceable.