Microsoft is trying the "you can't hold me responsible for yesterday's shooting because the gun is in my other pants" defense.

The law has _always_ held that if you are before the court, everything relevant to the case is before the court.

If this were not the case then the Tobacco and Asbestos companies could have just said "all those meeting minutes and research records are stored in our warehouse in mexico so ha ha, you all lose." Any company or person, on any issue, could just mail the evidence out of state or out of country and get off scott free.

That just never happened.

Just because the evidence is "on a computer" instead of "printed on paper" doesn't make the "other pants" defense viable.

The court is not reaching across a border. Microsoft is _here_. Microsoft does business _here_. The complaint is _here_, and the court is _here_. The proper legal response to "the other pants" gambit is to tell the guy in his shorts to send someone to go get whatever it is from those pants and bring it back.

Criminals don't just "move" their assets to other countries, they "hide" them because if it can be found it's on the table.

Every court. Every country. Every topic. From the beginning of time.

This is no different.

This isn't a case of the U.S. reaching across a border. Microsoft is _here_. Microsoft is doing business _here_. The court _here_ is ordering microsoft _here_ do produce documents _here_. Microsoft's claims that the docuements are "in their other pants" (e.g. on a server in Ireland) is immaterial because microsoft is _here_ and _microsoft_ owns those documents.

Now _if_ this were a case where a U.S. Court was ordering a company that was not _here_, say an Irish company that was _there_ in Ierland called Irish Pizza Delivery Co. to cough up emails even though they don't do any business here... that would be a huge over-step. That over-step is because they are _there_, or more correctly _not_ _here_, and the court is _here_.

This is _exactly_ the same reason that the U.S. Tobacco companies and Asbestos companies could not dodge legal responsibility by just shipping their money and internal paperwork to south america as soon as people started coughing.

It's always, without exception, a strategic move by the PR department, to encourage public chatter about some product.

As someone who actually had a product (they owned and managed) leak, I can tell you that it is never "always" a strategic move.

This might be orchestrated by the Microsoft PR team, but please don't assume that every leak is.

Maybe. Certainly with today's approach.

So a guy walking around with an artificial leg, a plastic heart valve, dentures and google glass ISN'T a cyborg? What is?

Seriously?

By the parent using the parent's bank card. By the kid splitting a larger card so he can give some amount to his buddy or combining several cards he got from his buddies.

I'm against a cashless society but not because there's any practical obstruction to it working. There isn't.

Shame you don't understand logical fallacies.

"Appeal to consequences" means an argument that something must be false because the consequences would be bad. I made no such argument. I said, "we'd better be damn sure we're right" before undertaking an effort with such negative consequences.

Unproven is not the same as false, nor is disputing unfounded conclusions the same as calling the conclusions untrue. This is one of the central fallacies that the alarmists have been perpetrating: that anyone who says, "hold on, it looks like you should investigate this a little more thoroughly" is a "denier" claiming that the hypotheses are false.

Climate alarmists may yet find sufficient scientific evidence to justify drastic action. I claim only that the ringing of the alarm bells is premature and I even suggest a form of acceptable evidence which, if found, would sustain the yet unproven claims.

Unfortunately science only works when scientists are at liberty to try as hard as they can to demonstrate counter-examples to your theory. The whole "denier" politics discourages folks from asking the questions scientists must ask in order to sustain or refute the hypotheses on the table. Your politics have gotten in the way of actually proving whether you're right.

Not exactly. When someone with good credit pays off his "cash back" card at the end of the month, the bank passes on a portion of the merchant fees. That's the "cash back."

Of course, if you use your card as an unsecured loan for longer than the billing cycle then you pay interest. And if you're late paying you pay late fees. You're a fool to do that in anything but a dire emergency, and your parents, friends and colleagues have warned you about it all your life, but you're free to live your life any way you want to.

What would we like about the dollar coin? Except by sight it's nearly indistinguishable from a quarter worth, well, a quarter of what a dollar is worth. And when we see it... it's ugly. I want to see George Washington on my dollars, not obscure companions of explorers however worthy they may be.

I do think it'd be reasonable to replace the penny and nickle with a better designed $1 coin and a $5 coin. Then the new system of cash transactions in tenths of a dollar instead of hundredths of a dollar would make sense and the universe wouldn't end because of it.

Pre-paid debit card.

Well, I don't know if anything in economics is provable per se, but Europe (more specifically the UK) is going through this debate right now. The EU is a giant free trade zone. How valuable is that? People who do business all think it's essential, but people are who are just employees aren't so sure. Let the debate commence.

Whatever the reason, they still boosted domestic production and economic growth.

That may have been true in the USA (hard to say given the lack of in-depth statistics back then and difficulty of knowing the impacts of such things even today) but it probably wasn't the case abroad. Sure, the USA didn't care one whit back then about the impact of tariffs on British or European manufacturers, nor did they care much if Americans couldn't afford superior foreign-made products for a while. They valued economic independence more, and given their situation that was understandable.

But putting military concerns to one side, free trade theory is correct. Those tariffs made the world as a whole economically worse off. If governments could be trusted not to use their economies as weapons of war, it'd be better for everyone if tariffs were reduced and removed, because it makes people wealthier in the long run and that's why every so often countries and trading blocs try to engage in free trade treaties.

Of course the problem is, governments do so love using economics as a weapon .... the USA more than most. So tariffs will continue to have non-economic justifications for the forseeable future, of the form "yes it makes us less wealthy, but the upsides are worth it".

Banning loss leaders (a.k.a. market dumping) seems like an inherently attractive fix to improve free markets, but it's fraught with difficulty.

The most obvious problem is R&D costs. I do market research and decide that people would be willing to pay $100 for a widget. But said widget does not yet exist, so I spend a million dollars to develop it, and then start selling it for $100 a pop. I calculate it will take several years to break even but that's OK, because I'm a businessman who thinks long term and we like those sorts of people don't we?

I think you can see where this is going - the business runs at a loss for several years, to build the market and spread out the development costs. Eventually I can reduce the price of my widget because I paid off the R&D costs. But until then I'm still in the red.

Amazon is no different. If they make no profit, it's because they choose to charge low prices, build the market and develop new products all at the same time, instead of cashing out. Though actually I think you're distorting history by saying they "muscled their way into the market". Amazon was one of the first online stores. There was no market to muscle in to, nobody else was doing what they were doing. Bezos pretty much created a new market from scratch.

And sometimes it is, despite the supposed inefficiencies. That's what the French government thinks, and there are similar opinions in other European countries.

If governments could reflect the diversity of opinions in their population perfectly ever time, the world would be a simpler place.

In practice they tend to reflect the opinions of a very specific group of people - politicians (closely followed by bureaucrats) who are e.g. typically older and wealthier than the average man on the street.

There's an interesting article by an author on the topic, called "Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you". Worth reading, at least.

If it isn't better, why would you do it?

Small online book shop - you didn't hear about them so .... they don't exist? Is that what you're implying?

Read this article about a commercial dispute between Amazon and a large publisher (Hachette). It was on the Colbert Report, a US news comedy show. The hosts book was caught up in this dispute and so he told people to go buy his book and others at Powell's Books, which I can only describe as a small (relative to Amazon) online book store.