Please follow up with every sarcastic expression of sympathy you can muster. To start: "I'm playing the world's smallest violin for him."

Yes, AdBlock Plus reportedly does disable that tab.

Any time someone thinks they've idiot-proofed anything, the universe takes that as a challenge to design a bigger idiot.

I believe that Amazon has a conventional physical presence in New York - they have to have offices somewhere, and lucky New York gets to play host (and charge the sales tax).

They aren't cutting any customers off. What they're cutting off is sellers going through the Amazon Affiliates program. It would be very different.

Amazon could boycott North Carolina themselves. This would have no appreciable benefit for Amazon and would not result in any significant change in the legal situation; other corporations without any pre-existing 'affiliate program' would gain Amazon's market share and, lo and behold, would have exactly the same effect as Amazon's current action is having. Withdrawing entirely from the North Carolina market would be a completely irrational move on their part with no moral benefit. Amazon has not the slightest moral obligation to hang around incurring costs in order to help out its affiliates in making the affiliates' business model work in North Carolina.

That still wouldn't get Amazon to restore its NC affiliates, even if North Carolina made sales tax information perfectly free and instantly accessible at any moment. Amazon would still be forced to collect sales tax in North Carolina, due to having those affiliates constituting a 'physical presence' by the proposed NC law. By remaining an Internet retailer with no physical presence in the state, they do not have to charge the sales tax.

It's not about the technical difficulty. It's about the competitive disadvantage Amazon would accrue due to having an in-state physical presence. Other e-tailers would be able to undercut them simply by not having any physical presence in North Carolina.

Right! Public health inspectors have no place coming into PRIVATE restaurants! Just think of how much money the poor restaurateurs could save if they didn't have to put up with those intrusive inspections, citing them for things like 'chefs not washing hands' or 'seafood kept in unrefrigerated piles on a dirt floor next to the catbox.'

World War Three. After that one, there's not much left to form an economy from anyhow.

There would be no point to not selling to NC residents. North Carolina is claiming that the independent affiliates count as a 'physical presence' for Amazon, meaning Amazon has to pay sales tax on anything sold in the state. Amazon can eliminate that qualifier by eliminating its contracts with North Carolina businesses, freeing Amazon to continue to do business tax-free in the state. Refusing to do business entirely would only hurt Amazon more without particularly adding much more pressure.

Google is combining forces with Hulu. "An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy!" Google rationalizes their participation on the grounds that there's too much information in the world to efficiently search, so by eliminating one rich source of data (California), they can reduce the amount of information they need to index and thus keep their search results more relevant, which they consider a good thing.

If I request in this comment that people not respond to it, for how many people will the default behavior be responding to it? Please do not respond to this comment.

... of de programming language that your code doesn't compile!

So that 'one by one' response boils down to repeating several times your opposition to abortion at all. Got it. Fortunately, people are not forced to abide by your opinions. I take the point of view that a functioning human life requires an active human brain; we accept brain death as a distinction of the end of life, so the inauguration of brain activity can be taken as the beginning of a human life. Until there are alpha waves (or some other test for ongoing neural activity), I consider a fetus a potential life, but not an actualized one. This happens to take place around the end of the second trimester. There has to be some point at which there was not an independent life before and now there is one. Some people put this at conception, which means that birth control pills are a form of active murder, since they prevent fertilized embryos from implanting in the lining of the womb. I put it at the start of consistent neural activity.

What, nobody watches The Meaning of Life anymore?