Actually, the big differentiator is that American companies owe their older union employees the pensions they are contractually obligated to pay for, but the CEO's pissed all the pension funds away on failed buyouts in the 80's/90's. The CEO's that made those choices aren't even running the companies anymore, so the new guys are left holding the bag all the way around.

The foreign companies coming here are starting out with fresh labor forces that don't have that kind of drain on their resources.

Yes, you can literally pay the executives nothing, because most executives earn most of their compensation through stock options. Which means they no longer care about the long term health of the company they are running, their only concern is their short-term stock options and their golden parachute when they bail out after running the company into the ground. Foreign companies don't give their executives anything close to the kinds of compensation American CEO's demand.

To top off the outrage, if the American CEO is a really special kind of a-hole executive, they'll arrange to buy up the company they just destroyed for bargain basement prices and sell off the pieces to other companies for a healthy profit!

You also might want to conceive of the fact that corporations have more responsibilities than just to efficiency & stock holders, despite how most try to downplay any such ideas, a company has responsibilities to it's community and it's workers too. There is nothing appealing about the notion of companies constantly roving the globe destroying their environments as they suck every last bit of profitability out of the populace before moving on to the next new cheap labor pool. It's funny how the great industrialists had more of a sense of community contribution than most modern CEO's.

Unions are as equally corrupt as the company management or the government, but why do only two of those ever get the scorn of anti-union people like you?

Most companies are run by CEO's with no loyalty to the company beyond what their stock options are worth, and will actively sabotage their operations if it will drive up their short-term stock prices. How is that sort of behavior better?

DOCSIS 3.0 modems can carry gigabit data over coax. DOCSIS 3.1 is expected to be capable of multi-gigabit service. The cable ISP loves their tiers though, so they artifically limit your connection speed and tie that to a billing level. It has fairly little to do with what the hardware is capable of.

You behave as though the ebook is being composed letter by letter by some team of pensioned union workers and not 99% just a .doc file being run through a converter. Sure, there might be a bit of touch up to the final copy, but it's not the insurmountable work you make it out to be.

I'd challenge your perceptions there, because most self published ebooks on Amazon sell for 1/10th the cost of a publisher produced eBook. Yet there is a hungry market for books that they are serving, regardless of their warts and grammatical errors. Publishers, as they currently do business, are standing in the way of that market, in fact blatantly ignoring it for their own higher profit "established" authors.

I can, perhaps, agree with that, except apparently computer files are more expensive then paper since most eBooks are priced higher than the paperback version, and priced much higher when released at the same time as a hardcover.

Typically those are books that are being 'self' published and Amazon is just providing a store front for the unscrupulous jerks who are repackaging public domain stuff. I don't think it's Amazon's fault their system is being abused this way.

This. I don't know how Mr. Stross can complain that eBooks are being sold at a loss when they are ROUTINELY priced at $9.99 while the paperback is $6.99 to $7.99. Often while a book is in hardcover for $15-$18, the eBook will sell for $12-$15. If publishers aren't making a profit with those prices then they suck at business and deserve to be shuttered.

The aristocracy tastes like chicken.

All I can say is thank < insert deity of preference here > that Aristotle, Caesar, Gengis Khan and all the other people throughout history never had a "right to be forgotten" or we'd know absolutely nothing about our past. Who's to say what a future historian may or may not find useful, and who are we to rob our descendants of the legacy of our lives? There are historians and archaeologists who'd kill for any kind of day to day minutia of just daily life in various ancient civilizations.

Destroyed slave culture! We must protect slavery so that our children can continue to live and thrive in slave culture! It's our moral responsibility!

You've never played Star Wars: The Old Republic, have you. The majority of the problems they've had with development has been wrangling their 3rd party game engine to fit their game concept.

The art & the story are hard to do, but picking the right game engine can make or break your game as well.

Seriously?

1. a) Nobody knows exactly what information the NSA collects. They might very well have an extensive workup on everyone in Congress.
2. b) It's not a matter of better or not better. It's a matter of access to sensitive information & ability to effect the nations laws. Nobody is going to blackmail Joe Schmoe to pass laws benefiting them but they certainly might Joe Congressman.

So yes, spying on anyone without a warrant is bad, but spying on government officials is worse.

A member of Congress or the Senate on a day to day basis will deal with 100x the sensitive material you will. Furthermore there's the question of who gets access to the records & can they abuse it to blackmail govt. officials or otherwise effect policy decisions.

So yes you are not a special snowflake.