The case was ELDRED V. ASHCROFT. Lawrence Lessig (and others) pointed out that the constitution only allows copyrights to be granted "for a limited time". SCOTUS responded that they couldn't give a shit what the constitution says. The decision was 7-2 so it's highly unlikely that the court will change it's mind anytime soon.

Those who enjoy having more money should benefit from all the luxuries that their money can buy them. Yet, being healthy must not be a luxury.

So people should have to work for worthless trinkets but never for anything that has real value? You are a harsh master, but fair. However, I do wonder if people will still work as hard once they realise their wages can't buy anything of real value.

It should be an universal right, that each and every person should benefit equally, independent of income or liquidity.

Socialism hasn't worked with any other market, why should it work with healthcare?

I hadn't realized there were so many advantages to having money. Next they'll be telling us that rich people get all the best houses too.

Nothing lasts forever, which is why there is no way to live sustainably. It's an entirely useless concept.

Enjoy what you have while it lasts, and make sure you have something lined up to replace it when it's gone. Are you concerned that one day there won't be anything else to follow up with? Tough. That day is certain to come because nothing lasts forever, including the human species.

Future generations will look back at us with scorn and wonder why we chose to be less when we could have been more.

They are also quite good at locking people up. If you want anything else done right you will have to do it yourself.

Aren't all those things... cultural...?

No. The details (like tea sets or the type of doll) may be cultural, but the types of mental and physical ability that are engaged by different types of play are not cultural. For example, when girls play with "dolls" they typically play out social interactions in which the salient features of the game are the social relationships between the characters. When boys play with "action figures" they typically act out hunt, contest, and combat scenarios in which the salient features of the game tend to be things like, who shot first, what got blown up, and who won.

Also worth keeping in mind that because this disease kills about 15,000 people a year in the US (and many tens of thousands world wide) every year of delay caused by over-regulation will kill many thousands of people.

Oil is inelastically priced. People will pay whatever the price is.

So why does the price of oil ever change, and why isn't it always $[insert some arbitrarily large number] a barrel? Does OPEC get together sometimes and decide they have enough money to last a while so the price can go down?

There are no goods that have strictly inelastic prices, and given enough time all goods have elastic prices. In the case of oil the price tends to be highly inelastic in the short term, but much more elastic in the long term.

If the price doubles today then people still have to get to work with the car they have, airlines still have to run their scheduled flights, and manufacturers still have to meet their outstanding orders, and it takes time to develop new energy sources. But in the longer term, people buy smaller cars, the price of travel goes up so the number of flights goes down, and fewer manufactured goods get made. So demand is elastic. Also, sources of oil that used to be uneconomical become economical (this is the reason OPEC lost the monopoly they had on the supply of oil in the 70s), and substitution of other energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power occurs. So supply is also elastic.

One thing that statists like you tend to forget is that governments are also artificial corporate entities that have no natural rights. They are just legal fictions created by people to serve their interests. So whining about greed and lack of patriotism when real people, who do have rights, say they don't feel like paying more tax to the government, is pointless. The government is just another corporation with no natural right to anything.

If you want to take everything down to the level of real people, who do have real rights, then here is what is going on:

Some people (like you for example) want some other people (like Ballmer for example) to cough up more money, so these other people are threatening to pack up and take their money somewhere else. End of story.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...

Won't work. Lessig tried to argue against retroactive copyright extension on the those grounds. The SCOTUS decided that this clause was just an explanatory preamble, that didn't actually limit the power of congress to grant exclusive rights.

I don't know how the law works in Sweden, but in most English speaking countries fraud requires some element of misrepresentation and some means to benefit from that misrepresentation. You don't have either in this case.

the Rules of Engagement state that they are only allowed to use deadly force if there is an imminent threat of death or injury

The ROE for ground troops on peace-keeping missions sometimes set the threshold that high. In an actual war the threshold is never set that high.

What this really means is that the people and infrastructure used in a cyber attack are now considered to be legitimate military targets. So as far as the laws of war go, very little justification would be needed for a counter attack against such targets. A counter attack would merely have to serve sufficient military purpose to justify any harm that might be done to non-combatants.

So, for example, assassinating people known to be involved in the cyber attack would be just fine, as long as the risk of hitting the wrong people were low enough. Of course that is unlikely to happen. A much more likely response would be the destruction of internet links out of the country involved.

No we already have schools that loose, and we have students that loose because they are forced to attend these failed institutions.

If students were free to move to another school then some schools would be shut down for lack of students. And that would be nothing but good.

It wasn't a technicality. A key part of the "overwhelming" evidence was the testimony of one guy, and a lot turned on whether that one guy was telling the truth. Turns out that one guy told the investigators a totally different story when they first interviewed him. That raises a substantive issue about his credibility and the credibility of the evidence he gave, not just a technical issue about whether some evidence was obtained in the right way.

The issue conservatives often complain about (actually it isn't just conservatives, just about everyone outside of the US thinks that this is an absolutely mental feature of the US legal system) is the exclusion of evidence that was obtained improperly regardless of whether the impropriety affects the credibility of the evidence.

For example, a murderer can say "Yes I killed her, and her head is in my fridge", the cops can then go and find the head in the guys fridge, only to see the freely given confession and conclusive physical evidence thrown out because someone forgot to tell the killer he was entitled to speak to a lawyer.

In other words, even if there is no doubt about the reliability of evidence, and even if the evidence is conclusive, US courts will sometimes throw out that perfectly good evidence just because someone didn't follow the correct procedures when they obtained it. That is what conservatives mean when they complain about someone getting off "on a technicality".

Not so much. Winter is just starting in the southern hemisphere. The equinox was March 20 so in Antarctica the sun only went down a few weeks ago.