While I think that the laws around Copyright need massive reform, I do have a problem with the "not our job to plug loopholes" mentality.

It is impossible to create a law free of loopholes. The law is static, and people are not. There will always be a way around the letter of the law, and that means that a country that forces itself to be bound by the letter of the law basically ends up not being ruled by laws at all.

What the Supreme Court needs to do is issue a ruling that says, "We find that the tax shelter employed by Acme Corp to be completely legal and compliant with IRS guidelines. Nevertheless, we fine it $1B anyway just to prove the point that companies should pay taxes, a figure that is 3x higher than what they would have paid if they just took the marginal rate times their gross revenue without applying any deductions at all." Sure, it would be arbitrary and capricious, and that is the point. Lawyers would then realize that if they pushed things too far, they could end up getting their heads lopped off, so to speak, and that would lead to moderation, which is what makes laws work well.

I know a judge who gave a presentation on ethics in his area of practice to a room full of lawyers. He said that the theme of 95% of the Q&A was around identifying just how much a lawyer could push the rules before they'd get sanctioned. It would be like walking up to a police officer and asking them if you'd get pulled over for going 60 in a 55 zone, then asking if 65 was ok, then if 70 was ok, and then if 69.5 was ok, and so on. There was really no interest in just doing the right thing for its own sake.

That's like saying that a Superbowl ad is only worth the money if lots of people click on it. Oh wait, you can't click on TV ads, and yet companies have considered them valuable for a long time.

The point is that from a marketing experience the XBox gets's MS's name out there. The 30-year-old playing games on the XBox goes into work and gets to make technology purchasing decisions. You want them to be thinking about MS.

So, even if the XBox just barely broke even, it might have value beyond the direct revenue. That is the sort of thing that MBAs tend to ignore - the intangibles. Will Virgin Galactic ever make money? I'm skeptical. On the other hand, might it lead more people to fly on Virgin Airlines? Quite possibly, even though no MBA could prove it.

I can certainly echo that, but the long-term effects are even worse. Companies that get into this mode end up doing layoffs and reorganizations so frequently that nobody stays in a role for a long time. Everybody adjusts to this, which leads to some really bad culture changes.

Any big company tends to get bureaucratic. The official way of getting things done tends to be slow as a result, but that doesn't have to be a problem since everybody learns how to navigate the bureaucracy. Employees can either use this knowledge to quickly jump through hoops when there is something urgent to be done, or to work around the system by calling in favors (and granting them in turn). A common term used in big companies is "influencing people" - reflecting that rarely does anybody have the actual managerial power to make something happen that they need to happen.

The problem is that once you have layoffs and frequent re-orgs the employees never develop this level of organizational knowledge. Heck, at work my IM contact list is still grouped by the names of departments that went away 5 years ago, though the people in the groupings are still strangely relevant today. When something needs to be done, people need to figure out how to get it done like they are new hires even if they've been around for 10 years. Also, nobody is in a position to ask for a favor - you never work with anybody in any particular role long enough to actually be able to "influence" them - everything gets done by the book.

Instead of focusing all that internal networking on figuring out how to get work done, the internal networking effort all goes into understanding what is going on (as you describe), and trying to gather intelligence on where the next cuts are coming. Relationship-building isn't about team interaction - it is about finding people who can help you find a job should you lose your own. Half the socializing at work ends up being with people who don't even work at the company any longer.

All of this is horrible for morale, and for productivity as well.

I'm not in favor of making Google take down search results, and I'm not in favor of affirmative action either for somewhat similar reasons.

I agree, but we still manage to get by without issuing federal licenses to tree owners.

I just don't see the need to regulate low-flying drones at all (1000'). I can see the need to come up with a more workable way to handle aircraft of any type including drones at higher altitudes, since a drone getting sucked into an engine can cause serious problems or death for hundreds of people. Frankly, the FAA's approaches aren't really adequate even for small aircraft, which is why the whole general aviation industry is dying out. They need to get past "see and avoid" which is basically just another way of washing their hands of doing anything to proactively prevent collisions.

Because every employer will treat you that way, and their money is still green?

Well, the choice is live with the problem or do something to help mitigate it.

That's the reasoning. I can't say I'm a fan of this approach, but fixing the root cause isn't really possible until we can control everybody's thoughts and actions.

Sure, but a drone's shape and materials will probably be less likely to cause damage than a baseball or other more common object flying through the air (like a tree branch).

The drone is designed to fly - it is going to be light and flimsy.

And that was my whole point. The problem is that in the meantime you still have to deal with the damage.

I'm not sure why they'd be waiting for the US to do it first, but sure.

Look at it the other way around. Suppose that somebody has reason to think that Google has been collecting private data about Germans illegally. They sue Google. Google says they don't have to produce any evidence to the court, since Google doesn't store any data or documents relevant to its German operations in Germany.

Allowing this kind of argument will just lead every single company everywhere to move all their records retention and datacenters around so that nothing relevant is stored in a country that it is relevant to. They could send the US paperwork to Germany, and the German paperwork to the US, for example, or move it all to some friendly shelter.

Courts don't like shell games, so they just tell the company that figuring out how to comply is its problem, and to produce the documents/etc.

How does one prove that a business used those resources to make those determinations?

If I send out a job application I don't get a letter back saying, "thank you for your job application - we wanted to hire you but the manager didn't like the color of your hair." I simply don't get a response, or if I do it doesn't speak to whether any determinations were made, or at most simply states that I wasn't the best candidate for the job.

Ditto when losing a job - they just say that they no longer require your services.

Companies learned a LONG time ago that if they don't say anything, you don't have anything to sue them over.

And that was the whole point of my post in the first place.

We can't fix the reader, so we fix the technology since it is something we actually can fix.

Agree, but fixing the root cause of this is MUCH harder than removing some search results.

Heck, getting gay marriage legalized is probably an easier cultural change than getting people to treat information they hear with appropriate skepticism and giving people a chance. Actually, if we could fix that then getting gay marriage legalized would be a simple follow-on...

Excellent. Then as long as you restrict yourself to selling your products in Antartica and locating all your operations there, you'll be fine.

If you sell elsewhere, then you'll be fine to the extent that the armies of Antartica make the rest of the world stand in awe of its ability to bring freedom and the Antartic legal system to their shores.

Nope. Every nation on earth maintains double-standard when it comes to this sort of thing. Ultimately, you have to pick a side.