Why would cab companies clean up their act, when they can just rely on government to prevent competition anyway - as, apparently the Nevada government did.

Absolutely. BitCoin wasn't designed to be an investment, it is intended as a means to store and transfer wealth.

The fact that some people made out like bandits investing is a side-effect of the system, not its reason for being.

Because "non-binding resolutions" are so impressive.

I'd also say that the group of people willing to install a non-default browser (not IE, not Safari) are also more likely than average to change default search providers.

What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.

Because goodness knows, nobody's been assaulted by a licensed taxi driver.

By "retire" I mean "not use anymore". Of course, we'll still be stuck supporting the legacy crap for decades to come. Much as we'll be stuck supporting HTML5 when the new shiny comes over the horizon.

It's basically just a bunch of new features that are wrapped up into a bundle with the label "version 5" slapped on it. It's usually accompanied by CSS3, which adds new features for styling stuff.

There are two reasons people like HTML5, in my experience. Firstly, the canvas element lets you do arbitrary drawing with javascript, opening up a large range of applications for pure-HTML that used to rely on stuff like Flash or Applets (most notably games). Secondly, HTML5 does a lot of stuff natively, that used to have to be added (somewhat hackishly) by javascript and UI libraries - form validation, colour pickers, date selectors. When you add CSS3 into the mix, you can make quite rich UIs with very little (if any) use of javascript.

Basically, HTML5 will let us retire a whole bunch of crufty old legacy hacks from the bad days (Javascript everywhere, Flash, Applets, etc)

When you get to international scale, tax is just like everything else; it's a competitive market. Once they have the size to make it feasible, corporations will go to whatever country offers them the best benefits for the least money, just the same as corporations inside the US shop around from state to state looking for the best tax deal.

It's no different to what happened in Soviet Russia with individuals, really. Those that were the most productive, and earning the most money, were those "taxed" the most. They didn't like that, so they left the country. Faced with the mass exodus of their most valuable citizens, the USSR made it illegal to leave. We're just seeing the US government go through the same cycle. Rather than control its own massive spending on military campaigns and welfare, the US is trying to squeeze more and more income out of their tax base, and their tax base is leaving the country. All this crying about "tax avoidance" is just the first step in trying to compel them to stay.

Then everyone says: "Hey look, the USA is ignoring international patent treaties. I guess we're not bound by them any more either." China sends the USA a gift basket.

This isn't the way I remember it - unless we're remembering different things. From what I recall, companies were forcing their employees to get a business number, and hiring them as contractors so as to avoid paying for entitlements like superannuation, holidays, etc. The Fair Work Ombudsman slapped them down.

In any case, you'll pay more tax as a company than you will as an individual - you will pay corporate tax on your company's profits, and then personal income tax in all money that you receive from your company. If you spend corporate money as if it was your own to dodge tax, then ASIC will want to have a long, hard talk with you, regardless of what the ATO does.

Then you'll drive every retail industry into the ground.

Say I'm an electronics store. I operate on a profit margin of about 2%, because there's really not that much margin in electronics (or most retail, except the high end). I buy $100,000 worth of stock. I sell that entire volume for $102,000, making myself $2000 profit. I then receive a tax bill based off my revenue of $100,000, instead of my actual income of $2,000.

And I'm sure a licensing requirement would have totally stopped that. I mean, he might have been willing to flaunt federal laws against sexual exploitation of a minor, but he would totally have respected state licensing requirements. Right?

That's pheasant. Although, traditionally, it was fine to harass peasants, but peasants weren't allowed to hunt pheasants.

Bloody English.

Same thing. It's inclusive, by being vague.

Yes, I'm sure that when they sat down to formulate legislative regulations on corporate finance records, they thoroughly intended that it be used for punishing fishermen who caught undersized fish.