Their complaint is about price-fixing from January 2004 to January 2010. You couldn't get a DVD-R drive for under $20 back in 2009.

"Maybe it's time for the US to take the hint and stop this barbaric and medieval practice?"

Maybe it's time for the US to take the hint and start manufacturing their own propofol and other drugs of major importance.

The schools are bad because they can't attract good teachers to the area due to the high cost of living, and they're not willing to double or triple the salaries to bring in the good teachers.

In this case, the father wanted them to get the vaccine but the mother didn't. The parents disagreed, the court broke the tie, it didn't impose its will against both parents.

They need to bring back the working model requirement. If you can't produce a working model, maybe your idea won't work exactly as written, but if your patent would block others from making a variation which works.

For cases where the working model is too expensive or time-consuming for the inventor to build, grant the patent provisionally with the requirement that a working model must be produced within 7 years. If no working model is produced by then, the patent automatically goes up for auction (alternatively the inventor can sell it or put it up for auction before that), with auction proceeds going to the inventor. Whoever buys that patent has to produce a working model before they can sue anybody for infringement.

With that system, the inventor can still get paid for what they invent even if building a working model is beyond their capabilities.

So what if it's not really 15 minutes for a colonoscopy? The 15 minutes was just an example to demonstrate a point, which is that for various procedures the payment is based on an assumed X minutes for a particular procedure although it actually takes X/5 minutes.

Yes, the writer could have done a better job on choosing numbers more consistent with reality, but the point they're making still stands.

You apparently work for somewhere like Microsoft, Intel, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or HP, where most of their employees in the US are US citizens, and they pay H1B workers the same as US citizens.

But most H1B visas are used by big outsourcers like Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and Tata. Making $100,000/year while working for them is way out of the ordinary for anybody who isn't in management.

H1B workers have to pay the same level of taxes as a US citizens, including Social Security which they normally won't be able to collect unless they eventually get green cards or US citizenship.

"There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another."

That is the L1 visa, used for management. They use that to send the project managers and executives to the US. But the on-site developers have H1B. If they're using the L1 to send the regular developers, that's visa fraud.

Except that the H1B is being used to support and expand outsourcing. The big outsourcing companies send developers with H1B to clients in the US to provide an on-site presence to coordinate with the larger development teams in India or China. Without the H1B program being used like that, either the entire project would be done in the US, or American developers would fill the roles of the on-site technical leads.

Ultimately somebody has to be trusted, but that level of trust shouldn't be placed in the hands of a 29-year-old contractor.

Access to secret data and documents should be on a need-to-know basis, or a practical approximation of it. It's clear that he had access far beyond what he needed to know. If he can't get at the sensitive documents in the first place he can't copy them to USB or use his cellphone to take pictures of them or upload them to his Wikileaks partners.

"Al Capone was convicted on the basis of an "encrypted journal" that the government interpreted."

Did the government interpret it, or did they force Capone to interpret it? There's a big difference there.

The 5th Amendment doesn't stop the police from trying to brute-force the encryption key until they find it. The protection is against forcing you to interpret the data for them by supplying the password from your brain.

"Forcing somebody to unlock their data is not the same as forcing somebody to sign a statement. After all, it's real data, it's already there. By being forced to unlock the data you are not being forced to say something new, it's not new information that is on the disk, it's not like you are forced to say: I am guilty, here is the body.

You are forced to open a box that may have data providing that you are guilty, but that information is already there and it's not new, you weren't forced to first create that data and then give it up, you are forced to open the data that existed already in a form that is not attached to you, it's independent of you, it is already existing outside of you."

Those box and lock analogies don't really apply to encryption. Every byte of data is already available to the police, it's just that it's not in a form where they can discern any meaning from it. Decrypting isn't unlocking a safe, it's transforming the contents of an already-open safe into something the police can interpret.

The 5th amendment protects you from having to help the police interpret the evidence against you or give them information from your brain to reveal your association with the evidence. Having to decrypt the drives would both be helping the police interpret the data and effectively admitting to ownership or control of the data.

At this point they apparently have enough to convict him for possessing child pr0n, but that's not their main goal.

Their main goal is to obtain a precedent-setting decision that they can use to force other people in the present and future to decrypt their hard drives.