How Congress is meant to go about "securing ... the exclusive right[s]" to works is not specified. I have no reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have a problem with compulsory licensing (changes to which are the issue under discussion) as a means to secure these rights. Compulsory licenses have existed since 1909. As to whether particular license terms are appropriate, that is a political question, not a constitutional question.

It would seem to me that the royalty rates are simply part of the terms and conditions of those rights. Congress didn't have to include those terms when creating and granting the rights, but they have done so. One can argue the wisdom of that decision, but I don't think it's an "invasion".

A tax is different from a royalty. The entire recording industry exists as it does today in the United States because it has the right granted by Congress under Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution and various international treaties to collect royalties. This argument is about the partitioning of revenue streams between private parties, not about how much revenue should be taken and used for public purposes.

In regard to treaties, I believe that treaties can trump US statutory law. They are considered of similar standing to the Constitution, and that is why they need ratification by the Senate. Of course, the terms of the treaty might exclude exclusively domestic production and consumption. Note, I'm not a lawyer, but this is how I understand treaties to work. They can impose all sorts of obligations on the signatory countries.

Copyright is inherently a restriction on the free market. Unlike physical goods, writings and recordings can be multiplied and redistributed by whoever possesses them. Copyright was originally a way to ensure authors got a cut of the revenue stream when their works were republished. Thus, publishers were required to pass on a bit of the cost of each book (and later recording) to the owner of the copyright, resulting in higher prices to the consumer. Without copyright, prices for all works would be lower, but the creators might not be inclined to produce without the compensation provided by royalties. In the United States, the power to grant copyrights was explicitly included in the Constitution and exclusively granted to Congress.

I don't really care if the labels go out of business, as they are just a distribution and marketing system. But, if I want to hear new recorded music, there will need to be some system in place for compensating musicians for the time, effort, and expense of making recordings. Not all music that I and others want to hear can be recorded in a bedroom.

No, but what is new is the ability to instantly listen to practically any song on demand without purchasing the song either as a track on an album or as a single. I think this is the biggest issue. Whether it's through a service like Spotify, which pays very low license fees, or the various infringing ways of obtaining music, I can now obtain a song at decent quality whenever I want at a much lower cost (free or almost free) than I could previously.

Well, regardless of whether your argument is correct about the validity of governing documents, the power to grant exclusive rights to authors is in fact given to Congress in the US Constitution in Article 1, Section 8. I guess one could argue about whether a sound recording is a "Writing" per the terms of that clause. But if you accept that the protection of sound recordings falls under the jurisdiction of Congress, then the terms of that protection would also seem to be up to Congress. This is a different issue from whether you think the particular way they are handling the issue is correct.

Wegner identified strong evidence for continental mobility; it was then needed to find a mechanism. The mechanism was seafloor spreading and subduction, which were discovered in the post-WWII era (but hypothesized at least as early as 1928). Expanding earth has the problem that there is no evidence that the earth is expanding (as the list linked to in the parent documents).

There's already been a bit of a pile-on here, but as others have pointed out, Wegner was not an irrational pseudoscientist. He had evidence that has withstood the test of time. I own a (badly Xeroxed) copy of a 1928 conference volume put out by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists on the topic of continental drift. There are papers pro and con. One of the "pro" papers proposes a mechanism very similar to seafloor spreading as it is known today. Until the WWII-era mapping of seafloor topography and accompanying magnetic surveys, it was impossible to verify the mechanism, but the geological and paleontological evidence for mobility was strong.

You are not being very coherent. The First Amendment prevents Congress (and, thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, the States) from making laws restricting the freedom of speech. It says nothing about the content of the speech. I am not a lawyer, but the straightforward reading is that Congress/the States are prevented from making any laws that restrict any type of speech whatsoever. It does not say that the topic of the speech must be political. In practice, the Supreme Court has ruled that laws may be enacted punishing libel, and certain types of speech that may incite immediate violence. You are right in that the First Amendment does not protect people from private action (e.g. being fired for making racial slurs). But it does not protect only those speakers who are speaking against (or about) the government.

As a frequent pedestrian in Denver, I can attest that drivers who roll right on red are often not looking for pedestrians approaching from the right, as they are focused on traffic coming from the left. It's not a safe maneuver.

Eh... this is Dennis Gallagher. He tried to prove an epidemic of unreported absenteeism at the airport by looking at badge-swipe logs that were never intended as an attendance system. If you entered the building with your friend in the morning, stayed all day, and left in the evening, the system never saw you, and he decided you had been absent that day. Of course, he hadn't actually told the employees that they had better swipe their badges as if they were time cards. Needless to say, it caused a ruckus.

I think the case in Denver is that the traffic engineer's office is not well-funded. So, they are always just trying to keep everything working, rather than being able to actually improve things. I remember a few years ago, they spent some time working on the Colorado Blvd. signals, and they were noticeably better. I think they are still better than they used to be. Also, I think the problem of handling large amounts of traffic on a grid is a hard one. The one-way streets are sometimes (but not always...) timed pretty well for 30 mph. They seem to either sometimes get out of sync, or there is some sort of dynamic adaptation that favors some streets over others.

Wikipedia has an article, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Rule_in_the_United_States