How does this not drive more Burger Kings into Canada? If they go after McDonalds and not (now Canadian) Burger King, they drive corps out. If they go after BK, then can any country do that, tax USA based corporate assets? It's probably better than a VAT, I guess (which is why USA corporate taxes are relatively high, it makes up for lack of Value Added Tax).

Dammit, please. I watched the touchscreen market, via DigiTimes, for years. The geeks in Taiwan who were carving the niche for ATM touchscreen displays were the top of the touchscreen pyramid. Apple was buying IPods (pods not pads) from Taiwan contract manufacturers, who would show other "cool stuff" they had. Apple saw it quickly and wrote software and gets a lot of credit, but designed Taiwanese inventions into it. I was told the small firm Apple claims did it for them in Vancouver was from the Taipei outfit.

Apple basically did to Taiwan what Bill Gates did to IBM. Which is great, I have no problem with it, but please give Terry Gou and Simon Lin (the Jobs and Gates counterparts in Taipei) some credit for what happened. They are the reason the Samsung vs. Apple patents go nowhere - its because Taiwan geeks made the hardware. It's less the invention of the hardware than it is the licensing fees. Control of the licensing fees is what made Gates and Jobs, and that's largely a legal play. Again, fine, but it just pains me to see the actual engineers ignored.

On the contrary, at the current rate of increase of smog production, Earth is going to transform into a gas planet.

Graham Pickren wrote an excellent Ph.D thesis in 2013 "Political ecologies of electronic waste: uncertainty and legitimacy in the governance of e-waste geographies". While it isn't about nuclear waste, per se, it rather brilliantly describes how industrialized nations apply a "fetishism" to material which tracks downstreams but not upstreams. http://www.envplan.com/abstrac...

The point of the article is that the dirtiest recycling (or most questionable Yucca storage) is practically always better than the cleanest extraction (mining).... and this applies to the risk at Yucca (for storage) vs. mining uranium in the USA Southwest. Nevada's strangely among the most willing states to allow in situ mining, even when mercury effluent (from gold mining) turns their extraction points into Superfund sites. 14 years ago Nevada and NM legislators were trying to provide the private sector with $30 million to develop environmental restoration technologies for in-situ leach (ISL) mining of uranium. "In a statement from his office in Washington, D.C. Domenici said he decided to remove the ISL provisions from his comprehensive nuclear energy plan in order to calm fears stoked by "substantial misinformation about the legislation." (Gallup Independent, Nov. 10, 2001)"

Treatment of Planetary Environmental health oddly follows the same "waste centric" obsessions of western medical history. Western medicine is pretty great today, but went through a couple of centuries of giving mercury as a laxative, and being always focused on what comes out of the body rather than the nutrition stream. Closing the "waste deposit" while giving tax incentives to mine uranium is "anal retentive" environmentalism.

See also Pickren et. al. at AREA Waste, commodity fetishism and the ongoingness of economic life http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

When NSA collects 'metadata', it's disturbing but also difficult to see how they benefit from corrupt use of the data. But corporate 'big data' just has many ways to make money off of it. Where is the Snowden of Citibank?

What the Hotels actually are losing are orders for movies. They set pricing on their wifi to replace the overpriced movie orders they no longer get from in-room orders. Once again, porn industry drives internet pricing.

Murdoch press means Rupert, I assumed

If the dump of the Malaysia Airlines emails actually shows some cover up or incompetence in the disappeared jet, LizardSquad may be acting as a kind of whistleblower. If the emails are just a bunch of seat assignments and flight bookings, they just look mean for kicking on Malaysia Air when it's down.

Would be an interesting topic of discussion if it showed something about the data. Unfortunately THIS link appears to be a "be afraid" ad by a cyber security expert.

And I support Cable!

The point is to use content labels to stimulate democratic change by hoping consumers become more concerned about words on a label with information they've been taught to pay attention to for health reasons. Now I do believe there are very legitimate social/environmental concerns over GM DNA, such as reduction in crop diversity, or unintended consequences. But there are no health concerns deriving specifically from the fact DNA was "modified" (could be bad, could be good, GMO is not health information). So "the point" is clear: to use labels to introduce non-health related message to consumners.

In my 20s I was involved in the "recycled/recyclable" label rules introduced in the 1980s and while I wasn't opposed to putting packaging content information, I saw it was rapidly politicized. "Metal has more recycled content", "glass is more recyclable", "plastic is source-reduced weight"... labels became "recyclable" or "recycled content", then "post-consumer recycled content". In Europe, composite material drink-boxes made a deal to pay-to-play, where the chasing raindrops label could simply reflect the packaging company "paying to support recycling". (That money led EU regulators to increase in number and power... a good thing when they know what they are talking about, an awful thing most other times).

There is a limited amount of "shelf space" on food package labels. Environmentalists are trying to repeat the "success" of recycled/recyclable. Many passionately believe in the social/environmental concerns, such as crop diversity, just as we believed in recycling. But perhaps labels should just be for health and nutrition information.

Most of the comments here assume people were ordering stuff on SkyMall for themselves. My assumption was always that, like holiday catalogues, the target audience was a gift shopper. Someone older who wants to order a nice gift for someone but can't think of anything their giftee actually needs or doesn't already have. Those shoppers have a lot more choices now.