How do you know? It's only 5:30. Is that you, Kurzweil?

The technology is set to come out with Duke Nukem Forever.

Not sure I get it, why is that going to be necessary?

Couldn't you just compress the helium you already have contained? i.e. transfer some helium to a compression chamber, compress into storable containers of high pressure, high density helium, repeat process.

I agree with you that the availability of free songs shifts the supply curve, but that's not really my point.
From what I understand (I could be wrong), their argument is that everyone who downloaded the song for free would have paid the full price for it if it wasn't available free. If you were to draw that, you get a flat demand curve, where the demand is the same at a price of $0 as at a price significantly greater than that. Surely the demand for music isn't price-insensitive.

Granted, but for the tort of conversion, as you said, there is the crime of theft... I'm not sure that we need much additional deterrence where there are criminal sanctions available.

I don't mean to nitpick, but in the U.S. civil court system at least, punitive damages are available under certain circumstances (and they are very often claimed, not as often awarded). But in this case, $750 doesn't necessarily even include punitive damages: because money lost includes "lost profits" (expectation damages in contracts, consequential damages in torts). If they can show, with preponderance of the evidence, that because you shared one song, 10 people who otherwise would have paid for it did not, you can be liable for those 10 lost sales.

One big flaw in their evidence is that (from what I understand) they argue that a song downloaded is a song that would otherwise have been purchased - which completely defies any basic principles of economics (price/demand curve).

I think we can all agree that $750/song or $1.5 trillion total sounds just absurd.

Apparently, this is what the Australian police has in mind for what happens after you click the button...

I agree with you that there are mechanisms in place that are intended to avoid double-taxation. My point though is that, despite these mechanisms, in practice (at least in my experience) you still end up paying more than the greater individual tax rate, i.e. more than you would pay if you were just declaring everything in one or the other of the two countries.

Speaking from experience, it's still a huge hassle. While I personally don't anyone who just ignores the law (although granted most of the people I know still work for U.S. companies) it makes your taxes so complicated that you pretty much can't file them without the help of a tax attorney.

Most importantly, you're still getting screwed because the country in which you reside (and work, presumably) still expects you to pay taxes, so in the end you're paying:

(local taxes) + (U.S. taxes) - (some exceptions meant to avoid double-taxation) = (still more than you would pay in either country if you were taxed only by that country)

When the other country you're living in is a European country with a very high tax rate (e.g. France, Sweden, etc.), you end up paying a lot more in taxes than you are getting in return benefits.

On the upside, for Microsoft employees, that means less money to spend on chairs. *ducks*