So, an evolution sim was given a set of rules to conform to what could be built with existing technology, and (gasp) it produced a robot out of pre-fab robot parts.
Whatever.
Wake me up when a computer designs a better version of itself.
If you own a land-line phone, you are charge for the phone service.
If you are in England, and you buy a TV, and then have to pay the "rates" to use it.
If you buy lights, you still need to pay for electricity to use them.
Starting to see a pattern here? It does not matter where you are from, a lot of things are split into "purchace cost" and "maintainence cost". EQ is just one more example.
There's this concept for raising money, it's called incorporation. Qwest Communications decided to ignore the existing lines and lay their own damned fiber at their own damned expense. They just bought USWest, a former member of the government-backed monopoly known as "Ma Bell". By your thinking, this should have been impossible without government intervention.
If the government gets out of the Cable business, you most certainly can compete with them. Look at Hubbard Broadcasting. They spent billions putting digital TV satelites into orbit. If they had been allowed to lay competing cable lines, they most certainly would have. Government protection of the cable companies makes them stronger than they should be. Instead of crying over the money that was thrown down a well in the past to prop them up, the best move now would be for government to get out of the way and let the market take over. You might not see it as a perfect solution, but it's a damned sight better than what we have now.
True, but were you forced to use only Sprint's digital network
Yes. Sprint's digital network is proprietary, so my phone is no good for AT&T service. This is not a problem for me, because I got a better deal than AT&T offers. (I bought the phone that matched the service I wanted, not vice versa).
There is no question that more people would play EQ if either the service or the software was free, but sales and subscriptions of EQ completely blew away their wildest expectations. Why ask for less money when you have so many customers willing to pay more?
My point remains the same, they are selling you two things, a product (the software) and a service (the hosting), and feel they have the right to charge for each.
If you don't like their pricing scheme, you have the right to spend your money elsewhere, and/or participate in the WorldForge project, which may lead to a free EQ-like game.
Variant's server farm hosts a couple thousand players on each machine, so you are right that it would be difficult for a home brew job to handle the traffic of just one of the official EQ servers... But what might come about is something closer to the old MUD culture... hundreds or even thousands of mini-EQ servers sprining up to support, oh, say 100 players at a time.
For a hard-core EQ player (as I once was), the idea of having a private server, just for your own guild, is quite appealing.
Also, server owners will be able to express some creativity of their own, possibly building new worlds that are every bit as intersting as the standard one, if not more so.
This could be the one thing that gets me to start playing EQ again. I would totally get into the chance to play on a server that isn't busting at the seams, jam-packed with players all competing for the same spawning points. Some of the most fun times I had playing EQ was during off-peak hours, when I could go to a less popular zone and find only two or three other players there.
It's also interesting to notice that to play Everquest, you have to buy the package AND pay a monthly fee... this might fall under forced
bundling rules if they don't allow people to buy the product without paying the subscription....
When I bought my Qualcomm phone, I did not get a free subscription to Sprint's digital network.
Same principle applies here. The software client is a product (from Sony), the Variant subscription is a service that lets you use that product.
(By the way, if the FCC allowed a bunch of Linux hippies to host a free phone network that worked with my Qualcomm phone, Sprint could not sue them and Qualcomm would not want to.)
You seem to be under the impression that the game is a pay-per-play from Sony. It's not. Sony wrote a game and is selling it. A different company (Veriant) has an exclusive deal with Sony to host EQ servers.
The monthly fees are for Variant's service, not Sony's software. If I sit at home and build a custom server (either a reverse-engineering job or a new game server from scratch) that lets me run the EQ client on it, I am not stealing anything. Ditto if I invite my friends over to play their EQ clients on my custom-built server. Ditto again if I put let people log on to it over the Internet for free.
If I charge for the service, then I might be in conflict with the agreement between Variant and Sony, but that is mostly their problem... I still am doing nothing illegal.
You probably think you are being provacative by your insistance that God might be a woman, but the concept is not as radical as you may think.
One of the Psalms addresses God using female pronouns. In Genisis, one of the terms used in reference to God roughly translates to "Man And Woman". Genisis also states "He created them, man and woman, in his image".
Judaic scripture uses male pronouns the vast majority of the time because God is a patriarchal figure throughout the Torrah. Christian literature also uses male pronouns, for three reasons: 1) Prior to modern feminism, male pronouns were often thought of as being gender neutral, 2) It follows the Judaic tradition, and 3) Because Our Lord is the "father" of Christ.
Nowhere does Hebrew or Christian scripture make the claim that God is specifically male, because He transends humanity, and therefore categorires like race and gender simply do not apply.
So, what you said was not really out-of-line with Christian fundamentals; it was just pedantic and tedious.
Sorry to nitpick, but Atheism doesn't preach, although some Atheists do.
Okay then. Christianity doesn't preach either, although some Christians do.
Two can pick that nit.
People of the same religion attract each other, but those of different religion repel each other.
First of all, I would include philosophies like athiesm in that generalization. Athiests are drawn to one another, and away from people of religion, as evidenced by your little heated argument you've been having with "Dan Hayes".
Secondly, this is not an artifact of religion, but of human behavior in general. People like to surround themselves with other people who are like themselves, because it reaffirms their identities.
Neither of you is going to persuade the other of anything through this flame-fest, so please just drop it.
I kind of wish there was an automatic router in the Slash Code to send religion arguments to another location on the server.../dev/null comes to mind.
It seems to me that what makes soccer so much fun to watch is that it is such an awkward game... people trying to move a sphere around with their feet.
Watching robots that were designed specifically for moving a sphere around sounds less exiting to me.
Now, get those robots to kick the crap out of each other, and you've got something to watch.
Union bosses are rich people. Filthy stinking rich people. The days of an elected laborer rising up against a 70-hour work week are over; stop clinging to the myth. These are guys in suits who do not negotiate according to what's best for the union workers, but according to what's best for the union infrastructure. They are able to do so because union membership is manditory in most companies that are union-controlled. Since nobody can quit the union without quitting there jobs, what possible insentive to the bosses have to look after their members best interests, beyond putting up the facade of caring.
The Verison strike was not really about medical benifits or retirement plans... it was about expanding the union into the newly acquired non-union parts of the company.
I'm not even going to start getting into the mafia influence issue, or I will be ranting about what a crooked bunch of thieves they are all day.
suffice it to say that I am not an employer. I am a tech worker who has belonged to one union a few years ago, and would prefer not to ever again.
You haven't paid attention to a word I said, have you. Let me point out again that the tobbacco companies made out like bandits in the settlements!
If tobbacco sale is as evil as you say it is, then push for making it illegal. To allow them to sell it as a legal product, knowing that it will kill people, and then act all shocked that people are dieing and filing junk lawsuits is a joke.
Raising the price of tobbacco via litigation does not accomplish your goal of punnishing phillip morris... and punishment should not even be an issue when the law is not being broken. If you want to push for anti-tobbacco laws, and then go after them for breaking it, that is fine, but you set dangerous legal precedent when you go after companies for selling legal products.
High-cholesterol foods are probably the next target, building on the arguments that have been established in these cases. Get ready to pay $6.50 for a Big Mac.
It's because an third-party candidate (Labor Party) won the race for governor years ago, and the Democrats merged with the Labor Party shorty afterwards.
Now we have a Reform^^h^h^h^h^h^hIndependence Party governor in Jesse Ventura, so I suppose we will have a DFLI (Democratic Farmer-Labor Independence) Party forming soon.
Wrong. The fact is that they DID get the benefits. Therefore they are responsible for making certain concessions as the government deems necessary.
Did the government get a commitment from them to do so? No? Well, the time to attatch strings to a favor is before you do it, not after.
More government tinkering to fix the previous government tinkering is not the answer. The answer is to take away what subsidies the cable companies currently enjoy, wash your hands of whatever support they got in the past, and let the market catch up with them. Given that almost every cable company I have ever dealt with offered really shitty service, it should not be hard for an upstart to overtake them. All it takes is seed money, and that can be raised on the market instead of crying to Uncle Sam.
I suppose all CEOs are like the farmers, metaphorically enslaving, killing, and eating their workers?
Yes.
Duh.
Did you even read Animal Farm in school???
And what do libertarians have against unions, anyway? It's the free market answer to economic injustice, no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
You answered your own question. What libertarians have against unions is that they are no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
What does this have to do with the consequences of smoking?
This is about scumbag lawyers and polititians profiting from an industry that they know is dangerous, but are not interested in stopping. This is about graft for lawers in exchange for campeign contributions.
If anybody should be sued for the harmfull effects of tobbacco, it should be the government, who SUBSIDIZES tobbacco farms, then turns around and tells us how noble they are for fighting big tobbacco.
that extra money will go to paying for your medical care.
Smokers save us money. They die quickly at a young age of heart attacks and lung cancer. Their hospital stays are short and painful, and mostly covered by raiding their estate.
It is the non-smokers like us that run up huge tabs when we are 95, living in a managed care facility, and on a kidney machine 24/7... long after our money ran out and we were put on public assistance programs.
By smoking, they are doing us all a huge favor by shuffling this mortal coil before they can collect any Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
The tobacco settlement was big, but would have been bigger if he hadn't pocketed enough to fund a US Senate campaign.
Not to mention the fact that his law firm bankrolled the Skip Humphrey for Governor campeign, as well.
Mark Dayton may be in some obscure way my boss (I think he's the largest individual shareholder in Target Corp., which his ancestors founded), but I'm still glad he's ahead of Ciresi.
Swell... just what we need... another member of the Rockefeller family sent to Washington. (For those who don't know, Dayton married a Rockefeller, and has used some of their personal fortune to run several high-profile campaigns for Senator in the past. He's at it again this year.) Old money never goes away. (sigh)
Needless to say, my preferred candidate, Jerry Janezich, is way back in 4th place. He's from a mining town and owns a bar. He even has the DFL endorsement. How could he fail?
I'll though I am a conservative, I will take an good ol' honest left-wing radical over the two-faced bastards running the Democratic Party any day of the week. I really hope Janezich gains ground.
The guy I wanted already dropped out of the race. Tim Penny has been the Democratic Party's best asset in Minnesota for a long time now. He's a Senior Fellow at the U of M's Humphrey Institute, an experienced leader, and (funnilly enough) a Fellow of Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute.
On the bright side, I understand that Wellstone intends to step down from the Senate in a couple years (he promised to be a two-term-only guy), so maybe Penny will run for that seat.
Oddly enough, Rod Grams can't seem to please anybody. The Republicans in Washington hate him because they consider him to be far too moderate, but here in the People's Republic of Minnesota, he is painted as some kind of far-right conservative.
The Cato Institute is scary in that they seem to believe that corporations should be running everything rather than government.
That may be what they "seem to believe" to you, but having meet many of these people I know that not to be the case.
As for the cable companies, pretty good argument for why they should have never received benifits from the government in the first place, isn't it? The fact is that the cable companies OWN all that infrastructure, no matter what grants allowed them to build it. Now we are crying because the won't share it... well, too bad. You shouldn't have let yourself get suckered by the greedy bastards in the first place.
Subsidizing ISP's to "compete" with them will only make the problem worse, extending the government/corporate marriage to a few more companies.
No. If you read my post you would see that I consider phillip morris to be part of the problem. They, along with the lawyers on both sides, are violating anti-trust. They fooled you. They fooled nearly everybody. They are big winners in all of this, and most people will not notice for years how good for phillip morris these settlements really were.
Perhaps it is time America had a serious discussion about why tobbacco is legal and pot is outlawed. As a consumer of neither, I feel I am somewhat objective in my opinion that the policy is inconsistant.
That aside, tobbacco is a legal product, and any company that enters the market now faces a stiff legal fine when no legal wrongdoing on their part exists. I wasn't discussing the moral debate about tobbacco use, because it is obviously not an issue from the perspective of a government that wants to keep it legal and profit from it.
The number of applications also doesn't have a bearing on Micro$oft's business practices, which is what the antitrust suit is really about.
Out of the mouth of an Anonymous Coward comes the truth.
It is not a violation of anti-trust to win in market competition and therefore dominate over 90% of a commodity market. That just means you have a good sales department.
It's not even really a violation if a market is suddenly dependent on your company for survival. Companies will always try to work with a market leader if they can.
It becomes a violation when you abuse that position to stifle competition, fix prices, diminish consumer choice, and generally f* up the free market system.
A good example is what the auto industry allegedly did in the early 20th Century. According to some historians, they bought out as many public transportation systems as they could, in order to close or downgrade them, so people would need to buy cars.
Actually, they are fighting one of the biggest corporate scams of our age... the tobbacco lawsuits.
I'm sure you have heard from a lot of big-shot lawyers (now running for various political offices), as well as a lot of sitting governors brag about how they "took on the big tobacco companies and won"... but this is a huge lie.
Settlements like the one reached in Minnesota resulted in huge cash payments to crooked lawyers like Mike Cerreci, while guaranteeing a monopoly dominance for the biggest five tobbacco companies. The only losers were the tax-payers, who Cerreci supposedly represented, who will not receive one dime of that settlement; and the smokers, who will now pay a lot more cash to feed their addiction.
You see, the companies who were found to have mislead consumers are expected to pay punative damages (much of which goes to the lawfirms involved), which they will raise by hiking up their prices. The thing is, there are lots of smaller and newer tobbacco companies who had nothing to do with this scam... but if they do not have this extra cost and the violators do, that would put the big companies out of business, which would mean no more settlement money.
So, to make sure the lawyers get their pound of tasty flesh, all companies that choose to sell tobbacco (even a brand new company which has never done anything wrong) must pay into the settlement escrow. That way, all companies that sell tobbacco have the same costs, allowing companies to fix prices on cigarettes to guarantee a steady profit to pay the settlement. All this money comes out of the pockets of the smokers... mostly working-class chumps who got addicted when they were 12 or 13.
The Cato Institute is going after both the big tobbacco companies and the lawyers who were "taking them on", for violating anti-trust laws.
When are people going to recognize that consumer advocate law firms and union bosses are just like the pigs in Orwell's "Animal Farm"? They have gradually become that which they once set out to conquer.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever.
Wake me up when a computer designs a better version of itself.
I was under the impression that Sony did not own Verant at the time that EQ came out, though. When did they buy it?
If you are in England, and you buy a TV, and then have to pay the "rates" to use it.
If you buy lights, you still need to pay for electricity to use them.
Starting to see a pattern here? It does not matter where you are from, a lot of things are split into "purchace cost" and "maintainence cost". EQ is just one more example.
If the government gets out of the Cable business, you most certainly can compete with them. Look at Hubbard Broadcasting. They spent billions putting digital TV satelites into orbit. If they had been allowed to lay competing cable lines, they most certainly would have. Government protection of the cable companies makes them stronger than they should be. Instead of crying over the money that was thrown down a well in the past to prop them up, the best move now would be for government to get out of the way and let the market take over. You might not see it as a perfect solution, but it's a damned sight better than what we have now.
Yes. Sprint's digital network is proprietary, so my phone is no good for AT&T service. This is not a problem for me, because I got a better deal than AT&T offers. (I bought the phone that matched the service I wanted, not vice versa).
There is no question that more people would play EQ if either the service or the software was free, but sales and subscriptions of EQ completely blew away their wildest expectations. Why ask for less money when you have so many customers willing to pay more?
My point remains the same, they are selling you two things, a product (the software) and a service (the hosting), and feel they have the right to charge for each.
If you don't like their pricing scheme, you have the right to spend your money elsewhere, and/or participate in the WorldForge project, which may lead to a free EQ-like game.
For a hard-core EQ player (as I once was), the idea of having a private server, just for your own guild, is quite appealing.
Also, server owners will be able to express some creativity of their own, possibly building new worlds that are every bit as intersting as the standard one, if not more so.
This could be the one thing that gets me to start playing EQ again. I would totally get into the chance to play on a server that isn't busting at the seams, jam-packed with players all competing for the same spawning points. Some of the most fun times I had playing EQ was during off-peak hours, when I could go to a less popular zone and find only two or three other players there.
When I bought my Qualcomm phone, I did not get a free subscription to Sprint's digital network.
Same principle applies here. The software client is a product (from Sony), the Variant subscription is a service that lets you use that product.
(By the way, if the FCC allowed a bunch of Linux hippies to host a free phone network that worked with my Qualcomm phone, Sprint could not sue them and Qualcomm would not want to.)
The monthly fees are for Variant's service, not Sony's software. If I sit at home and build a custom server (either a reverse-engineering job or a new game server from scratch) that lets me run the EQ client on it, I am not stealing anything. Ditto if I invite my friends over to play their EQ clients on my custom-built server. Ditto again if I put let people log on to it over the Internet for free.
If I charge for the service, then I might be in conflict with the agreement between Variant and Sony, but that is mostly their problem... I still am doing nothing illegal.
Asimov was right to say "no" no publishers all those years on a 4th Foundation book, and wrong to finally give in. The newer books all suck.
One of the Psalms addresses God using female pronouns.
In Genisis, one of the terms used in reference to God roughly translates to "Man And Woman".
Genisis also states "He created them, man and woman, in his image".
Judaic scripture uses male pronouns the vast majority of the time because God is a patriarchal figure throughout the Torrah. Christian literature also uses male pronouns, for three reasons: 1) Prior to modern feminism, male pronouns were often thought of as being gender neutral, 2) It follows the Judaic tradition, and 3) Because Our Lord is the "father" of Christ.
Nowhere does Hebrew or Christian scripture make the claim that God is specifically male, because He transends humanity, and therefore categorires like race and gender simply do not apply.
So, what you said was not really out-of-line with Christian fundamentals; it was just pedantic and tedious.
Okay then. Christianity doesn't preach either, although some Christians do.
Two can pick that nit.
People of the same religion attract each other, but those of different religion repel each other.
First of all, I would include philosophies like athiesm in that generalization. Athiests are drawn to one another, and away from people of religion, as evidenced by your little heated argument you've been having with "Dan Hayes".
Secondly, this is not an artifact of religion, but of human behavior in general. People like to surround themselves with other people who are like themselves, because it reaffirms their identities.
Neither of you is going to persuade the other of anything through this flame-fest, so please just drop it.
I kind of wish there was an automatic router in the Slash Code to send religion arguments to another location on the server... /dev/null comes to mind.
Watching robots that were designed specifically for moving a sphere around sounds less exiting to me.
Now, get those robots to kick the crap out of each other, and you've got something to watch.
The Verison strike was not really about medical benifits or retirement plans... it was about expanding the union into the newly acquired non-union parts of the company.
I'm not even going to start getting into the mafia influence issue, or I will be ranting about what a crooked bunch of thieves they are all day.
suffice it to say that I am not an employer. I am a tech worker who has belonged to one union a few years ago, and would prefer not to ever again.
If tobbacco sale is as evil as you say it is, then push for making it illegal. To allow them to sell it as a legal product, knowing that it will kill people, and then act all shocked that people are dieing and filing junk lawsuits is a joke.
Raising the price of tobbacco via litigation does not accomplish your goal of punnishing phillip morris... and punishment should not even be an issue when the law is not being broken. If you want to push for anti-tobbacco laws, and then go after them for breaking it, that is fine, but you set dangerous legal precedent when you go after companies for selling legal products.
High-cholesterol foods are probably the next target, building on the arguments that have been established in these cases. Get ready to pay $6.50 for a Big Mac.
Now we have a Reform^^h^h^h^h^h^hIndependence Party governor in Jesse Ventura, so I suppose we will have a DFLI (Democratic Farmer-Labor Independence) Party forming soon.
Minnesota politics are weird, but fun to watch.
Did the government get a commitment from them to do so? No? Well, the time to attatch strings to a favor is before you do it, not after.
More government tinkering to fix the previous government tinkering is not the answer. The answer is to take away what subsidies the cable companies currently enjoy, wash your hands of whatever support they got in the past, and let the market catch up with them. Given that almost every cable company I have ever dealt with offered really shitty service, it should not be hard for an upstart to overtake them. All it takes is seed money, and that can be raised on the market instead of crying to Uncle Sam.
Yes.
Duh.
Did you even read Animal Farm in school???
And what do libertarians have against unions, anyway? It's the free market answer to economic injustice, no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
You answered your own question. What libertarians have against unions is that they are no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
You just earned your second "duh".
This is about scumbag lawyers and polititians profiting from an industry that they know is dangerous, but are not interested in stopping. This is about graft for lawers in exchange for campeign contributions.
If anybody should be sued for the harmfull effects of tobbacco, it should be the government, who SUBSIDIZES tobbacco farms, then turns around and tells us how noble they are for fighting big tobbacco.
Smokers save us money. They die quickly at a young age of heart attacks and lung cancer. Their hospital stays are short and painful, and mostly covered by raiding their estate.
It is the non-smokers like us that run up huge tabs when we are 95, living in a managed care facility, and on a kidney machine 24/7... long after our money ran out and we were put on public assistance programs.
By smoking, they are doing us all a huge favor by shuffling this mortal coil before they can collect any Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
Misspelling on my part, thanks.
The tobacco settlement was big, but would have been bigger if he hadn't pocketed enough to fund a US Senate campaign.
Not to mention the fact that his law firm bankrolled the Skip Humphrey for Governor campeign, as well.
Mark Dayton may be in some obscure way my boss (I think he's the largest individual shareholder in Target Corp., which his ancestors founded), but I'm still glad he's ahead of Ciresi.
Swell... just what we need... another member of the Rockefeller family sent to Washington. (For those who don't know, Dayton married a Rockefeller, and has used some of their personal fortune to run several high-profile campaigns for Senator in the past. He's at it again this year.) Old money never goes away. (sigh)
Needless to say, my preferred candidate, Jerry Janezich, is way back in 4th place. He's from a mining town and owns a bar. He even has the DFL endorsement. How could he fail?
I'll though I am a conservative, I will take an good ol' honest left-wing radical over the two-faced bastards running the Democratic Party any day of the week. I really hope Janezich gains ground.
The guy I wanted already dropped out of the race. Tim Penny has been the Democratic Party's best asset in Minnesota for a long time now. He's a Senior Fellow at the U of M's Humphrey Institute, an experienced leader, and (funnilly enough) a Fellow of Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute.
On the bright side, I understand that Wellstone intends to step down from the Senate in a couple years (he promised to be a two-term-only guy), so maybe Penny will run for that seat.
Oddly enough, Rod Grams can't seem to please anybody. The Republicans in Washington hate him because they consider him to be far too moderate, but here in the People's Republic of Minnesota, he is painted as some kind of far-right conservative.
That may be what they "seem to believe" to you, but having meet many of these people I know that not to be the case.
As for the cable companies, pretty good argument for why they should have never received benifits from the government in the first place, isn't it? The fact is that the cable companies OWN all that infrastructure, no matter what grants allowed them to build it. Now we are crying because the won't share it... well, too bad. You shouldn't have let yourself get suckered by the greedy bastards in the first place.
Subsidizing ISP's to "compete" with them will only make the problem worse, extending the government/corporate marriage to a few more companies.
No. If you read my post you would see that I consider phillip morris to be part of the problem. They, along with the lawyers on both sides, are violating anti-trust. They fooled you. They fooled nearly everybody. They are big winners in all of this, and most people will not notice for years how good for phillip morris these settlements really were.
That aside, tobbacco is a legal product, and any company that enters the market now faces a stiff legal fine when no legal wrongdoing on their part exists. I wasn't discussing the moral debate about tobbacco use, because it is obviously not an issue from the perspective of a government that wants to keep it legal and profit from it.
Out of the mouth of an Anonymous Coward comes the truth.
It is not a violation of anti-trust to win in market competition and therefore dominate over 90% of a commodity market. That just means you have a good sales department.
It's not even really a violation if a market is suddenly dependent on your company for survival. Companies will always try to work with a market leader if they can.
It becomes a violation when you abuse that position to stifle competition, fix prices, diminish consumer choice, and generally f* up the free market system.
A good example is what the auto industry allegedly did in the early 20th Century. According to some historians, they bought out as many public transportation systems as they could, in order to close or downgrade them, so people would need to buy cars.
I'm sure you have heard from a lot of big-shot lawyers (now running for various political offices), as well as a lot of sitting governors brag about how they "took on the big tobacco companies and won"... but this is a huge lie.
Settlements like the one reached in Minnesota resulted in huge cash payments to crooked lawyers like Mike Cerreci, while guaranteeing a monopoly dominance for the biggest five tobbacco companies. The only losers were the tax-payers, who Cerreci supposedly represented, who will not receive one dime of that settlement; and the smokers, who will now pay a lot more cash to feed their addiction.
You see, the companies who were found to have mislead consumers are expected to pay punative damages (much of which goes to the lawfirms involved), which they will raise by hiking up their prices. The thing is, there are lots of smaller and newer tobbacco companies who had nothing to do with this scam... but if they do not have this extra cost and the violators do, that would put the big companies out of business, which would mean no more settlement money.
So, to make sure the lawyers get their pound of tasty flesh, all companies that choose to sell tobbacco (even a brand new company which has never done anything wrong) must pay into the settlement escrow. That way, all companies that sell tobbacco have the same costs, allowing companies to fix prices on cigarettes to guarantee a steady profit to pay the settlement. All this money comes out of the pockets of the smokers... mostly working-class chumps who got addicted when they were 12 or 13.
The Cato Institute is going after both the big tobbacco companies and the lawyers who were "taking them on", for violating anti-trust laws.
When are people going to recognize that consumer advocate law firms and union bosses are just like the pigs in Orwell's "Animal Farm"? They have gradually become that which they once set out to conquer.