The constitution never implied patents (or copyrights) were a property right any more than slaves on the plantation were. This property propaganda is a bunch of crap made up by lawyers and the RIAA, and has absolutely no solid foundation in common law or constitutional law at all.
I suggest you talk to one of the biggest proponents of copyright reform, Lawrence Lessig, who states that "copyrighted material is, by definintion, private property", in his blog. Alternatively, you could back up your supposition (which I think is nonsensical, but hey, I wouldn't mind being wrong on this one).
Indeed, there is a plethora of common law dating back to the 1700's in England on copyright, in particular, defining it as property (Lockean natural law; the Blackstonian legal distinction was usurped by the common law).
You are unwittingly correct that it is "made up by lawyers"; it is a constructive property, just as corporations are constructive people, with effectively the same rights and liabilities therein. Unfortunately, you fail to establish any distinction between constructed and "real" property, in a society under rule of law.
In fact the constitution clearly states that copyrights and patents are a government mandated monopoly that is to be short term - genuine rights don't have an expiration date.
What's a "genuine" right? Your property rights effectively end, thanks to perpetuities legislation, ~81 years after you die (save trusts & fancy legal wrangling with big money), to prevent "ruling from the grave", so to speak. This makes your existing property rights no less tangible or "genuine", does it? Indeed, copy-rights in some jurisdictions vastly outlive real property rights.
There are transient rights, such as freedom of association, free speech, and the like, but I suspect these end when you die, though they may be vicariously preserved (to no personal avail, I imagine). I am left wondering what rights you are talking about.
Bear in mind that we are talking about "just compensation" for the government depriving you of rights to copyright or patent (or trademark) profit and enjoyment. In essence, this is legally analogous to depriving you of real property rights. Analogy to transient rights is superfluous; this is property, whether constructed by lawyers or not, it is recognized by courts of competent jurisdiction. That right can be taken away by government, but constitutionally the government must compensate the owners.
I'm not sure if your statement is directed at patents in particular. But at least in terms of copyright, it is incorrect. For all the intents and purposes of my 5th amendment argument, however, I believe patent protection is analogous, given that constructive legal property, ala. patents, trademarks and copyrights are, in good standing, equivalent to actual property.
And there's no "property" taken from the inventor in violation of the 5th ammendment.
Quoth the Raven:
copyrighted material is, by definintion, private property, and to argue that an individual is taking from the public by extending his copyright requires a dyslexic misreading of the literal meaning of the amendment. the 5th amendment argument is better used by those who support an extended copyright than by those who wish to shorten it.
Taken from the blog of Lawrence Lessig, , one of the world's most prominent intellectual property lawyers.
I'm not sure what you are referring to with "natural rights"; natural persons and artificial persons (ie. corporations) are equally entitled to the constitutional provisions, just as constructive property rights are equally as applicable as common law or other rights (not sure what you mean by "natural rights", so...). I suspect I have no idea what you are talking about.:)
Incidentally, even if Congress constructs a right, they must compensate for taking it away again, pursuant to the last statement of the 5th amendment. This is not equivalent to not granting it in the first place; at some point the law granted rights which, when removed, may require "just compensation" for things such as lost profits.
The US has to be careful with patent reform, perhaps because of the lesser used part of the 5th amendment. Ie.
... [No person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
For the same reason that copyright reform may be difficult to bring about, as postulated by Mr. Lessig, Mr. Knopf, and others, it would literally cost the government a fortune to deprive owners of patents their due value, for a public purpose, as the 5th amendment guarantees them just compensation.
The lackadaisical politics is in essence digging its own grave, ensuring the continuation of a terrible intellectual property system, as the government will be unable to afford to compensate the existing privileged in the name reform for the public good.
piracy@microsoft.com; it'd take years before they figured out the boilerplate about what was going on.
Hollywood: "You've pirated a movie." Microsoft: "Thank you for reporting this piracy. We will prosecute violators to the full extent of the law.".. and so on and so forth.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs.
"The most common scale of costs is called partial indemnity, which means the successful party will receive approximately 40-50% of its legal costs from the unsuccessful party. Where one party's behaviour has been particularly egregious, the court may award a higher scale of costs, called substantial indemnity, which is in the range of approximately 70-80% of the actual costs incurred."
The courts also have the discretion to NOT award costs, particularly if they feel that the losing claim was legitimate but failed on technicalities, or if there is substantial economic disparity. In the case of SCO, I'm fairly sure that IBM would ask for substantial indemnity.
Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).
You should mail this to yourself, keep it sealed, and submit it as prior art when XYZ corp gets a patent for it.
I'm certain that is the only reason Jar Jar Binks ever survived being edited out of Episode 1 is that no one would dare say to George, "Uh, George, you may not have realized it, but this character is nothing more than an offensive racial stereotype that will not go down well with anyone."
I'm sure that in his godliness he is gives less importance to listening, caring, or tolerating such advice. I'm quite certain the man is literate, and if he reads anything besides the Star Wars fansite claptrap, he is surely aware that he is producing films with zero redeemable value and inconsequential longevity.
Or perhaps he as a different ultimate design in mind, for fans: short term milking and long term bilking. I suspect the man must resent the Star Wars universe, perhaps for the same reasons that Alec Guiness did: overshadowing and marginalizing the rest of his career.
Re:How about supergun or space elevator?
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
Quite right; "Expended" nuclear rods are actually better fuel than 'new' ones. Indeed, the problem lies in the explosive nature of the remaining isotopes. Someday, there may be ways to retrieve, isolate, and harness the currently unusable energy.
The browser. We like standards compliant browsers. Switch to or adopt Mozilla technology. This is an anathema of Microsoft's strategy of usurption, but if you want to extend the olive branch, it's got to be attached to something we care about.
Seeing as Microsoft essentially stops developing the browser after it's done with it anyway, it might as well take advantage of the free maintenance costs, continual renewal and compliance adherence inherent to projects like Mozilla/Firefox. Instead of a whole team of Internet Explorer programmers, sponsor some open source programmers, as it feels fit.
Also, incidentally and less idealistically, by involving itself in something like the development of Mozilla, Microsoft could garner some support for proprietary technologies, that would otherwise fall upon deaf ears. Control comes with money. If Microsoft is on the outside, they have no control. The ideals of Mozilla/Firefox right now are precisely aligned against Microsoft's dominance; to curb or curtail that alignment requires involvement.
This is great for awareness of what's on the net. Kids don't, from what I gather, comprehend the whole self-centered capitalism. I mean, we try to teach them sharing, from day one. So you have this weasel come in and try to tell them that it's bad to share things on the internet. What message will kids get out of this? That there are lots of things being shared on the internet; they can download and share movies on the net, movies they cannot otherwise generally afford or would rather not ask parents for.
Sure, one can try to answer the moral question as an adult and come up with your own decision, but as a kid, I would've used this as an opporunity to talk to my friends and find out how many were downloading stuff off the net, and then use this as ammo to try to convince my parents to get high speed internet so I could participate, too. Hard to beat that herd mentality, especially in kids.
There is lots of case history on employment contracts. eg. Recording artists? Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. v. Nelson [1937]. Warner Bros produces movies in the US, signs Nelson (stage name: Bette Davis) to a contract stipulating non-competitive work. Nelson quits and works for an Opera company in the UK, but Warner Bros gets a court injunction against Nelson, prohibiting her from working anywhere involving acting acting skills. Draconian precedent, but there you have it.
You win some, you lose some. They effectively won minidisc, and playstation; they have paid off in a goldmine. I don't know if they ever really lost with betamax; it was a superior format to VHS, and millions of films were distributed in that format. I guess if you win one major standard, it's worth gold, eg. Microsoft Windows.
...exploration really takes off, property rights will become of paramount importance. In fact, I predict that, in the next 100 years, there will be a terrestrial war over something in our Solar System that is rich in minerals. While I have no love for lawyers, the forward-thinking people in our society had better work this stuff out NOW.
Bah - law of the sea and laws of space are pretty much synonymous for almost all intents and purposes; they are based on customary practices, and essentially economically efficient possession or treaties. There are some important differences, such as the lack of adjacency with any extra-terrestrial objects, whereas we have coastal jurisdictions on the sea. There seem to be a lot more exploitable resources in space, especially when orbital access gets cheaper.
Point being, there isn't a great deal of work to do above and beyond customary international law of the sea. The same principles seem to apply.
This makes me wonder if by 2006, Linux versions of games will be commonly released along with or even before windows versions.
Or, perhaps more precisely, if by 2006 Linux will constitute substantial market and mind share for game producers, sufficient to consider the loss of it to competitors of similar games adequate to justify producing and supporting a Linux version.
The cost of producing and supporting Linux games will hopefully get cheaper as the platform matures. One can only it will remain a free platform.
The funny thing is that you can sue the federal government but the government must give you permission first. While there are cases where the government has given permission to sue, I'd imagine that suing the patent office may be more diffcult than suing a business.
It's not necessarily that simple. State immunity comes about in many forms, from what I gather. In the USA, it is likely that there are several ways to sue the government, or its agents.
1. Sue the agency itself, for harm arising from its negligence. As part of the Feds, it might be immune to civil lawsuits through Federal legislation.
2. Appeal to a tribunal, such as human rights tribunals (if the USA has those), or justice tribunals, or what have you. They sometimes pointedly get around state immunity legislation.
3. Sue the Patent Agent as part of the Agency; his negligent acts mean the Patent Agency is vicariously liable for damages. This may be different from suing the Agency itself, depending on the immunity legislation. If the Agent acted 'negligently' in their role, they may make the Agency liable.
4. Sue the Patent Agent as acting outside their duties. If they were so irresponsible as to have acted outside the boundaries of their job, they may be personally liable for your losses. Shallow pockets; sets a nasty precedent,though.
Mind you, you probably want to find a lawyer if it gets to that. Lobbying your senator or congressman, or whomever your elected representatives are, is probably the best option.
I haven't bought the singular dark-side=evil argument. Even Obi-wan stated that 'many of the truths you cling to depend upon a certain point of view', or something to that effect. There should be depth to these characters; even the most heinous of creatures in history have been motivated by a particularly breed of truth.
We are never really presented with the perspective of the dark side that can be rationalized. There's innuendo to some sort of quicker gratification through the dark side of the force, that it is more seductive, but we never see why people who fall to the dark side are bound to it. For conscious creatures to be bound to the dark side, they must rationalize their actions, and cling to a particular truth, so to speak. You'd go nuts, otherwise, eh?
I'm not sure I've seen this, in all of the Star Wars pictures; the dark side is still a shallow artistic license that begs for depth, that could have been eloquently explored in the prior two movies. I think we'll just get more muppets this time, though. Lucas's brain seems to have melted around the same time as the bronze bikini, too.
People have been doing RK (radial keratotomy) since the 1940's with razor blades (if you can imagine), the precursor to PRK (photoradial keratotomy), the laser equivalent. There are people alive today who have had eye surgery for over 60 years. I know at least one who had RK in the 1970's, and who has suffered, to my knowledge, no long term side effects. This is a poor statistical sample, however.
It is not yet probably known what the odds are of higher risk for long term complications, but certainly people have been having laser surgeries for a long time. Lasik is a bit different too, though, and much newer. It is possible that it will lead to a variety of long term complications that would not arise with P/RK.
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Canada, it's helpful to get your family physician to recommend and refer you to a laser eye surgeon. That way the surgeon is at least morally accountable to a professional, rather than just a customer, and sadly but truthfully it can make a difference in the quality of time spent on your procedure.
There are two common types of surgery, Lasik and PRK. I had the latter a year and a half ago. It took 6 months to heal, though it has been fantastic since. There can be problems with dry eye-sockets and blurry night vision, but it is typically, from what I understand, that these problems simply get worse if you had them before the surgery, and are not necessarily direct byproducts of modern surgery. (If I recall correctly, older PRK could cause, rather than just exasperate, blurry night vision)
If your prescription is above -6, I have heard that the risks of complications, including blindness, are substantially higher. Though for both Lasik and PRK the risks are marginal, with PRK the complications are less often and usually less serious. Lasik heals in approximately two weeks, however. Be sure that you see a surgeon that does both, as PRK may be a safer option for you if you have an astigmatism, though Lasik is often the preferred method. If the surgeon cannot offer PRK, then you may not be presented with your personally superior option.
As for the surgery, it takes less than 5 minutes per eye, and is painless. For 2 weeks after PRK, however, it is very painful as your eyes begin to recover from the surgery, and it will be some time before you can see properly. You will probably be given ample drugs, sleeping pills, pain killers, tranquilizers and muscle relaxants, and you will want to really take it easy for this time. Your eyes won't return to normal vision for probably 2-3 months. Lasik doesn't have this delay in recovery, and is substantially less painful in the recovery.
It is really an individual question, and you probably want professional advice on the matter.
Hope that helps. Finally, eyes aren't something you probably want to do on-the-cheap, so find someone reputable.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously doubt you're a lawyer, because no lawyer I know would be so reckless as to make this statement. It's just plain wrong
;) Being wrong doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for deciding not to make a statement.
Obviously, you haven't met many lawyers.
The constitution never implied patents (or copyrights) were a property right any more than slaves on the plantation were. This property propaganda is a bunch of crap made up by lawyers and the RIAA, and has absolutely no solid foundation in common law or constitutional law at all.
I suggest you talk to one of the biggest proponents of copyright reform, Lawrence Lessig, who states that "copyrighted material is, by definintion, private property", in his blog. Alternatively, you could back up your supposition (which I think is nonsensical, but hey, I wouldn't mind being wrong on this one).
Indeed, there is a plethora of common law dating back to the 1700's in England on copyright, in particular, defining it as property (Lockean natural law; the Blackstonian legal distinction was usurped by the common law).
You are unwittingly correct that it is "made up by lawyers"; it is a constructive property, just as corporations are constructive people, with effectively the same rights and liabilities therein. Unfortunately, you fail to establish any distinction between constructed and "real" property, in a society under rule of law.
In fact the constitution clearly states that copyrights and patents are a government mandated monopoly that is to be short term - genuine rights don't have an expiration date.
What's a "genuine" right? Your property rights effectively end, thanks to perpetuities legislation, ~81 years after you die (save trusts & fancy legal wrangling with big money), to prevent "ruling from the grave", so to speak. This makes your existing property rights no less tangible or "genuine", does it? Indeed, copy-rights in some jurisdictions vastly outlive real property rights.
There are transient rights, such as freedom of association, free speech, and the like, but I suspect these end when you die, though they may be vicariously preserved (to no personal avail, I imagine). I am left wondering what rights you are talking about.
Bear in mind that we are talking about "just compensation" for the government depriving you of rights to copyright or patent (or trademark) profit and enjoyment. In essence, this is legally analogous to depriving you of real property rights. Analogy to transient rights is superfluous; this is property, whether constructed by lawyers or not, it is recognized by courts of competent jurisdiction. That right can be taken away by government, but constitutionally the government must compensate the owners.
And there's no "property" taken from the inventor in violation of the 5th ammendment.
Quoth the Raven:
Taken from the blog of Lawrence Lessig, , one of the world's most prominent intellectual property lawyers.
I'm not sure what you are referring to with "natural rights"; natural persons and artificial persons (ie. corporations) are equally entitled to the constitutional provisions, just as constructive property rights are equally as applicable as common law or other rights (not sure what you mean by "natural rights", so
Incidentally, even if Congress constructs a right, they must compensate for taking it away again, pursuant to the last statement of the 5th amendment. This is not equivalent to not granting it in the first place; at some point the law granted rights which, when removed, may require "just compensation" for things such as lost profits.
The US has to be careful with patent reform, perhaps because of the lesser used part of the 5th amendment. Ie.
... [No person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
For the same reason that copyright reform may be difficult to bring about, as postulated by Mr. Lessig, Mr. Knopf, and others, it would literally cost the government a fortune to deprive owners of patents their due value, for a public purpose, as the 5th amendment guarantees them just compensation.
The lackadaisical politics is in essence digging its own grave, ensuring the continuation of a terrible intellectual property system, as the government will be unable to afford to compensate the existing privileged in the name reform for the public good.
I believe the a more practical unit of measurement is the "collected works of Jenna Jameson".
Because it grows at about the same rate as hard drive space?
Not quite the USA demographic; this is diluted even more in the last 15 years:
Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none 10% (1989)
per, CIA World Factbook, USA
piracy@microsoft.com; it'd take years before they figured out the boilerplate about what was going on.
.. and so on and so forth.
Hollywood: "You've pirated a movie."
Microsoft: "Thank you for reporting this piracy. We will prosecute violators to the full extent of the law."
"Almost hits the market" is like "almost pregnant". Doesn't count. After all, Duke Nukem Forever has been "almost released" for about six years.
Well, the implication of being "almost pregnant" is that there's lots of trying going on, and that can be an Ok thing too.
Frankly, one dead pixel isn't really that big a deal - maybe you've had experiences otherwise with "one dead pixel", though.
It's the bright red always-on ones that make you appreciate Futureshop and Staples' no-questions-asked return policy, though.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs.
"The most common scale of costs is called partial indemnity, which means the successful party will receive approximately 40-50% of its legal costs from the unsuccessful party. Where one party's behaviour has been particularly egregious, the court may award a higher scale of costs, called substantial indemnity, which is in the range of approximately 70-80% of the actual costs incurred."
The courts also have the discretion to NOT award costs, particularly if they feel that the losing claim was legitimate but failed on technicalities, or if there is substantial economic disparity. In the case of SCO, I'm fairly sure that IBM would ask for substantial indemnity.
For more details, check this.
Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).
You should mail this to yourself, keep it sealed, and submit it as prior art when XYZ corp gets a patent for it.
I'm certain that is the only reason Jar Jar Binks ever survived being edited out of Episode 1 is that no one would dare say to George, "Uh, George, you may not have realized it, but this character is nothing more than an offensive racial stereotype that will not go down well with anyone."
I'm sure that in his godliness he is gives less importance to listening, caring, or tolerating such advice. I'm quite certain the man is literate, and if he reads anything besides the Star Wars fansite claptrap, he is surely aware that he is producing films with zero redeemable value and inconsequential longevity.
Or perhaps he as a different ultimate design in mind, for fans: short term milking and long term bilking. I suspect the man must resent the Star Wars universe, perhaps for the same reasons that Alec Guiness did: overshadowing and marginalizing the rest of his career.
Quite right; "Expended" nuclear rods are actually better fuel than 'new' ones. Indeed, the problem lies in the explosive nature of the remaining isotopes. Someday, there may be ways to retrieve, isolate, and harness the currently unusable energy.
Incidentally, IIRC, 75% of the oil energy expended in the USA is in vehicles. Only 25% goes to homes.
The browser. We like standards compliant browsers. Switch to or adopt Mozilla technology. This is an anathema of Microsoft's strategy of usurption, but if you want to extend the olive branch, it's got to be attached to something we care about.
Seeing as Microsoft essentially stops developing the browser after it's done with it anyway, it might as well take advantage of the free maintenance costs, continual renewal and compliance adherence inherent to projects like Mozilla/Firefox. Instead of a whole team of Internet Explorer programmers, sponsor some open source programmers, as it feels fit.
Also, incidentally and less idealistically, by involving itself in something like the development of Mozilla, Microsoft could garner some support for proprietary technologies, that would otherwise fall upon deaf ears. Control comes with money. If Microsoft is on the outside, they have no control. The ideals of Mozilla/Firefox right now are precisely aligned against Microsoft's dominance; to curb or curtail that alignment requires involvement.
This is great for awareness of what's on the net. Kids don't, from what I gather, comprehend the whole self-centered capitalism. I mean, we try to teach them sharing, from day one. So you have this weasel come in and try to tell them that it's bad to share things on the internet. What message will kids get out of this? That there are lots of things being shared on the internet; they can download and share movies on the net, movies they cannot otherwise generally afford or would rather not ask parents for.
Sure, one can try to answer the moral question as an adult and come up with your own decision, but as a kid, I would've used this as an opporunity to talk to my friends and find out how many were downloading stuff off the net, and then use this as ammo to try to convince my parents to get high speed internet so I could participate, too. Hard to beat that herd mentality, especially in kids.
What is the case law precendent?
There is lots of case history on employment contracts. eg. Recording artists? Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. v. Nelson [1937]. Warner Bros produces movies in the US, signs Nelson (stage name: Bette Davis) to a contract stipulating non-competitive work. Nelson quits and works for an Opera company in the UK, but Warner Bros gets a court injunction against Nelson, prohibiting her from working anywhere involving acting acting skills. Draconian precedent, but there you have it.
And yes. There are monsters both under your bed and in your closet.
It's ok. They're afraid of the monster in my bed.
You win some, you lose some. They effectively won minidisc, and playstation; they have paid off in a goldmine. I don't know if they ever really lost with betamax; it was a superior format to VHS, and millions of films were distributed in that format. I guess if you win one major standard, it's worth gold, eg. Microsoft Windows.
...exploration really takes off, property rights will become of paramount importance. In fact, I predict that, in the next 100 years, there will be a terrestrial war over something in our Solar System that is rich in minerals. While I have no love for lawyers, the forward-thinking people in our society had better work this stuff out NOW.
Bah - law of the sea and laws of space are pretty much synonymous for almost all intents and purposes; they are based on customary practices, and essentially economically efficient possession or treaties. There are some important differences, such as the lack of adjacency with any extra-terrestrial objects, whereas we have coastal jurisdictions on the sea. There seem to be a lot more exploitable resources in space, especially when orbital access gets cheaper.
Point being, there isn't a great deal of work to do above and beyond customary international law of the sea. The same principles seem to apply.
This makes me wonder if by 2006, Linux versions of games will be commonly released along with or even before windows versions.
Or, perhaps more precisely, if by 2006 Linux will constitute substantial market and mind share for game producers, sufficient to consider the loss of it to competitors of similar games adequate to justify producing and supporting a Linux version.
The cost of producing and supporting Linux games will hopefully get cheaper as the platform matures. One can only it will remain a free platform.
The funny thing is that you can sue the federal government but the government must give you permission first. While there are cases where the government has given permission to sue, I'd imagine that suing the patent office may be more diffcult than suing a business.
It's not necessarily that simple. State immunity comes about in many forms, from what I gather. In the USA, it is likely that there are several ways to sue the government, or its agents.
1. Sue the agency itself, for harm arising from its negligence. As part of the Feds, it might be immune to civil lawsuits through Federal legislation.
2. Appeal to a tribunal, such as human rights tribunals (if the USA has those), or justice tribunals, or what have you. They sometimes pointedly get around state immunity legislation.
3. Sue the Patent Agent as part of the Agency; his negligent acts mean the Patent Agency is vicariously liable for damages. This may be different from suing the Agency itself, depending on the immunity legislation. If the Agent acted 'negligently' in their role, they may make the Agency liable.
4. Sue the Patent Agent as acting outside their duties. If they were so irresponsible as to have acted outside the boundaries of their job, they may be personally liable for your losses. Shallow pockets; sets a nasty precedent,though.
Mind you, you probably want to find a lawyer if it gets to that. Lobbying your senator or congressman, or whomever your elected representatives are, is probably the best option.
I haven't bought the singular dark-side=evil argument. Even Obi-wan stated that 'many of the truths you cling to depend upon a certain point of view', or something to that effect. There should be depth to these characters; even the most heinous of creatures in history have been motivated by a particularly breed of truth.
We are never really presented with the perspective of the dark side that can be rationalized. There's innuendo to some sort of quicker gratification through the dark side of the force, that it is more seductive, but we never see why people who fall to the dark side are bound to it. For conscious creatures to be bound to the dark side, they must rationalize their actions, and cling to a particular truth, so to speak. You'd go nuts, otherwise, eh?
I'm not sure I've seen this, in all of the Star Wars pictures; the dark side is still a shallow artistic license that begs for depth, that could have been eloquently explored in the prior two movies. I think we'll just get more muppets this time, though. Lucas's brain seems to have melted around the same time as the bronze bikini, too.
People have been doing RK (radial keratotomy) since the 1940's with razor blades (if you can imagine), the precursor to PRK (photoradial keratotomy), the laser equivalent. There are people alive today who have had eye surgery for over 60 years. I know at least one who had RK in the 1970's, and who has suffered, to my knowledge, no long term side effects. This is a poor statistical sample, however.
It is not yet probably known what the odds are of higher risk for long term complications, but certainly people have been having laser surgeries for a long time. Lasik is a bit different too, though, and much newer. It is possible that it will lead to a variety of long term complications that would not arise with P/RK.
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Canada, it's helpful to get your family physician to recommend and refer you to a laser eye surgeon. That way the surgeon is at least morally accountable to a professional, rather than just a customer, and sadly but truthfully it can make a difference in the quality of time spent on your procedure.
There are two common types of surgery, Lasik and PRK. I had the latter a year and a half ago. It took 6 months to heal, though it has been fantastic since. There can be problems with dry eye-sockets and blurry night vision, but it is typically, from what I understand, that these problems simply get worse if you had them before the surgery, and are not necessarily direct byproducts of modern surgery. (If I recall correctly, older PRK could cause, rather than just exasperate, blurry night vision)
If your prescription is above -6, I have heard that the risks of complications, including blindness, are substantially higher. Though for both Lasik and PRK the risks are marginal, with PRK the complications are less often and usually less serious. Lasik heals in approximately two weeks, however. Be sure that you see a surgeon that does both, as PRK may be a safer option for you if you have an astigmatism, though Lasik is often the preferred method. If the surgeon cannot offer PRK, then you may not be presented with your personally superior option.
As for the surgery, it takes less than 5 minutes per eye, and is painless. For 2 weeks after PRK, however, it is very painful as your eyes begin to recover from the surgery, and it will be some time before you can see properly. You will probably be given ample drugs, sleeping pills, pain killers, tranquilizers and muscle relaxants, and you will want to really take it easy for this time. Your eyes won't return to normal vision for probably 2-3 months. Lasik doesn't have this delay in recovery, and is substantially less painful in the recovery.
It is really an individual question, and you probably want professional advice on the matter.
Hope that helps. Finally, eyes aren't something you probably want to do on-the-cheap, so find someone reputable.