What if someone publishes a work entitled something like "Soil Composition Around the World"? That would take a lot of effort and involve many people to test the soil everywhere. It would be very valuable to certain groups (miners or farmers or other people who cared about that) for a long time (how often does the soil change?). So, this work would not be ever created if copyright protection existed only 10 years, because there's no hope of recovering the investment.
You're first paragraph makes a good point. I think, ultimately, the track record of increasing copyright duration makes investors more comfortable, and I think that's the justification for retroactive extension. I'm just trying to show that the track record on the past affects future confidence, and we can't disregard that effect, even if there are some other factors. I think they never should have increased copyright from 50 years, it had no real benefit and created many problems. We should be careful of backtracking though, because that is an indicator of instability.
If legislation is passed to require that the length of copyright for a particular work is limited (and guaranteed) to the length at time of creation, I hope we at least rescind the extended terms that have been granted the last few rounds first. Like that would happen.
Well, that might be a good idea, but it makes no sense in our legal system. If Congress makes a law, they can backtrack, and they can even contradict themselves. This idea reminds me of the "Social Security Lockbox" that Gore spoke of. Well, let's say they passed that Lockbox law, and then later they passed a law to spend the money on pork instead of SS. Now what? The money is gone. The only thing that would really make sense is a law against the government, also known as a Constitutional Amendment.
Unfortunately it's out of style for the government to obey the Constitution, so that won't do much good either. Try reading the Second Amendment ("...shall not be infringed.") and then try reading some gun control legislation.
How the government treats the past affects people's confidence in how the government will treat the future. To pretend that it will have no effect at all is not a good policy.
I don't think it should have ever been extended past 50 years. I think that was a big economic mistake. But the solution (changing copyright law around again, indicating instability) might be worse than the problem.
I agreed with you everything except the 3rd paragraph.
You're kind of using circular logic. Try twisting it around: if they DID extend trademark protection beyond the copyright, then there would only be one source for the works.
I think the argument against trademarks is much more simple: you only have trademark protection when you're using it as a brand in a particular industry. If you don't use it in some way that confuses the public, they can't claim trademark protection.
I do not feel like any kind of social injustice is happening if someone prevents me from seeing a work that someone else created. What if they just threw it away and never shared it? Well, that's kind of like having infinite copyright.
That being said, I don't think the copyright protection should be longer than a couple decades. However, more important than the specific timeframe is that it's stable and unchanging.
That may work great for most art forms. What about other things that are protected by copyright, like software or extensive reserach texts or huge amounts of collected data? Those things might be less fun to make, cost millions to develop, and take a much longer time to pay back the investment. They might just not be developed if copyright is 3 years.
My primary point was stability. Copyright law is sort of a promise by the government: "We promise to protect your work for 50 years if you create it now".
If we start changing copyright law all around, especially anything that reduces copyright terms, or anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work, it's a sign of instability. The change itself can have negative effects on investment in new works.
And I wouldn't take investment so lightly. People might still write music, but are people going to be paid to write software if nobody is willing to invest money in a software company? Are people going to be paid to write extensive research texts? People won't invest if they see copyright law as a moving target.
But I can make an easy argument NOT to make them infinite. The person who created the work will not live forever.
Isn't that what I said?
And yes, 50 years is a balance too. I never suggested otherwise, that's why I left it "X".
If someone creates a work and doesn't want to share it with me, that's their business. What if Disney made Mickey Mouse and then threw it away? Oh well, I can't stop them.
I think probably the most important thing is stability. Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights because it's an indicator that they might not protect new copyrights as much as old copyrights. I don't think they should have increased it to 70 years in the first place, because it creates more problems than it solves.
Stability is very important when it involves something as fundamental as property rights. We can't change copyright law around every few years because of a change of public opinion, because changing copyright protection is, in and of itself, bad for the economy.
Shouldn't copyright be used to *encourage new music*??
Well, copyright law must encourage many works, not just entertainment. It's nearly impossible, and not a good idea in my opinion, for the law to distinguish between the different reasons a work might be copyrighted.
You choose music because it seems much more rediculous for long copyright protection. Elvis got his benefit when people attended his concert.
However, a more long-term investment, such as writing software, might require significantly longer to pay off, and may require several revisions. Similarly for designing complex circuits or writing a long research text. And some works may involve many people.
Okay I wanna know if there is ANY possible justification [for extending copyright protection retroactively]
Investors are nervous. When the government starts to show signs that it is no longer protecting investments as it once was, investors get more nervous. If the government protects some property more than other property (regardless of what the creator knew at the time), then that would make the investors nervous.
Now, I agree that we shouldn't have extended it in the first place, and I also agree that if it is extended it shouldn't be retroactive. But investment is about trust and stability of the law and government. A government needs a good track record to promote investment. Retroactive policy definitely does affect the future, and those affects need to be acknowledged and considered.
If you follow your line of reasoning too far, you end up with an argument for putting all past works into the public domain because those are already created, and no more incentive is needed.
The premise of copyrights encouraging innovation and creativity is completely at odds with retroactive extension.
I don't think retroactive extension is inhenrently at odds with encouraging innovation. Practically, it's most likely motivated by things other than the public good (i.e. lobbiests, &c.), but it can certainly be justified.
At it's heart, copyright is about property rights. Strong protection of property rights encourages investment, which is a good thing for the economy.
However, property isn't as clear-cut as we'd like to think. Consider owning a piece of land: you don't usually have mineral rights, and the government can force you to sell if they want to build a highway. If you own some piece of a river upstream, you can't build a dam and charge the downstream people for water. You can't build a well and drain the entire underground water supply. And then all material goods are, at some level, made from these minerals. But I digress...
Patents are a strange form of property, because many patents cover ideas that may be arrived at without the patent holder ever existing. So that's why they're much more limited in timeframe.
Copyrights are actually the one form of property that you can reasonably claim: "Nobody would ever have this if I didn't create it." It's a very pure creation that doesn't depend on any prior property of any kind. So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator. Probably not a good practical idea, but reasonable people could at least make a good moral argument.
Now, the word "infinite" runs us right into another practical problem. People die eventually, and the moral argument really only lasts a few generations (for most people).
And all this makes the "X years plus life of author" make sense, I suppose. It's a balance. I think it would probably be best, from an economic standpoint, to have X = 25 years. But I have no real justification for that at all. Each person I expect has their own moral thresholds. My moral threshold would be much higher actually (X=100 years maybe), but from an economic standpoint, I really hate to see a valuable work go to waste.
P.S. The whole idea that ideas have zero marginal cost to reproduce introduces complexities that have been hashed out many times before, so I'll stay away from that one.
...but the school would lose money and lose a student, so the per-student money the school has would be the same.
In fact, most voucher systems would actually only take a part away, meaning the school would actually have more money per-student.
I don't believe that giving the failing public schools more money will fix them. California has just about the highest per-student funding in the world, and just about the lowest test results. I haven't seen much evidence that spending more money causes a better education.
I say it's time we let students take their money elsewhere. Not only will the students who leave benefit (after all, why would they leave if the public schools are so great?), but also the remaining kids at the public school. The public school would have more money per-student (or at least the same), and would then be forced to shape up to compete with the private schools.
Another crucial, crucial element is choice. Why can't we allow people to take their money out of a public school in the form of a voucher and go elsewhere? If public school are so great, it shouldn't matter, right? Some voucher programs only allow you to take a fraction of the average per-student cost, and we can't even have that as a choice.
I agree, that's one of two big logical flaws in the original post.
What justification does the poster have for the claim that ARM "controls" 80% of the cell phone chip market? If they raised their prices they'd be lucky to control 8% of the cell phone chip market.
With some companies I can at least understand where people feel the government should do something. MS software has a certain amount of "lock in". Even with cigarettes (or crack, or other addictive things) you aren't really stuck with any particular vendor.
I see no evidence that they "control" the market at all. Their customers could walk away at any time, so it would make a lot more sense to say "ARM's customers control 80% of the cell phone chip market". It happens that the customers just choose the best option available to them at the time, and for 80% of them, that's ARM.
I disagree with all antitrust "law", but in this case it seems particularly wrong to claim that ARM controls anything.
Protection through law varies, but it's usually very limited.
I wouldn't consider the protection "very limited". It certainly does have reasonable limits, but consumers are generally protected against faulty products quite well.
There's an "Implied Warranty of Merchantibility or Fitness for a Particular Purpose". If you buy a hair dryer, and it doesn't dry hair, you can demand a refund (often times you just get an exchange unless you're frustrated with the store).
If you want to give up the implied warranty, you have to sign something, usually called an "As-Is" sales contract (like with a cheap used car).
If you use the product in a manner not consistant with the instructions (like using a laptop underwater), you don't have any right to claim the implied warranty, since the laptop WAS fit for a purpose until you took it under water, and because you have no reason to expect that to be "normal operation".
I think it's a great balance between retailers and consumers.
Raw partition support would also be a good checkbox in the 'enterprise ready' table.
What does raw partition support have to do with enterprise applications?
When I think about raw partition access, I think about a huge amount of code that allows some minor optimizations that help only on dedicated postgres boxes.
They are going to reconsider this if someone can write a caching system that can beat the os but so far that hasn't happened.
It's a little more complicated I think. Using the filesystem has other advantages as well:
(1) PostgreSQL can work well with other applications running. Let's say you invent the best caching algorithm possible, then you still have two seperate caches, one for PostgreSQL and one for everything else. That means you have to dedicate the machine to PostgreSQL and have a high PostgreSQL cache (but any other app will suffer), or give postgres a low amount of cache space and it will suffer.
(2) The postgres developers don't want to worry about the bugs involved in making their own filesystem. Also, who's to say they can make a filesystem as fast right off the bat? It might be a huge development effort, with relatively minor benefit for most people.
"Tablespaces" allow you to put individual tables on different storage devices. Prior to tablespaces, an entire database had to be on one device*.
You are referring to two completely different technologies:
(1) "Writing directly to disk cluster" - By that you seem to mean direct disk access, not through the filesystem. I don't even think this is part of the PostgreSQL TODO, because there is just not a very strong need. Are you experiencing performance problems in this regard?
(2) "fragment tables across spaces" - By that you mean "Table Partitioning". That allows you to break up a single table across multiple storage devices. That would be very valuable technology, but as far as I know, won't make 7.5.
If all these features really work out for 7.5, they should call the release 8.0, and maybe they will.
*: There are some tricks you can use if you need to move a single table to a different device prior to 7.5. I think symlinks work fine, but if it's important, I'd wait for 7.5 or ask on the -general list to make sure it's correct.
Nazi stands for national socialist party, which is not capitalist.
Why do people associate fascists with capitalists? They're almost polar opposites.
I'm sure you can find similarities between nationalism in a fascist state and nationalism in the Republican Party, but I wouldn't necessarily call the Republican Party capitalist, either.
By the way, and this is an honest question, what does spelling America with a "K" ("Amerika") mean? I really don't understand, although it seems derrogatory.
Well, what then if it's not a public cororation, but a privately owned enterprise?
Also, I think that kind of thing does more harm than good. It's hard to argue that thousands of people losing their jobs and millions of companies without support for their software will be good, unless there's a deterrent factor. And I don't see the deterrent factor.
The only real solution is for consumers to start demanding open standards. People demand that when they buy a car, the hood isn't welded shut. They demand standard size bolts to hold it together, of a standard head size. Why not the same for software?
I don't know why people don't demand that -- I do. But what I do know is that any judicial solution will not be a real solution. The only real solution is for consumers to really demand an open system.
If you go down the path of government-run corporations, you get government-run corporations. And I'd take 1000 companies like microsoft before I'd take a company run by the national government.
I often wonder about anti-trust law. With any other law, there is a fairly clear line between "I haven't broken the law" and "I have broken the law", and the person breaking that law should be able to understand that line, and avoid it.
With anti-trust law, you can never really know. It's based heavily on interpretation by judges and there is little in the way of objective criteria (and by "objective criteria" I don't mean hand-waving projections and so forth). You can't even really call it law, since it's not the rule of law, but the rule of whatever judge happens to be hearing the case, or whatever people happen to be in the Justice Department at the time.
Can anyone in the world identify the particular time that Ballmer or Gates actually broke the law? Was it when they gave I.E. away for free? Was it when they added features to I.E. that nobody else had?
I am very worried about the power of judges in the U.S.
I don't believe that abortion should be against the law, but I also think it should be voted on by the people or added as a Constitutional Amendment. A few judges made a national law for everyone. I agree with the idea, but not how it was forced on the Amercian people by a few judges. And there is absolutely no Constituional justification for ruling all anti-abortion laws in the U.S. unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting.
We'd lose out on some large-investment works as a society (because they'd never be created), but it's not out of the question.
What if someone publishes a work entitled something like "Soil Composition Around the World"? That would take a lot of effort and involve many people to test the soil everywhere. It would be very valuable to certain groups (miners or farmers or other people who cared about that) for a long time (how often does the soil change?). So, this work would not be ever created if copyright protection existed only 10 years, because there's no hope of recovering the investment.
You're first paragraph makes a good point. I think, ultimately, the track record of increasing copyright duration makes investors more comfortable, and I think that's the justification for retroactive extension. I'm just trying to show that the track record on the past affects future confidence, and we can't disregard that effect, even if there are some other factors. I think they never should have increased copyright from 50 years, it had no real benefit and created many problems. We should be careful of backtracking though, because that is an indicator of instability.
If legislation is passed to require that the length of copyright for a particular work is limited (and guaranteed) to the length at time of creation, I hope we at least rescind the extended terms that have been granted the last few rounds first. Like that would happen.
Well, that might be a good idea, but it makes no sense in our legal system. If Congress makes a law, they can backtrack, and they can even contradict themselves. This idea reminds me of the "Social Security Lockbox" that Gore spoke of. Well, let's say they passed that Lockbox law, and then later they passed a law to spend the money on pork instead of SS. Now what? The money is gone. The only thing that would really make sense is a law against the government, also known as a Constitutional Amendment.
Unfortunately it's out of style for the government to obey the Constitution, so that won't do much good either. Try reading the Second Amendment ("...shall not be infringed.") and then try reading some gun control legislation.
How the government treats the past affects people's confidence in how the government will treat the future. To pretend that it will have no effect at all is not a good policy.
I don't think it should have ever been extended past 50 years. I think that was a big economic mistake. But the solution (changing copyright law around again, indicating instability) might be worse than the problem.
I agreed with you everything except the 3rd paragraph.
You're kind of using circular logic. Try twisting it around: if they DID extend trademark protection beyond the copyright, then there would only be one source for the works.
I think the argument against trademarks is much more simple: you only have trademark protection when you're using it as a brand in a particular industry. If you don't use it in some way that confuses the public, they can't claim trademark protection.
I do not feel like any kind of social injustice is happening if someone prevents me from seeing a work that someone else created. What if they just threw it away and never shared it? Well, that's kind of like having infinite copyright.
That being said, I don't think the copyright protection should be longer than a couple decades. However, more important than the specific timeframe is that it's stable and unchanging.
That may work great for most art forms. What about other things that are protected by copyright, like software or extensive reserach texts or huge amounts of collected data? Those things might be less fun to make, cost millions to develop, and take a much longer time to pay back the investment. They might just not be developed if copyright is 3 years.
My primary point was stability. Copyright law is sort of a promise by the government: "We promise to protect your work for 50 years if you create it now".
If we start changing copyright law all around, especially anything that reduces copyright terms, or anything that gives less protection to and older work than a newer work, it's a sign of instability. The change itself can have negative effects on investment in new works.
And I wouldn't take investment so lightly. People might still write music, but are people going to be paid to write software if nobody is willing to invest money in a software company? Are people going to be paid to write extensive research texts? People won't invest if they see copyright law as a moving target.
But I can make an easy argument NOT to make them infinite. The person who created the work will not live forever.
Isn't that what I said?
And yes, 50 years is a balance too. I never suggested otherwise, that's why I left it "X".
If someone creates a work and doesn't want to share it with me, that's their business. What if Disney made Mickey Mouse and then threw it away? Oh well, I can't stop them.
I think probably the most important thing is stability. Investors will get scared if the government doesn't protect old copyrights as much as they do new copyrights because it's an indicator that they might not protect new copyrights as much as old copyrights. I don't think they should have increased it to 70 years in the first place, because it creates more problems than it solves.
Stability is very important when it involves something as fundamental as property rights. We can't change copyright law around every few years because of a change of public opinion, because changing copyright protection is, in and of itself, bad for the economy.
The concepts are similar in many ways. I view copyrights as a weird form of property.
Shouldn't copyright be used to *encourage new music*??
Well, copyright law must encourage many works, not just entertainment. It's nearly impossible, and not a good idea in my opinion, for the law to distinguish between the different reasons a work might be copyrighted.
You choose music because it seems much more rediculous for long copyright protection. Elvis got his benefit when people attended his concert.
However, a more long-term investment, such as writing software, might require significantly longer to pay off, and may require several revisions. Similarly for designing complex circuits or writing a long research text. And some works may involve many people.
Okay I wanna know if there is ANY possible justification [for extending copyright protection retroactively]
Investors are nervous. When the government starts to show signs that it is no longer protecting investments as it once was, investors get more nervous. If the government protects some property more than other property (regardless of what the creator knew at the time), then that would make the investors nervous.
Now, I agree that we shouldn't have extended it in the first place, and I also agree that if it is extended it shouldn't be retroactive. But investment is about trust and stability of the law and government. A government needs a good track record to promote investment. Retroactive policy definitely does affect the future, and those affects need to be acknowledged and considered.
If you follow your line of reasoning too far, you end up with an argument for putting all past works into the public domain because those are already created, and no more incentive is needed.
The premise of copyrights encouraging innovation and creativity is completely at odds with retroactive extension.
I don't think retroactive extension is inhenrently at odds with encouraging innovation. Practically, it's most likely motivated by things other than the public good (i.e. lobbiests, &c.), but it can certainly be justified.
At it's heart, copyright is about property rights. Strong protection of property rights encourages investment, which is a good thing for the economy.
However, property isn't as clear-cut as we'd like to think. Consider owning a piece of land: you don't usually have mineral rights, and the government can force you to sell if they want to build a highway. If you own some piece of a river upstream, you can't build a dam and charge the downstream people for water. You can't build a well and drain the entire underground water supply. And then all material goods are, at some level, made from these minerals. But I digress...
Patents are a strange form of property, because many patents cover ideas that may be arrived at without the patent holder ever existing. So that's why they're much more limited in timeframe.
Copyrights are actually the one form of property that you can reasonably claim: "Nobody would ever have this if I didn't create it." It's a very pure creation that doesn't depend on any prior property of any kind. So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator. Probably not a good practical idea, but reasonable people could at least make a good moral argument.
Now, the word "infinite" runs us right into another practical problem. People die eventually, and the moral argument really only lasts a few generations (for most people).
And all this makes the "X years plus life of author" make sense, I suppose. It's a balance. I think it would probably be best, from an economic standpoint, to have X = 25 years. But I have no real justification for that at all. Each person I expect has their own moral thresholds. My moral threshold would be much higher actually (X=100 years maybe), but from an economic standpoint, I really hate to see a valuable work go to waste.
P.S. The whole idea that ideas have zero marginal cost to reproduce introduces complexities that have been hashed out many times before, so I'll stay away from that one.
...but the school would lose money and lose a student, so the per-student money the school has would be the same.
In fact, most voucher systems would actually only take a part away, meaning the school would actually have more money per-student.
I don't believe that giving the failing public schools more money will fix them. California has just about the highest per-student funding in the world, and just about the lowest test results. I haven't seen much evidence that spending more money causes a better education.
I say it's time we let students take their money elsewhere. Not only will the students who leave benefit (after all, why would they leave if the public schools are so great?), but also the remaining kids at the public school. The public school would have more money per-student (or at least the same), and would then be forced to shape up to compete with the private schools.
Another crucial, crucial element is choice. Why can't we allow people to take their money out of a public school in the form of a voucher and go elsewhere? If public school are so great, it shouldn't matter, right? Some voucher programs only allow you to take a fraction of the average per-student cost, and we can't even have that as a choice.
Why can't we give students a choice?
I agree, that's one of two big logical flaws in the original post.
What justification does the poster have for the claim that ARM "controls" 80% of the cell phone chip market? If they raised their prices they'd be lucky to control 8% of the cell phone chip market.
With some companies I can at least understand where people feel the government should do something. MS software has a certain amount of "lock in". Even with cigarettes (or crack, or other addictive things) you aren't really stuck with any particular vendor.
I see no evidence that they "control" the market at all. Their customers could walk away at any time, so it would make a lot more sense to say "ARM's customers control 80% of the cell phone chip market". It happens that the customers just choose the best option available to them at the time, and for 80% of them, that's ARM.
I disagree with all antitrust "law", but in this case it seems particularly wrong to claim that ARM controls anything.
Protection through law varies, but it's usually very limited.
I wouldn't consider the protection "very limited". It certainly does have reasonable limits, but consumers are generally protected against faulty products quite well.
There's an "Implied Warranty of Merchantibility or Fitness for a Particular Purpose". If you buy a hair dryer, and it doesn't dry hair, you can demand a refund (often times you just get an exchange unless you're frustrated with the store).
If you want to give up the implied warranty, you have to sign something, usually called an "As-Is" sales contract (like with a cheap used car).
If you use the product in a manner not consistant with the instructions (like using a laptop underwater), you don't have any right to claim the implied warranty, since the laptop WAS fit for a purpose until you took it under water, and because you have no reason to expect that to be "normal operation".
I think it's a great balance between retailers and consumers.
The mouse is the one with problems, if he peed on electrical equipment and it shorted...
I've always noticed a lot more America bashing than French bashing on /.
Raw partition support would also be a good checkbox in the 'enterprise ready' table.
What does raw partition support have to do with enterprise applications?
When I think about raw partition access, I think about a huge amount of code that allows some minor optimizations that help only on dedicated postgres boxes.
They are going to reconsider this if someone can write a caching system that can beat the os but so far that hasn't happened.
It's a little more complicated I think. Using the filesystem has other advantages as well:
(1) PostgreSQL can work well with other applications running. Let's say you invent the best caching algorithm possible, then you still have two seperate caches, one for PostgreSQL and one for everything else. That means you have to dedicate the machine to PostgreSQL and have a high PostgreSQL cache (but any other app will suffer), or give postgres a low amount of cache space and it will suffer.
(2) The postgres developers don't want to worry about the bugs involved in making their own filesystem. Also, who's to say they can make a filesystem as fast right off the bat? It might be a huge development effort, with relatively minor benefit for most people.
"Tablespaces" allow you to put individual tables on different storage devices. Prior to tablespaces, an entire database had to be on one device*.
You are referring to two completely different technologies:
(1) "Writing directly to disk cluster" - By that you seem to mean direct disk access, not through the filesystem. I don't even think this is part of the PostgreSQL TODO, because there is just not a very strong need. Are you experiencing performance problems in this regard?
(2) "fragment tables across spaces" - By that you mean "Table Partitioning". That allows you to break up a single table across multiple storage devices. That would be very valuable technology, but as far as I know, won't make 7.5.
If all these features really work out for 7.5, they should call the release 8.0, and maybe they will.
*: There are some tricks you can use if you need to move a single table to a different device prior to 7.5. I think symlinks work fine, but if it's important, I'd wait for 7.5 or ask on the -general list to make sure it's correct.
"nazi capitalist" is an oxymoron.
Nazi stands for national socialist party, which is not capitalist.
Why do people associate fascists with capitalists? They're almost polar opposites.
I'm sure you can find similarities between nationalism in a fascist state and nationalism in the Republican Party, but I wouldn't necessarily call the Republican Party capitalist, either.
By the way, and this is an honest question, what does spelling America with a "K" ("Amerika") mean? I really don't understand, although it seems derrogatory.
Well, what then if it's not a public cororation, but a privately owned enterprise?
Also, I think that kind of thing does more harm than good. It's hard to argue that thousands of people losing their jobs and millions of companies without support for their software will be good, unless there's a deterrent factor. And I don't see the deterrent factor.
The only real solution is for consumers to start demanding open standards. People demand that when they buy a car, the hood isn't welded shut. They demand standard size bolts to hold it together, of a standard head size. Why not the same for software?
I don't know why people don't demand that -- I do. But what I do know is that any judicial solution will not be a real solution. The only real solution is for consumers to really demand an open system.
If you go down the path of government-run corporations, you get government-run corporations. And I'd take 1000 companies like microsoft before I'd take a company run by the national government.
I often wonder about anti-trust law. With any other law, there is a fairly clear line between "I haven't broken the law" and "I have broken the law", and the person breaking that law should be able to understand that line, and avoid it.
With anti-trust law, you can never really know. It's based heavily on interpretation by judges and there is little in the way of objective criteria (and by "objective criteria" I don't mean hand-waving projections and so forth). You can't even really call it law, since it's not the rule of law, but the rule of whatever judge happens to be hearing the case, or whatever people happen to be in the Justice Department at the time.
Can anyone in the world identify the particular time that Ballmer or Gates actually broke the law? Was it when they gave I.E. away for free? Was it when they added features to I.E. that nobody else had?
I am very worried about the power of judges in the U.S.
I don't believe that abortion should be against the law, but I also think it should be voted on by the people or added as a Constitutional Amendment. A few judges made a national law for everyone. I agree with the idea, but not how it was forced on the Amercian people by a few judges. And there is absolutely no Constituional justification for ruling all anti-abortion laws in the U.S. unconstitutional.
Good analogy, but they only way they will eat the cost is if you don't pay them any more.
Well, it wouldn't cost that much if we just made all replacement parts metric. People here are slowly learning metric anyway.