There's levels of generalization between "treat all men over 75 as an identical class" and "every person must be treated as a unique individual". You could, for example, segregate outcomes by a few major factors, like reported levels of exercise, weight, smoking vs. not, amount of alcohol consumption, etc.
Fortunately, I've had relatively limited interactions with doctors, but the ones I have had left me somewhat surprised; perhaps I had had too idealistic view of scientific advances in medicine. Even things that seem like they're narrowly defined seem not to have much data around. For example, I got totally random suggestions from dermatologists about moles being removed vs. not vs. who knows. Obviously nobody wants to say "you shouldn't remove that mole" only to be sued when it turns cancerous. But it seems like a well-defined enough thing that there would be lookup tables giving cancer likelihood. Or something better than squinting and "eh, I don't really like the look of that one".
Heck, I bet if you collected enough photographs of moles, some basic demographic data on the people the photographs came from, and cancer vs. no-cancer labels, a computer could produce decent diagnoses.
The vast majority of procedures are highly constrained by insurance rules: either the government in the case of Medicare, or private industry in the case of various HMOs and insurance plans, have complex rules about what must be done in what order to get reimbursement. Doctors already have to follow that, so it'd at least be an improvement if those rules had some basis in scientific evidence indicating what treatments really are better.
There is quite a lot of resistance in the medical community to evidence-based medicine, especially among older doctors. The "everything requires subjective judgment of the practitioner, damn what your numbers say" strain of doctoring didn't really die out in the 19th century. Most doctors, actually, probably operate more based on folk knowledge and rules of thumb than any solid empirical evidence, except in specialized areas.
Say I'm a scientist, but not in the medical profession. So I can't treat myself, but I would like to be treated by someone who I have confidence is basing their decisions on solid evidence. That is, going to them should get me results that have better expected outcomes than doing my own damn PubMed searches and self-treating. It seems this often isn't the case; a lot of treatment is "rule of thumb" or "I don't like the look of that", and as you point out the patients are probably at least as responsible as the doctors in this.
But if I really do want a physician who's going to give me an honest summary of current scientific evidence, how do I find someone? Do people openly advertise as doing evidence-based medicine? I can see that a lot of people simply don't want EBM--- they want the old-fashioned village doctor who has a folk remedy and answer for everything. But it seems there ought to be some way to connect people who do with doctors who're willing to provide it.
There is no scientific evidence at all that "a regular practice of PSA tests" is useful in any respect, or that it even does more good than harm. It's a medical custom that has no empirical basis.
The current supply is what limits the near-term viability of the product; it means that it simply cannot become a large-scale product within the next year or two. If it started catching on and prices for tellurium went up significantly, that might spur mining companies to look for more. But now you're talking a 2-5-year lead time for prospecting and significant new mines to come online, by which point the technology will probably have been surpassed by others. So it might actually never catch on at all, if its popularity is nipped in the bud by restricted current supply. And knowing that, the mining companies may not even invest in new tellurium mines at all, since they aren't confident that demand isn't fleeting.
As another academic, the main stumbling block to me getting an e-reader has been that I'd mainly use it to read papers, and I've yet to find an e-reader that can comfortably handle 8 1/2" x 11, two-column text with small (usually 9-point) font, which is the standard for many CS publication venues. In particular, a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling with slow refresh rate is a nightmare.
It seems like it'd be fine for books, but I rarely read books professionally, just papers. When I do read books, I usually want a physical copy that I can read through without distractions, the exact opposite of what I'd use the e-reader for.
Your argument is sound as far as it goes: you're pointing out an oligopoly that is stable without collusion among its players. It happens that the current prices are considerably above cost, but as you argue, it's within each of their individual interests to keep them there, because any gain in grabbing more of the gravy would be offset by the loss of derailing the whole gravy train.
These are the sorts of situations that left-liberal economists generally believe call for regulation, because they're market failures: stable situations where competition fails to bring prices down to near costs, and instead results in oligopolies.
Classical economics counters, however, that regulation is not needed, because such situations will happen in pure free markets. While your analysis is correct looking at only the existing players, classical (and libertarian-leaning) economics generally rely on new entrants to a market being always a likely possibility. In this case, while it's not in the interest of any existing players to drop their prices (lest they upset the gravy train benefitting all of them), it is in the interest of outside players to enter the market and undercut the incumbents. They have no share of the gravy train to lose, so any gain in market share, at an undercutting price that's still above cost, is a net win.
Why doesn't that happen here? Essentially, barriers to entry. Libertarian-leaning economics argue that most such barriers are actually due to regulation: if cell-phones were less regulated, they argue, you would see dozens of new cell-phone operators, undercutting current prices and driving them down closer to cost. Left-liberal economists tend to find that an unlikely prediction, and think instead that cell-phones are a natural oligopoly, supporting a relatively limited set of players with large natural barriers to entry that make the spontaneous emergency of a highly competitive market unlikely.
You seem to have an oddly unorthodox hybrid of those two positions: you agree with the left-liberal economists that this is the natural outcome of the markets, but you don't think anything should be done about it.
Consumers pay fees, expenses, taxes, other costs, and profits.
That does not somehow magically guarantee that a cost increase to the producer can be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. It might take the form of reduced profits for the producer instead. It depends on how competitive the markets are, and how much above cost current prices are. Usually it's some mix of the two: profits are squeezed some (but not the full amount), and prices are increased some (but not the full amount). The same happens with cost decreases: businesses rarely pass the full decrease on to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Rather, some goes to the consumer, and some goes to increased profits.
This is why, for example, the airline industry's profits were significantly squeezed when oil prices went up: they were not able to pass the full cost increases on to the consumers in the form of higher fares, because the market would not bear sufficiently higher fares.
In general, cost increases (of which taxes are only one form) can either increase prices, or squeeze profits of producers, or both. Similarly, cost decreases can reduce prices, or increase profits of producers, or both. In either case, the answer "both" is the most common, because prices are relatively sticky, and determined by things other than purely cost to the producer.
Prices are set by both supply and demand, and cost increases only increase price if they reduce supply. In some cases, they don't (or don't significantly), because producers are willing to eat the difference and continue supplying the product, either because they still make a profit (albeit a reduced one), or because they think they can in the future and don't want to lose market share.
Take the large oil-price rises two years ago, for example. Part of the cost increase was passed on to the consumers in the form of fare increases, but not all of it was: some of it came out of airline profits, which were squeezed quite significantly, because the market would not bear fare raises sufficient to pass on the full cost.
Extremely large profits in the financial industry failed to provide any incentive to manage those companies competently. Instead, they simply pulled in money so fat cats in industry can feather their own nest and rip off the first derivative of the economic system.
The political position of allowing profits and opposing taxes is perfectly fine to hold. It's the pseudo-economics of arguing in the contradictory manner the grandparent comment discussed that's the problem.
The "have it both ways" attempt is:
1. When discussing large profit margins, we focus on a market-demand theory of price: price is unrelated to costs, and is instead related to demand. If something costs $0.02 to produce, and is currently going for $100, that's just the market at work. If people weren't willing to pay it, it wouldn't cost $100.
2. When discussing costs, we assume that in the limit, market prices approach the cost of production (as classical economic theory holds), and therefore we can use a cost-determined theory of price: prices are determined by cost to the producer, so an increase in costs means an increase in price for the consumer. If something previously cost $10 to produce, and now costs $20, it will cost the consumer $10 more.
I.e., ignore the part that isn't convenient to the current political position, and ignore the exact opposite part in other situations.
In fact, both have an element of truth and falsity, but in both situations. Large profit margins are indeed "fine" if the market can bear them: there's no obligation to sell near cost, if people are willing to pay more. However, they're also suspicious from a classical-economics point of view: large profit margins ought not to exist, except as temporary aberrations or in markets that are non-competitive for some reason, because in competitive markets, prices ought to approach costs more closely in the limit.
As for argument #2, argument #1 shows its error: prices are not directly determined by costs, but rather by what the market will bear. If your cost goes up by $10, this does not magically mean the market will bear a $10 higher price. Costs can indirectly influence prices, of course, by changing supply. Perhaps at the current prevailing prices, if your cost goes up $10, you are no longer willing to sell the product. Supply decreases, and prevailing prices rise. But this is not always true; if we were in a situation where things cost $0.02 to produce and the prevailing price was $100, now that they cost $10.02 to produce, the prevailing price of $100 is still quite profitable, so there would be little reason for producers to exit the market. There would also be no particular reason that the equilibrium price ought to rise, if indeed it's set by supply and demand (as opposed to collusion among producers who agree to pass on their costs).
In short, if you believe in a perfectly efficient market, where the invisible hand always brings prices relatively close to cost, then indeed costs do get passed on, but large profit margins are suspicious. On the other hand, if you thing large profit margins are a perfectly fine feature of markets, there's no good argument that costs will necessarily be passed in: whether and to what extent they will be passed on versus simply squeeze profits depends on the market.
An increase in costs to a producer can come from one of two places: increase in prices paid by consumers, and decrease in profit margin for the producer. How those work out proportionally depends on the market. A producer cannot just automatically raise their prices by the amount of a cost increase, if they operate in a competitive, non-collusive market.
Of course, since cell phones companies do routinely collude, and the market isn't particularly competitive, I expect them to just all in unison add a line-item on the bill directly passing the cost on.
No company was forced to bid for the spectrum. If a particular corporation was not interested in using the public airwaves for its business, it's free to enter some other line of business, and not bid at the auction. It's not a tax any more than a business's services are taxes.
Costs and prices are only indirectly tied. In free, non-collusive markets (which cell phones only sort of are), prices are set by supply and demand, not by costs to the seller. If it costs you $10 more to produce something, this doesn't automatically mean the market will offer you $10 more to buy it. Even if it costs everyone $10 more to produce something, it doesn't automatically mean the price will go up $10. It's possible margins will simply be squeezed instead.
Now of course if costs to the seller are more than the current market price, some sellers will either move out of the market or at least the low end of the market, reducing supply at the current prices, and thereby raising prices.
But that doesn't seem to be the case at the moment: cell-phone carriers are quite profitable. They could bear additional fees and still be profitable at current prices. Therefore, in a free market, it actually wouldn't result in price increases, just in profit decreases for the carriers (i.e. squeezing margins).
However, I will agree that, because of unofficial collusion between the carriers, in this case it's not entirely unlikely that they'll all raise their prices to try to maintain their current profit margins. That has nothing to do with free-market economics, though. In a competitive market with many independent, non-colluding suppliers, the fact that the carriers now had to pay an additional fee would not raise prices, unless it resulted in carriers actually becoming unprofitable at current prices.
While the judges themselves are employees of the government, most of the judicial apparatus is private, and operates under a market system. Suspect that your rights are being violated, but aren't quite sure what bit of legislation applies? Hire someone knowledgeable in the law to tell you. Need to file paperwork in a trial, but want to be sure that you did it correctly, and didn't miss something that could be important to your case? Hire someone who specializes in drafting legal papers to draft them for you. That's basically how a private market economy works: if you want something done that you can't do yourself, you hire someone to do it. However, there's a good case for making anything related to justice less privatized, in my opinion, as this tends to mean that the people who can afford to hire good consultants (lawyers) tend to get better results.
I agree that there isn't a good legislative solution to spam in general, but here we're talking about someone whose identity and whereabout are known, living openly in the United States, who has repeatedly been found to be violating federal law. If there's anything legal systems are supposed to be good at doing, it's keeping people whose identities and whereabouts are known from repeatedly and openly violating the law.
With Sanford, it seems that there ought to be a way to make subsequent judgments against him have more teeth than simply fines. For example, an injunction against any future participation in online advertising (spam or not), as he's shown he's unable to operate in that industry legally. Then throw him in jail if he violates that injunction.
Now maybe he'll flee to the Caribbean or something, which I suppose is hard to do anything about. But at the very least, he shouldn't be able to live in the US openly; if he's going to be a scofflaw, force him to live as a fugitive.
What is a potential purchaser going to want to know before deciding how much to offer for a security? Well, something about its characteristics. If it's a derivative of other securities, they might want to know how its value relates to the values of underlying securities.
You first need to know the qualitative information of course: how does a change in the underlying securities result in a change in its price? What additional risk components (such as counterparty risk) does it have? Etc. Then the potential purchaser might want to a way to estimate how much they ought to pay for the derivative given some numbers for the values they place on risk, the inflation they expect, etc. That's what pricing models are. Unless you can actually work through all these interrelations in your head, you need some sort of model to even figure out what a reasonable offer for the security is.
Now maybe markets could also discover this through trial and error. Securities are valued in one way, and it turns out (as it recently did) that they were actually overvalued, because they failed to sufficiently factor in a significant component of risk. Refine for the next iteration. But this also requires infinite time to get it right, or at the very least a few major business cycles (i.e. decades). In this case, I'm not actually sure the market discovered a flaw in the previous pricing model per se, but rather in the parameters people were commonly plugging in: models generally have terms for estimates of underlying default rates, counterparty default rates, etc. and they were all massively underestimated (by the market).
There are a lot of American things that seem to be chic in Japan, but technology has never really been one of them. It's like trying to impress a German with your precision-engineered American luxury car or something.
If they're literally claiming to have written it, and that's factually false, and they're competing with you commercially, there are still laws against false advertising.
I'm guessing part of the difficulty courts are having here is that in the non-crypto examples it never really becomes a legal issue where precedent is set. If you refuse to open the safe for them, they don't spend a bunch of effort trying to get the courts to force you to open it: they just break it open. I'm not sure the courts have been confronted before with evidence stored in what's essentially an unbreakable safe. (But I could be wrong.)
The BSD license is basically, "you may use this for any purpose, as long as you retain this copyright notice". There's also an implicit, "and as long as no other law prevents you from doing so". That's roughly equivalent to most uses of the Creative Commons Attribution license ("cc-by") (cc-by users can require that you "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor", which could lead to more onerous requirements, but most don't).
This license removes even the attribution requirement, and attempts to waive all of those other implicit rights, such as moral rights in some countries. It's basically an attempt to come as close as possible to: you really can use this for anything you want, absolutely no strings attached, I really mean it.
For software licensing the difference is somewhat smaller, because non-copyright restrictions like moral rights are applied fairly infrequently to software--- they're more often applied to things like artistic works. I'm guessing that's why BSD-licensed software has never worried about it much.
You can indeed apply CC licenses to software, though I would probably only do so with the non-restrictive ones, like this one or cc-by. If you want to apply a copyleft license to software, using something like the GPL or LGPL is probably better than the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike ("cc-by-sa"), because it makes more effort to define exactly what the viral nature does and doesn't do, while cc-by-sa leaves a bunch of stuff vague when it comes to thinks like linking.
Slashdot Mirror
There's levels of generalization between "treat all men over 75 as an identical class" and "every person must be treated as a unique individual". You could, for example, segregate outcomes by a few major factors, like reported levels of exercise, weight, smoking vs. not, amount of alcohol consumption, etc.
Fortunately, I've had relatively limited interactions with doctors, but the ones I have had left me somewhat surprised; perhaps I had had too idealistic view of scientific advances in medicine. Even things that seem like they're narrowly defined seem not to have much data around. For example, I got totally random suggestions from dermatologists about moles being removed vs. not vs. who knows. Obviously nobody wants to say "you shouldn't remove that mole" only to be sued when it turns cancerous. But it seems like a well-defined enough thing that there would be lookup tables giving cancer likelihood. Or something better than squinting and "eh, I don't really like the look of that one".
Heck, I bet if you collected enough photographs of moles, some basic demographic data on the people the photographs came from, and cancer vs. no-cancer labels, a computer could produce decent diagnoses.
The vast majority of procedures are highly constrained by insurance rules: either the government in the case of Medicare, or private industry in the case of various HMOs and insurance plans, have complex rules about what must be done in what order to get reimbursement. Doctors already have to follow that, so it'd at least be an improvement if those rules had some basis in scientific evidence indicating what treatments really are better.
There is quite a lot of resistance in the medical community to evidence-based medicine, especially among older doctors. The "everything requires subjective judgment of the practitioner, damn what your numbers say" strain of doctoring didn't really die out in the 19th century. Most doctors, actually, probably operate more based on folk knowledge and rules of thumb than any solid empirical evidence, except in specialized areas.
Say I'm a scientist, but not in the medical profession. So I can't treat myself, but I would like to be treated by someone who I have confidence is basing their decisions on solid evidence. That is, going to them should get me results that have better expected outcomes than doing my own damn PubMed searches and self-treating. It seems this often isn't the case; a lot of treatment is "rule of thumb" or "I don't like the look of that", and as you point out the patients are probably at least as responsible as the doctors in this.
But if I really do want a physician who's going to give me an honest summary of current scientific evidence, how do I find someone? Do people openly advertise as doing evidence-based medicine? I can see that a lot of people simply don't want EBM--- they want the old-fashioned village doctor who has a folk remedy and answer for everything. But it seems there ought to be some way to connect people who do with doctors who're willing to provide it.
There is no scientific evidence at all that "a regular practice of PSA tests" is useful in any respect, or that it even does more good than harm. It's a medical custom that has no empirical basis.
The current supply is what limits the near-term viability of the product; it means that it simply cannot become a large-scale product within the next year or two. If it started catching on and prices for tellurium went up significantly, that might spur mining companies to look for more. But now you're talking a 2-5-year lead time for prospecting and significant new mines to come online, by which point the technology will probably have been surpassed by others. So it might actually never catch on at all, if its popularity is nipped in the bud by restricted current supply. And knowing that, the mining companies may not even invest in new tellurium mines at all, since they aren't confident that demand isn't fleeting.
As another academic, the main stumbling block to me getting an e-reader has been that I'd mainly use it to read papers, and I've yet to find an e-reader that can comfortably handle 8 1/2" x 11, two-column text with small (usually 9-point) font, which is the standard for many CS publication venues. In particular, a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling with slow refresh rate is a nightmare.
It seems like it'd be fine for books, but I rarely read books professionally, just papers. When I do read books, I usually want a physical copy that I can read through without distractions, the exact opposite of what I'd use the e-reader for.
Your argument is sound as far as it goes: you're pointing out an oligopoly that is stable without collusion among its players. It happens that the current prices are considerably above cost, but as you argue, it's within each of their individual interests to keep them there, because any gain in grabbing more of the gravy would be offset by the loss of derailing the whole gravy train.
These are the sorts of situations that left-liberal economists generally believe call for regulation, because they're market failures: stable situations where competition fails to bring prices down to near costs, and instead results in oligopolies.
Classical economics counters, however, that regulation is not needed, because such situations will happen in pure free markets. While your analysis is correct looking at only the existing players, classical (and libertarian-leaning) economics generally rely on new entrants to a market being always a likely possibility. In this case, while it's not in the interest of any existing players to drop their prices (lest they upset the gravy train benefitting all of them), it is in the interest of outside players to enter the market and undercut the incumbents. They have no share of the gravy train to lose, so any gain in market share, at an undercutting price that's still above cost, is a net win.
Why doesn't that happen here? Essentially, barriers to entry. Libertarian-leaning economics argue that most such barriers are actually due to regulation: if cell-phones were less regulated, they argue, you would see dozens of new cell-phone operators, undercutting current prices and driving them down closer to cost. Left-liberal economists tend to find that an unlikely prediction, and think instead that cell-phones are a natural oligopoly, supporting a relatively limited set of players with large natural barriers to entry that make the spontaneous emergency of a highly competitive market unlikely.
You seem to have an oddly unorthodox hybrid of those two positions: you agree with the left-liberal economists that this is the natural outcome of the markets, but you don't think anything should be done about it.
Consumers pay fees, expenses, taxes, other costs, and profits.
That does not somehow magically guarantee that a cost increase to the producer can be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. It might take the form of reduced profits for the producer instead. It depends on how competitive the markets are, and how much above cost current prices are. Usually it's some mix of the two: profits are squeezed some (but not the full amount), and prices are increased some (but not the full amount). The same happens with cost decreases: businesses rarely pass the full decrease on to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Rather, some goes to the consumer, and some goes to increased profits.
This is why, for example, the airline industry's profits were significantly squeezed when oil prices went up: they were not able to pass the full cost increases on to the consumers in the form of higher fares, because the market would not bear sufficiently higher fares.
In general, cost increases (of which taxes are only one form) can either increase prices, or squeeze profits of producers, or both. Similarly, cost decreases can reduce prices, or increase profits of producers, or both. In either case, the answer "both" is the most common, because prices are relatively sticky, and determined by things other than purely cost to the producer.
Prices are set by both supply and demand, and cost increases only increase price if they reduce supply. In some cases, they don't (or don't significantly), because producers are willing to eat the difference and continue supplying the product, either because they still make a profit (albeit a reduced one), or because they think they can in the future and don't want to lose market share.
Take the large oil-price rises two years ago, for example. Part of the cost increase was passed on to the consumers in the form of fare increases, but not all of it was: some of it came out of airline profits, which were squeezed quite significantly, because the market would not bear fare raises sufficient to pass on the full cost.
Extremely large profits in the financial industry failed to provide any incentive to manage those companies competently. Instead, they simply pulled in money so fat cats in industry can feather their own nest and rip off the first derivative of the economic system.
The political position of allowing profits and opposing taxes is perfectly fine to hold. It's the pseudo-economics of arguing in the contradictory manner the grandparent comment discussed that's the problem.
The "have it both ways" attempt is:
1. When discussing large profit margins, we focus on a market-demand theory of price: price is unrelated to costs, and is instead related to demand. If something costs $0.02 to produce, and is currently going for $100, that's just the market at work. If people weren't willing to pay it, it wouldn't cost $100.
2. When discussing costs, we assume that in the limit, market prices approach the cost of production (as classical economic theory holds), and therefore we can use a cost-determined theory of price: prices are determined by cost to the producer, so an increase in costs means an increase in price for the consumer. If something previously cost $10 to produce, and now costs $20, it will cost the consumer $10 more.
I.e., ignore the part that isn't convenient to the current political position, and ignore the exact opposite part in other situations.
In fact, both have an element of truth and falsity, but in both situations. Large profit margins are indeed "fine" if the market can bear them: there's no obligation to sell near cost, if people are willing to pay more. However, they're also suspicious from a classical-economics point of view: large profit margins ought not to exist, except as temporary aberrations or in markets that are non-competitive for some reason, because in competitive markets, prices ought to approach costs more closely in the limit.
As for argument #2, argument #1 shows its error: prices are not directly determined by costs, but rather by what the market will bear. If your cost goes up by $10, this does not magically mean the market will bear a $10 higher price. Costs can indirectly influence prices, of course, by changing supply. Perhaps at the current prevailing prices, if your cost goes up $10, you are no longer willing to sell the product. Supply decreases, and prevailing prices rise. But this is not always true; if we were in a situation where things cost $0.02 to produce and the prevailing price was $100, now that they cost $10.02 to produce, the prevailing price of $100 is still quite profitable, so there would be little reason for producers to exit the market. There would also be no particular reason that the equilibrium price ought to rise, if indeed it's set by supply and demand (as opposed to collusion among producers who agree to pass on their costs).
In short, if you believe in a perfectly efficient market, where the invisible hand always brings prices relatively close to cost, then indeed costs do get passed on, but large profit margins are suspicious. On the other hand, if you thing large profit margins are a perfectly fine feature of markets, there's no good argument that costs will necessarily be passed in: whether and to what extent they will be passed on versus simply squeeze profits depends on the market.
An increase in costs to a producer can come from one of two places: increase in prices paid by consumers, and decrease in profit margin for the producer. How those work out proportionally depends on the market. A producer cannot just automatically raise their prices by the amount of a cost increase, if they operate in a competitive, non-collusive market.
Of course, since cell phones companies do routinely collude, and the market isn't particularly competitive, I expect them to just all in unison add a line-item on the bill directly passing the cost on.
No company was forced to bid for the spectrum. If a particular corporation was not interested in using the public airwaves for its business, it's free to enter some other line of business, and not bid at the auction. It's not a tax any more than a business's services are taxes.
Costs and prices are only indirectly tied. In free, non-collusive markets (which cell phones only sort of are), prices are set by supply and demand, not by costs to the seller. If it costs you $10 more to produce something, this doesn't automatically mean the market will offer you $10 more to buy it. Even if it costs everyone $10 more to produce something, it doesn't automatically mean the price will go up $10. It's possible margins will simply be squeezed instead.
Now of course if costs to the seller are more than the current market price, some sellers will either move out of the market or at least the low end of the market, reducing supply at the current prices, and thereby raising prices.
But that doesn't seem to be the case at the moment: cell-phone carriers are quite profitable. They could bear additional fees and still be profitable at current prices. Therefore, in a free market, it actually wouldn't result in price increases, just in profit decreases for the carriers (i.e. squeezing margins).
However, I will agree that, because of unofficial collusion between the carriers, in this case it's not entirely unlikely that they'll all raise their prices to try to maintain their current profit margins. That has nothing to do with free-market economics, though. In a competitive market with many independent, non-colluding suppliers, the fact that the carriers now had to pay an additional fee would not raise prices, unless it resulted in carriers actually becoming unprofitable at current prices.
I believe Love And Rockets covered this: "You cannot go against nature / because when you do / go against nature / it's part of nature too".
Thus confirming the thesis that all major questions of philosophy have been covered by 80s music.
While the judges themselves are employees of the government, most of the judicial apparatus is private, and operates under a market system. Suspect that your rights are being violated, but aren't quite sure what bit of legislation applies? Hire someone knowledgeable in the law to tell you. Need to file paperwork in a trial, but want to be sure that you did it correctly, and didn't miss something that could be important to your case? Hire someone who specializes in drafting legal papers to draft them for you. That's basically how a private market economy works: if you want something done that you can't do yourself, you hire someone to do it. However, there's a good case for making anything related to justice less privatized, in my opinion, as this tends to mean that the people who can afford to hire good consultants (lawyers) tend to get better results.
I agree that there isn't a good legislative solution to spam in general, but here we're talking about someone whose identity and whereabout are known, living openly in the United States, who has repeatedly been found to be violating federal law. If there's anything legal systems are supposed to be good at doing, it's keeping people whose identities and whereabouts are known from repeatedly and openly violating the law.
With Sanford, it seems that there ought to be a way to make subsequent judgments against him have more teeth than simply fines. For example, an injunction against any future participation in online advertising (spam or not), as he's shown he's unable to operate in that industry legally. Then throw him in jail if he violates that injunction.
Now maybe he'll flee to the Caribbean or something, which I suppose is hard to do anything about. But at the very least, he shouldn't be able to live in the US openly; if he's going to be a scofflaw, force him to live as a fugitive.
What is a potential purchaser going to want to know before deciding how much to offer for a security? Well, something about its characteristics. If it's a derivative of other securities, they might want to know how its value relates to the values of underlying securities.
You first need to know the qualitative information of course: how does a change in the underlying securities result in a change in its price? What additional risk components (such as counterparty risk) does it have? Etc. Then the potential purchaser might want to a way to estimate how much they ought to pay for the derivative given some numbers for the values they place on risk, the inflation they expect, etc. That's what pricing models are. Unless you can actually work through all these interrelations in your head, you need some sort of model to even figure out what a reasonable offer for the security is.
Now maybe markets could also discover this through trial and error. Securities are valued in one way, and it turns out (as it recently did) that they were actually overvalued, because they failed to sufficiently factor in a significant component of risk. Refine for the next iteration. But this also requires infinite time to get it right, or at the very least a few major business cycles (i.e. decades). In this case, I'm not actually sure the market discovered a flaw in the previous pricing model per se, but rather in the parameters people were commonly plugging in: models generally have terms for estimates of underlying default rates, counterparty default rates, etc. and they were all massively underestimated (by the market).
There are a lot of American things that seem to be chic in Japan, but technology has never really been one of them. It's like trying to impress a German with your precision-engineered American luxury car or something.
If they're literally claiming to have written it, and that's factually false, and they're competing with you commercially, there are still laws against false advertising.
id's games are probably the biggest remaining example of the "recent stuff is proprietary; once it's been out a while it goes free software" model.
I'm guessing part of the difficulty courts are having here is that in the non-crypto examples it never really becomes a legal issue where precedent is set. If you refuse to open the safe for them, they don't spend a bunch of effort trying to get the courts to force you to open it: they just break it open. I'm not sure the courts have been confronted before with evidence stored in what's essentially an unbreakable safe. (But I could be wrong.)
The BSD license is basically, "you may use this for any purpose, as long as you retain this copyright notice". There's also an implicit, "and as long as no other law prevents you from doing so". That's roughly equivalent to most uses of the Creative Commons Attribution license ("cc-by") (cc-by users can require that you "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor", which could lead to more onerous requirements, but most don't).
This license removes even the attribution requirement, and attempts to waive all of those other implicit rights, such as moral rights in some countries. It's basically an attempt to come as close as possible to: you really can use this for anything you want, absolutely no strings attached, I really mean it.
For software licensing the difference is somewhat smaller, because non-copyright restrictions like moral rights are applied fairly infrequently to software--- they're more often applied to things like artistic works. I'm guessing that's why BSD-licensed software has never worried about it much.
You can indeed apply CC licenses to software, though I would probably only do so with the non-restrictive ones, like this one or cc-by. If you want to apply a copyleft license to software, using something like the GPL or LGPL is probably better than the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike ("cc-by-sa"), because it makes more effort to define exactly what the viral nature does and doesn't do, while cc-by-sa leaves a bunch of stuff vague when it comes to thinks like linking.