What would be cool is if they took the MMORPG concept and applied it, so a couple of dozen players could each run countries in a tournament mode. I don't recall that option being in Civ 3 and I would have liked it.
HDTV and game consoles are consumer electronics, which is a market almost entirely driven by price.
Maybe the consoles, but those are usually sold at a loss to get people to buy games. When it comes to HDTV... I don't know about you, but I don't see someone shelling out $7,000 as being price sensitive when a larger screen DLP projection TV goes for thousands less.
And one of the applications they were talking about was high-end video cards. A high end consumer video card costs more than a 250gb SATA hard drive, but you can drop 2 or 3 generations back, have more than enough power to play all but the most bleeding edge games for the next year, and save $200. But there's a not-inconsequetial market that will pay the $200 premium to eke out a 10-15% gain in FPS.
A Kia costs like 1/4 the price of an *entry level* Mercedes, but you don't see everyone driving Kias. There's a decent-sized market that pays the premium for performance, for bragging rights, etc. This is the market they seem to be going after.
- Greg
Smart plan not to try to make it main RAM. By going after multimedia applications like HDTV, video games, etc. they're targeting a market historically willing to pay a premium to get the best performance. I'll be really interested to see the graphic cards based on it and how they compare with the alternatives.
"The ads appearing on the Exeem.com Web site and within eXeem(TM) application are delivered by our web advertising partner, Cydoor. Information about users of eXeem(TM) and Exeem.com, such as the number of times they have viewed an ad (but not user name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to users."
Cydoor is given a 7/10 Threat Assessment level by lavasoft.de, makers of AdAware.
I understand that completely but I wonder why this practice is so much accepted, even by the "geek community", which often demands openness everywhere else.
Probably because there aren't enough geeks willing to forego the gadget as a protest. If it's a choice of having a closed system digicam or no digicam at all, they'll take the digicam.
Honestly, it's like asking why addicts will buy heroin from a pusher whose dope doesn't meet FDA labeling requirements? Geeks don't want gadgets, they neeeeed them.
Seriously, if manufactures let people hack/rewrite their firmware, how much does that increase their support overhead? (don't give me "users are on their own, it still costs $$)
Have to agree. As someone who does support as part of my job, there's still a cost for the customer contact, even if you say "we're sorry, but we can't do anything for you." It may take 5 minutes of trying to patiently question someone who is irrationally frustrated or just flustered, merely to to establish the particulars of the situation so you can judge whether or not they're having a supported issue.
Then there may be more time of them trying to argue with you, trying to contact your supervisor to appeal your decision, trying to submit a helpdesk contact again in the hope that this one will land on the desk of someone more sympathetic.
Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products, when digital cameras could be so much more than their film-based counterparts?
Two words: "Unintended uses"
The camera manufacturers want to control how their cameras are used, within the realm of what control they can have. Imagine camera hackers adding functionality with the new software, creating software that uses the hardware more efficiently, adding new compression formats... People wouldn't upgrade nearly as soon as they otherwise would.
There are probably some bad examples too: a virus that detects when a camera is connected, updates the firmware, and then without a complete reflash of the ROMs, every time you turn on your camera it starts zooming in and out and you can't stop it. Who wants the bad publicity of being the first camera to be virus infected?
Last, and probably most importantly, the trouble of publishing the specs and documenting the hardware so that programmers could actually really dig into the system... well, it's an expensive proposition. Convince them that enough people who wouldn't have bought the camera would change their minds if there was a programming interface - make it make financial sense - and they might do it.
Entry 6: "Found a sheltered valley where everyone lives in peace. It's actually warm and lush. Who would have believed it? The GPS is saying our coordinates are.... Hey! Put down that spear! Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!"
Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? The gradual dismantling of Tech TV has been going on for years. Pure tech is too hard to translate into a full channel, and if you dumb it down to reach a wider audience, the core people who would watch a pure tech channel can't stand the content. Tech TV struck a pretty good balance between accessibility and intelligence, but it was always a tough row to hoe.
How about/.TV? 24 hour news and information for nerds? Fellas?
..."Name Three Fat Women In Entertainment" thread right here. Skill points will be deducted for all mentions of Delta Burke, Oprah, and Anna Nicole Smith. You have thirty seconds from the time you read the headline and pounced on the "reply" button.
What's interesting to me in all this is that the console is an attractive concept. Roberts did his market research and crafted, if nothing else, a set of specs that got techies, gamers, and investors excited.
It wasn't Roomba, iBot, and XBox 8 all rolled up in one. It was a feature set that got a certain subset of the population excited while having the technical underpinnings to make it possible that it could see the light of day at a reasonable price point.
Call him a con-man or a snake oil salesman if you will, but give him some props for being able to identify the pavlovian triggers that have suckered investors into believing his concepts had merit over and over again.
- Greg
Think about how many Firefox fans are going to buy the NY Times for the first time, possibly multiple copies, so they can have/see an actual printed copy of the ad. I hope the NY times is running extra copies for their retail (i.e. non-subscriber) outlets. It's going to be a nice sales boost for the NY Times that day.
And they're getting paid a nice chunk of money to run it too. What a racket.
Yahoo promising such a program, despite licensing agreements, is still vaporware until a public beta is released, as far as I'm concerned. Announce all you like, but until your product is actually in my grubby hands, it's just an empty promise.
I use Google's beta now at work. For all the flaws people claim, it kicks the hell out of any internal search tools in Outlook. I have to manage an archive of thousands of e-mails, many with large attachments, and Google makes hunting down the right e-mail a matter of seconds when it could take minutes before. It's saving me hours a week as I often have to look up these old mails for customer service issues. It also rund plenty fast on a 2.0 ghz pentium laptop with 512mb RAM and a slooooow hdd.
I'd like it to support more mail clients like Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Eudora, plus the generic "unix mailbox format" which is used by many more. But that would be for my home use. I have to use Outlook at work and the Google Desktop Search is the *first* thing that has made me glad I'm using Outlook.
Downloaded it, installed it, played with it, uninstalled it.
I use Pegasus Mail (pmail.com). For all the nice features in Thunderbird, it still seems to me that Pegasus has much more powerful filtering rules. And, at least for my uses, has more features aimed at people who maintain multiple e-mail addresses.
Pegasus is free, but not open source. I urge people to compare it to Thunderbird. I've used it since 1996 and have never found a mailer I like better.
Well, yes, that is the only legitimate criterion to criticize someone by. You can't draw conclusions about people based on things they didn't choose, such as ethnicity, but things they did choose is the only thing you can base conclusions on. All those things you listed are valid.
In that case, please state your religion so that I may deride and humiliate you, proclaim to the world that you are worthless and deserving of ill will, and otherwise say things about you that may be patently untrue because they're blanket generalizations about your group that may only be true of a few bad apples.
As all the various replies in this thread go to show, you can find good people and knuckleheads in many different groups, be it lawyers, men of God, or Slashdot's userbase. Who is good and who is a knucklehead may be a matter of opinion, but assuming all people in the group are one or another is still prejudice.
I don't have to know what type of law he practices (besides it it was a 'simple' form of law you would have said so). Laws are written for lawyers by lawyers. You can not look at the laws currently on the books and tell me they are simple.
Why would I have said what form of law he practices? My post was about Google's clicks, not about my dad, nor about law. He was just an actor in the story. This isn't a prospectus where I'd need to give two page bios on the principals. And what kind of law he practices is immaterial. Making a judgement about his character or the kind of treatment he deserves from others, merely because he practices law, *is* prejudiced.
And what does the complexity or simplicity of the law have to do with anything? The bible is hard to read, full of contradictions, and we leave it up to priests and theologians to interpret it. And at times, the bible has *been the law*. Yet I do not judge all men of God who choose Christ based on the misdeeds that are rife in the history of Church-sponsored oppression and abuse.
My wife and I are an interfaith couple (and I'm the non-Christian), but the minister who presided over our wedding is one of the most wonderful people I've met. OTOH, that Brother Jed character who used to come to my college campus and damn everyone was a total pr*ck. But I don't judge Christian men of God based on either. I judge them based on what they, as individuals, do.
And, son, don't confuse the facts with prejudice and bigotry. When you have to fall back on those words it just shows that you have nothing left to debate on and wish to use emotion to win your case instead of logic and the facts.
No, calling someone Hitler to evoke an emotional response is a fallback. Identifying something as prejudice when it is prejudice is just shedding light on it.
If you think any Muslim you meet is a potential terrorist until he proves he isn't, you're prejudiced. If you think any lawyer you meet is a sleazebag until he proves he isn't, you're similarly prejudiced. If you disparage an individual based on your biases about a group, that's bigotry.
It's that simple. And if you choose to remain prejudiced, it's *your* life that will be poorer for it.
Man, you're analogy is soooo wrong. People don't choose to be black (or any other ethinic/racial minority), they however, choose to be lawyers.
Under your logic, it's okay to disparage an entire group based on religion ("F'ing Jews!"), hairstyle ("damn longhaired hippies!"), and choice of OS ("commie Open Sourcers!"). Those are all choices too.
IOW, you dad got a taste of what he does to other each and every day he works.
Sure, and if he was Black, you'd call him a welfare cheat and talk about his love of fried chicken?
You don't know what kind of law he practices, who his clients are, and whether he helps the big guys crush little guys or helps little guys stand up to big guys.
A hammer can be used to build a house or bash in someone's skull. A law degree has good and bad uses as well.
There are a couple of words for the attitude in your comment... prejudice and bigotry.
And don't give me any mumbo jumbo about it being okay because there are so many bad lawyers. Under that logic, you can start justifying some really dangerous attitudes toward ethnic minorities so long as they meet some minimum arbitrary criteria you've set.
Hate is hate, no matter how you try to justify it.
Google needs to not just police fraudulent clicks, but their own counting system. My dad tried their system to promote a fledgling e-commerce site for his wife's business. In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks. Thing is, his web host reported only about 300 hits on his home page. This is not how many clicks from Google were in his referrer log. This was total traffic from all sources.
He complained and Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation about referrer logs and that he may not be able to accurately track how many visitors were coming from them. Since he's a busy lawyer and the time it would take to fight Google for maybe $60-100 would take way more time than it was worth, he just quit using Google.
But you can't even attribute this to fraudulent clicks. Even if Google was his sole source of traffic (which it wasn't), nearly 25% of the clicks they were reporting and billing for weren't reaching his site. And this is based solely on comparing clicks to the number of successful server requests for his homepage.
I've used the same host he has and their downtime isn't even 0.25%, much less 25%.
Draw your own conclusions, but I think even if Google eradicated fraudulent clicks, their ad program would still be a huge scam.
Yes the public really does have a right to know. You waste the Court's time and by extension the Public's money and then settle out of court? The minimum we should get out of the deal is details on the settlement.
Even if you find it aggravating, your right to know is not as absolute as you think it is. The judicial system only has to be transparent to the public so far as to ensure it is meting out justice fairly. An out of court settlement in a civil suit really doesn't fall under that umbrella.
Furthermore, if the defendant settles, why should what they paid or what they did to settle be any of the public's business? They did not initiate the suit.
You fail to realize that there are two parties in a suit and one usually isn't there voluntarily. That one never voluntarily abdicated their right to privacy. And that right trumps your self-proclaimed right to know. Even if they're dirty as sin and the settlement is obviously hush money... it's not a judgement. There was never a verdict in the plaintiff's favor. The defendant hsn't been proved guilty of the criminal or civil claim. And if they're not guilty, why should they suffer any further embarrassment by having the details of the settlement made public?
Do you think Bill O'Reilly's settlement was kept private to protect the woman who was suing him? If he paid a large sum, it would imply guilt, even if it was just a cost-benefit analysis on all the bad publicity a prolonged trial would cause. So the sum is kept secret. And that's his right because he was never found guilty of the sexual harrassment she accused him of. He may well b guilty, but he wasn't found guilty. And that makes a difference, at least legally.
There is no absolute right in America. You have free speech, but if you use it to purposefully incite a crowd to riot, you can go to jail. You have a right to bear arms, but the federal government can limit which arms, require licensing, and withdraw that right if you're a felon. You have a right to freedom of religion, but you can still be arrested for bigamy even if you're an old school Mormon.
You have a right to know. You just don't have a right to know everything.
... and I don't think the public has a "right" to know everything.'
that's bullshit. my tax dollars hard at work and yet i'm not able to see what's going on?
First, IANAL.
There has to be a balance. If parties believe that certain sensitive details, particularly trade secrets, will not be protected, then they are discouraged from using the courts as a method to remedy differences. That creates a barrier to access to the justice system.
Every time there's an anti-immigrant proposition in California where schools or hospitals or whatever are required to report illegal immigrants, the opposition's argument in debate and court is that creates a barrier to access to vital services.
You'll hear it again when someone tries to cap lawyer's contingency fees, set up a loser-pays law, etc. It creates a barrier to access for aggrieved parties who can't afford to risk their life savings on a law suit against a megacorporation.
None of this means immigrants couldn't go to the doctor or poor people couldn't go to court, but it does mean that it would create such risks as to discourage them from availing themselves of our medical system or justice system when they really need it most.
Providing reasonable access is a big thing in the American consciousness. It's an egalitarian concept since most of the laws that create barriers to access create them for the poor and disenfranchised.
But let's also consider the defendant in a trial too. If a defendant's proprietary information is exposed in discovery, does the public have a right to that information? The defendant was dragged into court, and now they'll lose valuable IP even if they eventually win? It wouldn't be moral, ethical, or "justice" if that happened.
OTOH, high profile cases that end in settlements where neither party admits fault and the details of the settlement are sealed... RRRGGGHHH! Those bug the heck out of me. But if the settlement is out of court and both parties drop their claim, the public doesn't really have a right to know anymore as it's become a private matter.
Slashdot Mirror
- Greg
Maybe the consoles, but those are usually sold at a loss to get people to buy games. When it comes to HDTV... I don't know about you, but I don't see someone shelling out $7,000 as being price sensitive when a larger screen DLP projection TV goes for thousands less.
And one of the applications they were talking about was high-end video cards. A high end consumer video card costs more than a 250gb SATA hard drive, but you can drop 2 or 3 generations back, have more than enough power to play all but the most bleeding edge games for the next year, and save $200. But there's a not-inconsequetial market that will pay the $200 premium to eke out a 10-15% gain in FPS.
A Kia costs like 1/4 the price of an *entry level* Mercedes, but you don't see everyone driving Kias. There's a decent-sized market that pays the premium for performance, for bragging rights, etc. This is the market they seem to be going after. - Greg
Smart plan not to try to make it main RAM. By going after multimedia applications like HDTV, video games, etc. they're targeting a market historically willing to pay a premium to get the best performance. I'll be really interested to see the graphic cards based on it and how they compare with the alternatives.
"The ads appearing on the Exeem.com Web site and within eXeem(TM) application are delivered by our web advertising partner, Cydoor. Information about users of eXeem(TM) and Exeem.com, such as the number of times they have viewed an ad (but not user name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to users."
Cydoor is given a 7/10 Threat Assessment level by lavasoft.de, makers of AdAware.
Probably because there aren't enough geeks willing to forego the gadget as a protest. If it's a choice of having a closed system digicam or no digicam at all, they'll take the digicam.
Honestly, it's like asking why addicts will buy heroin from a pusher whose dope doesn't meet FDA labeling requirements? Geeks don't want gadgets, they neeeeed them.
- Greg
Have to agree. As someone who does support as part of my job, there's still a cost for the customer contact, even if you say "we're sorry, but we can't do anything for you." It may take 5 minutes of trying to patiently question someone who is irrationally frustrated or just flustered, merely to to establish the particulars of the situation so you can judge whether or not they're having a supported issue.
Then there may be more time of them trying to argue with you, trying to contact your supervisor to appeal your decision, trying to submit a helpdesk contact again in the hope that this one will land on the desk of someone more sympathetic.
All that labor time costs money.
- Greg
AND they forgot their 20-sided dice. What a tragedy.
Two words: "Unintended uses"
The camera manufacturers want to control how their cameras are used, within the realm of what control they can have. Imagine camera hackers adding functionality with the new software, creating software that uses the hardware more efficiently, adding new compression formats... People wouldn't upgrade nearly as soon as they otherwise would.
There are probably some bad examples too: a virus that detects when a camera is connected, updates the firmware, and then without a complete reflash of the ROMs, every time you turn on your camera it starts zooming in and out and you can't stop it. Who wants the bad publicity of being the first camera to be virus infected?
Last, and probably most importantly, the trouble of publishing the specs and documenting the hardware so that programmers could actually really dig into the system... well, it's an expensive proposition. Convince them that enough people who wouldn't have bought the camera would change their minds if there was a programming interface - make it make financial sense - and they might do it.
- Greg
Entry 2: "Getting higher, getting colder."
Entry 3: "Damn, my nuts are freezing."
Entry 4: "Holy f***ing sh**!!! Whose idea was this?"
Entry 5: "Cabn't tabalk. Mah mowbouth ibis nubumb. Cobold! Cobold! Cobold!"
Entry 6: "Found a sheltered valley where everyone lives in peace. It's actually warm and lush. Who would have believed it? The GPS is saying our coordinates are.... Hey! Put down that spear! Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!"
No further entries.
How about /.TV? 24 hour news and information for nerds? Fellas?
All links go to photos...
Conchata Ferrell
Mo'Nique
Lori Beth Denberg
- Greg
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
- Greg
It wasn't Roomba, iBot, and XBox 8 all rolled up in one. It was a feature set that got a certain subset of the population excited while having the technical underpinnings to make it possible that it could see the light of day at a reasonable price point.
Call him a con-man or a snake oil salesman if you will, but give him some props for being able to identify the pavlovian triggers that have suckered investors into believing his concepts had merit over and over again. - Greg
And they're getting paid a nice chunk of money to run it too. What a racket.
- Greg
I use Google's beta now at work. For all the flaws people claim, it kicks the hell out of any internal search tools in Outlook. I have to manage an archive of thousands of e-mails, many with large attachments, and Google makes hunting down the right e-mail a matter of seconds when it could take minutes before. It's saving me hours a week as I often have to look up these old mails for customer service issues. It also rund plenty fast on a 2.0 ghz pentium laptop with 512mb RAM and a slooooow hdd.
I'd like it to support more mail clients like Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Eudora, plus the generic "unix mailbox format" which is used by many more. But that would be for my home use. I have to use Outlook at work and the Google Desktop Search is the *first* thing that has made me glad I'm using Outlook.
- Greg
I use Pegasus Mail (pmail.com). For all the nice features in Thunderbird, it still seems to me that Pegasus has much more powerful filtering rules. And, at least for my uses, has more features aimed at people who maintain multiple e-mail addresses.
Pegasus is free, but not open source. I urge people to compare it to Thunderbird. I've used it since 1996 and have never found a mailer I like better.
- Greg
In that case, please state your religion so that I may deride and humiliate you, proclaim to the world that you are worthless and deserving of ill will, and otherwise say things about you that may be patently untrue because they're blanket generalizations about your group that may only be true of a few bad apples.
As all the various replies in this thread go to show, you can find good people and knuckleheads in many different groups, be it lawyers, men of God, or Slashdot's userbase. Who is good and who is a knucklehead may be a matter of opinion, but assuming all people in the group are one or another is still prejudice.
Why would I have said what form of law he practices? My post was about Google's clicks, not about my dad, nor about law. He was just an actor in the story. This isn't a prospectus where I'd need to give two page bios on the principals. And what kind of law he practices is immaterial. Making a judgement about his character or the kind of treatment he deserves from others, merely because he practices law, *is* prejudiced.
And what does the complexity or simplicity of the law have to do with anything? The bible is hard to read, full of contradictions, and we leave it up to priests and theologians to interpret it. And at times, the bible has *been the law*. Yet I do not judge all men of God who choose Christ based on the misdeeds that are rife in the history of Church-sponsored oppression and abuse.
My wife and I are an interfaith couple (and I'm the non-Christian), but the minister who presided over our wedding is one of the most wonderful people I've met. OTOH, that Brother Jed character who used to come to my college campus and damn everyone was a total pr*ck. But I don't judge Christian men of God based on either. I judge them based on what they, as individuals, do.
And, son, don't confuse the facts with prejudice and bigotry. When you have to fall back on those words it just shows that you have nothing left to debate on and wish to use emotion to win your case instead of logic and the facts.
No, calling someone Hitler to evoke an emotional response is a fallback. Identifying something as prejudice when it is prejudice is just shedding light on it.
If you think any Muslim you meet is a potential terrorist until he proves he isn't, you're prejudiced. If you think any lawyer you meet is a sleazebag until he proves he isn't, you're similarly prejudiced. If you disparage an individual based on your biases about a group, that's bigotry.
It's that simple. And if you choose to remain prejudiced, it's *your* life that will be poorer for it.
- Greg
Under your logic, it's okay to disparage an entire group based on religion ("F'ing Jews!"), hairstyle ("damn longhaired hippies!"), and choice of OS ("commie Open Sourcers!"). Those are all choices too.
- Greg
Sure, and if he was Black, you'd call him a welfare cheat and talk about his love of fried chicken?
You don't know what kind of law he practices, who his clients are, and whether he helps the big guys crush little guys or helps little guys stand up to big guys.
A hammer can be used to build a house or bash in someone's skull. A law degree has good and bad uses as well.
There are a couple of words for the attitude in your comment... prejudice and bigotry.
And don't give me any mumbo jumbo about it being okay because there are so many bad lawyers. Under that logic, you can start justifying some really dangerous attitudes toward ethnic minorities so long as they meet some minimum arbitrary criteria you've set.
Hate is hate, no matter how you try to justify it.
Google needs to not just police fraudulent clicks, but their own counting system. My dad tried their system to promote a fledgling e-commerce site for his wife's business. In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks. Thing is, his web host reported only about 300 hits on his home page. This is not how many clicks from Google were in his referrer log. This was total traffic from all sources.
He complained and Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation about referrer logs and that he may not be able to accurately track how many visitors were coming from them. Since he's a busy lawyer and the time it would take to fight Google for maybe $60-100 would take way more time than it was worth, he just quit using Google.
But you can't even attribute this to fraudulent clicks. Even if Google was his sole source of traffic (which it wasn't), nearly 25% of the clicks they were reporting and billing for weren't reaching his site. And this is based solely on comparing clicks to the number of successful server requests for his homepage.
I've used the same host he has and their downtime isn't even 0.25%, much less 25%.
Draw your own conclusions, but I think even if Google eradicated fraudulent clicks, their ad program would still be a huge scam.
- Greg
Even if you find it aggravating, your right to know is not as absolute as you think it is. The judicial system only has to be transparent to the public so far as to ensure it is meting out justice fairly. An out of court settlement in a civil suit really doesn't fall under that umbrella.
Furthermore, if the defendant settles, why should what they paid or what they did to settle be any of the public's business? They did not initiate the suit.
You fail to realize that there are two parties in a suit and one usually isn't there voluntarily. That one never voluntarily abdicated their right to privacy. And that right trumps your self-proclaimed right to know. Even if they're dirty as sin and the settlement is obviously hush money... it's not a judgement. There was never a verdict in the plaintiff's favor. The defendant hsn't been proved guilty of the criminal or civil claim. And if they're not guilty, why should they suffer any further embarrassment by having the details of the settlement made public?
Do you think Bill O'Reilly's settlement was kept private to protect the woman who was suing him? If he paid a large sum, it would imply guilt, even if it was just a cost-benefit analysis on all the bad publicity a prolonged trial would cause. So the sum is kept secret. And that's his right because he was never found guilty of the sexual harrassment she accused him of. He may well b guilty, but he wasn't found guilty. And that makes a difference, at least legally.
There is no absolute right in America. You have free speech, but if you use it to purposefully incite a crowd to riot, you can go to jail. You have a right to bear arms, but the federal government can limit which arms, require licensing, and withdraw that right if you're a felon. You have a right to freedom of religion, but you can still be arrested for bigamy even if you're an old school Mormon.
You have a right to know. You just don't have a right to know everything.
- Greg
that's bullshit. my tax dollars hard at work and yet i'm not able to see what's going on?
First, IANAL.
There has to be a balance. If parties believe that certain sensitive details, particularly trade secrets, will not be protected, then they are discouraged from using the courts as a method to remedy differences. That creates a barrier to access to the justice system.
Every time there's an anti-immigrant proposition in California where schools or hospitals or whatever are required to report illegal immigrants, the opposition's argument in debate and court is that creates a barrier to access to vital services.
You'll hear it again when someone tries to cap lawyer's contingency fees, set up a loser-pays law, etc. It creates a barrier to access for aggrieved parties who can't afford to risk their life savings on a law suit against a megacorporation.
None of this means immigrants couldn't go to the doctor or poor people couldn't go to court, but it does mean that it would create such risks as to discourage them from availing themselves of our medical system or justice system when they really need it most.
Providing reasonable access is a big thing in the American consciousness. It's an egalitarian concept since most of the laws that create barriers to access create them for the poor and disenfranchised.
But let's also consider the defendant in a trial too. If a defendant's proprietary information is exposed in discovery, does the public have a right to that information? The defendant was dragged into court, and now they'll lose valuable IP even if they eventually win? It wouldn't be moral, ethical, or "justice" if that happened.
OTOH, high profile cases that end in settlements where neither party admits fault and the details of the settlement are sealed... RRRGGGHHH! Those bug the heck out of me. But if the settlement is out of court and both parties drop their claim, the public doesn't really have a right to know anymore as it's become a private matter.
- Greg