I mentioned the embedded hardware specifically, and the contracts needing to be signed by the customer imply that that software itself would not be a commodity. Even assuming I did not mention services and Jane decided to offer the software as a service, she still would have to protect the service via contract law. The result is added transaction costs for the product in the form of monitoring customers and enforcing the contract.
I have no idea why you think any kind of extended contract is necessary for these transactions. A software developer _doesn't need to control how the customer uses the software that the developer wrote_ for the developer to be able to make a living. That was the whole point of those three business models I described.
You wouldn't require a long-term contract to have a furniture maker build a custom chair for you, would you? You give him the spec., he makes the chair, and if you're happy with it you pay him for it. Any contract (if any) isn't going to extend beyond short-term arrangements to make sure the seller & buyer aren't trying to pull a scam.
You've got to get beyond thinking that content-creators somehow "deserve" to control ideas they've released to someone else, otherwise you'll never be able to conceive of _any_ other social structure other than something that enforces IP. Argue your case from the viewpoint of societal benefit, and back it up with some studies.
Of course, I'm arguing from the easy case - in the absence of any solid proof that IP laws provide a net benefit to society (and with a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that IP laws are currently retarding innovation), it's my belief that the market forces should be allowed to dictate the value of so-called IP without government interference. If there are some good studies that indicate that IP laws really DO encourage net innovation, then I'd have to reevaluate my stance.
1. Most people don't have multiple computers that belong to themselves
(and the expert is going to question why the computer that you were
supposedly using seems to be set up for your mom or grandma, and
all the email is addressed to them, etc).
It's quite the PITA to set up a decoy computer which looks like it
has been used by a real person (as anybody who's tried to run a
honeypot is probably aware).
2a-e Better, but an expert will probably be able to point out the pattern
of repeated copies & erases as evidence that you were trying to cover
something up. And given the size of hard drives nowadays, you'd need
a humongous amount of data to properly overwrite everything in a way
that doesn't seem suspicious (and that amount of data is usually
associated with the copyrighted music/videos that you are trying
to hide:-)
IANAL, but actively committing perjury & destruction of evidence to try and cover up a potential crime is probably going to hurt you a LOT worse in the eyes of the judge & jury than any punishment you might receive from the original case (although the way the Congresspuppets seem intent on making the punishments for IP violations so wildly out of proportion, that might not be true anymore...).
You can get in _really_ big trouble with the court if the independent expert reports that you "scrubbed" your drive before turning it over to them. Same kind of reasoning where people get caught shredding documents or deleting emails AFTER the court has told them to hold onto that evidence. At the very least you'll get contempt-of-court punishments.
The socialist solution would mean that all creators of content/ideas would be compensated equally regardless of how good their stuff was. The free market solution would lead to rampant piracy.
You hardly need to compensate everyone "equally" regardless of quality.
And the free market solution is the "natural state" of things - as I've been repeatedly saying above, in a free market it would be stupid to try and make huge profits by selling a product which takes a lot of resources to create but which can be cheaply distributed by anyone who wants to.
Most successful businesspeople when they are confronted with a non-viable business plan have to stretch their minds a bit & figure out an alternative way of selling either goods or services which people are willing to buy in a free market. Someone who thinks that a "viable" businessplan is to get laws passed which protect their bad business plan is just being damn greedy.
The question then is if there is another way to encourage good content/idea creation without "intellectual property".
How about a hybrid approach? Use a "socialist" approach to require that some % of taxes must go toward "content-creation" (you probably would want to distinguish between science & cultural content-creation), but have some mechanism where the taxpayer can decide where & to whom their taxes go to? This would encourage the flow of society's $$s into content-creation, but do it in a way that allows free-market type of decision-making to determine what kinds of things each individual in the society finds valuable.
Speaking as an annoyed taxpayer, I'm more annoyed by the idea that my taxes are being wasted or are being used for corrupt purposes than I am by actually paying the taxes. If I had a decent amount of control over how my own personal tax monies were being spent, I'd probably be quite a bit less snarky about paying a reasonable amount.
I can see that no one is reading my comments beyond the first paragraph or so (not that I'm surprised).
At least as far as software is concerned, I gave three viable business models (an economist or clever businessperson might be able to think of some additional) that do not depend on current IP laws:
1. writing software as a service, 2. using software to provide services, and 3. writing software to be embedded in hardware.
Your scenario of being reduced to ringing up cash registers is alarmist and unlikely.
All of these business models are already being used successfully by many small businesses to provide REAL products and services that everyone from poor to rich people can afford.
Your scenario of only rich people being able to afford software-enabled products/services is also alarmist and unlikely.
Software is an easy argument for me though - if you want to make YOUR argument for IP stronger, you should concentrate on entertainment content-creation.
I'm pretty sure that the entertainment industry would not be able to survive in its current form without the protection of IP laws - I suspect you'd end up with more of a "payment for performance" market, with media distribution being chalked up as a promotional expense. I don't think it would be easy for the current set of large media companies to exist as they do without being able to use the legal fiction of IP to control the flow of the information they are generating.
I'm pretty sure that the market would do just fine without the existence of those companies, however - it would just look different.
Then, the argument becomes whether allowing this kind of control over information is good for society or not.
If you'll read the history of innovation carefully, you'd realise that the explosion of commerce & innovation that occurred (at least in the U.S.) during the Industrial Revolution was because that U.S. commercial interests copied technology and business ideas shamelessly from Europe, and ignored their complaints about patent violations.
It's only after the U.S.'s industrial power had matured that the powers-that-be started having an interest in enforcing IP laws, as a way of maintaining the status quo. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the current IP regime is doing better at retarding innovation than encouraging it.
Interestingly enough, the world is currently in the same position with regards to China, where they're pretty much paying only lip service to IP rights while "stealing" all the technology they can copy (while the "developed" nations squawk about IP rights). Time will tell if the same strategy will yield the same results - with China as the preeminent superpower, where the U.S. falls into a technological has-been status.
So, you're saying that if I spend a year of my free time creating a fantasy game, complete with a new and unique world with its own history, events, species, characters, etc., and release that game for retail download from my website, according to you I have no right whatsoever to complain if someone else simply copies my work and tries to sell it themselves?
That's right, if you're stupid enough to do all that work & distribute it in a form that anyone can copy & resell it, then you've got nothing to complain about except your bad business model. Same result as if I spent millions of dollars and years of my life doing research & development to discover the perfect toy, and determined that the perfect toy was the common everyday cardboard box. Lots of money & hard work, but I would have made a bad investment of my resources.
You do not have the "right" to make money off anything you do, just because you happened to work hard to accomplish it. Goods & services have their values set by the BUYERS, not by the sellers. This is really basic Supply & Demand stuff. Even if you think your product is worth $10,000,000, if people are only willing to pay $10 for it then it's only worth $10 - no matter how much work you put into it. That's called the free market. Getting "special" laws passed to force people to pay for "value" which they would not otherwise be willing to spend is just the same as extortion.
And that's what it's all about, folks: balance. On one hand, creators of original works need some way to make sure no one else can simply steal their hard work out from under them
There is no reason to "balance" anything. The whole point behind IP laws was to encourage innovation - there haven't been any kind of reliable, objective economic studies showing that IP laws have resulted in more innovation than would occur without them. (Feel free to point me at some if you know where they are located.)
You've still got this emotional attachment to what's "fair" (which is always one of those terms that everyone agrees on principle, but no one can agree on the details). The law shouldn't be concerned with what's "fair" though - that's too subjective, and ambiguity provides opportunity for greed & corruption. The law should be concerned with what will be best for the overall society.
If you want to encourage content-creation, then figure out a societal mechanism to pay creators for their services (in those cases where there are no viable business models that can be exploited by the individuals). Maybe society can mandate a "cultural" tax, but allow each taxpayer to decide how (and to whom) they want those tax monies to be spent (just throwing out an idea). There's no need to violate free market economics & peoples' private property rights to encourage "innovation".
1. Jane Doe spends 10 years of her life 80 hours a week and $400,000 in funding from family and friends and loans to successfully build a revolutionary piece of software, which gets promptly stolen and mass distributed outside of her control. Jane and her family lose their livelihood and has to declare bankruptcy.
You know, if it weren't for government enforcement of an artificially-created monopoly, your example of Jane's attempt to make money would be called a "bad business plan". Without the legal fiction of "intellectual property", if someone expected to make money off a product which can be easily copied and distributed, they would be perceived to have a really poor sense of business (no matter how hard they may have worked on the product).
On the other hand, if they have a business model where they either write software solutions for customers (i.e., a software-writing service), or write software for themselves which they use to provide services for customers (software-assisted customer service), or package the software into a nifty little consumer electronics doodad of some sort, then those are business models which allow people to write software to make a living without depending an artificially-enforced monopoly. (I'm focusing on software since I'm a software developer - other content-creation activities might require greater differences in how they can be sold.)
IP laws are socialistic at their fundamental - attempting to "twist" free-market economics to try and achieve a social effect (encouraging innovation). Unfortunately, there has been little or no solid proof that IP laws do any better at encouraging innovation than just allowing the free market to dictate what will sell. Every argument always seems to be couched in terms of emotion or anecdotes.
patents: all patents should be forced RAND licensed. Only physical devices may be patented, and strict adherence to non-obviousness. If you file for an obvious patent, you're blocked from applying for any other patent for 5 years. Patent length proportional to R&D cost/profit per year, with licensing revenue as part of profits. Lieing on the R&D cost to extend its life gets you 20 years in prison for the people who applied for the patent, and every link up the chain including the corporations CEO and board.
I'll donate a set of ideas for a patent system (rather than my preference, which would be to completely throw the idea of "patents" out).
An alternative idea for a patent system would be to have a max # of valid patents at any given time, and have some kind of competitive process (like an auction) where you can force the people trying to get a patent "slot" to compete with each others' ideas to determine which ones are most valuable. New patent "slots" would become available when existing patents either expire, or are thrown out due to court challenges.
The competitive process would force patent-applicants to perform due diligence to weed out bad patents (ideas which are likely to be thrown out for uselessness, prior art, or obviousness). The importance of patent examiners should be greatly reduced by this process.
By keeping the max # of patents down at a reasonable level, it would be a lot easier for anyone to find out whether they were violating an existing patent or not. In addition, by having only a low constant # of patents enforceable, you place a rough "upper bound" on how limiting the patent system can be on "normal" innovation in the society (any ideas which weren't deemed "valuable" enough by the auction process can be used by anyone without worrying about being sued).
You can also use the auction idea to encourage submissions by small inventors - if you make it clear that whoever submitted the idea for the patent will get most of the money paid by the winning bidder (with protections to avoid people trying to pay themselves of course), then there will be little guys falling all over themselves submitting ideas into the patent process hoping for that massive jackpot payoff & lots of big guys examining the incoming patent stream hoping for that mind-blowing idea that can make them lots of money. It's a win-win for society, since you're rewarding the smart guys who don't have the money to take advantage of their ideas, and giving the ideas to the big guys who DO have the resources to take advantage of those ideas.
If searching files on a physical device is legal, would it not also be legal for customs to "inspect" all electronic data that crosses international borders? And in the same way that it is legal for the authorities to sieze a laptop for more intensive analysis, would it not also be legal for customs to "embargo" electronic transmissions until they can be analyzed?
Yes to both questions, but practically speaking it would interfere with too much money-making for it to be politically popular.
Bush the First realized this, and did not want to subject our troops to those weapons. Can you imagine what the world's reaction would have been? I'd rather not think about it.
It wasn't just that. The Iraqi army was pretty demoralized, including the vaunted "Republican Guards" - there's a decent chance they would've folded like the 2nd time w/o using any WMD (even if they had anything effective left at that time).
What Bush Sr. didn't want to set up was the _exact_ situation that we're in right now - our soldiers indefinitely stuck suppressing massive sectarian civil violence (which had been repressed by Hussein's brutality). Too bad Bush Jr. didn't care to listen to Daddy's advice.
The people designing the missile just have to make sure the source code is available in machine readable format somewhere in the missile. That way they'll maintain full legality with the GPL when they "distribute" the compiled version of the product.
Those enron executives still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills, and other things.
They also have a vast lack of ethics, and anyone who deals with them should have a vast lack of trust in anything those executives do or say. There are plenty of members of society with the knowledge & skills of these "elite" executives - if you get the lying, cheating sacks of crap out of the way, these other people might have a chance to strut their stuff.
The crooked execs also serve as role models for other ethically-challenged individuals in the business world. IMHO, severely punishing these kinds of people would actually do MORE good for society than punishing low-level criminals. Low-level criminals don't usually think about too much besides immediate consequences when they do their dirty deeds, plus (as stated above) their crimes don't usually affect more than a few people at a time. The effects of large-scale white-collar crime can affect thousands (or more) people at a time, and even if those people aren't being directly mugged, crippling financial effects can cause even more long-term damage in the emotional well-being of those folks as a quick brutal mugging.
Most of these so-called "pillars of society" actually have the brain capacity to contemplate personal consequences - if they know they're going to destroy their freedom, fortune & career for the rest of their lives, instead of just getting a slap on the wrist & a little community service, they'll be a little more circumspect about their peccadillos. They'll also be a little more conscious about the potential effects that stupid financial decisions might have on themselves, versus the current situation where they can play with "other peoples'" money all day long without worrying about their own personal situation.
I'm all in favor of severe punishments for white-collar crime, even as far as the death penalty for situations like Enron where tens of thousands of people saw their retirement savings get flushed down the toilet. All these executives claim they "deserve" their high pay because of the "risk" that they're talking - if they're going to toy with the lives of 10s of thousands of people, then they'd better put their lives on the line right along with'm.
Heck, you could also sell the program to the Republicans if you promise to use it to launch Democrats! Wins all around! (Joke, it's a joke, don't hit me...:P)
More to the point, "cheating" in school means you are often bypassing the actual information that the professors were trying to get you to learn.
Of course, when you graduate & discover you don't know how to do anything, you can complain about how crappy the school system was and how you didn't learn anything.
If you managed to collect enough water to cover half the solar system, I think you'll be more in danger of getting sucked into the resultant black hole than worrying about drowning.
Slashdot Mirror
What? We're not going to die? When did we all become immortal?
I have no idea why you think any kind of extended contract is necessary for these transactions. A software developer _doesn't need to control how the customer uses the software that the developer wrote_ for the developer to be able to make a living. That was the whole point of those three business models I described.
You wouldn't require a long-term contract to have a furniture maker build a custom chair for you, would you? You give him the spec., he makes the chair, and if you're happy with it you pay him for it. Any contract (if any) isn't going to extend beyond short-term arrangements to make sure the seller & buyer aren't trying to pull a scam.
You've got to get beyond thinking that content-creators somehow "deserve" to control ideas they've released to someone else, otherwise you'll never be able to conceive of _any_ other social structure other than something that enforces IP. Argue your case from the viewpoint of societal benefit, and back it up with some studies.
Of course, I'm arguing from the easy case - in the absence of any solid proof that IP laws provide a net benefit to society (and with a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that IP laws are currently retarding innovation), it's my belief that the market forces should be allowed to dictate the value of so-called IP without government interference. If there are some good studies that indicate that IP laws really DO encourage net innovation, then I'd have to reevaluate my stance.
1. Most people don't have multiple computers that belong to themselves
:-)
(and the expert is going to question why the computer that you were
supposedly using seems to be set up for your mom or grandma, and
all the email is addressed to them, etc).
It's quite the PITA to set up a decoy computer which looks like it
has been used by a real person (as anybody who's tried to run a
honeypot is probably aware).
2a-e Better, but an expert will probably be able to point out the pattern
of repeated copies & erases as evidence that you were trying to cover
something up. And given the size of hard drives nowadays, you'd need
a humongous amount of data to properly overwrite everything in a way
that doesn't seem suspicious (and that amount of data is usually
associated with the copyrighted music/videos that you are trying
to hide
IANAL, but actively committing perjury & destruction of evidence
to try and cover up a potential crime is probably going to hurt you
a LOT worse in the eyes of the judge & jury than any punishment you
might receive from the original case (although the way the
Congresspuppets seem intent on making the punishments for IP
violations so wildly out of proportion, that might not be true
anymore...).
You can get in _really_ big trouble with the court if the independent expert reports that you "scrubbed" your drive before turning it over to them. Same kind of reasoning where people get caught shredding documents or deleting emails AFTER the court has told them to hold onto that evidence. At the very least you'll get contempt-of-court punishments.
You hardly need to compensate everyone "equally" regardless of quality.
And the free market solution is the "natural state" of things - as I've been repeatedly saying above, in a free market it would be stupid to try and make huge profits by selling a product which takes a lot of resources to create but which can be cheaply distributed by anyone who wants to.
Most successful businesspeople when they are confronted with a non-viable business plan have to stretch their minds a bit & figure out an alternative way of selling either goods or services which people are willing to buy in a free market. Someone who thinks that a "viable" businessplan is to get laws passed which protect their bad business plan is just being damn greedy.
How about a hybrid approach? Use a "socialist" approach to require that some % of taxes must go toward "content-creation" (you probably would want to distinguish between science & cultural content-creation), but have some mechanism where the taxpayer can decide where & to whom their taxes go to? This would encourage the flow of society's $$s into content-creation, but do it in a way that allows free-market type of decision-making to determine what kinds of things each individual in the society finds valuable.
Speaking as an annoyed taxpayer, I'm more annoyed by the idea that my taxes are being wasted or are being used for corrupt purposes than I am by actually paying the taxes. If I had a decent amount of control over how my own personal tax monies were being spent, I'd probably be quite a bit less snarky about paying a reasonable amount.
I can see that no one is reading my comments beyond the first paragraph or so (not that I'm surprised).
At least as far as software is concerned, I gave three viable business models (an economist or clever businessperson might be able to think of some additional) that do not depend on current IP laws:
1. writing software as a service,
2. using software to provide services, and
3. writing software to be embedded in hardware.
Your scenario of being reduced to ringing up cash registers is alarmist and unlikely.
All of these business models are already being used successfully by many small businesses to provide REAL products and services that everyone from poor to rich people can afford.
Your scenario of only rich people being able to afford software-enabled products/services is also alarmist and unlikely.
Software is an easy argument for me though - if you want to make YOUR argument for IP stronger, you should concentrate on entertainment content-creation.
I'm pretty sure that the entertainment industry would not be able to survive in its current form without the protection of IP laws - I suspect you'd end up with more of a "payment for performance" market, with media distribution being chalked up as a promotional expense. I don't think it would be easy for the current set of large media companies to exist as they do without being able to use the legal fiction of IP to control the flow of the information they are generating.
I'm pretty sure that the market would do just fine without the existence of those companies, however - it would just look different.
Then, the argument becomes whether allowing this kind of control over information is good for society or not.
If you'll read the history of innovation carefully, you'd realise that the explosion of commerce & innovation that occurred (at least in the U.S.) during the Industrial Revolution was because that U.S. commercial interests copied technology and business ideas shamelessly from Europe, and ignored their complaints about patent violations.
It's only after the U.S.'s industrial power had matured that the powers-that-be started having an interest in enforcing IP laws, as a way of maintaining the status quo. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the current IP regime is doing better at retarding innovation than encouraging it.
Interestingly enough, the world is currently in the same position with regards to China, where they're pretty much paying only lip service to IP rights while "stealing" all the technology they can copy (while the "developed" nations squawk about IP rights). Time will tell if the same strategy will yield the same results - with China as the preeminent superpower, where the U.S. falls into a technological has-been status.
That's right, if you're stupid enough to do all that work & distribute it in a form that anyone can copy & resell it, then you've got nothing to complain about except your bad business model. Same result as if I spent millions of dollars and years of my life doing research & development to discover the perfect toy, and determined that the perfect toy was the common everyday cardboard box. Lots of money & hard work, but I would have made a bad investment of my resources.
You do not have the "right" to make money off anything you do, just because you happened to work hard to accomplish it. Goods & services have their values set by the BUYERS, not by the sellers. This is really basic Supply & Demand stuff. Even if you think your product is worth $10,000,000, if people are only willing to pay $10 for it then it's only worth $10 - no matter how much work you put into it. That's called the free market. Getting "special" laws passed to force people to pay for "value" which they would not otherwise be willing to spend is just the same as extortion.
There is no reason to "balance" anything. The whole point behind IP laws was to encourage innovation - there haven't been any kind of reliable, objective economic studies showing that IP laws have resulted in more innovation than would occur without them. (Feel free to point me at some if you know where they are located.)
You've still got this emotional attachment to what's "fair" (which is always one of those terms that everyone agrees on principle, but no one can agree on the details). The law shouldn't be concerned with what's "fair" though - that's too subjective, and ambiguity provides opportunity for greed & corruption. The law should be concerned with what will be best for the overall society.
If you want to encourage content-creation, then figure out a societal mechanism to pay creators for their services (in those cases where there are no viable business models that can be exploited by the individuals). Maybe society can mandate a "cultural" tax, but allow each taxpayer to decide how (and to whom) they want those tax monies to be spent (just throwing out an idea). There's no need to violate free market economics & peoples' private property rights to encourage "innovation".
You know, if it weren't for government enforcement of an artificially-created monopoly, your example of Jane's attempt to make money would be called a "bad business plan". Without the legal fiction of "intellectual property", if someone expected to make money off a product which can be easily copied and distributed, they would be perceived to have a really poor sense of business (no matter how hard they may have worked on the product).
On the other hand, if they have a business model where they either write software solutions for customers (i.e., a software-writing service), or write software for themselves which they use to provide services for customers (software-assisted customer service), or package the software into a nifty little consumer electronics doodad of some sort, then those are business models which allow people to write software to make a living without depending an artificially-enforced monopoly. (I'm focusing on software since I'm a software developer - other content-creation activities might require greater differences in how they can be sold.)
IP laws are socialistic at their fundamental - attempting to "twist" free-market economics to try and achieve a social effect (encouraging innovation). Unfortunately, there has been little or no solid proof that IP laws do any better at encouraging innovation than just allowing the free market to dictate what will sell. Every argument always seems to be couched in terms of emotion or anecdotes.
I'll donate a set of ideas for a patent system (rather than my preference, which would be to completely throw the idea of "patents" out).
An alternative idea for a patent system would be to have a max # of valid patents at any given time, and have some kind of competitive process (like an auction) where you can force the people trying to get a patent "slot" to compete with each others' ideas to determine which ones are most valuable. New patent "slots" would become available when existing patents either expire, or are thrown out due to court challenges.
The competitive process would force patent-applicants to perform due diligence to weed out bad patents (ideas which are likely to be thrown out for uselessness, prior art, or obviousness). The importance of patent examiners should be greatly reduced by this process.
By keeping the max # of patents down at a reasonable level, it would be a lot easier for anyone to find out whether they were violating an existing patent or not. In addition, by having only a low constant # of patents enforceable, you place a rough "upper bound" on how limiting the patent system can be on "normal" innovation in the society (any ideas which weren't deemed "valuable" enough by the auction process can be used by anyone without worrying about being sued).
You can also use the auction idea to encourage submissions by small inventors - if you make it clear that whoever submitted the idea for the patent will get most of the money paid by the winning bidder (with protections to avoid people trying to pay themselves of course), then there will be little guys falling all over themselves submitting ideas into the patent process hoping for that massive jackpot payoff & lots of big guys examining the incoming patent stream hoping for that mind-blowing idea that can make them lots of money. It's a win-win for society, since you're rewarding the smart guys who don't have the money to take advantage of their ideas, and giving the ideas to the big guys who DO have the resources to take advantage of those ideas.
Yes to both questions, but practically speaking it would interfere with too much money-making for it to be politically popular.
Actually, I've read somewhere that if there is too much cushioning, injuries are more likely.
Apparently, the cushioning makes it more difficult for the brain to figure out how to position the ankles to reduce injury risk.
Only if voter fraud doesn't save the Republicans' heinies.
You just won't move it very far...
It wasn't just that. The Iraqi army was pretty demoralized, including the vaunted "Republican Guards" - there's a decent chance they would've folded like the 2nd time w/o using any WMD (even if they had anything effective left at that time).
What Bush Sr. didn't want to set up was the _exact_ situation that we're in right now - our soldiers indefinitely stuck suppressing massive sectarian civil violence (which had been repressed by Hussein's brutality). Too bad Bush Jr. didn't care to listen to Daddy's advice.
Liberal _used_ to mean someone who thought everyone should be able to live & let live, until the propagandists got a hold of it.
The "sometimes useful idiot" applies more to the people who like to use the word "liberal" as a pejorative.
The people designing the missile just have to make sure the source code is available in machine readable format somewhere in the missile. That way they'll maintain full legality with the GPL when they "distribute" the compiled version of the product.
They also have a vast lack of ethics, and anyone who deals with them should have a vast lack of trust in anything those executives do or say. There are plenty of members of society with the knowledge & skills of these "elite" executives - if you get the lying, cheating sacks of crap out of the way, these other people might have a chance to strut their stuff.
The crooked execs also serve as role models for other ethically-challenged individuals in the business world. IMHO, severely punishing these kinds of people would actually do MORE good for society than punishing low-level criminals. Low-level criminals don't usually think about too much besides immediate consequences when they do their dirty deeds, plus (as stated above) their crimes don't usually affect more than a few people at a time. The effects of large-scale white-collar crime can affect thousands (or more) people at a time, and even if those people aren't being directly mugged, crippling financial effects can cause even more long-term damage in the emotional well-being of those folks as a quick brutal mugging.
Most of these so-called "pillars of society" actually have the brain capacity to contemplate personal consequences - if they know they're going to destroy their freedom, fortune & career for the rest of their lives, instead of just getting a slap on the wrist & a little community service, they'll be a little more circumspect about their peccadillos. They'll also be a little more conscious about the potential effects that stupid financial decisions might have on themselves, versus the current situation where they can play with "other peoples'" money all day long without worrying about their own personal situation.
I'm all in favor of severe punishments for white-collar crime, even as far as the death penalty for situations like Enron where tens of thousands of people saw their retirement savings get flushed down the toilet. All these executives claim they "deserve" their high pay because of the "risk" that they're talking - if they're going to toy with the lives of 10s of thousands of people, then they'd better put their lives on the line right along with'm.
If you control the voting machines, who cares where your candidate is from? :P
Heck, you could also sell the program to the Republicans if you promise to use it to launch Democrats! :P)
Wins all around! (Joke, it's a joke, don't hit me...
More to the point, "cheating" in school means you are often bypassing the actual information that the professors were trying to get you to learn.
Of course, when you graduate & discover you don't know how to do anything, you can complain about how crappy the school system was and how you didn't learn anything.
So you're laughing that he called it a reaction instead of a phase change?
You've got a strange sense of humor...
Not sure why you're laughing - what's wrong about what he said?
It's a lot more cost effective, and less dangerous health-wise, to have HIS tubes tied.
If you managed to collect enough water to cover half the solar system, I think you'll be more in danger of getting sucked into the resultant black hole than worrying about drowning.