Because the companies can only initiate civil complaints against them, and the only possible punishment a civil complaint (aside from child support cases) can generate is a fine, which your generic lowlife can't pay anyway. For the companies involved, the money you'd spend on filing and fighting a civil case is better spent on prevention and remediation.
What you want is a criminal complaint, which can generate jail time or (just as a suggestion) time in the public stocks as punishment. But criminal complaints can only be initiated by the State, i.e. by your local district attorney. Who, generally speaking, has other crimes on his mind. Problem is, no one much gets elected DA by promising to really go after obscure financial scammers. It just doesn't carry the cachet of, say, coming down hard on gangs or drug dealers or car thieves.
Even when you do have a DA who finds prosecuting white-collar crime, so to speak, an attractive route to personal political success (e.g. New York's Eliot Spitzer) he is more likely to be after a few big corporate defendants (e.g. Worldcom and its executive officers) where a giant fine from a single case can make the whole operation pay for itself. Going after a thousand little weirdos with not much money to speak of anyway is just a dead loss, financially and politically.
An interesting back of the envelope calculation comes to mind: what is the maximum size of arcology you can build given perfect light transmission to the interior?
The Sun drops about 25,000 lux on the Earth's surface, and ordinary indoor lighting is about 100 lux. So, imagine a room in your arcology is 5 meters square and 2 meters high. It needs 2500 lumens of light, or 0.1 square meters of surface area. Assume for convenience the arcology is a cube, in the sense that it has the same number of rooms N on a side. In that case the surface area is given by...
A = 40 N^2 + 25 N^2 in square meters.
Divide this into patches of 0.1 square meters, i.e. multiply by 10, and you get the number of rooms N^3 it can provide light for. That is, set A = N^3, solve for N.
The result is N = 650. So the largest possible arcology would be 650 x 5 = 3,250 meters on a side and 650 x 2 = 1,300 meters high, and sport about 650^3 = 274 million rooms.
Is there any way to store the photons in sunlight?
Yes, photosynthesis. In principle green plants can capture 34% of the energy in red photons and store it as chemical fuel, although in practise they normally do far worse.
From a strictly metaphysical perspective, this really is a storage of photons. The energy is stored as the Coulomb force between nuclei and electrons that gives the chemical bonds their strength. But a Coulomb force is simply the result of the rapid exchange of longitudinal photons. So I think you could legitimately look at a chemical bond as an intensely hot tiny soup of photons. The "perfect mirrors" at the end of the "cavity" are the charged particles, which absorb and re-emit the photons without loss, over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the companies can only initiate civil complaints against them, and the only possible punishment a civil complaint (aside from child support cases) can generate is a fine, which your generic lowlife can't pay anyway. For the companies involved, the money you'd spend on filing and fighting a civil case is better spent on prevention and remediation.
What you want is a criminal complaint, which can generate jail time or (just as a suggestion) time in the public stocks as punishment. But criminal complaints can only be initiated by the State, i.e. by your local district attorney. Who, generally speaking, has other crimes on his mind. Problem is, no one much gets elected DA by promising to really go after obscure financial scammers. It just doesn't carry the cachet of, say, coming down hard on gangs or drug dealers or car thieves.
Even when you do have a DA who finds prosecuting white-collar crime, so to speak, an attractive route to personal political success (e.g. New York's Eliot Spitzer) he is more likely to be after a few big corporate defendants (e.g. Worldcom and its executive officers) where a giant fine from a single case can make the whole operation pay for itself. Going after a thousand little weirdos with not much money to speak of anyway is just a dead loss, financially and politically.
An interesting back of the envelope calculation comes to mind: what is the maximum size of arcology you can build given perfect light transmission to the interior?
The Sun drops about 25,000 lux on the Earth's surface, and ordinary indoor lighting is about 100 lux. So, imagine a room in your arcology is 5 meters square and 2 meters high. It needs 2500 lumens of light, or 0.1 square meters of surface area. Assume for convenience the arcology is a cube, in the sense that it has the same number of rooms N on a side. In that case the surface area is given by...
Divide this into patches of 0.1 square meters, i.e. multiply by 10, and you get the number of rooms N^3 it can provide light for. That is, set A = N^3, solve for N.The result is N = 650. So the largest possible arcology would be 650 x 5 = 3,250 meters on a side and 650 x 2 = 1,300 meters high, and sport about 650^3 = 274 million rooms.
Yes, photosynthesis. In principle green plants can capture 34% of the energy in red photons and store it as chemical fuel, although in practise they normally do far worse.
From a strictly metaphysical perspective, this really is a storage of photons. The energy is stored as the Coulomb force between nuclei and electrons that gives the chemical bonds their strength. But a Coulomb force is simply the result of the rapid exchange of longitudinal photons. So I think you could legitimately look at a chemical bond as an intensely hot tiny soup of photons. The "perfect mirrors" at the end of the "cavity" are the charged particles, which absorb and re-emit the photons without loss, over and over again.