I'm not sure that providing an incentive to plant and cut down trees is better than reducing the incentive to cut down the trees that already exist.

Tax large-scale treecutting, and use the proceeds to plant trees.

I don't believe they advertise it as a "selectively filtered text message service". The only thing I can find about filtering from a quick glance at the messaging section of their website is this, which talks about user-controlled filtering: http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23533.xml

It's called a lease. Or a rental.

And guess what? They can't just put a sticker over the keyhole that says by breaking it, what you thought was a purchase (with paperwork to back it up) is actually a rental.

They actually have to get you to voluntarily enter into a different kind of agreement, up front.

The difference is with regulation we can try to manage risks beforehand, rather than just try to assign blame afterward -- and we don't need to worry who caused a specific harm. We can target activities which are known to be harmful in general, or which we don't know enough about and are too risky relative to their benefit.

Obviously it's not perfect, but what you propose would be worse.

but you didn't buy the air on my property, and I am definitely not on it.

The wind blew my air onto your property. Not *my* fault. Doesn't stop Monsanto from suing farmers when patented seed blows onto their farms.

More to the point, you are consuming as much air as I am (approximately),

You mean it's a common resource we all share, and nobody should own? :-)

We probably consume about the same amount of air (depending on metabolism, activities, etc), but maybe I own more air than you. Maybe you don't own any air at all!

now if you are poisoning the air by some extra means and we had adjacent properties and your poisons entered my territory, I would be seeking retribution.

Prove that it's my dirty air that entered your property and not the polluter across the street.

Throwing yourself in front of a car is actually creating the harm, which is not the same thing as merely being aware of the harm and planning to seek redress after purchase. While this particular situation is pretty scummy, consider the consequences that such a rule would produce.

Company A sues company B for some completely legitimate reason. Company C buys company A in its entirety -- the transaction would have happened whether or not the issue with company B existed. Why is company B off the hook?

Joe buys a house from Bob. This land, like all others in the area, has contaminated soil due to the activities of nearby EvilCorp. Joe buys it anyway because there's not much of an alternative. Should Joe not be able to join the class action lawsuit against EvilCorp, to help pay for cleanup?

Copyright is about my right to publish.
My right to control publication can be infringed whether or not I make a profit.

Under what circumstances does society have an interest in granting you this artificial right? Generally, the justification is that without the ability to make money off of the work, fewer works would get created, because the would-be creators (not to mention the supporting roles such as editor, QA, audio/video technician, etc) would be busy doing something else that pays the rent and keeps food on the table. The goal is not (or rather, should not be) control in and of itself.

That right, by itself, is worth something. Hence the statuatory damages.

Is it worth $250,000? Is it worth the loss to society of the ability to make full use of the work?

My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.

I am hereby giving notice that you have been discovered inhaling air, some of which was within the air rights of my property at the time that I bought it (it's your job to figure out whose air the wind blew toward you -- especially if you want to know whom to sue if it's polluted, and you can prove it was that specific breath that made you sick...).

Further unauthorized use of this privately owned asset shall be grounds for litigation. I hope your lawyer's as good (i.e. expensive) as mine.

I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property

The owners of the oil rig sure would. Do the owners of surrounding property have as much money to spend on lobbyists to represent their interests?

You seem to be assuming a justice system that is beyond just nominally "working", but 100% efficient and cost-free to the harmed party, and that everyone is going to have full knowledge, and ample evidence, of the harms that are about to be inflicted upon them (or are being inflicted).

Your example of people getting sent to jail for things like drug possession is curious -- that's an instance of the government pursuing criminal charges, not of individuals bringing civil lawsuits. Exactly the thing that you say doesn't work (not that the War on Drugs(tm) is all that successful, but that's another matter...). If someone breaks into my home, steals my things, and shoots me, should it be up to my next of kin to gather evidence, hire a lawyer, and file a lawsuit against the perpetrator?

Should I file the pollution lawsuit after I've got cancer, and find out what was being dumped into the water supply? Small comfort that'll be, and maybe the entity responsible (at least on paper) doesn't even exist anymore.

You're assuming that whoever I'm calling is a business with formal hours, rather than a coworker, friend, etc.

I work with remote teams in many parts of the world, and when there's a conference call it's usually outside "normal business hours" for someone, and sometimes everyone. It's nice to have a reasonably simple way to figure out just how ridiculous a given time request would be for someone else.

Which raises the question of why the software that failed relied on human-readable time for internal operation...

If we're still going to "get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark", it doesn't exactly sound like "we don't rely on the sun anymore".

The knowledge that it's 11:00 doesn't tell me anything about whether it's a reasonable time to call someone in another part of the world, for example. Instead of checking a time zone offset I'd have to consult local sunrise/sunset times?

Then there's daylight saving time -- it's easier to adjust the clocks than to adjust every schedule. I guess you'd ditch that too?

Would midnight and noon still be 0:00 and 12:00, or could you have mid"night" in the middle of the day? :-P

You've got quite an imagination. :-)

There aren't many non-hybrid non-motorcycles, at least on the US market, that get anywhere near 35 MPG when not on a highway.

Someone who wants to compare the cost of that trip to other ways of accomplishing the same goal (be it an alternate route, walking, biking, taking transit, carpooling, choosing a closer alternate destination, skipping the trip altogether, etc) might care.

I was thinking of something more fine-grained than measuring by the tankful... something which would provide immediate feedback about how much gas is used on each trip.