Believe that would be a very good start...

Just a brain storm, but I believe lots of side issues can be resolved by ensuring that companies are allowed a maximum staff of 1000 people (or a similarly fairly low limit) and can't own other companies. This will take care of issue 8 in your list as well and might be a resolution to issue 1 not providing enough diversity.

Having such a restriction will ensure:

- Real competition; companies can't now just grow market share by absorbing other companies.

- Increase in productivity through efficiency; since corporations can't just throw more people at a problem, this means that the only way to gain a competitive edge is to train staff and to become more efficient. This will also mean that corporations will become specialists in only a limited number of areas, since they can't have enough staff to be a specialist in all areas.

- Standardisation; some products may need more than 1000 staff to produce, which will decrease the number of companies that have complete end to end production lines (with only small components delivered by other companies). This means these companies need to start even more relying on parts produced by other companies, which increases the need for standardisation to be able to compete. The companies sourcing parts are not able to monopolise one complete part supply line, due the the restricted size in staff.

- Economic growth; because of the limit in the number of staff, there is more money flowing between different corporations, since more companies will need the services and products of other companies to be able to operate. The size of an economy is the amount of money in an economy multiplied by the rate at which the money flows through an economy.

This will also reduce issues like corruption and buying votes somewhat, since corporations will have a limited size and lobbying capability.

Maybe 1000 staff is even a too high a number...

Any thoughts?

While most VB hackers could make such a tool quicker than you can spell anti-trust, you have to take into account that if MS has to develop a tool that does that, you need to have at least 4 quadcores and 32GB of memory to be able to run it and they would need a development budget of around 300 million dollars.

Of course goncept knows this, but attacking someone's valid argument by attacking used hyperbole within that argument is a good way to try to discredit the entire argument itself, without actually having to counter the argument with own real arguments. After that attention is further diverted away from the original argument by stating that it's all not that much different than we already have.

That sadly actually says a lot of expected competency of government officials that the public has.

will not touch it until it has been certified by an industry independent body like ISO.

The point wasn't whether the act itself was illegal or legal, it was about the question if someone who committed a crime in country A which causes damages in country B, should be tried in country B.

I agree that if this guy broke the law he should be prosecuted. Only by the country where the crime is committed, otherwise you leave loopholes open like the example I gave.

If a party in country B has damages, they can go through the legal system of country A to claim damages. This just feels like some nationalistic 'We are americans and don't fuck with us' kneejerk reaction. I had hoped that attitude had gone with G.W.

So by your reasoning, you should be able to be imprisoned by the chinese government if you watch (by chinese government deemed) illegal content on a website that's hosted on a server in China. Even though the content of the website is perfectly legal in the country where you are browsing in? No? Didn't think so... This type of entrapment is a slippery slope.