> Good writing eliminates ambiguity

I'm afraid not in most fields. Good writing, in general, entertains or enlightens the reader. Part of the point of poetry is to _condense_ meaning into as small a message as feasible. The result is inevitable ambiguity.

Good _scientific_ writing, like good engineering documentation, is a bit unusual in its need for clear, unambiguous messages.

Any reported locations on comets yet?

                          http://io9.com/xkcd-animates-t...

> Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.

I'm afraid it's gotten too large to maintain as a normal freeware project. It has too many platforms, with far too much extraneous bloatware that must be tested and operate correctly to run on a normal freeware shoe string.

How would this be different from current law in most, if not all, nations?

That could be well worth checking. They'd also tend to share the same fetal hormones and biochemistry from their mother.

It's also not "free". If you don't buy drinks or tip the girls, you're asked to leave the club.

Note that this also does makes a real legal difference. The regulations for products or services that you _sell_ tend to be very different than those which may apply to personal activity or political speech.

It certainly can be "the state's damn business", when the "nose picking" is in food preparation areas or in hospital wards where infections are a large risk. Look up the history of "Typhoid Mary" and the resulting changes in food preparation regulations and laws. It's also the state's business when "sugary carbonated drinks" lie about their ingredients or their health benefits, such as selling aspartame based diet soda past its "sell by date", or making fraudulent health claims for "acai berries". You may not remember that multi-level marketing scam, I certainly do.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal practice that is documented from the Roman Empire and many civilizations since then. It is not a particularly American principle. The presumption of innocence has _never_ been taken as an excuse to discard all regulation of workplace activity, including simple employment itself in the USA. Employment normally requires an I-9 form to verify visa status to work.

> Actually, there is. Its to keep underage dancers and those with criminal (prostitution) records out of the clubs.

I'd be much more concerned about convictions for theft or violence.

There are other, sensible reasons for such a law. Many strippers engage in prostitution, and many have a history of drug problems. Education and safety training, and simple disease control, can be profoundly eased by reaching out to the registered strippers. It's also a way to check the age of employees, and try to keep children, especially runaways, out of that dangerous line of work.

Such a registry is certainly subject to abuse. Sex workers are certainly subject to stalking, and many families or former sexual partners who would harass or even endanger them. Others are just trying to make ends meet to take care of family and don't want their families to discover how they're paying the bills.

It's also well worth a Nobel prize and the gratitude of millions of people worldwide.

And lying about it. Comcast, for example, has a very large number of technically sophisticated customers reporting demonstrable throttling of high bandwidth services such as Bittorrent and Netflix. They deny it outright, but their denials are filled with what I would call "weasel words". They deny specific aspects of the throttling, but not the general practice.

> At least with international trade negotiations both parties send their best negotiators and lay their cards on the table at the same time

Yes, indeed, just like blackjack, bridge, and poker players get to see all of everyone's cards.

> On the other hand, free trade is a mutually beneficial arrangement

Compared to what? Monopolyy power, for example, is enormously more beneficial to one side than the other. Just as free speech can have notable, _specific_ benefits and general benefits for a society as a whole, control of trade and control of speech have tremendous power and benefit to the parties who have the control.

I'm also afraid that there also companies, specifically, from being ready and willing to "stab people in the eyeball". They're called interrogators, and they get notable benefits from mutilation and abuse in political causes. They've also repeatedly gotten political buy-in from large parts of their own societies. So you cannot assume that all groups have such a consensus.

> None of the negotiating parties are willing to reveal up front the maximum concessions

There are 2 notable problems with revealing up front.the maximum concessions.

1) None of them know in detail. They have to negotiate with powerful people whose ability, or willingness, may change from moment to change or may alter between the start of negotiations and the end of negotiations.

2) Giving the information up front would rob extensive, entrenched bureaucracy with centuries or even millennia of history of the personal meeting time and personal control over the negotiations which are the core of their power. Much like the fictional "flappers" of Laputa, their control of information and of the time of their nation's leaders is a major source of their power.

Whether or not they do their jobs well, and many of them do their jobs very well indeed, they're unlikely to willingly surrender their control. And even if the current bureaucracy were stripped of their control, it would re-establish itself very quickly as citizens sought to organize and understand the details of a large and complex environment. So a new bureaucracy of organizing and evaluating the information, and in the end controlling it, would recur very quickly.

> Most of the nogotiations are, or should not be, a game, where you try to achieve advantage over the other "partners", but try an agreement that benefits boths sides, or all, sides of the agreement.

Oh, dear. _All_ negotiations are games. Your goals, as an honest negotiator, should include your personal and group benefits, and do not have to include _hurting_ other people in the process. But the refusal to acknowledge that the game exists is much like "I refuse to play office politics." The people who make such claims are generally just very bad at it, and thus want everyone else to be equally hampered, or a very few of them are very subtle and want to be able to play their best game while their potential competitors think the game is not in progress.

If you worked for or with me, I'd be delighted to walk you through some of the typical salary negotiation games just so you're aware that they exist and in what ways they're inevitable. It helps reduce the conflicts and backbiting and tragic that occur when the games are kept entirely secret and the negotiations occur without the knowledge of other interested or directly affected parties.