I agree wholeheartedly that smart people don't argue with cops, because you will lose every time, regardless of the merits (that seems to be what happened in the recent unpleasantness with the woman who may or may not have hanged herself in jail--she failed to, in the words of Eric Cartman, respect his authoritah, and as a result went to jail for the crime of failing to signal while changing lanes).

Whether or not this is the smart play does not, however, make it the just one. In a JUST society, we would discipline those who casually abuse their authority in an attempt to simply cut off debate about whether or not they are correct in their actions, and not argue about whether the victim of that abuse deserved it or not. Imagine a world where Rosa Parks simply obeyed the order to go to the back of the bus, that civil rights marchers simply obeyed the orders to disperse, and everyone else in that era simply did what they were told--because in the end, this is what "smart" people are advocating.

Once upon a time, our smartest people did not simply accede to the demands of power. Today, we do. You get the government you deserve.

That was what I came here to say. To be fair, MS did "do their homework" by outsourcing their CDN to someone who actually knows what they are doing. That said, I can't help but wonder how they can claim to be competent to host something like Azure when they won't even run their own services on their platform (it's like back when they used to run Hotmail on BSD).

That's precisely my point - the valid reason to regulate here is specific, measurable harm, not "general well-being".

I did scraping before (and note that we aren't talking about screenscraping here, but rather website scraping) - I once wrote a scraper that presented an entire online forum as a newsgroup. Based on my experience with that, and on the layout of the RCW website, scraping this particular thing is absolutely trivial.

I agree that we shouldn't have to do that. I'm just saying that I find it doubtful that they do it to extract money from people, because I just don't see that working well when it's so easily scraped. If someone were to hire me to do that, it'd probably take me something like a few hours, and I wouldn't ask more than $200 for such a job.

The way the laws are laid out on that website, it would be trivial to scrape them into a single document. Even the URLs there are very predictable, making it particularly easy. For $615/year, I'm sure someone would do it.

All I can say is that I regularly look up RCWs pertaining to different things where I have doubts or am just curious about it, and so far I haven't found any trouble finding the relevant bits.

From a lawyer's perspective, perhaps this all is still missing crucial bits. If providing, say, a single-page HTML download would be immensely useful, then sure, they should do it (especially as they already likely have some kind of script along these lines, as you do have a single-HTML option for individual chapters).

So far, all the people responding to my example have overlooked one crucial word in it: "force". Does Finland merely provide incentive for people to maintain a healthy lifestyle? Or do they actively force people into such a lifestyle. That's the main distinction here.

Thank you for illustrating my point so eloquently. It's precisely because of people like you that this line of reasoning is so fraught with peril.

Um, the search is by keyword also (click on the "Search RCWs" link to see the full UI). And PDFs are refreshed once per year because paper publication of the complete thing is also once per year, it's not like they're deliberately slowing things down.

Here's a better example, then - Revised Code of Washington:
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/

Most recent version is searchable online HTML. It, and all the previous editions, are also available as downloadable PDFs, exactly as they are published on paper. All of these are free.

You are missing the point: none of these force you to exercise, merely encourage you to do so. But if your rationale is "general welfare", then literally forcing people to exercise is equally legitimate - it's for their own good!

Let me rephrase that. It could be used as a justification of such a law, yes. My point is that it doesn't have to be, and we're better off not doing that because that would have undesirable legal side effects down the line.

"General well-being of the people" is a very vague notion that can be used as a justification for too many things, most of which you probably wouldn't like at all. Of specific note is that it doesn't require any outside actor - they could just as well limit your own activities that are potentially harmful to yourself, even statistically speaking (i.e. not harmful to you personally, but universally banning them would prevent enough people from exercising them in a harmful way that it would improve "general well-being"

It's far better to go with some more concrete justifications, such as specific measurable harm that is inflicted by the actor to other parties. It's not exactly hard to do with pollutants, either, because the emissions are measurable, and so are their effects. It's still collective harm, since it's pretty hard to quantify the individual damage you get from e.g. AGW (though still possible in some cases, and I'd love to see the polluters pay compensation and damages specifically to people they hurt whenever we can trace it), but then at least it's about harm, not some nebulous "it could be better that way".

I see the difference. The point is that it's not about "general well-being of the populace" at all.

What extent of "encouraging" do you find acceptable? For example, should we tax people higher if they don't exercise enough, and then use that money to give everyone else free gym passes?

Well, why are we punishing people who earn money through hard work? Why is sweat-of-the-brow taxed higher than rent?

As long as you have one rate set higher than the other, you can make that argument either way. Why not set a single flat rate on all kinds of income? Isn't it only fair?