You young guys take note: When you hate someone for having what you do not, you bring curses upon your own head.

Funny, but at least in the US, this is today's way of life. Class/wealth envy is the most powerful tool being used by today's political elite to stay in power.

I'm not sure this is a totally correct assessment. Large companies tend to have defined desktop standards that they force all users to adhere to, even when they cause problems (i.e. full disk PGP encryption on a developers desktop work station because they might test with sensitive data). The standards apply to developers, call center and executive admins equally, so they don't really work well for any one group. This is the norm as a way to keep internal support costs down.

But, because of this standardization, the internal development staff only needs to target one defined platform, they aren't really worried about cross-platform support. So they'll use what ever tool they are familiar with or that will get them to the end product fastest, because internal development is also usually an expense (not a revenue generator) and those systems tend to be rushed to not waste money.

Here's a question I've always wondered about, what happens if someone refuses to take the oath? Say for example you are brought into court under subpoena, and when you take the stand and they say Do you swear to tell the truth.. you answer with Nope, I don't. Could you be charged later with perjury or lying then?

Can't see that there is any way to force a person to take the oath, but knowing our system, I'm sure the judge would just say You're under oath anyway or hold you in contempt.

Or how about A Boy and his Dog

While I also play WoW under Wine and agree it works reasonably well, I have to ask a simple question.

One reason WoW works reasonably under Wine is that it will use OpenGL and is not tied to DirectX. Many of the WoW developers are actually using Macs so the application could not be dependent on DirectX. And yet, there is no native Linux client produced for it, only native for Mac OS X and Windows.

As popular as the game is, and knowing it can run on a *nix variant, Blizzard still won't produce a native Linux client. So why do you suppose that is?

What you appear to be describing is not so much what I think of as simplification but more reduction. It is possible to simplify the laws but still cover all the same points, just make the laws clearer and in more readily understandable language.

But that aside, a bigger change we could make (at least in the US) is tort-reform to a loser-pays system. Lawsuit-lottery exists in the US simply because the lawyers know they can keep dragging it out because if their client loses, they aren't stuck with the law bills for the other side.

In the US system the lawyers always get paid, regardless of outcome. In a loser-pays model, a lawyer weighs the actual merits of a case before taking it because if his/her client loses, he/she runs the risk of not getting paid.

Of course every time tort-reform is introduced it gets defeated by the lobbying might of the trial lawyers (which many members of Congress are) and the late-night TV class action lawsuit-mill lawyers ("Were you denied Vanilla ice-cream with your birthday meal at Joe's Pizza Parlor? Well call us, we can help").

And this excuse continues to come up over and over as well. Since nothing is physically lost, no one is harmed

Ok, so let us say that that is an acceptable argument. If you truly believe that argument, why don't you print your own money? After all, all you are doing is making your own copy, no one else is losing anything. The technology today makes it very easy to do.

Now of course people will jump all over this saying "but counterfeiting is a criminal offense, this is just a civil offense blah blah blah" but the fact is there is no difference based on your argument, so you should be protesting the fact that copying money is a criminal offense whereas copying the work of others without their permission isn't.

So when do you start printing your own money?

White House != Congress

This is proposed by Congress (Legislative branch), not the White House (Executive branch). Where are all the emails written/received from Congress critters? The only ones I've heard of in recent years are those associated with Republicans being slimes with interns, or like Sarah Palin's hacked account.

<devilsadvocate>

H1B visas mean the people getting hired are living in the same country, and probably the same city as the US worker you mentioned, these jobs are not outsourced overseas. How is it then, that these people can survive on $20k yet a local worker needs $50k? Is it a matter of expectation or actual need?

</devilsadvocate>

Note I'm not saying that it is correct to undercut citizen's but how do you we make the case that $50k is necessary as a living wage when the employers can point to the H1B visa folks and say "See, they are doing just fine at less than half that amount"? How do you win that argument?

Really? Would the ACLU even exist if the US military did not exist? Would United States exist as an independent nation without the US military? You have the ability to be part of the American Civil Liberties Union because there is a strong military protecting the United States where such an organization can exist.

Do not confuse the military with the politicians. Last time I looked, the US military was not patrolling the streets of this nation taking away your rights, the people that we vote into office are the ones doing that. And I don't recall the military being called in to back up executive orders, that is the FBI and Justice department.

Citing Health care In Canada

emphasis mine. Canadian citizens are not allowed, by law, to spend their own money to receive medical treatment if they desire to, unless of course they go across the border into the United States. Which makes sense, because

The doctors themselves are leaving to work in the US.

Maybe because we live in the 30 second sound bite/1-hour "solve everything drama" media driven world created by the folks that are protected by many of the bought and paid for laws that are chipping away at our freedoms.

What this does is get people to expect instant gratification, then when they don't get it they just move on to something else. A population that isn't paying attention to what their leadership is doing is easily mis-lead.

You need to re-read my post, I said nothing about charging for free software being not legal. In the case of the OpenOffice download the charge was for the use of their servers. We didn't pay, and grabbed it else where.

What I said that was apparently legal is there are companies putting up bogus web pages that purport to offer you the product you are seeking, but in reality all they do is charge you a fee for some crap like "showing you how to read the documents", then when you click the "Buy Document" they route you to a legitimate site. The consumer thinks they are being charged twice for a given product, and the only contact numbers are for the legitimate site who takes all the complaint calls.

Think of it like this, you want to buy a book from an online bookstore. You search Google for the book and you go to the first site that pops up because of adwords. On this site you read some instructions about how to order books on Amazon and they ask for your credit card information and charge you $7.95 then you click "Complete" and you suddenly show up at Amazon's order page for the same book. Amazon then asks you for your payment information. You go back to the first site and see a little notice at the bottom of the page that reads in very small print

This is what I meant by apparently legal, not charging to download free software. I know this from first hand experience because I have helped legitimate companies that have this problem.

When my son got a laptop for college, he went to download OpenOffice instead of paying for Office and called me asking for a credit card to pay for it with. Reading the fine print I saw that the site was charging for the download of the software from their servers, but for any problems you were supposed to contact OpenOffice.org.

There are a number of legally gray sites doing similar things. I know of one that has a page that previously came up high in Google rankings because of adwords for you to order particular documents. The site charged you to "explain how to order" then when you went to get the documents, you were routed to a legitimate site that sold the documents and then you were charged for the docs. Many people called the legit site asking why they were being charged twice.

This is apparently legal, so long as there is a disclaimer on the page. Turns out in this case the disclaimer was very small print, but still there. The legit site started monitoring the referral header so they could let the visitor know they had not yet actually purchased anything, but it still caused calls to the legit company's help desk and complaint lines.