"One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are "lexical dark matter" that appears in no standard reference work." I'd like to take a look at that study to see how they handled technical vocabulary, misspellings, typos, and scannos. URL or other ref. data?

Whatever happened to "Do No Harm"? I guess that's just something Google said when it was trying to win us over. Now that they have us....

Right. One is always "stuck" with what is available when needed. The Air Force had no good choice other than the F-4 if its fighter pilots were to participate in the Vietnam War.

In the eyes of impractical people, there is always a superior alternative to what is currently actually available. Such people seem to operate in a world that is not much constrained by time, so hindsight seems to them to be the same as foresight.

I never said the solution was wrong, only that a fine-based solution will tend to be a non-starter.

Can't you hear the objections? "This is unfair to poor people, allowing rich drug users to get off easy, while forcing the poor into gang recruitment centers (ie prisons)."

It's prescient, not precient. Same root as science. It refers to having foreknowledge. If only they would invent a technology that would look over our shoulder as we write and correct out mis-spellings.