1) Lot's of software engineers do get paid by the hour, for similar reasons. It's not really always predictable work.

2) A lawyer has to deal with opposing counsel screwing up with his work. Usually software engineers don't have to deal with sentient beings in their computer adding bugs.

3) There is a huge difference in information accessibility. The information you need to know to, say, write a program is there and (relatively) easily accessible to you. The information you need to build a case may be in the minds and desks and file cabinets of someone who has every incentive to try to keep it from you. You may not have any idea until you get far into the discovery process how much a case will actually cost to litigate.

The law tries to be clear, but it never can be because it's fundamentally trying to encode all sorts of fuzzy human emotions/motivations/tendencies, etc.

Let's take your lawyer-free utopia. Rules are crystal clear and the process of checking whether a rule has been followed is straightforward and mechanical. How do you handle something like a fair use rule? A 30 second time limit? What if it's a 35 second clip that's on quietly in the background of an Indie movie? What if it's a 15 second clip of an advertisement lifted directly from a competing company's ad?

Look at laws that have crystal clear applications: statutory rape laws. Did they have sex? If yes, is she under 17? If yes, then guilty! No mind that it was her 18 year old boyfriend. How about drug possession? No need for judges to do the sentencing, we can simply make sentencing mechanical. 10 years for 10 grams, 100 years for 100 grams. No need to consider stuff like that the same amount of LSD can weigh a ton more when it's dissolved in sugar cubes rather than blotter paper.

The criminal justice system is one of those areas where lawyers and judges have been taken out of the loop, with 95% of cases being disposed of quickly through plea bargaining and sentencing being dictated by tables and formulas. It is also one of the most completely messed up, random, and downright unfair areas of the law.

Uh, it's not the tree huggers to blame for the US's industrial problems. The Europeans have even more stringent regulations than we do. The blame for the decline of American industry lies almost entirely with the labor unions that have made American labor completely unaffordable and companies using it completely uncompetitive.

> Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP?

We have about 100 thin clients here (linux-based ones :)

Apart from what you mention in administration costs, there also the following fact: thin clients have no moving parts (or they're not designed properly). This results in:
1) _much_ lower maintenance costs
2) silent operation
3) longer lifetime (twice as long, probably)

I can honestly say that where we used to struggle with about 2 FTE syadmins/helpdesk (for 100 linux desktops and assorted servers and services), since we introduced thin clients we're easily coping with the workload.

Of course, with windows YMMV :)

Thank you for the complement about the article.

I really can't imagine why you'd want to come across as having not written it

I didn't immediately want to take credit for the article because as yerricde, so many people had put me on their foe lists for allegedly repeatedly ramming the issue down their throats on every single music-industry-related article. I guess they just couldn't handle the facts about the copyright incumbents' monopoly on songwriting.