To: PMS Witch who wrote (32699 ) 11/7/1999 7:36:00 PM From: SC Respond to
As far as the government is concerned, this isn't about money, it's about POWER. The government will get their money one way or the other as long as no one challenges their POWER. The reason the DOJ went after microsoft wasn't to protect the poor consumer. It wasn't even because they wanted to help poor netscape, sun, aol, et.al. It was simply because microsoft had become so successful that, in spite of all the power draining effects of the myriad taxes that the various levels of government could levy, microsoft has become too economically powerful for their comfort. Civil suits are another matter. Civil suits generally are about money. It's commonly called the legal lottery. It's very lucrative for the trial lawyers who are able to win a class action suit against a deep pocket defendent. It's lucrative for the plaintiff in some cases but if you are the member of a class it usually means some worthless discount on your next purchase from the defendent. Everybody else pays a little more for products and insurance. Thus the analogy to the lottery--most plaintiffs lose, of the plaintiffs who win most get a trivial prize, a few plaintiffs get the big prize in order to maintain interest and the trial lawyers and the government are usually the big winners. Nobody claims that legal proceedings result in the absolute, pure, real truth. They result in the legal truth which is presumed to be the best approximation of the real truth in the majority of cases. In a legal proceeding, evidence which would be dismissed as anecdotal and not worthy of serious scientific consideration in a peer reviewed professional journal, is considered equally as powerful and worthy as a double-blind prospective study demonstrating extremely high statistical precision and accuracy. Lawyers and politicians think and reason differently than scientists and engineers. In answer to your question, look for the company that poses the greatest threat to the governments POWER.
