After a while I realized that there’s another spin on it. You might expect consumer protection to be a government function, but it’s generally not very well done by governments in the US, for various reasons. In the absence of gov’t consumer protection, big corporations will screw you over and over.

One reason for the corporation NOT to screw you is to avoid being targeted for a class-action. The gov’t has effectively outsourced this function to enterprising lawyers. Instead of paying the gov’t a fine, they pay the huge legal fees.

I agree that it is an imperfect system, and there are plenty of bogus class actions. But it is not without value.

You might be interested in MyDeDub: a data de-duplicating block-device (on which a filesystem like ext3 or so can be placed) which stores its meta-data…and data(!) in a MySQL database.
http://www.vanheusden.com/java/MyDeDub/

If I had all the skills required to work for Percona I’m pretty sure I’d do good on my own as well and only use Percona as multiplicator for my own business so I might as well share alike in the losses (if there are any).

The nice thing about payroll taxes from a lawmakers perspective is that not many voter will notice it going up so not as many people will care. And even if you as an employer raise the question it can be construed as cheaping out on your employees’ benefits.

Like you I never throw away books and have an ever increasing pile of them, especially if they are old and interesting.

Books are the lifeblood of the modern age, even though we all now live with computers. You only have to look at how many searches people make on Public Domain information to see how important books from the past really are.

Dave.