[oconnor663]

I think that tactic makes a lot of sense when it's being applied to good laws. Like, "hey, you know you violated our XYZ contract here, and you know that if we go to court you're going to have to pay me $X, so why don't you just pay me slightly-less-than-$X now and we both save ourselves the trouble." That helps everyone involved. In a sense, all contracts and obligations work that way.

[paulddraper]

This.

Out-of-court settlement is awesome.

The real problem is that laws are complicated and variably enforced, making it extremely unclear who is right. Thus high legal fees.

The legal system is worse than the shittiest legacy code base you have ever seen, composed almost entirely of buggy exceptions, written with no thought toward future maintainers, beyond the comprehension of any mortal man, and gluing centuries old defunctness to poorly conceived addendum patching over the peeling layers. No one has interested in remove features, just adding more to the mountain of rubble.

[hermitdev]

> The legal system is worse than the shittiest legacy code base you have ever seen

You haven't seen the legacy code I have. One of the apps I worked on was modelling financial legal agreements. That was some truly shitty code. One function was over 50 printed pages with indentation levels I can't even begin to describe. It was also C++ written like Java. Tons of new's - no deletes or use of smart pointers. Leaked memory like you would not believe. Thankfully it was a batch-process. Even then, the server it ran on was allocated more that 128 GB of RAM because the hardware was cheaper than fixing the software.

[ScottBurson]

Process termination has always been the cheapest way to do GC :-)

[Rexxar]

It is one of the rare case where I would try to use the Boehm GC.

[weerd]

Dear god... these things exist?! And are used regularly!?