Arrow proved that you can't make a perfect election system for more than two candidates. That doesn't mean every voting system that does exist is equally worthless.

Consider France, for instance. They use top-two runoffs, and they have more than two parties. While top-two doesn't really fit Arrow (as it's not a ranked ballot method), it probably doesn't pass the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, and so isn't a perfect method by Arrow's yardstick. Yet it works: it does permit multiple parties. That in itself means that some methods, while not perfect, are good enough.

Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.

Let's see. Standard DVD size has a diameter of 120mm (radius = 60 mm). You want 1 in (25.4 mm). There's a center hole that's 15 mm in the DVD standard, so let's say it's shrunk to 8 mm. Then the area of the DVD sized disc is pi * (60^2 - 15^2), and of the small disc, pi * (25.4^2 - 8^2). The DVD sized disc has about 5.8 times the area of your smaller disc, so if they can get 500 GB on the big one, 80 GB on the small? Sounds good.

However, the record companies are not run by robotic automatons. They are run by humans and, quite frankly, as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance. Trying to earn a profit is not a morally corrupt quest. Trying to earn a profit at the expense and livlihood of your fellow human beings, and at the disruption of the society that you, yourself, are part of is downright stupid, if not flagrantly evil.

There's a selection pressure going on. If you have a sense of morality, you're not going to last long in such an environment, so you quit. Meanwhile, the people that don't have such compunctions keep working. Pretty soon all the moral people have been weeded out.

If the corporate optimization function is aligned for profit alone, then don't be surprised when the upper echelons of the companies get filled with people who care only about profit. In this respect, the sociopaths have an "evolutionary" (selective) advantage: they don't let their morals get in the way of the profit optimization. Thus they can optimize further than ordinary people can, and hence they're selected for. Doing something about that would involve altering the optimization ("fitness function"), but how?

Bioshock was basically System Shock 2's story set underwater, they had 10 years to come up with something semi-original.

And how blatantly so. Atlas is Polito, with the same twist. That makes Fontaine SHODAN and Ryan XERXES (and his splicers The Many). Tenenbaum is Delacroix (atoner). In this corner, we have some pipe hybrids, and over in that corner, some splicers, both zombies.
As for the game elements... stock up on elements in System Shock 2 and take pictures in Bioshock, then grab some cybermodules or ADAM. Can't do spooky action at a distance? No problem, hack some vending machines/vending machines and get some PSI hypos/EVE, then let 'er rip from your PSI-amp/arm.

I find it extremely unlikely that the state can re-engineer the internet to such a point that the limitations to internet liberty can't simply be sidestepped. Even less likely is that they can do that without destroying the very thing that makes the internet useful in the first place: all intelligence at the edges, simple neutral routing between the endpoints.

It could be a general Gnostic reference. Abraxas is also a Marvel Comics character.

Yours is the minority report!

And blackjack.

Sorry, I won't go for anything less than 239 PUs.

It's unclear from the game whether your side is purely defensive or if it's actually aiming to wipe the cabal out. Without spoiling things too much if you want to play the game, they never get their chance. But your point about illness is a good one. It used to be the case that mental hospitals were run like prisons. Perhaps one should instead run prisons (for those who have no alternative, like the cabal members) as hospitals.

As for social-technical points, I would say that social points are actually more important than technical points. If you have lots of social points, you can make abundance work without high tech; but if you have lots of technical points - i.e. power - without the social points that confer the responsibility needed, you could get a parallel LulzSec making an airborne plague "for the lulz", or terrorist fanatics wiping out cities with nanotech. Some of the same is alluded to in a later cutscene of Hostile Waters, where it is shown that the universal assemblers can also be used as universal disassemblers.

So far, responsibility has managed to stay ahead of power - even with nuclear weapons, the nations of the world have managed to not destroy themselves. But will it hold as more and more power is available? I don't know, but there will be interesting times.

(And as a note on churches: I got the feeling that they were talking about the kind of religion that could be subordinated to authority. Consider the claim of the divine right of kings, and the significant power the Pope wielded back in those days. One can graft hierarchy to any organization, and so attempt to gain control of the organization's domain.)

And all I have to say is:

This is how the Duke ends,
this is how the Duke ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper.

RIP!

You might want to check the cutscenes to the old game Hostile Waters, particularly Nanotechnology and Cabal. It's an RTS, but your side is a post-scarcity society and the enemy group is those leaders that didn't like the redistribution of power that brought.

It may be simple, but I haven't seen that kind of setting elsewhere.

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that were replicators or printers to exist, but the classical economy derived its scarcity value entirely from DRM, I would have no problem downloading "LaBWaRe.CRACKED.stl.rar", or for the intellectual challenge of it, downloading the demo (were there such a thing) and cracking it myself. And since the only thing separating this scenario from one where everybody could have everything they wanted is the artificial addition of DRM, I don't think the majority of the people would feel bad in either cracking or downloading pirated copies, either.

In the current world, at least you can claim that it's unjust to download a pirated copy since it deprives the author of the money they would get if you had bought it legally. However, if the only thing that makes things have monetary value in a replicator+DRM society is that there is DRM, then money only exists as a legitimate way of canceling the DRM. Thus, my pirating doesn't deprive the ultimate authors of their value since they can just pirate what they need, too.

It is true that things will be much less clear in the intermediate period where somethings can be printed and other things not, but the greater the fraction of things you need that can be printed, the weaker the claim that piracy is morally bad will be. In practice, in such a "mixed economy" (scarcity/abundance), I'd probably just try to make open source labware.

That would be Manna.