The most likely outcome is they will cut flights to deal with the drop in passengers and charge more to make up for lost revenue. They may be able to charge a premium since flying is faster, though not inordinately so once you factor in the security circus.

Much of an airline's expenses are relatively fixed - fuel, landing fees, taxes. Lowering prices may simply not be an option. It's not a very profitable business to start with - there have been analyses over the years which show while there are occasional good times, when you add up all the profits and all the losses you end up with a negative number, i.e. the industry as a whole has lost money.

Organise a "draw Jesus sodomizing Mary" contest in Texas and you'll get crazy

You'll get signs and yelling. You won't get assassins.

Stop trying to draw parallels where none exist.

Dateline 2015: Scientists finally decode honeybee "dance" language. First message recorded:

"Man, I'm really jonesing for some of that nicotine-laced nectar. Can you watch the hive for a bit while I take a break? I'm gettin' the shakes."

Worse yet, PC's today are barely faster than 5 year old ones at similar price points. Moore's law ran headlong into a thermal brick wall.

That's not really true. Design rules are still shrinking at about the same rate they always did. Moore's law, after all, is about transistors and not speed. Chip makers can certainly use that extra real estate to add cores and dedicated hardware for things like video processing.

But the real problem (from Intel and Microsoft's perspective) is far more pernicious. Five year old hardware is good enough for 99% of people who need a PC. If all I'm doing is commenting on Facebook, watching Netflix movies, and doing my taxes there isn't any reason to replace my old hardware. I'm sure that's a big part of the attraction for the chip makers - they'd love to force everyone to buy new hardware in order to watch videos.

No, it just means it will get phased in over time as old PCs die and are replaced, and there's nothing new to buy except what supports this scheme.

But then they have a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody is going to make sure to buy a PC with the DRM hardware if they can get the content without it. Nobody is going to produce content exclusively for DRM'd hardware if market penetration of that hardware isn't more than a tiny blip. And consumers aren't going to wait five years for the industry to get its shit together and produce a system that works transparently for authorized users.

One of three things is going to happen: Tools to strip the stream of DRM will become ubiquitous, the scheme will die from lack of adoption, or Microsoft will succeed in prompting a mass move off of the PC platform, thereby finishing the process (started with Windows 8) of slitting its own throat.

Unfortunately, it looks like the advent of PlayReady 3.0 could leave older PCs in the lurch.

Other considerations aside, this alone makes the scheme DOA.

Making a profit from writing a book about your criminal life or the criminal rife of your relatives is illegal.

Maybe, depending on the jurisdiction. In any case I've never heard of a "Son of Sam" law that doesn't require an actual conviction, something Goebbels was too dead to get.

It's way older than that. In the early 1800s people were complaining that government was wasting money on canal infrastructure projects, digging canals so shipping could travel across the US.

You mean the canals that today sit unused?