That's a "weakness" of life in general, not just the free market.

The beauty of the free market compared to democracy is that you don't need to be in the majority to get what you want. The majority can buy from Motorola and others while you can freely buy from the those that cater to you. Personally I have an OpenMoko Freerunner. If you want something newer you could have look at GeeksPhone, Nokia 900 or one of the many other phones out there to see if they are free enough for you.

What do you think is the most likely reaction of a politician when he hears about this technology that makes it impossible for a user to change the software on his devices? Will it be to ban it or to make it obligatory so the government can put stuff in your firmware. (Only to be used against terrorists and pedophiles of course. (At least in the beginning. (At least officially.)))

How can you be sure that the kids really are yours when you already know that she's an adulteress? You could of course get a paternity test but you shouldn't just assume that the kids are yours. She did after all fool you into thinking she wouldn't cheat on you. How can you be so sure she hasn't fooled you on who her children's father is as well?

There are plenty of people with access to your network card before it reaches you. People at the factory, those doing transportation, people working in customs, people near all the places the card is stored before it reaches you, etc. You may also take the card to repair once you got it. And if your computer already is compromised the malware can flash itself to the network card so it will survive a reinstall of the operating system and boot loader.

I personally look forward to helping bring Cocoa to OpenJDK and hope I'm not alone.

The BSD-port of OpenJDK already run on OS X. I don't know if they support using Cocoa yet but their mailing list would probably be a nice place to start looking for others that are interested in working on Cocoa support in OpenJDK.

It's not always smart to make what you are doing legal. In many areas that would really destroy your profits. Just imagine what would happen to the market for illegal drugs if everyone could manufacture and import drugs legally.

The Bible was not written in English. It is translated to it. English is a living language. Sometimes a new word, like "homosexual", appear in English. That new word can make translating the Bible easier. In the original Greek you have the term "arsenokoites". It comes from the terms "arrhen" and "koite" that, according to Strongs dictionary, has the meaning "male (as stronger for lifting):--male, man" and "a couch; by extension, cohabitation; by implication, the male sperm:--bed, chambering, X conceive". Strong explains "arsenokoites" as "a sodomite:--abuser of (that defile) self with mankind." The 1611 King James Bible translate "arsenokoites" in 1. Tim 1:10 as "them that defile themselves with mankind". In current English the more precise term "homosexual" exist. So a translation to modern English should use it.

In that case I'm sure you could explain to me why it would be wrong if I killed random people on the street with a flamethrower. That is: explain it without using religious arguments, including implicitly religious arguments. As long as you don't I hope you will forgive my doubts about the truthfulness of your statement.

I'm not a Catholic so I can't speak for them. However I would guess that Hitlers behavior, not to mention his complains about Christianity, somehow would disqualify him. (Catholics believe in Matthew 7:20, right?) To quote Hitler: "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" What a politician claim to be in public aren't always the same as what they really are.

Your point is? The fact that the nazis did the experiments have no relevance for my argument. They would have been just as cruel had they been done by someone else. Stopping the research would still have helped the victims.

In some cases it would (had my rhetoric been enough to stop them).

Ya. I mean all those people who didn't want penicillin, modern plumbing, flight, electricity, smallpox vaccines, the internet you're typing this on, etc. are doing so well.

The claim I was responding to was that distrust of intellectualism was blocking the advancement of society on a wide variety of fronts. That statement could include more then just harmless technological progress. One example of where someone may want to "advance" society is towards the tyranny of the "intellectuals" over the commoners (in the name of helping since commoners would make the "wrong" decision if they could choose). Another example is towards cannibalistic cures where you kill one human to treat others. Alternatively it could be towards something positive (like the Internet). So I asked towards what goal the advancement would be and pointed out that there are "advancements" many don't want. (Don't pretend that you would want all possible advancements of society. I'm quite sure that you wouldn't want advancements towards, lets say, more biblical ideas in society)

The extreme distrust of intellectualism throughout the US in particular is a major block in the advancement of society on a wide variety of fronts, and most often that distrust is manufactured as a form of religious views attacking scientific foundations and research.

Advancement towards what exactly? Have you ever considered that not everyone want to go in the direction you want to "advance" them?

Unfortunately the government kept the hand of the Free market away. Read Curing Cancer: A Patent Impossibility (written in 2007) for the details. Here is an excerpt:

The bad news is that it is a simple, inexpensive chemical long used in medicine, and is not patentable. Thus there is no mechanism for getting the chemical (dichloroacetate, DCA) past the billion-dollar barrier of FDA approval.