So ... the right-wing, neo-con Republicans under Bush were known for domestic and foreign overreach in the name of perceived terrorist threats, massive spending to support corporate interests, and being general enemies of an open goverment. How do the ideas espoused by Libertarian candidates, such as Paul, form the "extreme" version of that? The closest I can see is that an anti-regulation stance might be seen as supporting established (corporate) interests, but I think that there are just as many cases of new regulation being used to do that as striking down old regulation.

There are plenty of points worth arguing against Libertarianism, but I don't think that "extreme republican" is one of them. While many (but not all!) of the libertarian-leaning members of congress are members of the GOP, and their views could be considered extreme (ie, differing from the norm) within it, they are not extreme (ie, exaggerated) versions of the central planks of that party.

The horrifying part is that the lies and the cheats are so egregious that they thought a prosecutor would balk at them...

I've actually been watching woot.com's sporting goods section for cheap scopes to use as a finder; there's much higher volume in accessories for rifles than telescopes, so it's more likely to find a deal!

A free market for credit reporting agencies would select for those agencies which best differentiate between real and fraudulent claims :)

Heated seats (or steering wheels for that matter) are a pretty terrible example, too. Locking out features of software works because you're trying to get the software to do something you couldn't figure out on your own. Turning on a heated seat just involves shorting around the box locking you out.

I think you've hit on the correct phrasing of the question raised in TFS: Are people who use the extra features are going to get screwed? Depending on how you look at it, either yes, they are, or no, people who only want a bare-bones car are finally off the hook subsidizing stuff they don't use. There's two problems, one a universal economic one and one practical:

Economically, the seller is partitioning their market which allows them to capture more of the surplus by filling the area under the demand curve with a stair-step market price line rather than a level one. The bare-bones people will pay less, but not save as much as the feature-users pay out in increased prices. The teller will be if people can be hoodwinked as easily with monthly car charges as they are with cell phones and cable (being a rational economic actor can save you a ton of money!).

Practically, cars are not like software. Carrying extra pieces of car around costs a lot more than having extra code sitting on disk. With fuel economy a feature of ever-increasing importance, the seller who gains 2 mpg by not including disabled hardware has a decent shot at the sale.

There is still room for novelty in solving a traditional, well-explored CS problem in the physical space, largely because the cost of operations is different. In a computer, quicksort is the accepted way to sort data without foreknowledge of how it is mixed. Sorting railcars using quicksort would be a terrible idea because you can't swap arbitrary cars in constant time (https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=369&y=0&no=&content=true&page=5&css=print). In this case, Amazon may well have developed a novel caching scheme that is efficient in the space of their distribution network, which likely has a different topography than the memory of a 286.

At least in CT, the age at which you can practically operate a vehicle on your own keeps creeping up, and there are always new rules restricting the privilege (only during the day, no passengers, etc). Assuming that the rest of the nation passes similar policies (given that we never repeal such things it has to be a purely additive effect anyway), I would think it obvious that teens drive less on average, as teens can't drive as much.

Putting the home/end/etc cluster in upper right in the same configuration as desktop keyboards is one of the more intuitive pieces of design I've seen. I use home/end a lot while coding, and it took me about 5 minutes to adjust the muscle memory when I got my first Thinkpad (well, only Thinkpad; the T40 is built like a tank).

By and large, yes. Red Hat picks a version to baseline for each major RHEL release (4,5,6 ...). So, RHEL6 runs kernel 2.6.32, whether it's 6.0 from 3 years ago or 6.5 that just came out. What they then do is selectively back-port changes from the latest version to create their own special version number: 2.6.32-431, for example.

While hypothetically they are guaranteeing to protect you from any breaking changes, it makes it an absolute nightmare to guarantee that anything is FIXED. For example, if I am asked "is bug xyz fixed?", I can look in the upstream changelog and see that the bug went away in kernel 3.2, it's very hard to see if that fix made it into Red Hat's version -431. From a stability standpoint, RHEL is wonderful, but from any other, specifically security certification, it's a pit of despair.

If the Federal government hadn't used taxation to effectively eliminate most of state government, "the majority of Americans" could have their coastal utopias and leave the big, square states in peace. Unfortunately, states are forced to clone whatever rules the Federal government comes up with to recover the taxes paid by their citizens. Example: states individually manage their highway systems, but if they want them to be funded they either need to double-tax their citizens, or reduce the speed limit to 65, set the drinking age to 21, and care more about seat belts than safe foul-weather driving.

The Voting Rights Act calls specifically for certain states, by name, to submit any changes to state voting law to the Federal government. Also, if the Senate were ever to legitimately consider state's rights when evaluating legislation, the Federal government would be a great deal smaller.

If two demographically different groups are also geographically distant, is one group being larger a reason to give it dominion over the other?

I believe that there is something to be said for an age where there are potential scheduling conflicts between lunar probes.

What attribute of a "real" currency prevents collapse? Governments (looking at you Venezuela) will claim to enforce exchange rates, but once they run out of hard currency to trade at their declared rate (or just refuse to exchange at that rate), the collapse happens anyway. It's unlikely that there is anyone who would attempt to maintain a charade around a collapsed Bitcoin, but just because someone is willing to pretend doesn't make something real.