Back when I was in grade school some middle school kid in the same school district cut off the tip of his nose using scissors (it was reattached). They banned regular scissors for all kids through middle school and we all had to use these stupid, feeble scissors that barely worked. I assume that to this day the kids at those schools still are deprived decent scissors over what an outlier did a couple of decades ago.

As you say, it's asinine. It completely defies any understanding of science and statistics. But there's more to the story: they are doing this out of fear of lawsuits. If they hadn't banned those scissors and another kid had done a repeat, the parents would have sued and might have won. The lawyer would have stood before the jury and railed about how just months or years before the same thing had happened and the school did nothing. In this case, if they make no change and someone gets hurt in a repeat then there will be a lawsuit and the lawyer will do the same thing: paint it as if the airlines and government should have changed the rules.

The object of this ballot system is to let users know that a choice even exists. It's not to promote any specific competitor. You seem to overlook the fact that there are people out there (and quite a few, I might add) that don't know they have a choice. They don't know what a browser is. They just know they click that specific icon to get on the internet. They don't know there is an internet separate from the web. A lot of computer users have very limited knowledge.

As to why they should know, that is everything to do with economics. You can go read about that in depth, but the gist of it is that information is the lifeblood of a market (particularly an information market). The more nuanced an understanding the average participant has of the marketplace, the healthier that market will be. This is because as sophistication grows in the market, the options must become refined to compete. To put that in terms of browsers, as more browsers compete they all become standards-compliant and have to differentiate on other factors such as speed, security, extensions, portability (both the browser and the data), and so on.

I would question whether he did admit liability. The quote:

"Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings"

is a horrible question akin to "have you stopped beating your 30 wives?" One can easily intend to answer the numerical quantity without considering the issue of liability.

It's also tragicomic to see an otherwise-intelligent company not get ahead of a problem like this from a PR standpoint.

I can accept that it was a technical mistake and not a policy change or a gaming or breach of their systems. But it's very hard to accept that they wouldn't immediately cop to the problem and give an explanation. Other sites take pains to inform their users of technical difficulties and disabled features.

At the very least there should be a window of time after a title has been de-listed from sales rank that it includes a notice explaining that has happened. It's very difficult to trust a system that may change arbitrarily at a moment's (lack of) notice.

Which is, go figure, no different than an equivalent use-tax on public transportation.

Err, the road construction isn't heavily subsidized?

While I agree we can't just build a whole rail system overnight, I think there are places it makes a lot of sense (especially to take some burden off of heavy-traffic roads).

But no, I don't buy the subsidy argument when we're subsidizing the current system (and paying a lot of hidden costs to boot) already.