one of them is filtered as insightful +5

I can only say ...
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/75619/detail/

omg .. one slip and I get 3 responses in a matter of minutes :)
I don't know whether to be happy or curl up in a dark corner

ever used an electric cook top?

Again, I am against burdensome regulation. regulations can, as you have demonstrated, be in place to protect the interests of large organizations and not the individuals. It is interesting that you bring up the example of net neutrality, since it is analogous to a free market. As you clearly put it, net neutrality can only be hindered by "regulation" which organizations would push on us. Competition would actually push providers to be net neutral so as to one up their competitors (since customers prefer net neutral providers). Providers can only afford to not be net neutral if they have a monopoly (or cartel) or are forced to by regulation.

I agree with you whole heartedly. Lack of regulation is no answer (even greenspan would disagree with that), I see it as a necessary evil that should be avoided if possible, where as from what I understand from you, it is a first resort.

Whereas in reality, the solution will lie somewhere in between. It will be a balancing act between people who take your approach, and people who take mine. Having both mindsets participate in the system will ensure that we understand the negatives of both approaches. But we have to participate and be willing to disagree and accept that there may be things that we appreciate yet that are important to the other mindset, so we can improve upon the regulations that are in place.

touché .. however, the birth of fascism just goes to show people's ignorance of the free market system, and is an indicator of the type of people (hitler et al) who would espouse "excessive" government intervention.

Much has changed since that era in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, and we should have learned much from what happened back then. So god willing, we will not see a repeat of what happened.

I guess all our discussion so far has been circling about the idea of justice in society. Justice does not come about from a purely free market or a highly regulated centrally planned economy.

The free market would turn into a jungle. Greenspan acknowledges this fact and see's an important role for government in protecting rights of individuals.

What amazes me is that we might think that "more regulation" brings about justice.
In the extreme case of a centrally planned economy, we would assume that the government knows everything about everyone. This by itself is unjust as privacy advocates would tell you, however, we know also that it is impossible.
In less extreme cases it would be to add regulation to a current free market system in response to certain events, to deter certain unwanted behavior which I would also argue is unjust for the following reasons:

1- There is enough regulation in the market for government and any market participant to know what is considered right and what is considered wrong, therefore the justice system can take care of any cases of illegal behavior.
2- More regulation would just add more burden on the market players that choose not to participate in the illegal behavior, and therefore, it is a punishment for them more than it is a deterrent for future illegal activity.
3- More regulation would reduce the number of entrants which free markets rely on to correct itself and bring about innovation.
4- Market players who have an intent of illegal activity will not be deterred from regulation, and will find new ways of gaming the system. It will just be more difficult finding them because we might have regulations up to a point where it would simply obscure what they are doing (and people wonder why madoff got away with a 50$billion ponzi scheme).

5- More regulations creates more opportunity for corruption, especially if the regulation becomes burdensome, and therefore, the lawful organizations will find it hard to compete in this environment

Let me conclude by suggesting an alternative to more regulation. The internet already empowers individuals to seek and disseminate information. Why not leverage the power of individuals to monitoring corrupt organizations. We already have the regulations in place, and no one would argue that it is government duty to step in and sort out the cream from the crud for that particular situation. It is counter productive however, to exert punishment on everyone else, by more knee jerk regulation in response to that instance.

My friend,
I would take a greenspan anyday in place of a Saddam, Hitler, Lenin, stalin and the likes.
You basically admitted that no system is perfect. I would stick with my corrupt democratic freemarket since I can at least enjoy some prosperity and know that mistakes from the likes of greenspan existed because no one choose to "knowledgeably" refute him.
Having a free market does not guarantee you make the best choices, but the beauty of free markets is that people will have choice and the can change them, and over the long run, the best choices will prevail.

since biometric security relies on information that is unique to an individual, couldn't such moves undermine biometric security efforts? what if all this information falls into the wrong hands?

the year of the linu .... um ...
wimax?

it's as dead as the linux desktop.

sun might have made a mistake by purchasing mysql, couldn't they have benefited from it without paying $1B?

I think USB-Vista comes before that

The point I was trying to make in my original post is that if consoles are going to merge with PCs, then they don't bring any additional value above what the PC offers to either the developers or users, therefore, it would be more cost effective for developers to simply develop for PCs directly, but this clearly is not the case.

agreed .. thats why I don't see consoles merging anytime soon if ever. The value the consoles bring is the standardized development process which reduces costs for game developers to the point where it would be worth paying the licensing fees.
Standardized specifications will not work and have never worked, as console manufacturers would want to differentiate themselves from other manufacturers and we would go back to the proliferation of specs. Anyone remember J2me?

just develop for the PC .. no licensing fees
the very existence of consoles suggest that there is value in the platform. Otherwise, all games would be PC based and it wouldn't be very difficult to build an open console platform that is based on PC components.