Depends on who swallows the cost.

From the customer's POV, the logical thing would be to put a liability clause into the contract that says "you have to pay us $ XXX million if you lose the payload, and you have to show insurance for it". Then the launch company can hash it out with the insurance company, and the customer has less worries.

Under this scenario, Orbital would either pay the higher premium from its profits or lose future launch contracts to the competition. Someone like SpaceX for instance.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but your numbers are not quite correct.

The article in the San Jose Mercury News says that the company had to pay the difference to the California minimum wage, $40,156 in total, plus a fine of $3,500.

So this time, they had in effect to pay the minimum wage, plus $3,500, plus some bureaucratic hassle to deal with the affair. Lets call it a loss of $4000 compared to doing things the lawful way. Had they not been caught, they would have saved $40,156 compared to doing things the lawful way.

That makes it mighty attractive to do it the illegal way at least until the first fine, even if there is an escalating penalty for repeat offenders. I think the penalties need to be much bigger for first offenders, and escalate from that.

If the "bricking" driver is delivered via a Windows update, Microsoft will likely get support calls saying "your OS update broke my device". From Microsoft's position certainly not the preferable solution. That's why I wondered about Microsoft's reaction...

AFAIK Sony has not been doing so well in the last 10 years (too lazy to dig out their financial results now). That may be partly due to the bad reputation from the rootkit affair and other things (OtherOS...).

Also, passing costs on to customers has its limits as long as there is meaningful competition.

Good point, and I wonder about what Microsoft will do when they realize what is going on. Perhaps retract the update in question and blacklist future FTDI updates, so they don't get into Windows Update anymore?

In my experience (living and buying stuff in Germany), it depends on the brand. So far, I've tried
-Osram CFLs, not the cheapest but kept their promises about lifetime. Good buy.
-"Megaman" CFLs, similarly priced but three out of four failed within a few months. That company is now on my shit list.

I don't have much experience with LEDs yet, as I only started to use them maybe a year ago. So far all of those are still working, but a year does not say much.

In my neck of the woods (Germany) that would have counted as criminal fraud and the German equivalent of the DA might have been interested.
I'm not so sure about US law, but threatening legal action might have been just the right thing :-)

Yet it is frequently attempted, up to and including outright fraud. A common and legal variety is pricing stuff highly and trying to create an impression of highest quality, but only providing average quality. An example that comes to mind is BOSE hi-fi equipment ;-p

On the other hand, decent quality has a minimum price, dictated by material and work costs. In that direction there is a limit.

And that is what happens to most environments, even if the user does not desire it.
Sometimes because the vendor of a (software) part of the environment stops supporting it and the need for support dictates going along with the switch.
Sometimes because hardware becomes obsolete and disappears from the market. Then you can't get replacement parts for your existing machines anymore and eventually they will "die out" from defects. Switching to a different system becomes a necessity.

Recent example:
End of life for Windows XP, users move to Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 because using unpatched XP on the internet is considered a bad idea.
Some sloppy programming practices using the installation folder as data storage don't work anymore, because Microsoft has added "virtualization" (hidden redirection to the user profile, Vista and Windows 7) or put a UAC dialog before write access (Windows 8 IIRC). Sloppily programmed software works no longer as it used to. Granted, those programs were bad ones to start with but here is your case of "indirect degradation".

I can see your idea working in some e-sports league where people are there for the PVP challenge.

Not so much in a MMO where friends/clans want to do PVE and play together.

From what I've read about WOW (to use great-great-GP's example) its most difficult content was designed for 40 person raids. I guess it is difficult enough to gather 40 people to show up at raid time. If an unspecified proportion of them get shifted to higher or lower player classes, it might become impossible. And outright banning some people from trying those raids "because they are not good enough" would probably not good marketing.

This.

Too easy or too hard are both unfun. There is a right degree of difficulty, and it is not the same for everyone.
Publishers who make their games easier to help newbies get into the game will lose veteran players who get bored.

Going a bit off topic....

Narrowing it down to "Mediterranean European countries" seems overly pedantic in the context of comparing countries elsewhere to Fascism. Without that limitation, Nazi Germany certainly qualifies:

- economic and cultural coordination by the state: check, at least for the media (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...). For big corporations, it may not have been quite so one-sided. Both my school knowledge and Wikipedia are a bit vague on that.
- a personality cult around a leader: check, the "Fuehrer" was a very important figure.
- a single-party or sham democratic system: check.
- national idealism: sorta check, it was partially replaced by racist idealism.
- and militant, expansionist foreign policy: Certainly, Germany invaded neighbor countries until the Allies reacted by declaring war.

With the "current gen console" you probably mean the PS4 or XBOX One, as they are available already?
Then the said mid level gaming PC might be equivalent. Maybe a bit better but not greatly superior. On the other hand, since the PS4 / XBOX One are fairly new, they might be the "standard" for the next five years or so.

But when the PS5 comes out, whenever that happens, all bets are off.

I like to use ECC even on the desktop, and yes there are ways to do it. At a cost.

On the Intel side, the CPU is not really the problem. "Small" Xeons like the E3-1225V3 are attractive for their price/performance even if you run them on desktop boards and don't use ECC support. In that setup they are like i7 parts with slightly lower clock speeds.
  For the board though, the choices are limited and you have to shell out an additional 100 Euros or more for a "small server" board, because the typical desktop chipsets don't support ECC.
Add the extra price for the ECC RAM, maybe 50 Euros difference depending on how much RAM you want, and you end up paying something like 150 Euros extra.

AMD used to be really nice, with most processors (pre-Llano all desktop parts but Sempron) supporting ECC RAM and some mainboards also supporting it. The mainboard choices for ECC support were a bit limited, cheapskates like Asrock usually did not bother to support ECC RAM. So you might have had to pay 10 Euros more for the board, plus the above 50 Euros extra for the RAM. Made maybe 60 Euros difference to have ECC RAM in your rig.
Sadly, their APUs don't support ECC. AFAIK the FX line still does, but it is not really attractive compared to recent Intel models.

There are sometimes small changes in table layout too.

One case where I can confirm a small incompatibility with certainty are the backgrounds in table calls. Word offers some patterns there that are missing when loading the document in LibreOffice, for instance dotted backgrounds. This is not a conversion issue, it is simply a feature that LibreOffice does not have.

Things like that are the reason why using Word and LibreOffice in parallel tends to have some friction. So when switching to Linux, best switch everything if you can and mandate ODF as new document format.