This is actually very simple. When you have a presence in a county, you are subject to that country's laws. Period. End of discussion. If you find yourself in a situation where you are subject to two countries' laws, and you are required by one of those countries to break the laws of the other, you must do one of the following:

1) Break one country's laws and abide by the other's laws, and accept the consequences.
2) Negotiate with/bribe one or both countries, and see if an agreement can be reached.
3) Leave one of the countries with conflicting laws, probably abandoning whatever property is within that country.

Microsoft is clearly wrong, and its lawyers know it. Any company with a U.S. presence is subject to U.S. laws, just as any company with, say, a British presence is subject to British laws. If the two conflict, one or more of the listed choices must be made. It doesn't matter if what the Government wants is located in another country. If the company wants to continue operating in the U.S., it must comply with U.S. law.

Heh, you haven't actually had to talk to the religious/nutty, apparently. They will defend their absurdly ignorant misinterpretation of the universe with a violent ferver not seen anywhere else. They will simply wait until one of their brainwashers/preachers/ministers/popes/whatever invents the most ridiculously ludicrous explanation for how this actually ties into their fairy in the sky's grand plan for humanity; and bullshit, ignore, and dogmatically shout down anyone who tries to use anything even remotely approaching logic.

No, this discovery will be completely lost on 95% of the world's massively idiotic population.

If first world countries were to redirect the massive amounts of money spent to invade and conqueror those third world, oil producing countries over to renewable research and development, the end result would comparable: enough funding to end the need to invade and conqueor said oil producing countries.

And who writes the program that does the test? Who writes the compiler that compiles the test? Who controls the build farm that creates and compares everything? Everything is under the strict, untrustworthy, iron handed control of the very same criminal (yes, convicted of multiple felonies in multiple courts) organization against whom Governments are trying to protect themselves.

Sorry, but this is all just smoke and mirrors from Microsoft.

I think they're talking about the prices they can charge other utility companies. Consumer prices will continue to rise, because corporate greed will never decline.

All qualitative arguments aside, and sticking to purely quantitative evidence: imprisoning drug users has resulted in no reduction in drug users over the last 30+ years. Drug use has risen, unabated by the threat of prison, from the very beginning of our misguided war on drugs.

Punishing addiction is bad policy. There are far deeper psychological issues surrounding drug addiction that cannot be addressed by the penal code.