Microsoft's day is coming (see: decline of the desktop computer, where Windows dominates, and Apple's increasing share of the laptop market), and I agree with you that Microsoft should have fallen earlier, but it wasn't because of a lack of antitrust regulations and government bureaucrats poring over code to make sure it's up to their standards. Face it: if you're going to give people monopolies on their intellectual output (i.e., copyrights and patents), the market will coalesce into a monopoly.

I love the h1'd "My brother is getting married" part. Also, this guy's a terrible HTML coder - he vacillates between using quotes and not, doesn't keep a consistent case in his tags, missed the body end tag, etc., etc.

Amen. Face it - Microsoft's monopoly is crumbling in the face of Apple, netbooks, and cell phones, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that the government stepping in and regulating computer code was gonna make it happen any faster.

Humans design machines that are efficient to work with. In the case of modern day computers, this means relying on two things - algorithmic efficiency and processing efficiency. If we can develop fast processors, we don't have to spend as much time tweaking our code, and can thus get things done faster. This is the whole premise of scripting languages: not the most efficient things, but damn easy to work with. You can go back to a world of writing in assembly, and like living as a subsistence farmer, it will be a very difficult life, but will not result in much happiness as you look around you at how your life could be.

Not everyone sees upholding intellectual property monopolies as a moral duty.

At least in Romania, where piracy is also widespread, the only companies at risk from these sorts of things are large companies owned by politically-involved people. Prosecutions for software piracy are often pretexts for some other political offense. If you're just a small design shop, I don't see how it would benefit any bureaucrat to come after you.

Democracy rose in popularity pretty steadily...not necessarily quickly, but generally steadily in the sense that democracies rarely devolved back into dictatorships. Communism on the other hand definitely peaked in its popularity and is heading steadily downward. It's possible for it to rise again, but given how hard it's fallen (there have been a lot of communist states in history, and they're pretty much all gone), I kind of doubt it.

You don't think the fact that it hasn't happened yet, despite the high-water mark of support for communism having passed decades ago, is a sign that people don't want to live under communist regimes?

You know, it's funny, it always seems to end up that way. I wonder why...

but hopefully it will grow over time

Hopefully not. How the hell else do you think that news and video is going to get paid for without targeted advertising? (Music obviously will always be able to fall back on live performances, which is good since it would be pretty annoying to listen to ads for music.) Traditional online advertising is both annoying and inefficient – there's a reason why people actually sort of enjoy reading ads in when they're targeted to them (think: magazines).

It's not just Euclidean zoning (the Sim City-style residential/commercial/industrial stuff) that discourages walkability â"Âit's also density caps, minimum parking regulations, setback requirements, etc.

Houston, for example, lacks traditional Euclidean zoning, but those other restrictions cause it to sprawl just as much as an other American city.

Why are you so sure that the trust systems will be so stupid as to allow such a thing to happen? There are so many ways that you could engineer around this that it boggles the mind. One such possibility is for systems to notice when e-mail patterns change to match those of an infected node, and to then red flag that account and do any number of things to alert the user to the problem and even do filtering of the outgoing e-mails.

Now U.S. car companies are paying the price for trying to satisfy the market.

No – they're paying the price for a tariff on imported light trucks and SUVs which caused US-based automakers to ratchet up their production of the vehicles above the market equilibrium.

Spam will be gone, but advertising will become less annoying but way, way more effective. But it's not a bad thing - it's part of the transition from broadcast media to narrowcast media, and from paid content to free content. The advertising will be so targeted that you actually won't mind sitting through it, because it will be for products that you might otherwise consider buying anyway.

Let's hope not. Biofuels based on corn and other food crops are bad for obvious reasons, but even non-food biofuels have their risks - among them degradation of the American/Canadian Great Plains, ecological degradation in the Third World, and the risk of invasive species (most of these non-food biofuels are fast-spreading grasses).

The most ecological energy policy is to stop the government from subsidizing oil (by building suburbia with land use restricitons), subsidizing coal, and subsidizing water. There is no magic fuel out there that will allow us to consume infinite amounts of cheap energy - nature made extracting energy expensive for a reason, and the government needs to get out of the business of trying to make it easier.