What you are missing is competition. A monopoly light bulb manufacturer might behave in exactly the way you describe. In a competitive market, while manufacturers might like to ensure a high demand for replacement bulbs by designing them for short lifespans, they would end up with dissatisfied customers who would no longer buy their product, but instead buy from manufacturers who provided the long-lived bulbs people really want.

How do you know that the 'invisible hand' is impotent to improve safety? It's true that for a many decades the automotive consumer was indifferent to safety, so the 'invisible hand' was indifferent as well, but now safety is a selling point. Luxury cars vie to introduce new cutting-edge safety enhancements that consumers choose because they want them, not because of government mandates. If they prove worthwhile, these enhancements then trickle down to the broad market. Because of externalities (i.e, the danger from someone else driving an unsafe car), some regulation is indeed necessary to ensure safety, but to assert that government alone can improve safety is preposterous.

Here is prime example of what passes as political discourse in Washington these days. Calling your opponents 'hairless apes', and thereby giving yourself license to completely ignore and de-legitimize their arguments. Another gem: the Democrats shut down the government in order to blackmail the Republicans into voting for Obamacare funding, yet partisan Democrats say that it was the _Republicans_ who did the shutdown. The Republicans voted to fund the entire Government except Obamacare. It was the Democrats who joyously embraced the opportunity to shut down the government and blame the Republicans. The Democrats steadfastly blocked all attempts to ameliorate their shutdown until they collected their Obamacare ransom.

Having programmed the PDP-8 and then the -11, I can draw two lessons from the experience:

1. You can get stuff done even with an instruction set that looks like a dog's breakfast.
2. Everything is much better with an elegant, well-designed instruction set. You don't truly appreciate this until you've done without it.

These two lessons can be directly extended to higher-level programming languages as well.

And how, exactly, is Google's legal team going to conduct a libel case in which they are prohibited (by US law) from disclosing their evidence?

The penny is just as pointless in the USA as it is in Canada. Of course, the USA is considerably behind Canada in recognizing the changes wrought by inflation. In addition to abolishing the penny, it should abolish the dollar bill and introduce a $2 coin as Canada did many years ago. (If you wanted to be really far-sighted, you could establish a plan for when to abolish the nickel and the $5 bill and introduce a $5 coin.)

Unfortunately, currency reform would not only face stiff opposition from the zinc lobby (because penny is largely zinc now), but from the politically well-connected Crane Company in Massachusetts, which manufactures all of the paper used in printing US currency. The absurdity of vending machines and tollbooths needing to accept paper money (much more expensive than coins) counts for nothing as against a corporation with skilled lobbyists.

Tell the victims of 9/11 or the Madrid bombings or the Tokyo subway gas attack that 'terrorists' don't exist. If any court hearing a secret wiretap application is, ipso facto, an illicit 'Kangaroo Court', then we are giving carte blanche to anyone inclined to mass murder.

But if you admit that secret judicial proceedings are necessary in handling wiretap applications, then the entire argument against the FISA court falls apart. If the FISA court is an illicit 'kangaroo court', then any court considering a wiretap application is illicit as well.

If you want to wiretap a US Citizen, then get a warrant. Period.

How do you get such a warrant except behind closed doors? Are you proposing that all wiretap warrant applications should be public? Are you proposing that every target of a wiretap application should be informed of it and allowed to oppose it in court? This would make the wiretap a joke. Maybe that's what you propose: abolish wiretapping, with or without warrant. If so, then law enforcement will be severely hampered and people will indeed be less safe.

If you grant that a society must sometimes intercept the communications of its adversaries, you must also grant that such interception must be done in secret, since it is otherwise useless.

Unfortunately, even the most democratic society has enemies that seek to damage or destroy it. Intercepting their communications is one of the most effective ways to counter such people, and such interception would be futile if it had to be publicly announced beforehand.

Most people don't understand that, under current judicial precedent, warrantless wiretapping of international communications is constitutional, needing only the approval of the Executive Branch. The secret FISA court is a legislative attempt to regulate this executive power. Without FISA you would have a secret bureaucracy making the decisions instead of a secret court.

Right. Just what regulation would have prevented the downturn? Remember that when regulators do their jobs, they don't have 20-20 hindsight available.

It really is a free market in enterprise computing, in the sense that Microsoft does have competitors. No one can deny that Microsoft has achieved strong customer lock-in, making it quite difficult to change, but Microsoft is now testing the strength of that lock-in in two ways:

1. - Microsoft will surely lose some enterprise customers over this: the ones with the weakest lock-in. How many it will lose is difficult to predict.
2. - New, growing companies just getting into enterprise computing are now fully on notice what to expect if they drink the Microsoft kool-aid. Even if they do not lose many existing customers, they Microsoft may be eating their seed corn here.

Microsoft has built a towering edifice of customer lock-in, terrible to behold. Eventually, in the fullness of time, the edifice will fall. We may be seeing the start of that process.

This is relevant because it has a potential for bias, and also because this guy did not tell the whole truth in pre-trial questioning, raising the possibility that he was trying to get on the jury to vindicate his legal philosophy on patents. If Samsung had known about the Seagate matter, they could have objected to his being seated on the jury.