It would also make higher-alcohol distiller's beer available so less energy has to go into distilling for hard liquor or for fuel alcohol.

In your dream world you'd involve two huge government bureaucracies when one accomplished the recall without the other? I can see handing off from one to the other if they were still causing the problem and the first agency was unable to change the behavior. Maybe we should think a bit before pulling in all the coordination costs up front though when they may not be necessary.

No, the government doesn't decide how many car dealerships for a manufacturer there are in a region. That's between the manufacturer and the dealers.

"The widespread franchise rules giving car dealers virtual monopolies in their territories epitomize the government-controlled marketplace Republicans purportedly despise". No. The regulation we're talking about here is whether or not car dealers can ban direct manufacturer-to-consumer sales. There is no government regulation of which I'm aware on geographical monopoly areas for dealerships.

In states that ban direct sales of cars to consumers there's an enforced oligopoly of dealers for new cars. It is nothing close to a monopoly. There is a distinct difference.

I doubt your claim that "most [...] educational institutions" have access to Windows source code. I'd really like to see documentation for such a bold claim.

I'm also not sure why my post was modded flamebait for pointing out that Microsoft found bugs in someone's open platform (which happens to be the competition they currently appear most worried about) but that their own model precludes that. Are you saying that Google has access to Windows Phone's source? I'd like documentation of that, too.

Think of all the help Microsoft could get spotting security flaws if Google and Stanford could look through the Windows source whenever they chose.

Why? I'm not the dolt who asks for details about people's jobs when they're trying to relax and enjoy the company of others. I'm the guy bemoaning being asked those questions by said dolts. ;-)

"Hack" as a language name? Really?

People are going to explain this at dinner parties. People who kind of understand that programming is more than being good at operating a computer as an end user but don't really know the difference between sysadmin, devops, programmer, business analyst, and DBA let alone what those roles really do are going to ask questions. Those questions will be things like "what kind of programming?", "what technologies do you use?", and "what are you working on right now?" The answer will be something about putting together a quick Hack program to change values in a database, and then it gets awkward.

Plus, did they consider at all how easily this will get confused with Haxe?

I remember a time when drugs weren't particularly marketed in big-budget TV campaigns directly to patients. Hell, I don't think telling a patient which drugs to try before they go to the doctor is a particularly good idea. A TV can't make a diagnosis. Why are we allowing them to drive up costs for giving non-specific medical advice to people who probably don't even have the conditions for which the drugs are being pushed?

How about instead of cost shifting and purchase pooling we actually work on what medical care costs in the first place? In the US you can got to Cook County or the US Federal court in the Eastern District of Texas and drive up a drug company's everyday costs by suing them in a class action for side effects they already disclosed before you bought their drug. There should be some sort of grand jury or board of people with a clue who decide the merit of these things before millions are spent on lawyers.

The for-profit speculative commission-only trial lawyers are a big part of service and product costs for drug companies, hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses, and even medical assistants and medical techs. If you want to make healthcare more affordable through insurance cost changes, change the cost of malpractice insurance so that only people who actually screw up need to pay exorbitant premiums. When I lived in Illinois it was really difficult to get a doctor's appointment within six months without crossing state lines because the malpractice rates caused several of the doctors in the area to retire early or move to more sensible states.

Also, why do we have federal and state funds going into basic research at universities that gets patented and sold to corporations to turn into products? If research comes from a largely government-funded school then the NIH or someone should be licensed to then sublicense any of those patents to all comers for a reasonable fee.

Also, why do the drug companies pay the FDA to fast-track drugs? The PDUFA means that in order to get faster drug trials, the deeper pockets get faster times to market. If we're spending billions of dollars to improve healthcare, why don't we fund the FDA sufficiently to get the best drugs approved fastest rather than the most heavily promoted ones? Why don't we partner with other developed countries to do joint trials that meet the standards of the FDA and its counterparts in, say, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and Brazil with all the agencies reviewing all the data and making decisions for their own constituencies rather than repeating the trials over and over?

Houston has a lower cost of living than Austin. Houston's a much larger city, too. They are close enough that employers match offers. Heck, employers in Dallas and Houston match one another, too. I'm not sure, then, how Austin works out as a better deal financially than Houston.

From the summary alone it's clear Facebook isn't "blocking" anything. They are asking people to remember to follow the law while on their property. They want to be sure that what takes place on their site is encouraged by them to be within the law. This makes Facebook potentially less culpable if someone violates the law in a post, as they've made it clear they want the laws followed.

I am not a lawyer. Ask a lawyer if you want legal advice.

I think technologists are often less likely to think about the more abstract arts, which is a shame. Having a poet in residence at a place like Caltech, while apparently at times challenging for the poet, I think is a wonderful idea.

Also, "Urinetown: The Musical" is a comedic Malthusian commentary on mismanaging resources, leading to a dystopian future.

Don't feel bad about not knowing the poem. The poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" I originally found from music. There's a group, or was anyway, named "Machines of Loving Grace". I found that through a classic bad computer movie (by which I mean a pretty good movie with bad representations of computers) -- they have a song on the "Hackers" soundtrack. I liked the soundtrack a lot, and was familiar with most of the other acts on it. I liked their song "Richest Junkie Still Alive" so much I researched the group, and was intrigued with the name which lead me to Brautigan.

It's a poem rather than a short story or essay. It's by Richard Brautigan who was the poet in residence at Caltech. It was first published in a volume of the same name, not all of which may be suitable for your audience.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (poem)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (collection)

Indeed. Also in some states (for example Illinois) your vacation/PTO is part of your earned income by law. Withholding that pay when you leave may be as illegal as withholding wages.

Using an IDE doesn't hurt you as a programmer. Relying upon one when coming up to speed with a new language may not hurt you either. Continually relying upon one surely hurts. Using one as a productivity enhancement while being able to program without it should be the goal.