Obligatory xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/135/

Fixed that for you. It doesn't matter how old some specific technology is.

I wish that worked with my girlfriend.

1) With more people being productive and willing to spend their hard earned money, there'll be greater demand for more workforce.
2) Why rely on unreliable inheritance, when you have 4 previous generations to help in time of need?
3) The key point is sound investment. It's being smart that pays off, not being old.

Refrigerator is a functional device, while iPhone and iPad are partially (for some people even mostly) fashion devices. For the former it matters how it works, for the latter it matters that everyone else can identify it's iPhone/iPad and not something else similar.

Apple makes fashion products, they put great value on unique looks, on trademark. Hence it's important for them, that people can tell which is which from a distance.

No, basic has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people had it or not.
basic:
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or forming a base; fundamental: "Basic changes in public opinion often occur because of shifts in concerns and priorities" (Atlantic).
2. Of, being, or serving as a starting point or basis: a basic course in Russian; a set of basic woodworking tools.

But after that first number of years, there were no more changes to the environment, but the mutations continued at a very similar rate.

This is not surprising. After all, just because the environment doesn't change now, doesn't mean it definitely won't change in the future. If there were no mutations, a sudden change in environment would be more likely to wipe out the whole population. With the mutations it's likely that a change will affect different members of the population differently, providing a possibility for part of the population to survive this change, even if another part vanishes.

So a company is running unpatched servers with no firewall. Even if they do get insurance against cyber incidents, they are guaranteed to get absolutely nothing from this insurance, because they don't have any protection set up. Isn't insurance in this case essentially unjust enrichment for the insurance company?

Don't fall prey to the perfect solution fallacy. Steam DRM is the step in the right direction, despite the fact that it's still DRM.

Don't kid yourself. USA would "shitcan" their own economy just as much, if they do that.

There are several ideas besides Space Elevator, that could provide a rocket-free way of sending payload into space. Here's an example that doesn't require new materials, but has other drawbacks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

If this creation really does benefit global economy as a whole, it makes sense to pay the creators and early adopters for inventing, implementing, testing and spreading this system. On the other hand, early adopters have the highest risk of spending a lot of resources on something that won't take off in the end. This means their investment should pay off with a greater rate. (Yes, *you* could've been an early adopter too, but 2 years ago no one knew that BTC will take off and get the current rate. That's what taking the risk is about.)

I just started reading up on the BitCoin infrastructure and it's quite fascinating. I have some education in economics, but economy is not my main field, so cut me some slack. From what I understand, this shouldn't be a problem and here's why I think so.

While what you're saying is true for "real" economy, it's quite different for BitCoin. When someone's suddenly dumping a lot of currency, greatly devaluating it, you have a reason to believe that this currency suddenly became less scarce. (Alchemists discovered a way to turn lead into gold, gold miners found rivers of gold, USA is printing dollars like there's no tomorrow, whatever.) So you want to get rid of the currency based on reasonable expectation, that it will never return to previous value and dumping it will provide you more benefit.

The key here is you predict the currency will *keep* devaluating until it's no longer useable. However with BitCoins you are not left in the dark and there's no central authority that can screw you up. You *know* the rate at which they are created, because it's governed by two unchangeable variables:

• 50 BitCoins per block (for first 210k blocks, decreasing after that, read FAQ)
• and 6 blocks per hour (self-regulating by the adjustable difficulty of making the blocks)

Furthermore there's a hard cap of 21 million BTC, so there's no way for someone to mint more than that.

Link on topic: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
And FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

It seems to me that people, who make laws affecting the economy of the country, should understand the implications of these laws. Hence they should be versed in law and, more importantly, macro economics.

The alternative is worse: laws that have good intention, but end up having good economic reaction only in short term. While in the long term the reaction would be completely reversed, making the consequences the opposite of what was intended. This is quite common in economics.

Thank you for valuing my time with your new concise reply. I will also try to be concise for your sake.

1a) Regarding DDO, see your link:

For certain products, premium products are priced at a level (compared to "regular" or "economy" products) that is well beyond their marginal cost of production. Economists such as Tim Harford in the Undercover Economist have argued that this is a form of price discrimination.

1b) Regarding Valve: you give a discount to the segment that is fun. There are no rules you can't segment customers this way. While your goal isn't to cover more market with the highest possible price, this isn't a requirement of price discrimination (see the examples in the wikipedia link).

2) Your words:

the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at"

No, you won't pay more for other games. You just won't pay less if you aren't fun to play with.

3a) Appeal to authority is not an argument. And if it was, it wouldn't be an argument you can win, when the original idea is by someone with much more authority than you.
3b) Commenting is not the kind of consideration I was talking about.