Although the NORC study was not primarily intended as a determination of which candidate "really won", analysis of the results, given the hand counting of machine-uncountable ballots due to various types of voter error, indicated that they would lead to differing results.

And later:

The results of the study showed that had the limited county by county recounts requested by the Gore team been completed, Bush would still have been the winner of the election. However, the study also showed that the result of a statewide recount of all disputed ballots could have been different.

The things we actually learn from Florida in 2000 are: (1) There was no clear winner; (2) Using the method Bush favored would probably lead to a Gore victory, while using the method Gore favored would probably lead to a Bush victory; and (3) Al Gore is a whiny crybaby who kept demanding the votes be recounted until he won.

Well, we cannibalized an old, dead Hammond organ just for the (faulty) transformer. I don't think that's quite the same thing.

Not that it matters now (this was about 10 years ago), but I don't think the caps were responsible for the exploding diodes. It had been up and running for a while, and the caps were already saturated. It was humming pretty loudly just before it blew if I remember correctly, so we put the transformer output on an o-scope. The waveform was just nuts, and it was hammering the diodes with a huge back-emf (it was a full-wave rectifier, so we weren't just clipping the negative voltage). But we actually got a pretty smooth DC out of our circuit until the diode blew. It settled down quite a bit after we got a new transformer.

The caps may have been responsible for the hum. I don't remember why we used such huge caps, except it seems like we were chasing a particular RC so we could get a smooth 600 V output. And I do recall it being awfully smooth. But every time we turned the thing off, my lab partner would play his guitar on it until it drained, or we would drain it through a grounded resistor, because none of us wanted to get near the thing until we were sure it was cold.

<memorylane> One of my lab partners in my EE Lab class played bass guitar. He wanted a tube pre-amp, but didn't want to spend $1,000 for it. So we built one as our lab project. We pulled a transformer out of an old Hammond organ, pulled tubes out of some old random stuff in a cabinet in the lab, threw in a pair of 12,000 uF caps, and four ceramic diodes for the rectifier. Then we had to code our own SPICE model for the tube so we could simulate it. That was one stout amp. Except the transformer put out a really unstable power waveformm, so one of our ceramic diodes exploded (tripping a breaker and taking out power in that wing), which was actually kind of cool. But we had to find a different transformer. Another time I accidentally grounded the 600-V node, which blew a big hole in our trace line and evaporated the solder off of one of our caps. The edges of the trace line survived, so we soldered the cap back in, powered it up, and it worked great. It was perfect except we were never able to get rid of the 60 Hz hum when it was plugged in. If you unplugged it, you could play for about a minute before the caps drained, and it sounded spectacular.</memorylane>

I miss those days. Now I just sit around writing patents and pleadings all day.

I don't know anything about British tort law, but since American tort law is generally descended from it, I'm going to assume you only have to "prove" torts by a preponderance of the evidence. That basically means "more likely than not." If some guy is hired and paid to get pictures of your computers, shows up and says he's interested, looks around, takes pictures of your computers (which generally don't come with the house), hands those pictures over to his client, and doesn't make an offer on the house, what's more likely: (1) He was genuinely interested in the house and this was just coincidentally a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; or (2) he was operating under a pretense for the sole purpose of getting pictures of the computers?

Still the damages will be minimal.

By my estimation, at least half of the Slashdot readership isn't even old enough to remember the Pentium division bug.

7) Profit!

And thus socialism always fails. As Justice Scalia sagely observed, "It is the first instinct of power to protect power."* The goal of your hypothetical socialized pharma industry would not be to cure disease. It would be to collect and broker power. It would be to make the rich richer under the auspices of protecting the poor. Some individuals are very good at being altruistic. Governments are not. The people who wrote our Constitution understood that and put in a bunch of roadblocks to prevent the federal government from getting too big and powerful. We have systematically dismantled those roadblocks---usually under the auspices of protecting the little guy---and thus managed to subjugate the little guy we pretend to protect.

*What, you want a cite? Okay. Here. Read this dissent if you've been wringing your hands about the recent opinion overturning campaign finance limits.