Does it? All I'm aware of is the perjury aspect, and as others have pointed out, that is pretty toothless in practice.

If content hosters (or maybe the uploader) could charge a few thousand dollars per false DMCA takedown notice, it would become financially feasible to review the notices and go after the guys who issue the fake ones.

In my experience, very few specifications are perfect, even if written by knowledgeable people. Things like a typo (in this case omitting a zero) happen easily. So if you program strictly to the specification, it may give you a quick acceptance of the program because the specs are technically fulfilled, but still an unhappy customer.

I'm aware that some people have no problems with that, but I have a somewhat higher priority for getting things done right. So I'm willing to put in a reasonable effort to double-check suspicious specifications.

Of course there is a limit to that - if the spec is obviously written by incompetents and grossly inadequate, I might insist on being paid by the hour so the (presumably plenty) extra work of revising the specs does not end up being unpaid work.

That would be rather unusual and should be separately noted in the specs. Without such an explicit requirement, I'd assume that you just produced a typo.

In practice, if I was the contracted programmer, I'd send you an e-mail with a request for clarification.
I'd also expect that such errors in the spec are the exception. If I get the impression that the spec is full of such carelessness before the contract is signed, I might decline to take the job on a fixed price basis.

If that assessment is correct, then yes, I agree that the contracted developer has not done his job.

But there are sometimes customer complaints that are not about genuine bugs. For instance misunderstandings of the specification on part of the customer, which then lead to "bug" reports because the customer did not get what he really wanted.

I wonder if the submitter really filters those out or if he just passes them to the contracted developer and expects him to sort out all of the bug reports. Which would be additional work that was presumably not contracted for.

I think the DMCA should contain statutory damages for each false DMCA takedown notice. It would not really matter if Sleazebag Studios or Scumsucker and Weasel LLC has to pay, the important point is that "mistaken" takedown notices would become expensive.

Short term, you are absolutely right.

Long term, it leads to a culture of mediocrity - as soon as your product does not look worse than the competition in performance and reliability, it is considered good enough and improvement stops.

If the company reaches a certain and not all that big size, there is usually a disconnect between the guys who work the low level stuff (like me) and those who lead the company. I see that at my own place of work, and it is a much smaller company than Microsoft.

Management cares about features they can sell, and stuff that does not immediately translates into new features is considered a waste of time. They do not exactly forbid us from doing optimization work, but we don't earn much appreciation from it either. Some pretty prototype Marketing can show off at a trade fair is far more likely to get you recognition.

So most of the time refactoring and gradual improvement is something a developer does to prevent getting swamped by spaghetti code, or maybe from his own sense of doing stuff right. But the "career-enhancing" value of such work is usually low. Only in rare cases, when the limitations of the existing codebase starts to obviously hurt the business, management will get behind optimizing stuff instead of adding features.

The open source graphics drivers could be better. Sure you can say that is the task of the hardware vendors, but the community always said "all we need is the hardware specs, then we'll write the drivers".

IMHO that is a promise that is slow in being fulfilled, as far as Intel and AMD are concerned. They do provide specs. On the other hand, nVidia refuse to document their chips, so I don't hold it against the Noveau project if they have difficulties. The Linux community never promised to support undocumented hardware.

The lack of native games is, of course, NOT the fault of Linux.

Actually, there is some state intrusion, but it may be worse in the US:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/05/05/2329240/former-fbi-agent-all-digital-communications-stored-by-us-govt
In Germany, the current government seems to be really eager to install a similar level of surveillance, but the Bundesverfassungsgericht (special court for constitutional issues) has killed the last law that was introduced to make ISPs collect data and keep them available for the authorities.

Right now the next round has been started. A new law was passed that would allow various authorities rather unfettered access to ISP databases, and some civil rights activists are preparing a lawsuit against it.

You do, however, have a point about voter apathy. The two largest parties in Germany really deserve to get their asses kicked for this in the next election, but it is not going to happen over the surveillance issues :-(

Gaming in general could use improvement. Current problems are
-poor drivers for 3D graphics
-and a meager supply of native games (as WINE is not perfect yet, and even if it was, it would be an extra layer that eats some performance).

But even so, I guess people who only use their PC for some web surfing might as well use Linux.

A better approach than changing for IE10 would be to aim for a standard that is supported by multiple vendors. For instance, HTML4 and JavaScript. See also
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Standardization
Of course there may still be minor quirks of the chosen browser, but accomodating those should be a much lesser task the next time the company needs to switch platforms.

Also, they might be able to use virtualized instances of XP as others have suggested. That may have its own drawbacks, but I guess it is worth a try before sinking lots of development money into redesigning the application.

On that "hairyfeet" had an interesting theory (in another thread) that is worth repeating:
Microsoft is rich enough to survive another Vista or two, but many PC manufacturers are not. If Microsoft does nothing to make them happy again, they may get desperate and push Linux in earnest.

So there is some risk for Microsoft of losing dominance in their main market if they overdo it with pushing the UI formerly called Metro ;-)

Oil is not really relevant when comparing prices for electricity generation. Coal is usually cheaper per kWh, and used much more frequently.

There are a few exceptions, such as HECO and its subsidiaries on Hawaii, who run some power plants on oil. But those are the only oil-fired power plant I've ever read about.

That's not entirely true.

In some individual tests in the benchmarks on Phoronix.com, the latest open source ATI drivers reach now 80-90% of the performance of the closed source drivers (most are still at something like 30%).

Maybe 2 years ago, the best individual test results were something like 30% of the performance of the closed source drivers. Benchmarks that would not run at all on the open source side were a lot more common that today (although Phoronix may since have settled on tests that are known to run on open source, so take this with a grain of salt).

So on ATI cards the open source drivers have come closer, but they still have a way to go.

In the case of the noveau driver for nVidia, I find it impressive that the developers got it to run by reverse engineering at all. Performance, however, looks like that of the open source ATI driver 1-2 years ago.

Renewable energy is widely used indeed, but so far often thanks to subsidies. In Germany, for instance, electricity from renewables gets a guaranteed price for 20 years from installation of a plant (paid for by an apportionment of the costs to the buyers of electricity).

The interesting point is "grid parity", when making your own electricity becomes cheaper than buying it. For private households we have reached this point in Germany, but with an important qualifier:
If you had to make your own electricity all of the time, it would become more expensive because you would need some energy storage for times of weak production.

On the production side, the cost of running a coal plant is still below 10 Euro-Cent / kWh, so most renewables cannot compete yet without subsidies. Wikipedia has some estimates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromgestehungskosten (German Wiki). If those are accurate,
  - Natural Gas currently wins in the US by a wide margin. Which may, of course, rapidly change if the more skeptical estimates about fracking are correct.
  - Hydro power looks nice (clean, and cheaper than coal-fired) but most attractive places to build a hydro plant are already in use.
  - Wind looks interesting in terms of cost, but has the disadvantage of being non-dispatchable.
  - Solar cannot compete yet, but may get there with further improvements in making solar panels cheaply.