The difference of opinion is that I'm willing to let Americans make that choice for themselves, while you want to choose for them. (I personally drive an 11-year-old compact car with high gas mileage.)

That's nonsense. "Society" is just a term for the collection of lots of people, and "society" has no goals of its own; each of the people has individual goals, some of which mostly align (e.g., most people are better off during peacetime than during war) and some of which vary widely (e.g., musical taste). Similarly, "the market" is just the collection of lots of individuals' economic activity, and the people making up the market most certainly do plan for the future; this is why commodity prices spike instantly on news of some catastrophe.

The claim that "$foo is running out, so you must give me power to keep you from using $foo" has been made repeatedly throughout history and has fallen flat every time. When it comes to oil specifically, the proven reserves of oil are greater now than they ever have been before. If oil were running out, the price of oil would have risen sharply, and that market you dismiss would have created incentives not only for people to use less but also for the limited oil to go to its most valued use.

It's only a market failure if you believe that a handful of politicians and bureaucrats should be making choices for millions of individuals and families rather than allowing those individuals to make choices (and bear the costs) for themselves.

Additionally, the Thrive has two power quirks that I appreciate: Its battery is easily replaceable, and it sacrifices the ability to charge via USB for a 30W power supply that can charge its battery from zero to full in 90 minutes. For typical business use, I only need to charge it about 30 minutes daily.

What do you use for an SSH client?

Halfway decent graphics systems scale text to dot pitch. If your text is illegibly small, either you have your display set to 6pt or your display manager needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1990s.

Perhaps if they instead focused on fixing the memory leaks, pushing out 64-bit builds wouldn't be so pressing an issue?

Right. It's in the proposal this panel is floating. I'm interested in the media reaction if this gets put into practice.

It'll be amusing to see what happens if these proponents manage to get Botox admitted to the select club along with Ebola and smallpox...

Nationalizing it just ensures that some wanker will be at the wheel. Make it known that a crash means that the shareholders take a bath, and you'll get some serious scrutiny from institutional and other big players.