There are lots of other reasons you want regulation and government, not just because something is too expensive. Sometimes corporations (thay are after all designed to be a means to aggregate capital) can take of that for you.

Sometimes corporations fail: when coordinated behavior is required, for example in cases of large externalities. The economics classic "Tragedy of the Commons" is exemplified by our modern day causes of and solutions to pollution (compare for example how acid rain and CO2 are/are not handled). Game theory and showed us how under real world economic assumptions and actors (not the economics 101 supply/demand model that many people never seem to advance past), markets can and do consistently fail without regulation.

Also consider what is efficient. Sure, society, life expectancy, technology, or anything can probably advance without governmental institutions (or week ones), but much faster with properly designed strong interaction much faster. As a thought exercise, consider the relative course of history with and without the CDC, WHO, and UNICEF. Go read about guinea worm disease if you need help. You seem to like the idea of consumption taxes, a revenue mechanism that is very inefficient since it ignores the declining marginal utility of money.

As an engineer myself, I am dismayed at how many engineers I encounter that don't get the above and are libertarian in nature. They should firstly be interested in designed to solutions to problems, like the various failure modes of market based systems or political institutions. Second, they should understand the dynamics and forcing functions that might drive these very complex systems to self destruction when improperly designed or regulated. Back when I was in school, they made all the engineers in the early intro classes watch the various famous cases of engineering failures...Tocoma Narrows, Hyatt Regency skywalk, space shuttle...They still do right?

huh? what? web sites are redirecting?

(ok, RDR is not that good, but it helps, and I'm sure as this becomes even more prevalent, people will work around it)

Keep in mind, this being a DARPA program, the MNP is going to be largely R&D and POC activities. Once it gets past this stage, that is when you are talking real money.

Seconded. Loved my Okidata 600e, lasted almost 15 years. And to top it off, the toner was something on the order of $20 a cartridge, for about 5000 pages. Cheap, reliable, compact (for the time), fast (for the time), supported PS, PCL5...only needed ethernet and it would have be perfect.

But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again.

I might if I knew that after someone took it, a magical copy remained in its place. And I definitely would if everyone did this, so that cars were essentially shared, I definitely would.
It would be pretty cool...relatively few original cars would multiply many times until everyone had a car. Then, undoubtedly, some would tinker with cars they got at little to no cost, whether for fun, or because of special needs or tastes. Hopefully they would produce better, faster, higher mileage, more luxurious cars...which would then multiply since people would like them better. Eventually there would be a great variety, each catering to individual tastes, and constantly improving too. Some people would almost certainly band together to support particularly complex tinkering, or even wholesale re-creation, where the more casual tinkerers couldn't support, and their needs were great enough. Soon...flying cars, submarine cars, space cars! Yeah...this would be a pretty cool universe to live in.

Fortran has all sorts of what we would now consider artificial limitations and restrictions on its syntax that make writing even simple programs a lot less simple and intuitive. For example, line length limitations, special columns, short & special variables names, etc. I'd rather not spend time teaching/learning (especially non-standard) syntax and more time on the concepts while encouraging good stylistic conventions (use commenting, readable variable/function names, etc). I found Pascal a much better first language. Not to mention that many of these programs using FORTRAN are arcane, dated in their teaching concepts, and force FORTRAN despite students who often already know many other languages.

Cause somebody once told me that would be all I ever need.