That only works until the company that offered the open source solution starts a lawsuit. Suing over lost tenders is rather common.

Because KDE was one of the first free software projects to focus on involving more women. They KDE Women mailinglist archive goes back to 1998. Given the recent attention for that subject it seems like a good idea to ask KDE about their experience.

It is about freedom, just not the freedom of the programmer. It's about the users. Freedom is not an absolute condition, it's always a balance the rights of various stakeholders. The cliche is that my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Most software licenses restrict the rights of the users in favour of the programmer. The BSD licenses are vary liberal but they only focus on programmers that want to use the code. As a user you don't know anything about your rights if code is based on BSD code. Usually its 'free', but there is no guarantee. The programmer has no obligation to the user. The GPL is about giving assurances to users. If software is based on GPL code the user knows for sure that he will be able to get the code and use it.

What people fail to grasp is that shrinkwrap software is only a small part of the entire software market. Most software is never sold. It's written to solve a specific problem within an organisation. Most companies are not software companies. They will write software when they have to, but they would prefer to focus on their primary activity. Cooperating with other companies is a way to save money. Someone might think that those companies wouldn't want to share the software because they would lose a competetive advantage but that's usually not the case. Those companies don't want to compete on software, it's not their strong suit.

There is a number of intermediaries that try to solve this problem. If you want to buy a product you ask the intermediary to buy it for you. They will judge the seller and buy the product for you if they feel all is in order. When they receive the product they'll unpack it and send you a few pictures. Now you can decide if you want to buy it. If so they mail it to you, if not they will return it to the manufacturer and deal with the refundprocess. Ofcourse you'll have to a pay a small fee for the service but the examples I've seen were very cheap.

I wouldn't call your examples cases of overregulation. More a case of the law being behind the technology curve, as it usually is. Not that there is no overregulation, but I don't think your examples qualify. Regarding safety. There is no such thing as absolute safety. The law specifies a number of features a car should have to make it safe. How else would 'they' determine if the car is safe? You'll need some kind of guideline.

Not just natural genes. No genes at all should be patentable. Otherwise they'll just change one atom somewhere and claim that anything that resembles that gene is infringement.

"The rest of us" boils down to the 1% that gives a shit. The other 99% will just pick the cheapest solution, no matter what the consequences might be.

You must love "dark fiber". In one of my current project every vendor seems to be use "dark fiber" to connect stuff.

Yes, really great, compared to the rest of the USA. Over here in the Netherlands I have 500/500 for €60, €50 after discounts. That's from a high end provider which also includes goodies such as a 4G subscription for my cellphone. There is about a dozen others that offer the same speed for less money. 1000/1000 for €40 is also available. My other connection is 180/18 over cable.

I don't think your perspective on this is right. There is no hard cut-off between fully depending on support an doing everything yourself. At the very least you will need someone to talk with support. You will always have someone who is acting as an administrator and who will solve problems. Sooner or later you are going to run into problems that can be fixed without support. If you don't want to keep fixing the same problem over and over you are better of sending the fix upstream. With or without the help of payed support.

No, Moore's law is still going strong. Moore never said that your computer would get any faster, just that you would get more transistors in the same space. Newer hardware is still getting more transistors but the application of all those transistors has been shifted in a different direction and games do not always benefit.

Modern processors are much better at running multiple processes at the same time. Most games however don't use that capability, single core performance is what counts in most games. Therefor games don't benefit as much from improvements in transistor count as the used to.
Also, much of the heavy lifting is no longer done by the CPU. The GPU is doing most of the work. As the GPU is doing most of the graphics work the CPU has more time available for the rest of the game.
Thirdly, most high-end games are now designed for multiple platforms. Thus they are limited to the performance of the lowest common denominator which often is a game console. Most game-engines are very flexible and will adjust to work with slower hardware by decreasing the quality of the graphics.

Why is it called "One"? It's far from the first mission to the moon.
Are they referring to the Mars One project?
There is a lot of resemblance between those projects. Both depend on crowd-funding to work on a rather unrealistic goal. I guess both projects will pay a very nice salary to the people in charge. The project doesn't have to reach its goal to be financially succesfull for the owners.

I've got only one question: What license will they use?

Let's hope this is not a fixed-gear bicycle.