Piracy thrives due to high prices. Monopolies through copyrights, patents, and trademarks have been driving the inflation of IP costs to exorbitant levels. You can present iTunes and allOfMP3 as examples of lower cost alternatives to piracy increasing legal downloading (although in the latter's case it was too low to continue).

To be fair, the Nookcolor was fairly easy to hack and extend into a fairly functional low-cost android tablet. Considering it's low cost and Wifi/bluetooth capabilities, I imagine it would be fairly good for homebrew projects.

Incurring God's wrath by ignoring the plight of the poor is actually central to the Judeo-Christian mythology. Decadence is cited as the reason god cursed and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and also why Jehovah abandoned Judea and Israel when the Babylonians attacked. Jesus himself was killed because he attacked the moneychangers in the Jerusalem temple, whom he claimed were economically exploiting the pilgrims. Ayn Rand specifically stated that her aims were to change culture by replacing our morality by a new one that is not guided by our religious past. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6LSpFgxL94

There was just one two years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_plane_crash If that's not enough, here's some more TSA Fail: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/newark-airport-terminal-shut-baby-checkpoint-unscreened-article-1.1068800#ixzz1tHJ5bW5z http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/new_jfk_security_breach_PB8L58gzpwjmyqktLHRssN http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/TSA-Agent-Slips-Through-DFW-Body-Scanner-With-a-Gun-116497568.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357012/TSA-causes-outrage-confiscating-pregnant-womans-insulin-ice-packs.html http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120509/10161518848/congress-tsa-is-wasting-hundreds-millions-taxpayer-dollars.shtml http://consumerist.com/2011/12/tsa-agent-finds-pot-in-rappers-bag-leaves-note-rather-than-confiscating-it.html http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/boarding-pass-arrest-nigerian-slipped-jfk-airport-security/story?id=13963831

The article headline is misleading. Verizon isn't allowed to restrict third party applications from tethering (open-access), but is under no obligation to provide them for free (hence the $20 fee). As far as they are concerned, they were within their rights to block Google from selling the apps on the market (though the FCC disagreed). They also were compliant by allowing customers who did have third party applications to use the network for no additional fee. Basically, you can tether away, but Verizon isn't going to help you unless you pay them their bribe.

I think reducing the supply of an item (the used car market in this example) actually leads to increased cost.

When bribes are legal, no one *has* to be above the law. Lobbying can be done in the open, though no one really could say where the money is necessarily coming from.

One study put the return on bribes at 22,000% (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/taxonomy/term/xbrl/). The study's old, but the return on lobbying is infamously the highest rate of return on legal investments.

They miss out on certain DRM content like Netflix and iTunes.

It's fallacious to argue that money has similar opportunity costs in scale. $40 million could bribe a congressman to the tune of billions, whereas there is almost no legal opportunity to increase $200 to that degree.

I think your model breaks down as businesses move closer to monopolies, as has been the case for the past 30 years. Right now, we have a few parties quite content to collude together to fuck over their customers (LIBOR, RIAA CD price fixing, wireless providers capping data plans, etc., etc.).

Actually, the hackers didn't tell anyone. If people hadn't set up specific email addresses for their dropbox account, checked these boxes for mail, and reported spam, this might have never been discovered.

It means that you can tether away. Just keep in mind that if you buy another subsidized phone, you will lose your unlimited plan.

There was a study done that showed building wind farms to generate power did create a measurable temperature increase.

I think Google Docs is a viable cross-platform competitor to MS Office at this point.