War is irrational in the same way that the prisoner's dilemma is irrational. Sure, the world would be better if everyone is peaceful. But if you choose peace unilaterally, you end up like the the Moriori.

Punishing the people who give the orders is important. But it is often even more important to punish the people that follow the orders as well. There are a lot more order followers than order givers, and every one of them should have an incentive to refuse to obey, or even better, report the illegal activities. There should be accountability at every level, and no one should be able to get away with the Nuremberg defense of "I was only following orders."

Exactly. This is the whole point of the legislation. Now they can use "pollution" as an excuse to purge political enemies, while claiming to be "tough" on the environment.

Excessively harsh penalties tend to be counter-productive because they are almost never carried out, thus resulting in a culture of impunity. A $5 fine for littering would be far more effective.

Nope. You are thinking of trademarks, which have to be enforced to remain valid. Patents have no such "use it or lose it" provision.

Out of the 200 million acres of wheat planted in North America, it was so conveniently only found exactly where the anti-GMO activists looked for it, but subsequently no where else. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would say that the anti-GMO activists found it so easily, because they planted it.

RTFA. The NSA data was not used as evidence in court. The NSA data was used to identify suspicious behavior, and establish probable cause, but all the evidence used to convict was collected by normal law enforcement. A chain of custody is not required for all evidence. It is only required for evidence used in court.

It is called humor impairment. It is a common affliction.

Federal judges have lifetime appointments, and little inventive to rule against what they actually believe to be right. Since Google HQ is in California, the first court is likely to be in the 9th district, which has a reputation for smacking down government overreach. Google may ultimately lose, but it isn't a certainty.

Frontrunning is illegal, regardless of whether it involves HFT. An obvious solution is to make it illegal for a single company to be both a broker (trading on behalf of their customers) and a trader (making money on their own trades).

No, arbitrage increases liquidity, decreases volatility, makes the market more efficient and stock prices more fair, and is a Good Thing.

It is enough of a fact to be accepted by the SEC. One of the recommendations of the 2010 investigation was to find a way to keep HFTers active during periods of volatility. Perhaps even requiring them to actively trade in order to keep markets liquid.

There is no evidence that HFT causes spikes and crashes. Actual evidence says the opposite: by increasing liquidity, HFT reduces volatility. HFT was initially blamed for the "flash crash" in 2010, but when the investigation was complete, it was found that most HFTers had pulled out of the market during the crash, and HFT played no role in causing or exacerbating the crash. In fact, the crash would have been less severe if HFTers had better models which would have allowed them to stay active during the crash.

HFT is not speculation. It is the exact opposite. HFTers are market makers, not speculators. This tax will result in higher spreads between buy and sell prices, and will be passed onto you in the form of higher transaction costs whenever you buy or sell a stock. It isn't clear to me what people that want to constrain HFT are trying to accomplish. Reduce volatility? The balance of evidence is that HFT results in less volatility. Encourage long term investing? Average hold time of stocks is actually correlated with lower overall economic growth. Stop people from doing something that sounds scary to people that don't understand it? Maybe.

Unlikely. People that are good at implementing solutions are not always the same people that are good at envisioning them. My experience is that techies are the worst people to have at a brainstorming session. When an idea is floated, instead of expanding on it, they start nitpicking the technical details. Example: The people on the plane came up with some interesting and provocative ideas, and nearly every comment here is "This won't work because ...."

Nope. Proposed solar-thermal projects in both California and Spain have been cancelled and replaced with PV. The price of PV panels has fallen dramatically in recent years.

Plenty of cropland is already used for biofuel. If we can do so more efficiently, then more area will be available for food and/or nature.

Comparing biofuels to solar panels in area efficiency is silly. Solar panels cost hundreds of dollars per sq meter. Cropland does not. The important metric is not watts/area but watts/dollar. Also biofuels are liquid and can be used as transportation fuel in affordable vehicles. Solar electricity cannot.

TFA is completely devoid of any technical information, so I don't think you don't have enough information to determine if her invention is silly or not.