When I was younger, I pirated a lot of games. I had little spending money and a lot of free time. Now for the situation has reversed, I have money to buy a lot of games, but little free time to actually play them. So with the exception of games from a couple studios (Blizzard and Valve), I only buy games when they pass my impulse buy threshold. That way if I am more likely to get value out of the purchase even if I don't end up playing it that much.

It can be done in mysql without using loops, but its not as elegant and requires an extra table. Simply create an association table that links each child node back to each of its parents. You will have to keep it up to date, but it can be easily rebuilt if it gets out of sync. But the query then is as simple as joining that table when you need to select all the child nodes under a given parent.

You missed the biggest and most expensive reason.

We have socialized provider system, but a private payer system.

Anyone can get care in the US, no matter their ability to pay, especially with emergency care. The cost of providing this care is passed on to those who can still afford to pay for medical costs or insurance.

There are a huge number of people who make to much to qualify for government programs, but not enough to afford private insurance and are not provided with insurance through an employer or do not qualify due to pre-existing conditions. The number of people in this category at last estimate is around 45 million. These people still use healthcare services, a few can pay for it out of pocket, but many end up getting the bill forgiven through bankruptcy or other means.

If all these people became payers into the system, at any level, it would bring down costs for those who can still afford to pay for insurance. It would not bring down the overall costs as much as other measures, but it would spread the cost for a health care system much more fairly. It can bring down costs in that people will be more likely to seek cheaper preventive care instead of waiting until a problem requires much more expensive emergency care.

With the exception of number 1, I can't imagine any ISP's going along with this. A large number of people download music and movies, many of them unlicensed. The file distribution networks gave users what the RI/MPAA wouldn't and has cemented itself into internet culture. People don't think twice about downloading a movie or song off of pirate bay anymore.

A company may be ok shutting down a small handful of customers, but the practice of file sharing is pretty ingrained into an entire generation. Would an ISP willingly start disconnecting a large number of its customers?

The issue with Vista had nothing to do with process performance, for the most part, burning a CD or running a batch operation in Photoshop, generally took the same amount of time in both XP and Vista.

The issue had to do with UI performance, for example, the time it takes for a menu to appear when a user requests it or how quickly a folder populates with file. Unfortunately, most benchmarks don't test that.