Windows is completely free of viruses. Oh wait.

Often times the first generations of new technology are so extremely expensive, that only the rich can afford them. Then slowly, with iterations and perfections, the prices come down to normal consumer prices. Almost every breakthrough technology has been that way, car's, computers, tv's, home entertainment. The thing is, unless there's the initial generation of very expensive technology, there's usually no starting point for engineers to slowly develop improved and cheaper ways to build. It's rare a technology goes from non-existent to every consumer can afford it. Also keep in mind Tesla isn't trying to compete with Toyota sedans, it's trying to compete with high-end BMW, Audi, Infiniti sedans. As in other automobile technologies, the cheaper sedans benefit from all the R&D that goes into the more expensive sedans, as their features slowly trickle into the cheaper sedans.

The problem with this is the entire world would have entered a global depression to teach the bankers a point. Most people would rather spare them their 'lesson', regulate them better, and prevent a world depression.

I'm not talking about during the bubble (if I was talking about bubble to recession, oil dropped from 130 to 35, so I would have said it dropped 75%). What I'm talking about was post-bubble-popping to realization-of-recession. Which was about a 40% drop. With something as inelastic as oil, a 3-5% drop in demand leads to a 40% drop in price.

And what you're saying about speculation is a natural side effect of an inelastic supply - or perhaps "slowly elastic" is the better description. When it takes a long time to increase supply and short periods of time for demand to change, it *necessitates* speculation.

I agree with you that energy prices should "tax" high energy users. I'd say one of the biggest things holding this back are older people on fixed income that can't afford capital investment in their homes to make them more energy efficient, but suffer through high energy bills every year.

When push comes to shove this one made it though because most people don't really care about using CFLs or incandescent, and nobody cares deeply about it. If we can knock a meaningful percent off our energy usage without seriously upsetting people, politicians will do it. Can't blame them.

As a side-note, I'm not sure about the math since it's an ad slogan, but I live in NYC and they had posters up for a while that said:
"If every New Yorker switched to CFL's it would save enough energy to power the MTA."

The subway and buses alone get about 7 million people a day to their jobs - and that's not even counting the massively popular above ground commuter trains. This is a measurable amount of energy we're talking about...

Energy supply is very inelastic, which means small changes in demand can be reflected by LARGE changes in price.

It should never be underestimated what a small change in energy demand can do to raise/lower prices (for all of us). Remember when the recession hit, and energy demand went down a few percent, and oil prices shot down 40%?

Also - thinking of each consumer making their own choice only affecting themselves is not accurate when you're in a market where your neighbors poor choices make it significantly more expensive for everyone.

Security, stability, plethora of truly free applications...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster. Hell half the reason I dislike windows so much these days is the UI, I just work faster on my fully-customized linux machine.

Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons. I've seen no such arguments for MorphOS.

Apple's invested good money in chips that decode h.264 in hardware. Their chips get something like 2-3x better battery life decoding h264 in hardware than they do in software. So yes - Apple *does* have a stake in h264 staying dominant.