It's less about punishment and more about encouraging low-risk behavior. Why should those who choose low-risk behaviors subsidize those who choose high-risk behavior? The key here is that premiums should be based on the risk associated with the choices one makes rather than simply their circumstances.

The difference is that high-risk driving is a choice that one can make each day. On the other hand, most high-risk health conditions are not something that someone can fix instantly by changing their behavior. Now, there are indeed some high-risk health conditions that are a result of choice, such as smoking or unhealthy eating habits...but even with those, one can stop smoking, but there's a significant amount of damage that's already done that makes that person be a higher risk. If there's a way to adjust one's insurance premium based on the high-risk choices they make, it becomes more fair for everyone and helps to discourage high-risk choices.

I expect those are just the spoken names and that the commands will still be single words, similar to:
"GNU awk" -> gawk
"enhanced grep" -> egrep

Done! It's called "awk". Just set the RS and FS fields as appropriate. :P

If you can synchronize arrivals with departures at the same (or a nearby) station, energy regenerated through braking can be immediately used to power the acceleration of another train. If it is not synchronized, the power is wasted (unless they have batteries or some other power cache, which would surely introduce its own inefficiencies).

I once heard a story (though unfortunately I have no references--it may very well be an urban legend) that the Vancouver SkyTrain continued operating through a power outage thanks to (a) its very efficient linear induction motor propulsion & braking, (b) operating at a reduced speed (to minimize the impact of wind resistance), (c) supplementary power from backup generators, and (d) synchronized arrivals and departures from stations in conjunction with regenerative braking. The synchronization could be done precisely and programatically because it is a fully-automated system.

Slightly off-topic, but isn't it time to replace the image of borgified-Gates with an image of borgified-Ballmer?

"The Tunnel is a horror movie about what the MPAA does to people who download movies over bittorrent."

...did any of them actually answer in the form of a question?

A couple years ago I wrote a paper for SANS [PDF] about a similar technique I used to fight recurring problems with zero-day attacks. This technique could be modified somewhat for the needs of an ISP. For example, instead of moving them onto a quarantine VLAN, the redirect rule could be created on a per-IP-address basis. It could present the page to a user informing them of their problem, and upon user acknowledgement, it could drop a cookie in their browser that would allow them to surf uninterrupted from that host from some period of time (after which it would remind them again). That way, every user on every computer behind that IP address would be able to see that there is likely an infected system on their network.