Wikipedia is not a democracy. Furthermore, if it wants to be taken seriously as an encyclopedic source, it needs to get its house in order. Facts do not need anonymity, rather they require verifiability.

If I have problems with hoodlums vandalizing my house, I would need to stop inviting them in, not call the Department of Transportation to keep them away. Further, if I find them breaking the law on my property, I should report them to law enforcement, failure to do that and I would be an accessory. How they get to my place is immaterial.

It's CFLs, and it's not just you. No one seems to mention the awful, headache-inducing flicker of fluorescent bulbs. Fortunately, rough service bulbs are exempt from the legislation, which is what I will continue to use.

No problem with comprehension. Requiring one company to serve another's at the same price (or speed) is ludicrous. I would never expect McDonald's to serve me a Whopper, let alone at the same price. If my provider decided to throttle Netflix, I would be free to both complain to them and move to a competitor if I get no satisfaction. And there is now and will continue to be more competition, especially as wireless technologies improve. To expand on your example then, government regulation of Internet providers would be equivalent to government price-fixing. And that did not work out so well with National Industrial Recovery Act (later shortened to NRA) during the Great Depression (unless you think deepening the depression and jailing people for undercutting government prices are good things). Fortunately the supreme court unanimously ruled it unconstitutional.

surfacestations.org

Also, published code tends to be better quality because of the extra scrutiny it gets before letting others see it.

Convenience. It is a lot easier than carrying wads of cash. Not all payees can take electronic payments, some may not even have a bank account.

Or so you assume. That is a case where you may be confusing cause and effect:

Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

Exactly. If I want to use standard, dirt cheap, reliable, proven, incandescent bulbs that may happen to use a bit more electricity, I should not need the federal government's permission. It is not their role. Here in the US we just celebrated the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from this sort of tyranny, which gave freedom to the individual. None of us need to apologize or justify our preferences. Use what you want. I have found uses for CFLs, just not in my house.

Agreed. And the premise that only government regulation can force "better" design is fallacious. There are things known as competition and consumer demand. Furthermore, sticking it to the "fat corporate pigs" only makes them fatter because these sorts of regulations tend to force smaller players out of business whereas the large companies can more easily absorb the costs (which usually comes in the forms of layoffs). Plus, all the posts about how EU nations do it further reinforce how bad of an idea it is.

What? Ctrl-Space? I prefer Option-Space.

Actually, with Vista, I have seen that the installer is the same for all of the desktop versions and the cheaper ones have "features" disabled. One can "upgrade" simply by purchasing a license for a more "advanced" edition. Thus, by adding the version checks, it would be more expensive to create the limited product.

The reason I will never buy a Dell again is that they refused to give me support because I installed a different operating system than shipped with the system. It took months of regular calls to support before convincing them it was a hardware issue.