Then don't do that!`

Alright, the joke is that the patient says "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor says, "Well then, don't do that!" but the thing is people do stop doing things when they hurt, or to be specific, limit their range of motion rather than working out the painful area. This results in a cycle of pain increasing and range limitation.

Yes there are things like broken bones where it is good to limit motion for a time, but the thing is that there are many instances where this is not the case and the above scenario is happening.

Recently there was a situation of Sysinternals suing Best Buy for using unlicensed copies of their software. I feel like siding with Sysinternals but this feeling prompts me, providing new fodder with which to examine, to bring into focus, my values in this area on the basis of the fact that I don't really believe in intellectual property.
It's not a matter of whether or not it's illegal, but a matter of who we want to come ahead in the war of ideas and where we want to be. The law has fallen from a statement of ethical principals to become no more than a tool in which to fight this war. When you don't know the whole truth, sometimes it is necessary to perpetuate a smaller lie in order to freeze out a larger one.

The struggle against coding bugs

I hear that when a bug gets created, one needs to find its origin. I read that one should only change one thing at a time rather than scrapping a body of code taking the bug with it. Nobody ever makes a case for it, just accepting it as "the one true way". I theorize that being prone to bugs is due to flawed overall systemic design, so the presence of a bug should cause you to seek improvement in the design, the location of the bug telling you where the change in the design should be made, rather than going on a bug hunt.

A matter of scale

I like my fonts when viewing websites to be a certain somewhat large size. When I switch to sites that have their own idea of what size fonts should be, I'm cranking on the font size + keypresses. This is one of the rare spots where Internet Explorer is marginally better than Firefox with its font size toolbar button, but who decided it was a good idea to allow websites to set absolute font sizes?

A similar situation comes up when listening to music files, and sound in applications in general. Some files are encoded much more quieter than others, not to mention the separate volume controls for wave type files and MIDI files. I can be listening to a quietly encoded song and some notification will chime loudly. Some songs are supposed to be a little quieter than others, so normalizing all the songs is not without flaws, not to mention, which sound level should I normalize to, and what distortions will that cause in lossy formats such as MP3?