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The computer industry is known for many terminological conflicts, and I suspect this is likely to increase over time. Take a look at the dos tag at superuser.com/tags/dos/info which defines both DOS (Disk Operating System) and DoS (Denial of Service) on one page. (I also prefer @Matthew Read's suggestion to use an "ide-drive" tag; +1 for his comment.)
I bet there's a combination of all these factors and lots of other stuff we haven't thought of, which should prove to make this a challenging matter to resolve.
The Q100:A173 ratio does seem unfair to me, especially because it looks like the Questioner put effort into their writing (and even touched on a "memory" solution of some sort that isn't currently working for them). My guess is that people read the question, and then the answer, and then vote only for the answer. I don't know if this is the case though because I've noticed on that when I click on the upvote arrow that it doesn't always work (rare); when I come back to the question a few minutes later, I see that my vote didn't count, so I click again and then it stays.
I agree with your points, which I think are excellent and logical (+1). However, I don't see why there's a problem in the first case because it appears that josh3736's Answer has exactly the same number of upvotes as the Question (currently 7) -- when I vote, I can only vote once (I'm pretty sure this is how it works for everyone, except perhaps moderators). What am I missing on this point?
Downvotes aren't free? I have no idea what that means, I just noticed that downvotes are cast from time-to-time, but that the reasons aren't always clear. If you're going to do something that permits/encourages more downvoting, then I suspect that we'll also see a lot more people asking "Why are people downvoting my Question/Answer?" It seems to be a problem already where people often ask, and many people don't seem to bother to provide any explanation (although I've noticed that downvotes get retracted on occasion in the face of such questions, which I also find somewhat suspicious).
@Ivo Filpse: Short posts (e.g., under 3 lines or less than 500 characters) could be placed in a temporary moderation queue for users with less than 5,000 reputation points, then if after a certain amount of time (calculated based on reputation points where fewer points equates to a longer time-period) the answer could be automatically permitted if no decision is made by a moderator. (Perhaps users with more than 15,000 reputation points could also be included with those moderators for these purposes.)
Some people might be providing short Answers so that theirs will be first since I've noticed that a lot of folks feel that they should Accept the first Answer to their Question despite there being another Answer that is the same but was posted a few minutes later (probably because it took longer to write -- it could have been started earlier for all we know). It's almost as if there's a feeling of "this is the ethical thing to do" (loyalty isn't necessarily ethical) mixed in there somehow.
I suspect that many people vote for the Accepted answer (just because it is the Accepted answer) without even reading it, and do so without bothering to vote for other answers that are helpful, provide screen shots (as my answer in that question certainly did), are insightful, or add value in other ways.
I think that responding to both audiences is quite good, but not required. Basically, the choice is yours, but I don't see any reason to limit to just one audience if you have the time to address more since this will make your Answer or Question more useful to a wider audience. Keep up the great work, @soandos!
@mmyers: Heheh, someone could always use his name as an alias when assigning prizes -- yeah, people do this on the internet all the time! (For example, have you seen the massive collection of variations on the name "Eric Cartman" on YouTube?)
