Yes, exactly! And it is precisely this that scares the Republicans more than anything, that after the cliff the Democrats will start introducing tax breaks for the poor and middle class, which of course is legislation the GOP can hardly oppose, and so... Voila! Taxes on the rich have effectively been raised! Although in point of fact they likely won't even have been restored to Clinton-era levels, but I digress. Going off the cliff is a win for the Dems, unless the mere fact of it happening sends the Market into a tailspin, but Wall Street probably has just enough intelligent and level-headed traders to limit any disruption to a temporary blip. Really, I see going over the Dreaded Fiscal Cliff as something that might actually be good for the country, with very little downside. You heard it here first!

Sorry, I do have points, but... No can do, on the upmod. If you spend some time on any of the sites that are genuinely run by and for addicts and ex-addicts, you will find many, many personal stories posted by sometimes desperate addicts who have actually tried ibogaine therapy. The basic message seems to be, no, it does not work, with actual results that are a far cry from the way the drug has sometimes been portrayed in the media and in the few very limited and suspect studies done to date. Ibogaine is in the same category as so-called "ultra-rapid detox" type treatments, which is to say that while it does have its true believers, the vast majority of those who actually undergo the treatment don't see anything remotely like the promised results. Most discover this to their chagrin only after spending huge amounts of money. The sad truth is, there is currently no overnight and/or one-time procedure that will cure addiction. Of course there isn't, it's an extremely complex and still imperfectly understood condition with causes deeply-rooted in both personality and brain chemistry. So like the mythical free lunch, there simply is no such thing as a miracle cure for addiction, and I don't see much hope there ever will be.

Congress! Where else? Studies have shown that multiple tornadoes worth of hot air can at times be generated by even a single congressperson, it's just a matter of finding the right one. Yeah, I lost the link to those studies, but hey, you know it's true.

Zero choices, eh? OK, you want to talk about choices?? First of all, in the US most health insurance is provided by one's employer, so there is effectively very little or no choice involved, in most cases you get to take whatever your job provides, and that's that. Secondly, changing from one greedy insurance company filled with people who get bonuses for denying care to another such company gets you what, exactly? Certainly nothing in the way of increased value or better care, nothing of any substance. THERE IS NO CHOICE FOR THE CONSUMER UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM! There's barely even the illusion of choice.

I simply don't understand why the anti-single payer crowd can't see that there can be no true free market in health care, especially under the current system. Consumers are allowed no real choice about virtually any facet of the care they receive, in most cases it's not even possible to find out in advance what a given procedure will cost. Unless health care consumers have access to information like the true cost of medical tests and procedures, along with information about the competence and reliability of the professionals who administer them, nothing resembling a free market is possible. This is obvious, it's basic economic theory. Why is it so hard to admit that health care just might, just possibly might, be an area unsuited to a purely free market solution? Remember, emergency medical care must, by definition, be administered immediately, often without input from a potentially unconscious patient. No patient choice = no free market. It's that simple. And as we've seen, attempts to impose a pseudo-free market via private insurance companies simply leads to the mess we have now: 51st in life expectancy. For god sake, a single payer system is not just the most efficient way for a modern industrialized society to deal with health care, it's the only way! Anything else leads to a grossly unfair and unethical two or more tier system, and life expectancies comparable to third world countries. We can surely do better than that.

No of course not, actual prices could never be affected by futures speculation, this has been proven over and over again, just look at commodities, say precious metals like silver, er... Never mind, I meant the energy sector, look at crude oil and gasoline prices, where you can clearly see that... No, wait, wait, I uh... Surely there must be, um, something,,, /sarcasm

Seriously, you honestly think the packaging of real estate mortgages into futures-like securities had no effect on the actual prices of homes during the run up to the meltdown??? Or that what's being discussed here is so very different from that?? Are we living in the same universe? In my world the real estate bubble was almost entirely driven by the big banks and big institutionalized traders, the poor home owners mostly just got taken along for the ride, either intentionally or by happenstance.

You have misquoted the article, leaving out an important qualifier. The true quote actually reads:

I need hardly add that this is not a trivial distinction. Assuming you used copy and paste for the quote, you must have then deliberately removed the text reading "in some cases" before you posted. Why exactly would anyone do this, except to change the meaning of the quote, however slightly?

I doubt the scam you describe ever really happened, it's actually a throwaway line from one of my favorite movies, Guy Ritchie's "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". I suppose Ritchie could have based his dialog on a real life scam he heard about, but your description is practically word for word from the movie, so I'm guessing that's where you heard it. Or maybe someone else saw the film and passed on the description of the scam without attribution, who knows? Maybe it's become an urban myth? Regardless, I've always thought it's a great concept.

Why exactly is the lock associated with (as I presume you must mean) the female, while the male gets to be the key? Why not the other way round? When you think about it, the whole analogy makes very little sense, in fact it's really nothing but thinly disguised male-supremacist propaganda. I'm guessing you probably first learned it from some religious text or religious authority figure, very likely Christian. Which is rather interesting, don't you think?

Spontaneous orgasm is also one of the symptoms of heroin/opiate withdrawal - really, look it up! - but I'm in no hurry to experience that, either. Some things just aren't as good as they might seem to be at first (see also for example Priapism, another potential side effect of certain pharmaceuticals). I know, we're posting on Slashdot, we're likely desperate for thrills of this kind, but still...

My mod points seem to have just expired, unfortunately, but... Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have been trying to get people to understand this point for years, with little success. In particular, the "free ER healthcare for the poor" meme seems to be permanently embedded in the brains of conservative Republicans. Hell, even Mitt Romney got this one wrong recently. So ER care is free to the poor and uninsured in the US, Mitt? OK then, I'm currently unemployed with an income well below the poverty level, perhaps you could explain this whole free ER thing to the bill collectors currently hounding me over a recent ER visit? No, didn't think so. And that's precisely why I'm not voting for you, you have absolutely no conception at all of what it really means to be financially insecure and uninsured in modern day America.

Oh absolutely, wish I had mod points. To cite just one personal sticking point: any god who would inflict eternal torment upon otherwise good and honest people simply because they happen to hold different religious beliefs (or none at all) is not deserving of our worship! Period. It doesn't even matter whether He exists or not, if eternal damnation of unbelievers is part of the dogma, then the entire Church is no good. This should be absolutely self-evident to anyone with even a rudimentary sense of morality. There may or may not be sufficiently evil acts to render a human being truly deserving of an eternity of torment in Hell, but non-belief isn't one of them, and proclaiming that it is merely serves to proclaim the inner corruption of a particular faith.

Oh yes, I remember well the fear of software patents back in the day, and the big relief felt by most programmers when it appeared the issue was dead. Software was not patentable, the issue was settled, and the nascent PC software writing community heaved a sigh of relief went on about its business. It's worth noting that that was an era of absolutely stunning innovation, with new software ideas cropping up everywhere, seemingly overnight. Nobody worried about patents, and the industry flourished. And yet, somewhere along the way, the idea of software patents refused to die, and eventually managed to rise from the grave, bringing about the mess we currently find ourselves in. I know of no better argument against software patents then to look at the amount of innovation and success to be found in the IT field, especially amongst newly emerging small businesses, back in the '70s and '80s, as compared with what you find today. It's like the whole industry now labors under a crushing weight of fear, fear of the inevitable but often unforeseeable patent lawsuit. It's crazy that anyone could think software patents are a good idea. I firmly believe that the whole personal computing revolution would never have happened under the current restrictive IP rights regime. It just couldn't have survived. And yes, to this day, I don't quite understand how a seemingly settled legal argument could reemerge from the grave like that, complete with unholy powers and an unquenchable appetite for gobbling up the nation's brains. Indeed, I do despair sometimes, because clearly, the zombies are winning.

Recently I was reading an old Jack Vance story from 1974 called "Assault on a City" and was a bit stunned to come across an accurate description of an ipod. Both the physical description of the device and manner of its use were pretty much spot on:

As usual science fiction is way ahead of reality, ten years to be precise. What you describe was the exact plot of Allen Steele's short story "Mudzilla's Last Stand", initially published in January of '93! From an article about Steele:

I remember reading the story in Asimov's when it first appeared. Aside from being prophetic, it was a pretty good read. The plot is that a Japanese company builds a real battle mech much like the one in the TFA. The robot was intended to be genuine military hardware, but there were no takers because it turns out giant man-like metal monster robots are somewhat impracticable on real battlefields. Eventually the only prototype gets sold to, you guessed it, a promoter of monster truck rallies. You can guess what happens next... Or read the story.

I have an att.net email account which for some reason has to be accessed through Yahoo, I guess they're corporate partners or something... The point is, I have always protected my email address with religious fervor, and as a result I do not get spam, ever, period, not once. Until today, that is. Make of it what you will, but to me this is just way too much of a coincidence. I strongly suspect it will come out that the hack went deeper and compromised much more than what is currently being reported. To repeat, I have had a totally spam-free yahoo mail address for 5 years and all of a sudden today I get spam, despite the fact that my address is NOT listed in the list of compromised accounts. Make of this what you will, but personally I'm not very happy with Yahoo at the moment.