This is very convenient, if both you and your condition happen to be covered by Medicare, and you can find health care providers willing to settle for Medicare payments.

"... Canada would become a haven for actual criminals ..." You mean as opposed to war criminals? http://news.yahoo.com/canada-releases-names-suspected-war-criminals-205701047.html

Demonstrating that a scheme is secure would mean proving a negative -- an impossible np-complete problem. That's why it's so difficult to trust *anything*, because even the schemes people think are the most secure today may be broken tomorrow. It may be hard to make a scheme whose insecurity cannot be easily demonstrated, but when it finally is demonstrated, it usually appears to be easy.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041267/] "... Dr. Ordway (Warner Baxter) attempts to solve a murder in a highly interesting place: a sort of call-in jukebox where bar customers may request a particular record to be played ..." Wow, I guess this concept has precedent. Anyone old enough to remember those services actually existing? Muzak on demand.

Can you say "Paparazzi"? I knew you could.

There are a number of responses above with varying degrees of M$-enlightenment (thalakan's being the most professional); however, it's not entirely true that Windows was designed exclusively for point-and-click administration. That's only true of the GUI shell. Windows was *designed* to be administered by *compiled* code. Preferably C++, which is the only thing that can deal directly with the shitty disaster that is the Win32 codebase without making things worse. Everything else is a shim over the Win32 nightmare, which is still the "core" of the operating system. So, everyone saying "you're just fucked" is in some sense accurate, albeit not precisely correct. The whole OS should have been refactored starting in 2003, when Microsoft pretended to be interested in security. It wasn't, so here we are.

... Turkish government issues a statement denying the event ever happened ...

Maybe (1) http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/716/what-is-the-true-source-of-the-kennedy-familys-wealth and maybe not (2) http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-26/the-kennedy-bootlegging-myth or as Candace Bergen once put it "twelve arrests, no convictions" [T.R. Baskin] (not that old Joe was ever arrested, mind).

My wife and I walked this path last year after her Vista Dell POS died. I compared a variety of major brands: Dell, HP/Compaq, Lenovo, Toshiba, maybe a couple of others I don't recall. Yes I do: Acer, Gateway, Asus, eMachines, etc. Like others have suggested, I started from specs that should be good for a couple of years: Win7x64, four+ cores, big enough screen. In her case power/battery is not an issue. We wound up dialing in on a Toshiba, but Lenovo was a close second, and they do seem to be holding up the no-bullshit tradition. The Toshiba has behaved well following OEM crapware removal.

According to http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/dhscomplaint/ the subject is actually accused of EMBEDDING, not linking. That is, he is alleged to have embedded copyrighted video streams (and/or their surrounding pages) inside his own site with surrounding ad content, instead of linking the user to the actual hosting web site. The major mistake by ICE appears to be a failure to actually use the word "embed" in their complaint. I would expect a takedown or lawsuit if I did this, so it's difficult for me to be surprised. Of course, that's no reason not to retrieve the links from the Internet Wayback Machine and (properly) link them from all of our home pages.

Until content owners figure out that nobody will link to their content, thus their content will never be viewed. That will considerably devalue the content, which should not be what they want. They just want to make sure they get paid, and that requires maximizing exposure.

Sender-pays may well be the ultimate spam defense (but see comment about botnet operators...) That bit about delivery=receipt has to be reworked; it's not comparable to snail-mail return receipts, which have to be signed by the recipient. Might make more sense for business-to-business, since the other real value is in non-repudiation.

A matter of expectations management, perhaps. In this case, maybe they actually funded some driver-writing (good planning) when they should have just replaced incompatible hardware (poor implementation choices). The overall air of the citation seems to hinge on customer expectations. It seems more likely that the drivers issue is a red herring, and that the real costs derive from the need to cross-train monoculture victims in the workforce.

I'm finding it hard to believe that Wikileaks hasn't posted anything that's NATO-classified. Even if Sweden isn't a NATO member, wouldn't that expose Assange to prosecution in the UK, which is a member, and also happens to be his present location?

... but it's not just Google. Try finding archives of the news articles concerning the (1997?) WHSO / Secret Service pager intercepts on *any* search engine.