Speaking as a Massachusetts resident, I can tell you that Romneycare was in no way a Republican idea. At the time, the Democratic-controlled state legislative branch was essentially trying to take over healthcare via heavy regulation. This wouldn't be the first time: Massachusetts heavily regulates auto insurance and as such had some of the highest auto insurance rates in the nation. We've since deregulated auto insurance to some degree which has allowed some additional competition and a general lowering of rates. You're still required to buy car insurance, though.

Romney basically negotiated Romneycare in an attempt to prevent the same disaster that was Massachusetts auto insurance from being repeated in the Massachusetts health industry. He didn't get everything he wanted, quite a lot of "Romneycare" was pushed through thanks to the Democratic-controlled legislature.

And it didn't work. People lost jobs. (I personally know people who were forced out of the state due to Romneycare when their job evaporated because their employers couldn't afford to offer insurance.) Emergency room visits went up and doctor visits went down.

By the time Obamacare became law, the law was already a miserable failure here, so - uh, yeah. Enjoy your known-failed "conservative" approach to health care, I guess.

You live in [counts on fingers]... North Korea?

The debugger tab informed me the library was "blackboxed" and at that point I figured it was best to just give up and try a different browser. Chrome had no problem getting the error message and console message in the right order and its error message was more useful anyway.

I've had issues with Firefox's developer tools before. I remember managing to crash the browser by trying to inspect a JSON object that turned out to contain some huge number of entries. The DOM Inspector is also generally really slow and freezes the browser if you try to inspect some deeply nested node. Chrome's developer tools are, generally, better than Firefox's. The only reason I use Firefox these days is because NoScript is still better than anything I'm aware of for Chrome or, really, any other browser.

It's kind of amusing this should show up today, the same day I discovered a somewhat amusing little issue with the Firefox developer tools:

The "JavaScript error" developer console log messages (e.g., JavaScript errors) are not necessarily displayed in the same order that "JavaScript console" messages (i.e., console.log) are generated.

Meaning that if you're trying to track down what's generating a JavaScript message in some library you're calling (that is, a warning because the library "helpfully" catches the error for you and just does nothing), you: 1) can't get a stack trace of where that message was generated and 2) can't rely on "console.log" statements to help you narrow it down since "console.log" messages can be out of order of any other message type. I have no idea why this would be the case since JavaScript execution is explicitly single-threaded and having messages generated by a single thread appear out-of-order makes absolutely no sense, but - well, Firefox managed it.

I did, eventually, figure out a solution to my problem: I used Chrome instead. Not only did my app run twice as fast, Chrome messages are in order and included the property being read off the null object. (Allowing me to track down how the library managed to find a null off a non-null argument.)

So I'm glad Firefox is trying to make a "developer-centric browser," now if only their current browser tools weren't terrible.

As far as I'm aware, the "Sport" version is lighter and stronger than the regular version but that's the extent of the differences. The real answer is "who even knows" since it isn't released yet.

GPS not being in the phone is from the Watch technology page where they explicitly state "Apple Watch uses the GPS and Wiâ'Fi in your iPhone to help measure the distance you travel during activities that canâ(TM)t be measured in steps, such as cycling." As far as I know, the only page that details the difference between the models is the overview page.

Exactly what happens when the watch loses contact with the phone is still anyone's guess.

As I understand it, the issue is this. I make a Twitter account. (I dunno why I want to call them "feeds.") I mark it private, which means that only people I allow to follow me can see it. Then, someone else downloads this app which then shares my private Twitter feed to the app makers without my permission.

So let's say Alice makes a Twitter account, and marks it private. She allows Bob to follow her. Bob then downloads this app, which can then see her tweets as she's allowed Bob to see them. Alice is willing to let Bob read her tweets but doesn't want them shared with other people, and Bob presumably doesn't realize he's violating her privacy by downloading the app.

At least, that's my understanding of what people are upset about.

Yes, you can. You can create a Twitter feed and then set it up so that only people you've explicitly allowed to follow you can see your Tweets.

I'm pretty sure that is Nerval's Lobster's job. I really wish Slashdot would at least mention that the link is to a news site run by their parent company. I mean, they always used to when linking to things on SourceForge or ThinkGeek.

Sure, once you've been around here long enough, you'll learn that Nerval's Lobster == Dice news story and Bennett Haselton == verbal diarrhea, but it would be nice if the editors would at least pretend at being professional.

Unfortunately as other people have pointed out, you do need to carry the phone. Which has already killed the Apple Watch for one runner I know. She was really excited about the idea of being able to leave the phone at home while running while still having access to things like a GPS logger and her calendar.

Then I pointed out that would only work if she only ran in like a 40 foot bubble around her phone. (And that we don't know what happens without the phone and what the range really is.) The discovery that the watch doesn't have a GPS in it basically killed her interest in it. If she has to carry the phone anyway, why bother with the watch?

But you're right, if the Apple Watch was basically a tiny phone you could use from your wrist without requiring you to also be carrying the phone, that could be a great product for runners. Hell, if it had a GPS and just synced via your phone while it was in range, that would probably be "good enough" for a ton of runners.

As it is, its dependence on the iPhone for GPS and the fact that we don't know exactly how well it degrades without the phone basically kills its usefulness for runners.

And, of course, for those of us who don't go running and instead spend all our time sitting on our fat asses, I still haven't figured out a reason why we'd want an Apple Watch.

Back when the gaming journalism was run by the console manufacturers. Back then, they weren't even pretending not to be advertisers for the publishers! :)

So... getting women out of tech is a good thing?

(Joking. Only joking.)

It sounds to me like he was watching this documentary I recently saw on TV, Person of Interest, which is about the dangers of AI run wild...

(I think the character who created the AI on Person of Interest has said something almost identical to Elon Musk's quote from the summary. The latest episode has a throw-away line about how many iterations it took before his AI stopped trying to kill him.)

Since you mention it, if you search for "Doom", you get (amongst others):

So I guess John Carmack never did exist.

And, yes, "Doom (Video game)" appears twice. The second one is actually "Doom 4."

Honestly, that's because that's what it is. It makes a much better competitor to the MacBook Air than the iPad. (The price point doesn't help it either.) It makes a fairly lousy tablet, and it suffers from the general Windows 8-ism of "throw absolutely everything we can think of into it at once."

It's a multi-touch tablet. With an optional-but-not-really keyboard-touchpad cover. And a front and rear camera. And a pen that doesn't attach anywhere. (Fun game: in Surface ads, watch for them to produce and disappear the pen. It comes out of nowhere and disappears to nowhere.)

It runs a laptop OS (and runs it well, mind you) and therefore picks up some annoying laptop-isms: by default, unlocking requires your Windows password. (You can, thankfully, enable a PIN to unlock.) Like a laptop, it enters hibernation mode and then requires a couple of seconds to wake up if you leave it alone long enough. It also takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep (not hibernation).

As a small form-factor laptop, it works quite well. As a tablet - well, Windows 8.1 turns out to make a lousy tablet OS.

Although I find that using touch on desktop apps works surprisingly well. The handwriting support is also fairly good and you can get away with using just the pen in a surprising number of desktop apps.

It honestly isn't a bad whatever it is. It's just that it isn't really a good tablet.

I'm not sure the Surface Pro line is really competing with the iPad, though. I mean, according to Microsoft themselves, a Surface Pro 3 is equivalent to a MacBook Air.

(Disclaimer: I own a Surface Pro 3. They're probably right to compare it to the MacBook Air and not the iPad. I know everyone hates the "tablet UI" on the desktop but even with the Surface Pro 3 their tablet UI is still pretty terrible. I pretty much never leave the desktop. On my tablet. The few tablet-style apps I've tried for the Surface has all been terrible. It really does make a descent small Windows laptop, though!)