There is no government, only people who wants to be reelected.

And if they can make the government spend less on health care, they can lower taxes and maybe be reelected? You see?

This of could of course induce a fair amount of short sightedness into the system, but there a ways to take this into consideration as well.

The most important thing is not if the government is able run health as efficiently as possible. The important question is who earns money on what. In case of 100% private health care, everybody (even insurance companies!) earns money when someone is sick. In the case of government run health care the government loses money if people are sick. So they have an incentive to keep people well and only recommend useful medications. I think that's the important incentive here to take into consideration. Do people really want a system where the doctor earns more money if you're more sick and so on?

I am curious to what positive effect this might have in reality?

My favorite comment of the day. I like when you can put both parties in a quarrel to shame. It happens too seldom.

This is comment about comments and I realize I might be doing the same thing I'm complaining that other's are. Actually I'm pretty sure I am. Overall I dont like when comments like 'what's this doing on slashdot?'. Give attention to topics that are interesting to you personally. If a comment is not interesting, why do even bother giving it time? That's a waste of time. Reading an a boring article and then complaining about it.

I think I overpriced the Pamela Anderson alternative :/

Here is a crazy idea:

What if the news papers started give their readers a choice in how they want news. Have a basic fee for the content, say 15$/month. Then add a certain sum for each medium you want to use. Say 8$/month for paper distribution, 1$/month for digital edition distribution. 1300$/month for the version were Pamela Anderson comes to your house and reads you the newspaper.

Then there would be no discussion on how to charge. Each medium would be priced accordingly to costs of delivery and demand.

Hasn't this always been the goal for journalism? There may have been a time recently when the crowds were more interested in what happened the last ten seconds than real journalistic news, but I'm glad if we are heading back in the direction of quality journalism.

The problem with blogs as source for 'enlightened commentery' is that is difficult to know in which way a single blogger is biased. A newspaper is usually well known to be biased towards one end or the other, and therefore it's easier to judge their content.

As an iPhone user, i agree. The things that work on the iPhone are amazingly nice to use. But there is so much usability lacking. Hey, i cant even send someones number as TEXT MESSAGE easily. It need email or mms to do this.

But really, iphone as a phone really really really sucks. Missed calls, bad reception anyone? These things Nokia worked out in the mid 90's....

And the appstore? Everbody's talking about the number of apps. But are they REALLY that incredible? A lot of them is just there to get around limitations of the iPhone (like non-synching todo lists).
And while it might look like the amount of apps is not transferrable to another platform I think it's pretty easily done. Mostly it's just about porting the interface. The content of most apps is the important part (like my personal fitnes trainer!).

The web browsing is really nice on the iphone, but that part cant be impossible to duplicate!
After using the iphone at first I was like 'wow, omg', but then... it's a bit of a letdown. It really stands in the way i want to do stuff too often to be 'as good as everybody says'.

Just my 2 centimeters...

And that's modded insightful and not funny why??

LMCTFY (let me correct that for you)

I'm totally agreeing.
The first things comes to mind: That's the normal description on how a battery dies.

When like 50 million laptops start using Win7 at the same time, there's a lot of them that had a battery failure waiting. While it may seem strange as a personal experience, it's certainly not from statistical viewpoint.
Not without more data.

Or if there's only one dollar, how about using euros? We have plenty! And they are worth something ;)

This is definitely not just a monetary issue. It is a political and military issue as well.

Creating safe, sustainable energy production, without need of any kind of import of any kind (oil, gas, coal, biofuels) would make any country a LOT less dependent on others. This has been one of the Holy grails in politics the last 5 decades.

I find it VERY hard to believe that successful fusion technologies would have problems with finding funding for fullscale operation :) Especially in the US.

I'm from Finland. I was to the US last summer and have a brother working there. I must say a lot of you systems are hopelessly old and unefficient :) Anyway, I think here a committed criminal always has a record. But economic mistakes (like neglecting rent, or something similar) disappear after say 5 or 10 years, if you are able to somehow pay your debts afterwards.