It's perfectly possible to have private insurers. You just have to:

1. Mandate a minimum, standard base package.
2. Mandate that all insurers have to accept anyone for that base package.

Like in the Netherlands. Insurers can then compete on price for that base package and any extras and everyone can get insurance for basic health care.

Vote?

Showing that once again the root of the problem is in the retarded electoral system of the USA, that gravitates towards having only two parties, which means that politicians don't have to care about the people.

I think that campaign finances are the root of the problem that we should attack...

Actually, it's the "winner takes all" setup that causes the two-party system. There is only 1 presidential position to distribute, meaning people will only vote for one of the two candidates that actually stand a chance of winning.

Everybody in the Dutch talks as if the man is convicted already. He's not. The case is not solved until a judge has had the last word, and given the inaccuracies in DNA matching I'm very interested in what a judge has to say about this.

The question does not specify the performance function used to measure "better off". I selected that I'm better off because four years ago I was single and now I'm not. So financially my situation might be worse (Girls are expensive ;)) but mentally I'm a lot better off.

The wording of the DMCA is very sneaky here. They only have to make sure they represent the owner of the work that they claim the target work is infringing upon.
So of I make a video of a flower, then my lawyer can send take down requests to any video, even if that video has no flowers in it, as long as my lawyer only claims that he is representing me and thinks the target video infringes my video.
Only if another lawyer, that is not my lawyer, claims he is representing me and thinks that the target video is infringing my video, then the perjury bit comes into action.

Of course IANAL and I might have misunderstood the law because I don't speak legalese.

1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.

If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.

3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want.

Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.

Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.

Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.

9. The mimeograph mix:

Unfortunately, this UMG music-content is not available in Germany, because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.

Wow, the things that count as music nowadays...

Give me your voting password or you're fired.

Your proposed system fails to deal with the problem.

You completely miss the single most important aspect of a voting system that makes it fundamentally different from a banking system:
It must be impossible for anyone to see or prove what vote a voter has cast.

If that single requirement is not met, then the whole system, regardless of how secure it is in all other aspects, is useless.

A banking system does not have that requirement, since your bank is allowed to know who you transferred money to and from whom you got money.

You're still stuck in the "winner takes all" mentality. When the winner has only 22% that means he has to negotiate with other parties to form a coalition that has 51%. That means the winner can still not impose anything but has to negotiate with his coalition partners. This will lead to at least 51% of the population being represented.

Once those negotiations are done the coalition can rule, as long as they don't do stupid stuff that makes the coalition fall apart. There is no problem of a "cacophony of voices" since the coalition speaks with one voice.

The most important thing is that parties will actually have to listen to the people, since new parties can spring up very easily, and thus their 22% can evaporate in no time. New parties are not without a chance, since the winner is not big enough to rule and needs to form a coalition.

This combined makes a system with proper proportional representation much, much more democratic than what the USA has now. And that also makes that the USA will never change system, since it is not in the interest of the ruling two parties. The two ruling parties don't want democracy, they want power.

I have my tasks distributed over different virtual desktops. One desktop per task. When I click a program icon it always means: Open a new window for that program on the current desktop. I never want it to switch to the window that is on another desktop, because that window belongs to a different task, and I'm not working on that task. If I where working on that task I would be on the desktop of that task.

Programs that do not want multiple instances of itself started already have that covered in their start scripts, they already open a new window in the existing instance instead. (firefox, chrome, netbeans, etc)

So I switched to xfce.

Exactly, each task gets its own virtual desktop.

I think many desktop environment designers have lost track of what a task is. Multi tasking does not refer to a computer doing multiple things, but to a human doing multiple things. This means it is very important to group windows belonging to the same task, not windows belonging to the same program.

Each task uses multiple windows. One program can have windows in more than one task, but windows are generally not shared between tasks. Many of my tasks involve a terminal window and a browser window, but each task gets its own browser window(s) and its own terminal window on its own desktop.

That means that it is easy to switch between windows in the same task with alt-tab, because there are only a few windows on the desktop for that task. It also means it is easy to switch between tasks, since that is just a switch to a different desktop.

In a situation with multiple monitors, each monitor gets its own panel and window-list. That makes it easy to switch to "the browser window on the right monitor".

Both gnome and XFCE support multiple panels, and you can set a panel to be on a specific display. Right now I'm using XFCE so I can describe how to do that there (my laptop has only one screen right now, so I can't describe the exact details):

1. Right-click an existing panel and choose: Panel / Panel Preferences
2. Click the + at the top of the dialog, that adds a panel. The new panel is selected in the dropdown so you are editing the new panel.
3. In this dialog you can also select the monitor the panel should appear on, or set the panel to span two monitors. Make it apear on the second monitor. Maybe you can also just drag the panel there.
4. To this panel, add a "window buttons" item.
5. Go to the properties of the "window buttons" item and de-select the toggle "Show windows from all monitors" and de-select "show windows from all workspaces"

Voilla, a taskbar on your second monitor, showing only the stuff of that monitor and virtual desktop.

In gnome 2 it goes similar, I think you can just drag a new panel to the second monitor.

Exactly!
I don't switch to a window, I switch to a different task. That task has a whole set of windows. By using multiple desktops the windows of the current task are all nicely listed in alt-tab, and on the taskbar. No window hunting at all.

Even worse is if there is only 1 taskbar even if you have two windows. I know I want the browser window of the current task that is on the right monitor. And I know it is the only browser window on the right monitor that belongs to the current task, but I still have to search it between all browser windows, because there is nothing that only lists the windows of the right monitor :(