The problem is that by running with the most plausible interpretation, you give up the opportunity to shake your head sadly whilst piously intoning moral platitudes.

Well, it is still a fact that I think Zuckerschmuck is a clueless wanker who believes in a simplistic solution to a complex problem, while at the same time being a massive douchebag.

How was that? I'm not sure I know which words are meant to convey piety, and I may have missed the whole platitude thing, I'm not sure. ;-)

I'm good to very good at math and interested in computers. So I thought I would be a programmer.

I'm middling at math, but gravitated to programming.

When I was in university, I knew people who were brilliant at math but couldn't code worth shit and couldn't grasp some of the basic concepts or programming. (Once had to explain to a fellow student why if her numerical analysis project was going to take 9 months to run as she'd written it, she would fail the course -- she was scary brilliant at math, but couldn't figure out how to use loops and if statements, it just made no sense to her.)

As much as everybody says "programming is just math", it really really isn't. It's rooted in math, but the actual practice of coding is nothing like it (not to me at least).

There's a reason why computer courses have a double tassel distribution ... not everybody can wrap their head around what it means. I have no idea of why that is, but it's been a real thing for a very long time.

Assuming a Coal Miner can't code is presupposing a lot about their work duties and abilities.

Again, nobody is saying a specific coal miner can't ever learn to code. But to say that you expect to teach all coal miners to become coders is absurd. It simply won't work.

In my experience, first year CS culls out the entrants by about 50% or so. Either because of the way it is taught, or something about how you have to think. But, as you said, not everybody groks it.

To that end, Zuckerburg's quote sounds like it could have come straight from the mouth of Marie Antoinette.

Let them eat code.

I don't think anybody is saying "there is no coal miner on the planet you can teach to code".

What they're saying is "do not count on training all coal miners to write code and expect that to work".

Zuckerschmuck saying "teach them to code and everything will be great", then he really is clueless and out of touch. But, we knew that anyway.

The reach-through feature allows the user to switch from interacting with the personal screen to reaching through it to interact with the tabletop or the space above it.

Right, and god forbid what I want to interact with involves electricity.

Brilliant, I'll just reach through this veil of mist and unplug this power cord or grab my cell phone.

Sounds like neat tech, but the whole getting sprayed in order to reach through it seems like something I could live without.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows a small region of empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to quantum fluctuations.

I'm afraid my poor little brain is ill equipped to understand this.

So, if there was 'nothing', WTF is there to be 'quantum fluctuating'?

A fluctuation of nothing produced everything?

Sometimes (okay, often) ... when people speak of quantum mechanics I have no idea of WTF they're saying or how it translates into reality.

I despise the MAFIAA, but if the telecom doesn't have the right to disclose reasonable information upon request then that puts the copyright holders in a situation that gives them some real ammo to demand more law enforcement involvement.

You still need a legally acceptable threshold instead of "because we say so".

And Canada has privacy legislation which this more or less completely ignores.

Essentially it puts the rights of copyright holders (without requiring proof) above those of the people they claim to be investigating. And since we know the *AAs are pretty much incompetent (or malevolent) in how they do their searches, this will be abused and have very bad results.

Unfortunately, since the American *AAs are more or less writing draft legislation to put in the hands of lawmakers, the net result is a very one-sided piece of legislation which is designed to give them everything they want, and completely fuck the rest of us over.

The possibility of abuse of this law if it's passed is mind-boggling.

And that's kind of the point. The current government here is a "law and order, pro business, we can spy too" type of conservative.

They've been steadily trying to expand what government can do, ignoring our own national privacy laws, and generally trying to remake the laws into how they perceive how they should be (and generally ignoring anybody telling them why they can't).

Since we've got a First Past the Post electoral system, and even though they only got about 39% of the popular vote, they have a majority government and have more or less been doing as they please.

I do hope the Canadian people wakes up and take their politicians to task.

Trust me, we're trying.

The problem is the government wants to pass laws which do not adhere to either our Constitution or some of our other legal frameworks. And they more or less act like their will supercedes our laws.

Big deal, so I'm neither a lawyer nor up on my latin.

I still know what it means, and that Gonzales said it didn't exist as a right.

Do you have anything intelligent to add to the topic?

Jeff, I'm sorry that you're paying more. I'm envious that your state is implementing single-payer, though! California considers and rejects the bill every session, so far.

MVP itself is not-for-profit. Interesting that they think the pool in the two states they focus on is now that much more expensive. I can't imagine why.

Thanks

Bruce

To pick a nit, if you require medical attention after an auto accident, typically the at-fault driver's auto policy would need to cover that.

If they are so kind to stick around and your expenses do not exceed the limits.

Certainly such scams existed, but 30 seconds of googling can typically separate the good from the fraud.

The web helps. At the time, I was not able to see the plan until the salesman was present.

I think you are confusing laissez-faire capitalism with freedom. In this particular case the insurers had the task of operating a risk pool, but no incentive to allow any but the lowest risk customer into the pool. Freedom was harmed overall, as a significant number of people had no viable path to medical care.

There are a good number of people who, like you, would feel less encumbered if they were able to live on an island without any civil services and thus without any burden to pay for their fellow man rather than themselves. My surmise is that few of them would survive very long. However, I would encourage you to try if you are able to find such a place. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.

If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans. Ultimately, it should result in better management of the expense.

I'll certainly take Mr. Gonzales over Mr. Holder

As opposed to Gonzales who said habeus corpus wasn't really a right? Who said that torture was OK?

You can keep him.

I'm not defending Holder, but Gonzales didn't seem to have the barest clue about what the Constitution said and what it meant.

Sorry, but pretty much anybody from the Bush era (and quite honestly a bunch who are still in Washington) has no business working at a place which has a privacy policy.

If you have so few choices in that state, I'll bet the problem is government-based cronyism.

I think it's called laissez-faire capitalism. Too little regulation means that the market will concentrate on the most profitable customers and not necessarily provide any service at all to others.

The point of insurance is that it's a risk pool that lowers the cost of saving to pay for a catastrophe for every participant, based on the probability that most folks won't need it. But it doesn't work for the folks who aren't allowed in the pool. And the reality is that everyone will need it sometime, and that it is normal for a society for some proportion of its people to be sick.