Yes, the US Government will spend $960,000,000,000 ($960B for the comma-deficient) to manage existing and new health care costs in the U.S.

The other option is that this bill does NOT pass, and we spend 1,090,000,000,000 ($1.09T) to provide exactly the same health care services we have now, to what ends up being a smaller population. (That's the cost you outline, plus the CBO's estimate of $130B savings over 10 years. That does not include the CBO's savings estimate of an additional $1.2T over the second 10).

Yes, they're big numbers. The question isn't if they're big, the question is which is more cost effective. Unless math has changed since I learned it, there is no argument to be presented that shows that providing health insurance for an additional ~32M people at $130B less money than would be spent anyway is not more cost effective than what we're doing now.

The Pidgin plugin also had a tendency to knock your browser session offline while your Pidgin session was online - couldn't consistently run both of them. This is much better.

That would be a valid argument if you were talking about increasing lifespan from, say, 50 to 60. Vaccination affects things like, expanding life span from 3 or 4 into the point where they can become productive workers. When you're killing off a significant portion of your population before they ever reach a productive-to-society age, then they become nothing but resource sinks in resources to care for them and time to administer the care. A society that loses so many of its young will never reach the point where it can address work imbalances and the like, because it's stuck trying to grow up, not out.

No, it narrows you down to somewhere within 252ish public IP addresses (even considering IPv6, which contains a standard rest-of-the-address to "encapsulate" IPv4). Very few people (I'll even go so far as to say "the majority of users") on broadband services across most of the world truly appear to the outside world as an actual unique IP address, which is to say you and the guy at the desk/apartment/house/whatever next to you has a discrete and separate network address from you. Your connection is generally going to be NAT translated in some form or another from a private-network-space IP address to a public address. You will appear, to the world, to be generally the same "computer" as several users around you in the network.

If we want to move to an education system whereby teachers are valued based on their ability to teach, and the performance of their students, then the teachers own their lesson plans. This is assuming, of course, that they developed the plan in the first place. Let's just say that's the case in order to make the discussion clearer.

Teachers, good ones, develop their methods for teaching students. If those methods lead to better student understanding, then let them sell them to other teachers. It's really no different than all of the stupid process patents that we rail over, except they're not actually trying to lock them away, they're trying to share them with their peer group and get themselves some benefit in the process.

I don't see a big deal here. They figured out how to build a better mousetrap, let them market it. Unless a school district contains similar "work product" provisions in their teacher contracts that many tech people have in theirs, the schools have no right to the processes and products developed by the teachers for their use.

Define "superior conflicts-resolution system". Currently, TiVo's scheduler is smart enough to, through the priority set in your season passes, work around jsut about any conflict. For overlaps, TiVo's now offer you the ability to trim/crop recordings that overlap in one direction or the other (end one early or start one late). What did the Hauppage system do differently that those of us on TiVo don't realize we're missing?

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