"Healthcare" is a limited resource, consisting of the time and money of doctors and nurses, of the people involved in the creation of medical devices, compounds, and procedures. To say you have a "right" to healthcare is to say you have a right to the time and money of other people. Your right to free speech doesn't mean anyone has to provide you the means to speak, the right to keep and bear arms does not mean you will be furnished a gun. This is huge step in blurring the definition of a "right", and in my opinion just pushes us further towards a world with no consequences for failure or motivation to succeed.

Health insurance is not required for healthcare. They are two separate things. If a tree crashes through your roof and you don't have home owner's insurance, you can still get your roof fixed.

What we've done with Obamacare isn't "making healthcare affordable". It has nothing to do with looking at "why" various components of healthcare are expensive, it just bluntly tries to spread the money around and artificially cap expenses. We've basically made private insurance companies tax collectors. Everyone must pay them now. That means you and I are part owners of that big pool of money, and we will be responsible for making sure it never gets drained. With the added burden that now everyone must be covered by health insurance, the 9 pack a day smoker who eats 12 sausage links at each meal and can't leave the house will be free to drain that pool for their cholesterol medications, Mucinex, eventual cancer drugs, etc. But it is up to us to pay more and more to keep that pool full.

There are very few people who legitimately can't work. That group gets even smaller if you throw away the ones who very squarely put themselves in a position of being unprepared for life, whether through their financial idiocy of not saving a dime their entire lives, or just a series of boneheaded moves. There are some people who are poor, and nothing they could have ever reasonably done would have prevented it. But there are very few of those people, relatively speaking. Since we can't distinguish those who absolutely CAN'T do for themselves... the ones who actually NEED welfare... from those who have turned society's safety net into a hammock, our system of welfare is slowly eroding the beauty of life and living free... living and dying with the decisions you make. There are risks in life, there are unfair things that happen, there are unlucky out of nowhere things that will totally F you through no fault of your own. I would hope that people can donate their time, money, skills, kind words, to people in those situations. However, forcing "charity" like this is wrong on so many levels.

We have moved beyond charity. We have been marching towards becoming a society which has grown so used to comfort, so used to easy existence, that when something bad happens it must be someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility to fix. You're the victim because you paid for college and the degree didn't get you a job. You're the victim because you developed cancer. You're the victim because you don't have any money at retirement, but man those apartments you lived in your whole life sure looked good full of rental furniture. You're the victim because you made a sure-thing investment in a house, the value went to shit, and now you're under water.

We have abandoned tightly knit social circles, living within our means, and exchanged them for 700 Facebook friends who don't give a shit about us, 4 flat screen TVs in our apartments, and a thought that retirement is when we are given a bunch of money and get to stop working. We don't have any idea what emergency savings are. We lose our minds and are in complete despair that a car problem will cost us $250, but man Starbucks coffee sure is good every day. We think a 25 year old should still be living under the financial wing of his parents.

If people decided to throw their money into a pot and use it for charitable giving for medical purposes, that would be great. But they didn't. This healthcare law is not great, there's nothing great about it. But man, we 99% sure do love this safety-net-hammock thing.

Do you know why this pisses me off... Because for the last 10 years I've been living below my means. I didn't buy a TV until this year. I don't have cable. I pack a lunch to work. I have my fun, but overall, my friends and acquaintances view me as a "cheap bastard". I have a plan, and it's not to buy something cool next week. It's to make and save enough money that me, my wife, and any kids we end up having don't have to worry about 99% of surprise expenses. To have enough that I can retire when I've still got some life in me. If my motorcycle is old and rattly, I have one TV, I don't go out to eat often, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a jet ski, I don't have cable... I take 30% of my take home income and put it somewhere where I don't get to DO stuff with it this decade... What if I'm doing all of that and it doesn't matter? What if I should have just thrown caution to the wind, because screw it, someone will provide for me, and if I'm the only one who socked any money away, I'm going to be the only one who can give anyone else the handouts?

Just another baby step. Damn it.

That's not Google's doing, it's the legal hoops put up by the music industry in each country. Blame them.

If someone posted a story where someone claimed that their grandmother's pacemaker stopped working because the LHC was turned on, it would get voted down as unsupported circumstantial and anecdotal evidence. Most Slashdotters probably also laugh at people who are religious, even those who are convinced they witnessed a miracle from God at some point in their life. Come on guys. This is 99% a case of seeing what you want to see.

(whipsering) Miranda. (/whispering)

Two of the superficial things that I REALLY look out for... Handicap license plates and the old people that generally accompany them... and cell phones, whether texting or at the ear. I can't explain why... but my passenger notices it too... If someone is weaving back and forth in their lane, tail-gating, changing lanes without a turn signal, stopping rapidly, turning suddenly, driving too slowly, generally driving inappropriately for the conditions, or generally not giving other drivers notice of their upcoming actions... a cell phone being used is a REALLY good bet. On a bike, all of your inputs have to be dedicated to not getting squished, so you notice these things a lot more when your life really depends on it. In my truck, I personally turn into a moron when I pick up the phone to say "Can't talk, driving." Even holding the phone while it's on speaker is a distraction. I can't say why. Using bluetooth in the truck CAN be distracting depending on the discussion, but I don't notice it so much. Having a conversation on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth is definitely not something I do around town / on the twisties. This is enough evidence to tell me that I personally am not able to drive/ride as well when I'm on a phone, or even talking on Bluetooth. And I've seen enough to convince myself that people physically holding phones turn into total morons when driving. Or perhaps that most moron drivers just like to talk on the phone. Sure, some people think their cell phones don't impact their driving, but 95% of drivers think they're above-average drivers too. Hang up and drive. Or get a blue-tooth headset. Or a blue-tooth stereo. Whatever. That might still leave you 25% distracted, but it's way better than the simplified version of driving that cell phone users end up when holding it up to their face. "Follow car in front... follow car in front... follow car in front..."

Even more awesome.

And this is the best thing I've ever seen on it. I wish I could put this in the Slashdot survey as an example of the kind of stuff I come to Slashdot for. No, it's not breaking new ground, but this guy and his friends did a nerd thing just for the hell of it. And that's what we do. He planned it well, it executed well, and the way it was shared with us was awesome. That said... Why did the Go-Pro shield melt on the way up? Was it the heat conducted through the tube from the burning engines or something?

It's probably nothing... probably... but... well, no... we're well within normal bounds again. Continuing sequence.

I'm a fan of the Tea Party (I won't go so far as to call myself a member, since it's kind of like Anonymous in that regard... It is what you want it to be) and I've done more free work at my current job than I care to think about. I've also volunteered quite a bit of my time to causes slightly more important than my job. I have a feeling that if I thought my job was keeping planes from falling out of the sky, I'd probably keep doing it through a "blip" in my paycheck. Also, if I thought I would be potentially fired on the resumption of my pay. Would you really be comfortable walking away from your job just because the pay stopped temporarily? Don't pretend that wouldn't be held against you...

If he's examining the grey matter of easily distracted people, I assume he's doing this post-mortem... and it would make sense that these easily distracted people were then motorcycle riders who should have perhaps taken the bus.

Which will be recovered in the class action suit.

How did they manage to turn on their iPhone and get a decent enough signal for this testing? I'm sure it helps that it was probably sitting on a table and not being held^d^d^d^dattenuated by a human hand, but still.

This is incredibly well thought out. I forgot that since this was a free service, you're not permitted to have any concerns about the integrity of information stored on it. Man I'm an ass. Would love to hear how your tune changes when someone starts sending penis enlargement emails to your grandmother directly from your GMail account.

One of my associates manages the Facebook page of a local baseball team. A while back, they started getting iPhone spam posted to their team's Facebook page. No one could tell why. He was changing passwords, taking away peoples' access, running offline virus scans on their hard drives... Losing his mind with it. Each time one of these messages got posted, they'd lose 1,000 fans due to the spam. That's a big deal for companies that use Facebook. Turns out, the issue was due to the "mobile updates" feature. According to him, there's a random email address that you send updates to, and that gets posted to your page. This is not something you can disable, you can only request that the address be changed. The result is that you can basically spam a whole ton of random email addresses in this format and get your message posted to a load of random Facebook pages. Facebook has not been helpful in stopping this or disabling this feature for their account. Since then, I have seen this happen to my girlfriend's Facebook page as well as her friends', etc. This vulnerability is a wide spread problem. It may not be what happened in TFA (I did not read it), but it's out there. And it's insane.

Between Sony's adopted mantra of "Do all evil possible" and Google's of "Do no evil", when they get together that must become "Do nothing".