The worst corporations in history have been as you describe (e.g The Dutch East India Company, etc).

With the government hanging over them they just become extensions of it. Do you like Fascism? Because that is what you propose. Exactly what I'd expect from Nader.

Mussolini's oft quoted line about corporations is actually about these types of corporations.

You're viewing this much too short term. You are looking at the effects to date. YES the insurance companies love ObamaCare, but it is short sighted love. Healthcare under ObamaCare is making things much much worse, and much more expensive. WE are still at the front end of this thing, we haven't even begun to seen the long term problems that will come from it.

"Let's parse it for what you really mean--only those that had health insurance, not the millions that had jobs but no health insurance."

Lets give everyone a house, car, free food water .... MILLIONS of people can't afford these things too.

Socialism.

You missed the SCOTUS ruling. The only way the whole of ObamaCare is legal, is if it is a tax. Therefore it is a tax. I don't care what the IRS says, I care what the SCOTUS says. And so should you.

"Plans that charge more than they pay out are not legitimate."

Obama plans does the exact opposite, pays out more than it charges! YAY Socialism!
 

If you don't love programming COBOL will drive you out. But it's no worse than the project planning of the average PHB or the average codebase in service.

On residential streets, 'better than the shitty drivers' is still a dream for Google engineers. Highways are easy, residential is difficult.

Absent a major breakthrough in AI AND a couple more decades of Moore's law, fully automated cars won't be legal on the streets, in the lifetime of all /.ers reading.

If and when they do become legal they will be ubiquitous because people will never learn to be good drivers. They will never get their first 1000 hours in control.

Taxi's/Rental cars don't get loss of revenue, because it is known that the vehicles are INXS, the limit is passengers. Fleets are simply expected to keep a reserve.

Any significant level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Program crashing at startup? Okay, let's add debugging statements.

Can't get the debugging statements to execute? Okay, let's try removing code.

Doesn't fix the problem? Okay, let's keep removing more... and more...

A couple hours later, so much code was removed that the entire program had become nothing more than an empty main function that still crashed. This led to the following rule which I try to follow to this day: Make sure that you're actually compiling and executing the same copy of the code that you're modifying. ;)

What you've described has been known for centuries as a "book cipher". Benedict Arnold used one during the American Revolutionary War to protect his treasonous communication with England.

Anyway, there's a really fun way to beat this kind of encryption today. If Mallory can get Alice or Bob to send a copy of BLACK_SQUARE.BMP, it's literally game over. Imagine XORing your key against a bunch of binary zeros. The result is a big patch of the cleartext version of the data that is your key. Google will find that faster than you can.

I did this to a friend who had the same idea in a "you'll never guess my encryption" challenge. After getting him to download a copy of BLACK.GIF, I stared at the intercepted results for many seconds longer than I should have. It output a repeating string of something like SLASHDOTTODHSALS, so I said that's your key. He was arguing because his key was SLASHDOT, and his "algorithm" was to invert the letters of the key word and append a copy to the end of the key. My mind boggled because I was expecting encryption, not immediate success at recovering his key and data.

Now, let's say you're smart enough to avoid encrypting BLACK_SQUARE.BMP. I can still achieve most of the same results by predicting that your data stream will contain "Host:", "Content-Type:", "Accept: text/plain", "User-Agent:", "HTML", "BODY", and other such 'cribs' (I was all set up to apply this logic to the intercepted message from my friend mentioned above.) By matching fragments of my guesses with your message, I can look to see if I recover legible text. It only takes a surprisingly small amount of recovered text to be able to identify the source.

Yes, they have.

Is that a joke?

Well, except for the mass extinction.

AKA "PhD scientists studying this for the last few decades".

There is no one grand solution to AGW. There are a lot of smaller steps that added together might make a difference. Failing to do any of them certainly will not help.

"Satisfaction guaranteed, or we will refund the unused portion of your money."

Oh, wait. That's who over half the legislature is bought and paid for to represent.

Sounds like you are, in fact, buying mid-tier cables on sale, not buying junk cables.