And what, pray tell, is Harley Street?

Hint: It has bugger all to do with motorbikes.

No, it does not make you heartless, it makes you the author of a completely and utterly useless comparison.

If you assume food is a basic human right, then that does not equate to running a restaurant and having to feed bums off the street.

If you think of food as a basic human right, look to the billions in food aid to the Third World. A very significant part of the funding comes from governments around the globe. That is food as a basic human right - not your poor attempt to question the assertion that healthcare is a right.

So, in the honest-to-goodness telephony market, there are a bunch of dodgy rural providers who rip you off when you call a number in their fiefdom. As is poorly explained in the summary and article, they're trying to maximise the number of calls to their numbers - by selling them to sex line and chatroom operators and sharing the connection revenue.

AT&T and a load of other telcos have complained about this as they are hoisted by their own petard (free calls to landlines), and the net neutrality principle. The FCC are being painfully slow in sorting this out and giving the rural providers a good bitchslap.

I don't blame Google for not routing to these numbers, there are clearly defined prefixes for premium rate services and this is just a dodge to get round that. Eventually the loophole will be closed.

When I studied English at school I had an interesting time of it. I generally got on well with the teachers, got excellent marks for my in-class work, and, unlike the vast majority of my peers, had no trouble with classics like Shakespeare.

Then I failed the O-grade English exam everyone sits at 16. I was baffled. My teachers were baffled. They wrote it off as an anomaly and filed an appeal against my result using my classwork and the preliminary exam I'd taken earlier. I was also assured that even if I did not get the appeal, I would be allowed to study for and sit the Higher exam.

I did just that, and got an excellent grade in the Higher exam. My teachers were disappointed that I chose not to study English further, but I was much more interested in my science and mathematics courses.

It was when I had my first job in IT that I discovered that my "excellent English" was lacking in a number of respects. My first boss was an old ex-IBM guy who'd been in in the industry since punched cards were commonplace. My repeated casual faults were knocked out of me, and for specifications and proposals I learned to be far more concise.

Nowadays I am used to seeing screeds of specifications that make far, far worse mistakes than I used to. The worst ones are those that come from India. Senior management look at the lengthy buzzword-compliant nonsense and seem to think, "good, we saved lots of money." I just shake my head. You can tell a mile away which projects will be a complete failure - because it is painfully apparent in the specifications who understands the actual requirements, or more accurately who doesn't.

I saw a consumer TV piece that really brought this home to me. The reporter asked a number of professors to provide sample assignments they would generally use with undergraduates. These questions were then submitted to a number of websites that offer to have Indian graduates write the paper for you. Every single returned paper was given a failing mark by the professors.

English may be an official language in India, but in so many cases they just write to meet certain criteria with a grammar check using Microsoft Office.

The correct quote is, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."

Really?

What they don't tell you is that the only reason there is water on the Moon is because Neil Armstrong needed a pee.

Many moons ago, I was told a tale about sending out mass mailings, not this "slip of the mouse" email stuff.

The bank's marketing and finance guys have come up with this glossy brochure of stuff for their top customers, based on something like highest 5% balance holders. There's a letter drafted to accompany the brochure, it just remains to do the little personalising touches for the final run.

Someone forgets to replace the output placeholder with the salutation generation program that'll even spew out "Dear Sir Whimsey-Porpoise".

The final letters are printed, enveloped, and mailed. The salutation from the placeholder piece of code? "Dear Rich Bastard,".

There were those who turned up to these "Town Hall" meetings screaming that nobody was going to take away their goddamned Medicare and replace it with government healthcare.

You're left wondering, were they home schooled, or is it not just the US health system is fucked up.

I regret to inform you that, despite this admission, you are not allowed to stop paying to prevent people dying on the streets. Somebody might get the wrong idea and think it was a politician's fault.

You've certainly had your share of idiot politicians in America.

As I pointed out already, the UK is not a good example, but more socialist countries like France and Sweden have perfectly functional systems, higher standards of care, and better life expectancy. They're also paying at least 20% less per-capita than you're average insured American.

A huge part of the problem is ideology being put before reality. As an American, you've been conditioned to expect to pay for healthcare, and in looking at other countries where there is universal healthcare a contemptuously cynical streak emerges. You don't want healthcare funded via taxation just in case you're paying more than someone else, heaven forbid someone being unemployed.

Human lives, and the long-term quality of such, are dependent on the availability of healthcare. So, why is anyone allowed to run this as a profit-making enterprise?

After all, you don't hand your air traffic control over to be run as a for-profit business - for similar reasons, human lives.

Healthcare is only, truly fundamentally fucked in the United States of America - and the Third World.

Damn pig-headed ignorance, and millions of spin doctoring, advertising, and call-girl funds to keep your corrupt, obscenely profiteering insurance industry in business.

Let the drooling morons like Sarah Palin trot out how terrible the UK health service is, it certainly has been fucked by the same free-market dickhead politicians as America is infested with. They'd never dare compare their more expensive non-universal system with that of France or Sweden.

If you're in America, you should be insisting on a minimum standard for everyone. They get it anyway when they crawl into an accident and emergency ward and part of your insurance premiums covers "not being heartless inhumane bastards". Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with topping up with private insurance, that should cover things like a private room, TV/internet, and perhaps access to a private hospital for routine procedures you might otherwise have to wait a few weeks for.

They've been working to make 'that damn colour' acceptable for decades.

But first they had to ban smoking everywhere so it doesn't go nicotine yellow in a few weeks.

Pick something the US and the Brits can agree on... Blame the French.

Learn what a monopoly is and you'll come off less like an ignorant fucktard Microsoft fanboi.

Uh, go drool elsewhere.

The gibberish you posted was a waste of electrons.

Just thought I'd tell you that rather than take advantage of the fact that Slashdot seems willing to let me moderate your response to my post.