It depends on who "we" is. As others have pointed out, this portion of the law limits how much more private insurers can make smokers pay than non-smokers. This has nothing to do with what the publicly-funded (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, etc.) programs can and cannot do.

Unless your state requires community rating from your private insurers, they already do charge people more for being fat or being a woman, or working in a dangerous occupation. If they could make more money doing so, I'm sure they'd charge people who sleep around more, assuming sleeping around correlates with higher health care costs (I assume it does).

It's just like car insurance, dude. If they decide that you meet a particular risk profile that says you'll cost a lot more in claims, they're going to charge you more in premiums. Hell, if having blue eyes correlated with increased heath care expenses, they'd charge you more for that. It isn't moralizing; it's about being on the right side of an actuarial calculation. If you don't agree with that, you're free to write to your state representative and ask them to require community rating and guaranteed issue from the private insurers that do business in your state (or write to Congress if you want a federal standard).

Really?

I don't have a problem with torrenting stuff, but come on. It's not like 99.9% of the stuff out there can't be found with a minimum amount of effort.

Same here.

The dog chewed a laptop cable. It was cheaper to have Amazon overnight a new one than it was to buy it at the local Best Buy. $20 cheaper. The brick & mortar stores that deal in electronics thrive on the folks who simply don't have enough information to make an informed decision. As soon as they get wise, they order online.

I've been looking for the same, and never came across those. Thanks.

Now I have another quibble. ARM CPUs are always soldered on to the board. They can't be upgraded w/o upgrading the entire board. I'm waiting for the day when you can build from scratch a rig using an ARM CPU just like you would with an x86 CPU, using commodity parts from NewEgg, etc.

I'd be more than happy to short the hell out of Bitcoins if I had the resources. And even if I did, a smart man once said the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent.

That's a feature, but it's not a good feature to have (for Bitcoin). A currency's success is measured by its ability to facilitate commercial transactions, not by its ability to make you rich simply by holding it. That's what *investments* are for. Currency isn't an investment and shouldn't be.

The fact that there could never be any more Bitcoins ever again would encourage speculation and hoarding, which is not what you want from a medium of exchange.

If you're worried about currency devaluation and put some of your money/time into Bitcoins, that makes sense as a hedge against inflation (ie. an investment), but nothing more.

Yes. And you can't have an intelligent designer without an intelligent designer designer.

From there it's turtles all the way down.

Indeed. I'm a bigger fan of the GPL in most cases, but there is room enough in the world for both camps (crazy talk, I know). Now you have your compiler under a suitable license for you and your fellow travelers.

[citation needed]

I think you know the answer to your question of why certain technology must be outlawed or taxed more. It's because by the time the technology becomes cheaper than fossil fuels we will have already done the damage.

I'll meet you half way and say, lets just get rid of all the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels that already exist and then tax people on the externalities they create. Hell, that in and of itself might be enough to make renewables cost effective.

I'm reasonably sure we're past the point of no return, so it might not even matter.

Yes, criminal copyright infringement is that way. Civil infringement is a strict liability tort. That means you're on the hook even if you took reasonable steps not to infringe and did not ever intend to infringe.

So you could still be on the hook for the infringement of copyright if a copyright owner took you to civil court. Going to federal PMITA prison would require mens rea.

Echoing SiriusStarr, make sure you install the tweak tool and get familiar with the shortcuts.

I complained like crazy when Debian Sid went to GNOME 3.0. I moved to XFCE + Compiz for awhile until I decided to give it another try. It took a few weeks to get used to, but now that I have retrained myself and gotten used to it, I wouldn't go back.

I don't think its for everyone and the fact that 3.0 was very unconfigurable is what gave everyone a heart attack. It's getting better. Some people will never like it, and that's fine. Different strokes for different folks.

If they're in another country, it's hard to get them to pay anything in a civil case, DMCA or otherwise. I don't know what to tell you other than "talk to a lawyer".

Yes, that's generally the case. On an "at will" contract, you can be terminated for any reason that isn't explictily illegal. If the employer believes they were fired for an illegal reason, they have to make the case. The assumption is that terminations are for legal reasons absent evidenct to the contrary.

The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.

I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.