Except private medical care was very cheap until government got involved. Anyone who has been involved with medicine, especially billing, since before Medicare will tell you how the rise in the cost of medicine has been driven by Medicare.

Socialized medicine is not going to give everyone a "Navy Doctor." In fact your Navy Doctors may just highlight one of the problems with socialized medicine. It took taxes taken from 150 million to 200 million people or so (over the course of your full service) to provide excellent medical care for, what? 455 682, (active duty plus reserve)? If that same revenue had to provide medical care for the same 200 million people, the quality would drop or the system would go bankrupt, which is what i have heard reported is slowly happening to the UK and Canada. I remember a report from last year on Canada having to privatize a small portion of it's medical industry for budgeting concerns. I think it had to do with pharmacies and prescriptions. Norway pays for their medical coverage through government owned fossil fuel deposits.

The mess we have going on in the world of private health insurance was actually caused in large part by the involvement of Medicare, as many people who have been involved with medical billing since before Medicare will tell you.

Lastly, the 'socialized medicine' bills that have been proposed in the US so far, are absolutely horrible. Even if socialized medicine could work better than anything else, none of the bills that have been involved in the debates in the last year would give us such a system. I have read articles from 3 or 4 different people who have actually read the bills in their entirety, from lawyers to doctors, and the bills we have had to choose from would utterly destroy medicine in this country as well as make massive end-runs around the 4th amendment.

It is not governments function to take care of it's people. In fact it has been shown time and time again that attempts by the federal government to do so have caused more harm to our society than they have prevented from federal aid for disaster areas to medical coverage to education. It's not good to be dependent upon your government, eventually that becomes an avenue of control.

No. An agent of some entity is specifically one who is acting on their behalf. Having a government issued medical license does not make one an agent of the government, the clerk behind the counter at the licensing agency is the agent of government. Accepting payments from Medicare does not make one an agent of the government, the claim reviewer deciding if a claim is covered by Medicare and then if Medicare should pay out is the agent of government. Cooperation with the CDC does not make one an agent of the government. Allowing the government to dictate the advice one gives as a doctor does make one an agent of the government, as recently was reported in the UK. Doctors were mandated to give advice on lowering patients carbon footprint, such advice is not medical in nature and has no business coming from a doctor unsolicited. What do public schools have to do with a doctor being an agent of government?

why do so many russians call you?

everyone knows women are programmed with Brainfuck

for culture, yes.

There is only one real solution to the problem of illegal downloads, and that is to make them legal.

i say either draw districts according to geography...or let them do it still, but they have to do it the year *before* the census without any polling.

'the market' is just a total sum of goings on, like 'society'.

artificial props like the DMCA and copyright are far worse than what the market can pull on its own.

and the banks didn't walk off a cliff freely, they got pushed and also did some pulling. the banks don't set the fed. interest rate and low interest rates for too long put us here.

like these companies feel towards their profits? if people dont want to pay for the product then the profits aren't deserved, the companies fold and we find other things to buy.

that's a GOOD thing, something new will come around.

the situation of scarcity that allowed this market is gone, let it fall and let a new market rise.

let all market participants succeed and fail only on their own merits, no legislation, no false scarcity.

next time you say we don't have the right to share copyrighted media go read the 9th amendment, yes we do have that right.

and if you debate this on the side of the companies don't forget that they already are getting government support in the form of corporate protection, add onto that the DMCA and all the rest the current situation is undeniably unfair to the point of being unjust.

data cannot be owned and the legal game of twister that's happened in order to try and allow it is sickening. it needs to go away.

unless it's been mentioned and i ahven't noticed:

alice.org

scratch.mit.edu

you said for all students, so i assume this includes the ones who are not 'naturals'. give these a look over, they are mostly to convey the basic ideas of programming (at least object oriented and procedural). mit's scratch seems the most promissing to me though, but i'm not a teacher.

that comic is syndicated, publishers don't like controversy or bad press or lawsuits. it's far more likely that any threats made to the cartoonist came from his publishers.

you don't have to stop and let them look through your bags. assuming you aren't stealing anything you own everything inside your bags and have no legal obligation to let them look inside. the worst they can legally do is ban you from coming back to the store, but they can do that for any reason at all if they want.

at least in california to be arrested or detained by store personnel (citizens arrest) they have to see you take something off of their shelves, keep visual contact to make sure you don't put it back, and then see you make an attempt to leave without paying for it.

in my opinion instead of looking through my stuff they should just not have crap i can buy past the point i've already paid at. anyone familiar with fry's knows what i mean.

and yes, i've done my fair share of dive tackles on shoplifters in the parking lot; the manager said i was totally parallel to the ground.

there is an off chance some of the laws have changed in recent years but i doubt it. although it wouldn't surprise me too much.

what did you think would happen when they gave the keys to the kingdom to a marketing guy? now if apple could come out with a no frills, stable-as-the-earth-itself bsd based server, sans hipness MSFT could be in serious trouble.

i've been saying for a while that MS has 10 years left, and by my count we've got 6 or 7 left, but i think at that time MS will be left with at most 60% market share and linux will be popular enough that companies besides id will write/port games for it. i don't however think linux will ever take over compeltely, but i'd be really happy with a 10% market share.

notice that hardware manufacturers want something besides windows. they keep poking and prodding linux, they may not give it full attention yet, but they keep looking. i think they *do* want to loosen MS' grip on their balls. HP supports nearly all of their printers on linux and some (one?) OEM's have offered linux on their products.

i freely admit that i WANT Microsoft to fail hugely and you can argue with me about that all you want, but first you have to admit that they fucking deserve it.

wait...Schrodinger was a globetrotter?

it's a soldiers duty to disobey such orders.