That's only true if you are one of those dopes who believes that price and profit can't be regulated.

The medical economy can work in one of two ways:

1) I have to lower prices as costs go down or my competitors will and I won't get any revenue at all and I'll go out of business.

2) I have to lower prices as costs go down or the government will slap me with a big fine and take away my license and I'll go out of business.

The reason (1) doesn't happen now is because the GOVERNMENT often gives medical-industry participants a patent or license that prevents competitors from getting into their field of speciality. Since it's the government that creates the scarcity and thus the opportunity for excess profit, then the government has every right to take its share of the value from that and either tax you down to a nominal yet lucrative profit, or fine you into lowering your prices to that level, i.e., system (2).

Right now, the people in the medical industry know full well that (2) can be implemented if the democracy only figures out that we have the power to impose it, so they spend a lot of money keeping the democracy from figuring that out. Not least by falsely demonizing government control of the economy (which they're only too glad to have in the case of the patents and licenses, etc.) and by generally tearing down government so it has little power to interfere.

And if a weak government and expensive healthcare mean more people are sick and the sick are more desperate, well, that's just synergistic with their goal of squeezing every last dollar out of anyone who prefers being broke to being dead.

I haven't seen a BSOD in a long while. But the past several times I thought my computer was beyond dead, a reboot, or a repair with the repair DVD, brought it back to life.

So, really, I'm hoping they luck into that, just to get rid of the wailing of the relatives of the deceased on the customer-service line.

They aren't lazy, they're productive, and taking advantage of the resources available.

When they're tired of putting the first-to-market markup and the bleeding-edge markup in their bank accounts, then they'll address reports of sluggishness or resource starvation in less-profitable market segments.

Right now, though, the fruit that are hanging low are fat and ripe and still fit in their basket.

N1 never had it and never will, neither. Neener.

You recognize that it's a company problem and that you're not enough manpower to get it done.

You get management to recognize that by explaining to them that it needs more manpower and it needs to be done.

If they balk, you're stuck dealing with it on your own, and it will be slow, and there may be times you just can't change something without changing several other things and you can't change them all in a short enough time to prevent the company from grinding to a halt, so you'll just have to leave them.

1. If all you want is "good results", then computer models are fine.

2. it's still expensive to build a model of anything natural, and still can't be perfectly accurate, because you can always make it an even more detailed copy. shorelines are fractal, and so are all the textures and texture mixes. at a certain point, you might as well just run experiments on the actual thing.

You can make a computer model fit a physical model.

Your physical model will never fit your computer model. At least, not if your physical model is supposed to be natural.

Then I'm guilty of not wanting people to be jealous of my naked body.

The cable company actually gave me 3 months free of all the movie channels, probably out of fear I was going to switch to the competition (around here it's directv vs dish network vs. cable vs. the believe-it-or-not the fucking phone company). And you're completely right. 50 new channels, and I find maybe 1 movie a week worth watching, and it's usually on at some ridiculous hour. I can't believe people pay upwards of $10 per month for just a portion of these bandwidth wasters.

No, when we have technology that reduces the problem of commercials and bad shows, then we will have solved the problem.

Of course, that technology has been around since the day the first home VCR was powered up.

It's called "time-shifting your favorite shows and fast-forwarding through the ads."

So the problem now is that people like to whine about a problem that was solved long ago. I can solve that by applying the principle of "closing my browser window and going to dinner."

No, it's $100 because there are a number of other devices that do exactly the same thing that cost about $100 but don't suck you in to the Apple content system, which they can then use to manipulate more $'s from your pocket.

You must be a viewer. Advertisers consider that a feature, not a bug.

It works for you because you happen to have a particular set of equipment that doesn't have bugs in their remote database.

I have two units that don't work unless I use variant names for them.

And (unless they've fixed this, which they didn't for the 3 years I was bitching about it) heaven help you if you replace one of your pieces of AV equipment with something else. You might as well dissolve your remote in acid and start with a fresh one.

That isn't a TV problem. That's a the-planet-is-spherical problem. The solution to that is simple, but requires an addition of massively expensive infrastructure.

TV can be fixed using exactly the equipment that is currently installed and for sale for cheap, by changing none of it.

TV can be fixed by lining TV executives up against the wall and letting the ninjas go to town on them.

Remove those, and they'll be replaced by infomercials. You won't get Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2012 or anything like that.