Why read other comments when I'm responding to this one? Why do you try to change the subject by misdirection, then revert to the same argument I've already responded to?

You say the insurance industry has owned Washington, the third time you've said there's a distinction between the two. I respond again that there is no difference, that they are the same players. Google for "regulatory capture". Look at the list of high level government officials since the Constitution was adopted. As I said before, pretending they are different players is willful ignorance.

I've provided plenty of ways for you to refute me. You have provided none to buttress your claim, or to refute mine. Someone is stalling here, dodging the questions with repeated assertions without backing.

The same ignorance and naivete, and unsurprisingly, the same as Occupy Wall Street. They correctly identified Wall Street corruption but incorrectly laid all the blame on Wall Street and expected the government to rescue them, as if they were two distinct players.

Anybody who thinks Wall Street and Washington are distinct is willfully blind. You write as if industry players is Wall St alone. Look at all the cabinet secretaries, all the major appointed politicians, the Fed bankers -- Wall Street insiders, the lot of them.

There isn't even a revolving door between the regulated and the regulators. They are one and the same. To arbitrarily lay the blame on the name on one side of the badges while ignoring the other side is pathetic.

You are truly ignorant and naive if you think we had a market based system prior to ObamaCare.

Yes, but it's amazing how many uncached sites show up.

I signed up with Wild Blue about ten years ago; they were bought out a year or two ago (by Exide?) but I haven't noticed any change in service. I am very happy with them as far as doing the best any sat connection can do. So here are the caveats:

1. Ping time is routinely 1.5 seconds, sometimes as fast as 1.3. Don't think I've ever seen faster.

2. Speed of light time is 1/2 second; up, down, up, down; 4 x 36K km = 144 kn = 1/2 second. Whoever said .27 forgot about the round trip. I assume the sats and ground stations buffer like crazy to maximize bandwidth usage.

3. The ONLY time I have problems is when snow piles up on the dish. Gusts of 60 mph (100 kph) or so have never bothered it, but it's on a good solid tower. Snowstorms themselves are no problem, not the heaviest (4 feet in a day several times). There's an electrical heater on the back side of the dish made up of that tape you wrap around pipes; when power goes out and it's running without that, I have to brush the snow off every few hours, but that is the ONLY time I have had problems. They are rock solid otherwise.

4. Power outage is a nuisance. I have a standby generator but it takes 30 seconds to kick in, and I ought to have the modem and dish on a UPS, but I don't so sometimes I have to manually kick power to get reconnected.

5. Speed is 512Kbps up, 3Mbps down. Bandwidth isn't the killer, it's the latency. Ask the com root server who ibm.com is. Ask ibm.com who www.ibm.com is. Ask www.ibm.com for index.html. Find the css, ask ibm.com who css.ibm.com is. And so on, all at 1.5 seconds each. It's pretty frustrating sometimes. Some web sites are very unfriendly for slow latency connections.

I wish it were cheaper ($80 / month), but it's that or unreliable AT&T dialup.

Their elitiest arrogance shows in many ways. Two which particularly annoy me and come to mind at the moment are there position that they get to decide when pages are vanity pages or otherwise trivial and irrelevant, and the really frustrating cookies which expire too soon. Usually my only edits are typoes and afew obvious errors, but it requires a fresh login too often, especially since I browse wikipedia from several different computers, so the likelihood of a cookie expiring increases all that much more.

The editors should stick to resolving head bashing disputes and reversion battles, not substituting their elitist expertise against crowd sourced opinionson what articles are worth chucking out for having no links or for not following some arbitrary standard format.

It's the clueless marketing and product spec types who don't have a clue how computers work, don't have even the most superficial knowledge of how the current systems work, can't decipher what customers say they want, and write product specs which are so devoid of reality as to soak up more time straightening out than everything else combined.

Oh bullshit. Sequestration was only a puny cut in projected spending increases, not an actual cut in year to year spending, and certainly not the 20% budget cut it would have to have been for 20% of scientists to look for greener pastures.

I bet if you asked any group of employees if they were considering looking for another job, 20% would say yes regardless of any external conditions.

Sagging federal research my ass. You are just another chicken little.

There are so many laws on the books precisely because police and prosecutors want to be able to charge anybody with some crime if they feel the need, usually for disrespect of cop, but any perceived need will do.

Since everybody can be charged with a crime at almost any time, police HAVE to exercise discretion about what they charge and whether they charge.

This cop chose to be a dick, and he deserves to be recognized and treated like a dick.

If you still think he had no choice, then let me ask you why no other cop in the entire state is doing the same thing. Could it be that they chose to not be as dickish as this dick?

Slashdot itself, at least for registered users. I remember postponing registration just because.

IIRC, the Spitfire and ME-109 were 20-30 mph faster, primarily because they had such short range. They probably had armor and self-sealing fuel tanks, but I don't know. They did have better guns. As far as maneuverability, I'd guess the Zero was better at medium speeds simply from being lighter.

I've tried comparing them with Wikipedia stats and other web sites, but planes (other than the Japanese) were progressing so fast that it's hard to get data for simultaneous versions.

Your context reading still sucks if you can't even read my handle correctly. Hint: there's a UID after it.

Investments don't mean squat. Until there is verifiable proof that they have created wonder weapons that other nations haven't, then their imaginary results are just that.

I can't make it any simpler: unless they have magic technology with better engines, fuels, explosives, guidance systems, stealth technology, and everything else it would take for their cruise missiles to be do deadly, then they have nothing that other nations don't also have. They are not supermen or magicians. They are just humans with secrets.

As Khrushchev supposedly said to his son, "We have nothing to hide. We have nothing, and we must hide it."

History is full of examples of politicians and generals using scary stories of what enemies might be doing. They are almost never true. It's one thing to base your decisions on an enemy's capabilities and not intents, but it's quite another to make up stories which a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation will show require, say, rocket fuel five times more powerful than anyone else has, or guidance systems which billions of our own dollars haven't even come close to producing.

Not a single story about the deadly Chinese cruise missile passes the smell test.

A post devoid of all meaning except an attack on the messenger. You should try forming real thoughts and putting them down as real comments with useful content. People will think better of you for it.