Which parts of the health care plan, specifically, are you against? Getting rid of being uninsurable because you have a preexisting condition? Forcing competition amongst otherwise monopolistic and gouging health insurance companies? Reducing hospital costs? Helping to insure those who can't afford it (since we pay for them anyway as hospitals must treat emergencies, many of which could be avoided more cheaply by preventative care)? Being able to keep your insurance as though nothing happened? Not letting the health insurance system actually implode because of skyrocketing subsidies and take our economy down the hole with it?

How would your ideal plan differ?

Abraham Lincoln was to give an address from his balcony at intermission about the cure for cancer he discovered. But who was John Wilkes Booth? That's right! The Cancer Industry!

If Docs aren't allowed to prescribe silver, then how do they use it?

Also, silver sounds like a rather silly idea when we have actual antibiotics.

This isn't a "MAYBE", this is a "we stopped using silver a long time ago because we developed better things and it is bad for you."

Exactly. I have had no qualms spending my money buying games on Steam. I don't have to keep track of installation media, go to a store, or do much of anything to get my game and start playing. The only downside is that, in order to play offline, you basically have to predict internet outages.

And of course if Valve goes under and takes Steam with it I only have their word that they won't screw their customers... but...

Sure beats having to go to the store or put up with terrible copy protection. I only have to put up with somewhat annoying have-to-be-online copy... oh... wait...

To be fair, Apple's Lisa's GUI was way ahead of its time (this was heavily based off of PARC, yes). Unfortunately, that computer cost over $10k at the time. The OS they released for the scaled down version, Macintosh, was in fact a piece of crap.

Excuse me, perhaps not racist, but a vast oversimplification. Saying "fried chicken seems to be a part of a particular black culture" is different from "all black people eat a lot of fried chicken". Sure, stereotypes are nice and comfortable, but they distill complex cultures into a few little talking points. Which can lead to a group thinking they are better because, obviously, we're better than X group who does Y all the time! Which breeds racism.

I think his most fallacious assumption is that I can't attend every event I want to attend.

I most certainly can sit in my underwear watching cat videos on the internet every night, thank you very much!

Here is another one.

I'm sorry you live in North Korea. How's the weather?

Yes it is. It would be the like going to a golf club, seeing only white people, and saying "All white people love golf and love to waste obscene amounts of money on it". You are making sweeping generalizations based on skin color because you're too stupid realize that there might be black people, elsewhere, who aren't currently eating fried chicken.

Wow, insurance understanding fail.

The entire freakin' point of insurance, and the way it works, is that enough people who don't need it buy it when they don't need it. If you want to wait until you're older when you will need it soon, while not paying into it your entire life, you are breaking the system. The cost of the sick is offset by the payments of the healthy.

If you want to try to game the system, fine. But the health insurance companies will be looking for any way they possibly can to deny you coverage when you come crawling to them at 60 (and rightfully so, you're trying to screw them and everyone on their insurance).

Tragedy of the commons, etc.

All of the things you have mentioned have been explained by scientists. The logic and reasoning are sound. Feel free to read the papers.

AGW could easily be falsified by showing that CO2 doesn't have a greenhouse effect. Or by showing that an increase in CO2 doesn't effect the overall greenhouse effect. Or any number of things.

Also, Phil Jones' comments were taken WAY out of context by parties trying to make a story out of this.

Water vapor only stays in the atmosphere for about a week or two, and then falls down to complete the water cycle. CO2 is up there for decades. That is why increased CO2 production is far more of a problem, even though it constitutes less of an overall greenhouse effect than water vapor.

When we put CO2 up there, it stays there and has a chance to really accumulate, like it is doing.

Ihlosi pointed out the other reasons CO2 can be a bad thing to have too much of. It also seems that scientists have shown there to be a problem, it is just that people are purposefully ignoring/misrepresenting the data.

It sucks what happened to your son, but feel free to prove the studies wrong. Get your degree, dedicate your life to medical research, and perform a study with hundreds of thousands of people. Prove several other of these studies wrong because "Big Vax"? was in the way. Go ahead. I'll wait.

The reason it seems causative is because the shots are given around the time language begins to develop. So do the first really noticeable signs of autism. There is no link other than time, as shown by several major studies.

Agreed. This is why I also only buy nVidia. Plus, as a programmer who does scientific computing, I'm far more interested in CUDA or whatever ATI's CUDA-like offering is called than in gaming.

If ATI isn't going to have drivers for me to use that capability comfortably in Linux, screw them. There is another company with a similar offering who does support the OS I do my development in.

I understand that I represent a small market, but nVidia seems to still recognize that market, where ATI just barely pays lip service. So I know who my money is going to.