The problem with the "lets guess what a psycho will do" game is that it really never ends. We live in a very technologically sophisticated and open society. The means to do stupid or evil things are all around us. It's not just guns. It's our entire modern society. If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself.

Or you have no imagination whatsoever.

If you try to ban anything that anyone could abuse, then everything will unravel because psychos and terrorists will adapt even if you can't.

> I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context

People wrote stuff down. None of this is a mystery. You simply can't get away with re-writing history because someone already wrote it down when it wasn't even history yet.

That's the problem with a literate society. You can't just make up nonsense and pretend it's reality. Any one is free to dig up primary sources (or even secondary sources) and demonstrate just how much of a corrupt piece of shit you are.

Fine.

If you want to butcher it then there is a well established procedure for that. Just use it. Good luck with that.

Weak transparent lies just undermine law and order and democracy. Redefining terms to suit your political agenda should be rightfully placed next to the worst political abuses anyone can summon.

Although in truth you are just trying to pretend that a severe and pervasive economic issue is instead a matter of simply interfering with personal property rights.

Having managed myself to generate counter-factual results with such industry certifications, I have zero faith in them. A University may not be your idea of a suitably custom crafted trade school but it does imply a bit more depth than cramming for some multiple guess exam.

I dunno. At one time I had access to the internal EA version of reality on this subject and at that time, console gaming was clearly the dominant force in the industry. I can't really see how that situation would have actually improved in favor of the PC since then. Although I don't have an insider's veiw any more.

I think this article is just a bunch of hogwash and people trying to keep up appearances and pretend that the Titanic really isn't sinking when it is.

The entire PC platform as a consumer product is in danger. It may stick around indefinitely as a business machine but I think the "must be DOS compatible" mentality for home computing is coming to an end.

It's not even that. Anyone that's associated with the post 911 Intelligence apparatus seems like a rediculously inappropriate person to align yourself with now that we have that same apparatus threatening the viability of the entire Internet.

Her "war crimes" are just a side show. The real problem is what kind of relationship she might have with the NSA. Just the message that it sends to everyone is appalling.

At least what the Mozilla CEO was into was not directly related to the business.

They just put a Fox on the board of directors of a Hen house.

Huge WTF moment.

For what they seem to be talking about, even discarded hardware running some discontinued version of Windows would be a better idea than a locked down web terminal.

This sounds like some completely clueless idiot latching onto the latest fad or something he heard about in the news.

Yes... getting out of "the tedious low end job that sysadmin is" just so that you can sit in painfully dull meetings all day. Great plan that.

It's pretty obvious really. The US has festering pockets of 3rd world poverty that skew the numbers.

While bleeding hearts blither on about gun control, bad economic and social conditions continue without any one paying attention to the real problem.

So while these numbers might reinforce the smugness of some Euro-trash, they aren't as significant as all that for most people. And for the rest, the situation is actually far more dire than these "statistics" indicate.

It makes you wonder if the rest of the numbers are misleading tripe too.

With proprietary data, you never can tell really. Compatibility is never nearly as good as advertised. The idea that government should be transparent, or that Robber Barons shouldn't be free to run amok and charge tools every 5 miles is not a new idea. Nor is it one unique to "open source fundementalists".

You were unintentionally funny when you came up with that.

Biff would be proud.

...false dichotomy.

Option 3 is to encourage the propagation of less expensive urgent treatment facilities. Get hospitals (that are the real villan of this story) out of the situation. You could even make these non-ERs free in certain areas.

In any given situation, a hospital is the least efficient option. Their prices are complex and opaque and they crassly exploit their status as "non profits" to make out like bandits.

The percieved higher cost of American healthcare is probably entirely driven by bogus billing numbers from hospitals.

Although just about no one wants to be stuck with nothing but medicare patients. The government doesn't pay enough to keep the lights on. They are an equally untenable extreme.

If Obama had the balls he could have called it a tax from the start. Then there would be an ObamaCare tax on my paystub next to the SSI and Medicare one.

While I would not have particularly like that, it at least would have not been a Harvard Con Law Professor wiping his butt with the Constitution.

This kind of dishonesty leads to all kinds of nasty consequences and corruption that are ultimately bad for business. The biggest problem isn't even the personal liberty angle. The biggest problem is really how the personal liberty angle feeds into our prosperity as a nation.

Things like predictability and the rule of law aren't just academic or theoretical issues.

There are perfectly crass reasons to care about the rules.

Using the SCOTUS as an appeal to authority is a dangerous thing that can lead to obviously absurd results.

Although the comparison is not nearly as absurd as you would like to pretend.

Forcing me to buy some consumer good is no less of an intrusion on my basic liberties than forcing me to be part of some sort of posse to hunt down an alleged escaped slave.

...and what's the monthly cost of a plan that will relieve you of that burden?

Chances are that the marginal cost of such a plan will DWARF that deductible.

Despite what you may have been told, insurance companies are not charities. If they are giving you something for "free", then it's being paid for somehow. Perhaps you're even the one that's paying for it. Or perhaps you are lucky and are able to MOOCH off the rest of us.

Someone, somewhere has to pick up the tab.

The overhead of running the transaction through an insurance carrier is not trivial. For smaller claims, the transaction overhead may be more than the value of the "free" service.