There is actually a good amount of truth in that "tired fallacy." If you are a runner running a race, nothing I can do will help you run faster as only you can make yourself do that. But I can sure make you run slower if I whack you in the kneecap with a crowbar. Government is pretty much the same way.

Yes, we medical people in the U.S. have heard of a bunch of foreign generic and trade names for drugs in the U.S., including paracetamol. (We generally call it "APAP" rather than acetamiophen or paracetamol after its chemical trade name acetyl-para-aminophenol as it has fewest letters.) Do you think that no foreigner has ever had to go to a hospital in the U.S. and that nobody American has ever gotten drugs from a foreign pharmacy? Come on...

A registered trademark of Intel Corporation :D It's a thinner than average laptop with a slower-than-average low-volt chip and an above-average price tag.

Ron Paul and his supporters align themselves with the Republican Party because if Ron Paul and the libertarian-leaning Republicans split off from the authoritarian-right Republicans, a non-split-up Democrat Party (even though it has three factions- the blue collar union Democrats/historical Democrats, the old hippie Democrats, and the statist Democrats) would walk all over them for decades until their infighting split them up and left us with about five political parties. The little-L libertarians in the Republican Party realize that even the last four years under a statist Democrat are far more ugly to bear than electing a authoritarian-right Republican like Romney and thus stick with the Republican Party as a whole. It's a "we're screwed if we do, we're REALLY screwed if we don't" methodology.

- Rewriting the Constitution in "modern legal language" to give much, much less room for the judicial "interpretation" that has rendered much of the Constitution invalidated (10th Amendment, anybody?)
- Getting rid of the previous judgments based on an extreme amount of mental gymnastics used to allow acts that were clearly unconstitutional- e.g. "The Switch in Time that Saved Nine" that allowed the Commerce Clause to be used as justification to allow regulation of almost everything*.
- Tightening up some of the loopholes in the Constitution that allowed for creeping government growth- there needs to be a balanced budget article in the Constitution, for example.

The basic framework set by the Founders was solid but 200+ years of many people with huge incentives of increasing their power and influence trying to get around it using any means possible has succeeded in gutting much of it that got in their way. Hitting a reset button would be the best thing that comes to my mind.

*Except to force people to not avoid participating in a market, that apparently is allowed under the 16th Amendment (see the Obamacare decision.)

They have a lot of interest in acting on their re-election campaigns...

I think scrapping the current government would be a huge improvement...bring on the convention!

Obamacare is an example of this- the original bill (HR 3590) dealt with the homebuyer tax credit for veterans until the Obamacare stuff was tacked on as an amendment.

Perhaps the nearly immobile lives that youngsters live has something to do with it as well? Recess and gym are a fraction of the time they used to be, if they even still exist in schools. You can't have kids memorizing material for the federally mandated achievement tests that determine a larger and larger chunk of cash-strapped school districts' budgets if they are outside running around. If that isn't enough "persuasion" to cut recess and gym, the fear of lawsuits if little Brayden (or Aiden or Kayden or Jayden) catches a hangnail as he trips over his own feet and falls into the mandatory two-foot-thick rubber mat on the playground will. It's no better at home. There is the same worry about Brayden catching a hangnail as at school, but now since it is unsupervised, you have to worry about (the one in ten million chance of) a child molester kidnapping Jimmy! Go out and supervise Brayden yourself? And miss watching "Jersey Shore?" That's ludicrous! Better to have Brayden stay inside.

...where they put you on diabetes medication (metformin.)

In the Midwest, it's often the opposite. The Kansas Turnpike and the toll road segments of I-44 through Oklahoma are very well maintained. The non-toll roads range from decent to "hope you are dating a mechanic" bad.

You'd be seeing that 60-second ad a lot. If there was one thing pre-OS X Macintosh OSes did well, it was lock up and require rebooting.

Better yet, just drive a Trabant and get the two-stroke weed eater sound PLUS the huge cloud of blue burned oil smoke. The deaf guy will hear you coming, smell you coming, and then be able to move out of the way because you can only go about 8 mph in one of those cars.

What's even worse is when your company's IT department uses Windows group policy to lock the resolution of every machine at 1024x768 regardless of what monitor is attached, and also disables right-clicking on the desktop so you can't even think about changing it. That's bad, but what makes it worse is that most of the monitors at work are 22" widescreens with a native resolution of 1680x1050, 1600x900, or 1920x1080 so everything is blurry AND stretched.

AMD *does* push out affordable 4-socket Opteron setups- the Opteron 6000 series CPUs. They are selling those a whole ton less expensive now than they did in the K8 days. The least-expensive Opteron 6000s sell for $266 each and the most-expensive ones are around $1200-1500, compared to starting around $800 each and going on up to close to $3000 for the K8-era 4-way-capable Opterons. Considering a 4-way-capable Intel Xeon still costs close to $2000 and goes on up to near $5000- and is based on two-year-old technology- the Opterons are that great deal you were wishing for.

However on the desktop, Intel has gotten much better in their pricing (i.e. they don't cripple lower-end chips as severely as they used to) and is giving AMD a real run for their money.