Because you're not paying attention.

You're right. Please send me your $36.50 ATMega version.

How does the developed world lack imagination? It's producing these devices, and generating the demand for them, and using them in the applications. Indeed most innovation comes from outside the third world. Yes, third worlders are busier just surviving, but the developed world is supplying plenty of imagination.

Your post was sent from the developed world, and shows plenty of imagination.

Now, I won't disagree that plenty of developed worlders are idiots without imagination. But they've outsourced it to people like us, which is how we address the problem. The species lacks sufficient imagination, but that's not really what we're talking about here. There's plenty of imagination to go around, though it would be better if there were more.

More interesting is a $15 Pi with lower HW specs : no audio; no serial (only 1 USB, like Model A); no HDMI (only VGA) or even no video. But also integrated wireless mesh, preferably a snapin daughtercard for either Bluetooth, Zigbee, or even WiFi.

The purpose of these devices is to bootstrap British youth Computer Science education. That education better focus on networked distributed computing, preferably wireless for mobile or just ubiquity. Only one of the machines on the network needs better specs, for human interface. The rest should interface to the many things we have to make smart.

I personally would buy thousands of those low spec devices each year. I'm sure there's a market for hundreds of millions, probably many billion of them. Though most of that market will probably be served by stickon, postage-stamp sized devices powered by ambient (heat, light, flexing) energy and cost under $1, we have to get there steadily. I don't know why Chinese exporters aren't selling Model A and Model B for under $20 already (they're $80+), and a $10- Model C stripped down from there.

Republican Issa's corporate sponsors evidently believe that they've got the Internet set up for whatever harvesting they might desire. So they're leveraging the small House majority (elected by a gerrymandered minority of House voters) they bought into eliminating the power of the Democratic minority, the significant Senate majority, and the reelected Democratic president.

Darrell Issa has spent his career investigating and attacking Democrats. It's cost a fortune, halted government action, and turned up nothing but empty headlines and a blowjob. How about a moratorium on Darrell Issa? I'm voting for that in 2014 by voting for a House Democrat. Only 17 more and Issa can't run anything but his mouth on Fox News.

+1 Agree :)

Private businesses are fare more wasteful, fraudulent and abusive than are Medicare, Medicaid and VA healthcare. Indeed the government is far better at catching these abuses than private business is: private insurance is defined by it; employers administering it are characterized by its incompetence version, gilded with plenty of scamming.

Public health financing in the US is far more effective per dollar than is private. Even apart from the profit collected by terrible insurers, even before considering the public finances far more unhealthy people.

Indeed all of the many Obamacare cost studies by qualified orgs say it's more cost effective. It's primarily designed to reduce public health budgets, though sold on many other benefits.

Everything you said is exactly backwards. Especially the part where the "existing relationship" with one's employer is somehow the correct way to get better compliance with healthcare policies. That relationship could also be used to insist your kids do their homework: your boss as your kids' boss - how about going over your spouse's credit card bills along with the monthly department budget, too?

You're talking from pure ideology, ignoring the actual well established facts. You're devoted to corporatism, though its practice rips apart all the values you likely insist your ideology enshrines. Try looking at the real world, not the one sponsored by your media chaperones.

I love it when my boss hassles me to exercise and eat right. That asshole in HR who's always trying to "forget" my benefits should know that I need viagara, especially right before that birthday long weekend. The executive team's experience making widgets really qualifies them to design and administer the medical care that my family's health and life depend on - because it sells more widgets. I should change my healthcare based on the whims of my new employer, or stay stuck in one workplace because I depend on its benefits. Not.

Employers shouldn't have anything to do with administering healthcare. It's crazy, and perhaps the ultimate corporatist policy. They should mind their own business, literally.

No, insurance is not defined as amortizing costs across time. It's defined by paying across time costs defined by risk, whether or not that risk actually materializes.

Some insurance is for low risk, and indeed designed to spread costs smoothly across time. It's addresses cash flow, and always costs more than paying only for the cost in the event. Other insurance is for high - catastrophic - risk, spread across a pool of risk takers, not all of whom see their risk materialize.

There is no reason that a profitmaking outfit must provide even the low risk maintenance insurance. Indeed, decades (centuries) of practical experience (across the globe) have demonstrated that model poorly finances proper maintenance, at higher cost and far more management by policyholders, than does widespread publicly funded insurance. The idea of competitive profitmakers finding efficiencies in a choosy market sounds great, but in practice it's undeniably a failure. Sick and old and young people are much more suited to being victims than to being savvy consumers, and giant private corps are more suited to exploiting their customers than to serving them.

Because we'd pay for you to be sick as a dog. And you'd die sooner, saving us your Social Security payments. If mental health care were properly covered, nobody would indulge in such self destructive behavior just because it's paid by the public.

Of course cigarettes carry extra taxes to cover the extra costs. Corn syrup should, too, and probably soon will. Indeed every high risk consumable ingredient should be taxed according to its extra risk, to pay its way. Health supplements should get proportional price subsidies. Freedom of choice with personal responsibility - costs internalized instead of externalized. That would be the Conservative platform, if they weren't totally corrupt.

You're wrong, just like a Republican bigot. Poor Black people tend to live in cities; trailer parks have more poor White people. In 2012, in reality (not in the Republican fantasy bubble), Democrats had only a two point advantage among Whites making 17 points (ie. R:58% / D:41%).

It's thinking like yours that doomed Republicans to win a landslide only in your imaginations.

Republicans oppose publicly funded broadband because Republicans are funded by a few very rich people whose corporations would lose some of their monopoly money to the public competition.

Capitalists will sell the rope used to hang them.

It's a crisis of governance. Republicans are committed to terrible ideas about how to govern the country. The ideas that they executed for years with trifecta control of the US government, and perpetuated in years after by minority interference with goverment action to reform what they installed.

I hope that Priebus and the Republican Party stays committed to them. They belong on the dustheap of history, along with so much American greatness they destroyed.

Because Obamacare does a lot more than just insure more people. Though for those newly insured, it has improved their healthcare by funding what couldn't be bought before, already proving you wrong.

Obamacare also requires insurers provide contraception for the price of insurance premiums, which is preventive medicine that reduces costs due to unexpected pregnancies and STDs.

You're pretty sure that health insurance is meant to cover only catastrophes, but it's not. It's to cover spikes in health care costs that come from occasional expensive events. It's just like car collision insurance: it's a financing strategy that allows people to keep moving through life in a way they can afford, based on statistics. In fact car insurance should pay for routine maintenance that prevents catastrophic costs like engines seizing or bald tires skidding into something.

The financing costs money to operate, plus salaries and profits to motivate people to dedicate the time it requires to do it properly. Though not as much as the insurers charge (up to 20% of premiums, even under Obamacare). What every one of our foreign competitors has chosen over the past several generations is a public health insurance system like unemployment insurance, which we already have for a lot of Americans in either Medicare, Medicaid, VA insurance and some others.

In fact you have called for public health insurance in what you have detailed. Except for some reason you want an "employer offered health account". Why should the employer have anything whatsoever to do with health? Why should an employer even know when you have drawn on payments for medicine? Why should you have to move it when you change employers? Why should employers spend one minute administering health financing when their business is totally unrelated? Obviously that "account" should be Medicare/Medicaid/VA insurance, paid by taxes, administered without profit by the government that already does so very well for many millions of Americans.

What's wrong with you libertarians is that you cannot accept that government is the people joined together to protect ourselves, at a great scale economy. You're obsessed with authoritarian private corporations that demonstrate daily the vast waste they layer atop most widespread services, especially those that are equally available to all. You reduce actual life experiences demonstrated everywhere to inane sloganeering like "heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works". No, you have merely cherrypicked history and called things names without regard to their meaning.

There's more to economics than economics 101. There's more to reality than the libertarian mayor of Sim City bothers to carp about.