What? Obama's new wonder-plan is what TOOK AWAY our low deductible plan and forced us, for more money, to buy one that will cost us thousands more each year in premiums, and ten thousand more a year in deductibles. The people you're defending - Obama, Pelosi, Reid - forced us to buy a high deductible plan with fewer benefits, minus the doctor we'd used for years, and more. Obama didn't "outlaw" bad, expensive coverage, he just forced us into that exact situation. Thanks for shilling for him, though - it's nice to see that BS so transparently on display for all to see.

I used to have affordable insurance for my wife and I. The ACA killed it. Were forced to go to a new plan that:

1) Has much higher monthly premiums (we went from roughly $230/month to about $500/month)

2) Has a hugely higher deductible (we went from $2,500 a year to about $12,000 a year). This means that we are much, much farther out of pocket every year, especially if we actually need medical care beyond one or two simple visits annually.

3) We are past any risk of pregnancy. None the less, we are being forced to pay for elaborate maternity care that we cannot possibly use.

4) The new plan forced us to give up the doctor we've been using for 15 years unless we want to pay cash for that in a way that doesn't help with our deductible.

5) The two best local hospitals are no longer available to us unless we want to pay retail for their use, and get no benefit against our deductible.

Prior to this "affordable" new act, we had no need to change insurance, doctors, hospitals or anything else for well over 10 years.

Because of how the math is working out, we're told to expect that next year's premiums will go up by another 45-55%. Thanks, Mr. Obamacare Cheerleader, if you're one of the people who helped to empower the people who snuck this 100% partisan monstrosity through congress on Pelosi's "deeming" technique. Thanks a lot.

So you are ALSO saying that the information presented is incorrect ... that the people at HHS had NO idea that the site wasn't full of holes in terms of security and functionality. That the "cherry-picked" emails that show the administration knew the site was a train wreck are referring to something else, because the site wasn't a train wreck when it went live. Right? I see. So if that's incorrect, then what you're saying is that the administration did NOT know that the site was a train wreck. Which makes them stupefyingly incompetent.

So your idea of "nothing to see here" is either:

1) The administration knew exactly what a train wreck the thing was, but lied about it. Or...

2) The administration, at every level, was so foolish and incompetent that it had no idea whether or not the system was useless, and in lacking any sort of knowledge one way or the other, just assumed it was fine.

So what you're saying is that: 1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context. 2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground. I see.

Frequently the bank forces the user to use exploitable means just to communicate with the bank.

IE6+ActiveX required, anyone?

If your bank requires you to use that steaming pile of fail, why haven't you left yet?

Wells Fargo used to throw up warnings when you used a browser they hadn't yet evaluated, but I think the rapid-release schedule taken by most browser vendors put a stop to that. Even then, it was just a warning...it didn't affect functionality.

Say what?

Dude, either you haven't been paying attention, or you don't know how to use teh intertubes. Every movie is available as a torrent in full 1080p pretty much the day the blueray disks hit the store shelves. Many are available even earlier.

If by "race" you mean that the various release groups are tripping over each other in order to see which one can get theirs up in the shortest amount of time, then yes. "X-Men Days of Future Past" won't be available for purchase for another 3 weeks, but there's already a 720p blueray rip available on the torrent sites, and the 1080p version should follow in the next few days.

Got you one better: in this day and age it's pretty much inconceivable that they would disable bleutooth functionality. If you can pair your fancy unpiratable player to a PC rigged to copy the incoming audio stream to disk, you've got yourself a digital copy with essentially no quality loss.

The difference is that when you make someone who starts up a business pay all of the country's taxes, they're forced to simply pass that along to consumers as higher prices. The consumers pay the taxes regardless, always. Businesses can't exist without people buying their goods and services.

Dammit, I was going to go with "Popplers"

Already taken.

If you told me someone was selling draft beer supplies (or whatever this crap is), my first assumption would be that it was for bars and taverns, not for home use. Thanks for taking time to point out the obvious.

I take it you don't know any homebrewers, then. Kegging is a hell of a lot easier than bottling. That said, the usual insurance against a keg running out is...wait for it...having a second keg on tap. Cheap and low-tech.

I keep hearing this complaint - that there are devices out there which are "designed to be harder to repair" - but, at least in my experience, that's incredibly rare. More often devices are designed to be difficult to open due to concerns about warranty claims on modified items, and even THAT is pretty rare. Every electronic gizmo which I currently own can be opened with relative ease. Most of them I would be able to perform SOME repairs on, as long as it doesn't involve having to replace chips or capacitors.

There are some things that bug me - such as my Nexus 5 not having a (easily) replaceable battery. However, while I may not be happy about them, they're all design choices which the manufacturer made for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability. And, for the most part, they're things that don't really effect me (eg. it is highly unlikely that I will keep my Nexus 5 long enough to actually need a battery replacement).

If it were well supported by the data I wouldn't have said that it keeps being repeated without any good evidence. In reality, all of these claims are only supported by the "research" of S.A. Marshall, and there's no evidence that the guy ever actually did the research that he claims he did. There's certainly no replication of his results. But there is evidence that he had a habit of making up data to support his narratives.

This is like saying that the reason professional basketball teams are so good is because they actually try to score points. Silly, at best.

The actual reason veteran units are so dangerous is because:

1. They're experienced.
2. They're a (literal) example of the survivor bias; most of their crappy soldiers die off, shifting the bell-curve to the right.

Blocky, pixellated sex, I imagine.

Kind of like the GIFs we downloaded from BBSes in the 1990s.

My safe word is "ZMODEM".

Why, I haven't had five bees in my pocket since nineteen-diggety-two, when the Kaiser stole the twenty. You could get 40 rods to the hogshead back then.