This. And while the government is at it, please fine the bajeezus out of Amazon for having a "disable" switch on one-click that doesn't actually disable one-click in large parts of their website (e.g. Amazon Instant Video). I complained about this, and they said to set a PIN on the account to prevent purchases. Unfortunately, that also prevents streaming viewing, and there's no way whatsoever to prevent purchases or streaming of G-rated material, because there's no setting lower than "G".

Amazon has a lot of 'splainin' to do.

That doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. There's nothing even remotely suspicious about a person trading a one-time benefit in recompense for an extended benefit he provides to another.

It is dubious when that one-time benefit can be taken away at any time, as a job can be, or can suddenly turn sour like a job can.

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."

Oops. Wrong stage of evolution. We're not there yet.

Do the math? What math, it's all the same. If the property has 1 mile road frontage or 10 feet, that 1 mile or road still needs all those services. If the property is valued at 10 dollars it still needs the same services as if the property is valued at 2 million dollars.

But the cost of providing those services isn't the same. First, the probability of a forest fire is roughly proportional to the area of land, because lightning doesn't care. Second, people are more likely to steal from big, expensive houses than slums, and people are more likely to build big, expensive houses on large pieces of land than small ones, so police protection tends to be (at least to some extent) proportional to land area as well.

Even things like utilities cost more for larger pieces of land, because the utility companies have to run their cables past your property to get to the next potential customer, and the longer your property is, the more it costs to do so. They only get one customer per property, so larger properties effectively raise the installation cost for everyone on your block.

And unless you're at the end of a street, the street has to go past your house, not just to it. Therefore, the cost is directly proportional to the width of the piece of land, so longer pieces of land should pay more in taxes. This also applies to the cost of fuel for police driving past your house when they patrol your neighborhood, the cost of running water pipes past your house for fire protection, etc.

In other words, the costs are almost all proportional to area.

That's changing the goal post a bit isn't it? Taxes do not pay the insurance coverage. the city or whatever government entity does not provide the insurance. More expensive property will cost more to insure primarily because it will cost more to replace anything of higher value. But the police and fire are not used more then cheaper properties.

Actually, they are, to some degree. When's the last time you heard of somebody breaking into a falling down shack because they thought the person might have stuff worth stealing? And as I said, forest fires are proportional to area. And house fires... well, those are more determined by the age of the home than anything else, so those tend to be inversely proportional to the cost of the home, but they're still mathematically related. :-)

If he got that big a dose and lived, he should seriously play the lottery.... IIRC, that's right about at the line where everybody above that line dies within a week or so....

The worst ones are:

4) The counter reaches zero, then you have another minute or more before the light changes. If you press the walk button again, you get a second walk cycle.

What were they thinking?

Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves.

A health insurance plan tuned for the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses [jw.org] would still pay for blood substitutes [slashdot.org], iron supplements, and other expenses associated with bloodless surgery [wikipedia.org]. Some insurers might prefer bloodless surgery anyway because it keeps the insurer from having to pay for units of blood and pay to treat blood-borne diseases.

Now take it up a notch and consider religions that reject healthcare almost entirely, like Christian Science, or religions that insist on Eastern medicine, or.... At some point, you really do have to draw a line. The only question is where the line should be drawn. The easiest place to draw the line is "never allow exceptions". Everything from there gets progressively more complex.

There is no justification for forcing anyone to pay for anything. Not even spaghetti. Government economic coercion is the real "slippery slope". Contraceptives are predictable expenses and have no business being in insurance, abortion is an elective procedure and shouldn't be covered either.

Ignoring your last sentence (snipped), I mostly agree with you, but with an exception. Some use of contraceptives is not for prevention of birth, but rather to treat underlying medical conditions, such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis. If a policy excludes birth control, that exclusion should be allowed only when there is not a medically necessary reason for the prescription.

Oh, and the policies should also exclude other drugs that don't serve a medically necessary purpose, such as antihistamines (except for treatment of anaphylaxis), Levitra/Viagra/Cialis, etc.

...they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.

Up until that bit, we were in agreement. However, that last part should really be left out of this discussion. The same faulty logic can literally be used to justify any level of abuse, legal or illegal:

• You don't like the fact that you have to work a twelve-hour shift, seven days a week? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You don't think our working conditions are safe? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You want to get paid more than ten cents an hour? You're free to work somewhere else.

And so on. The fact of the matter is that people are not free to leave a job and take a job somewhere else. There's a very high cost to doing so. You must find the time to search for other jobs, interview for those jobs, get those jobs, and then leave. And when there are no jobs in your field nearby, you must move somewhere that has jobs. And when businesses are not regulated by laws that require certain minimum standards, those other jobs are likely to be equally bad.

As for the issue on the whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for things that go against my convictions. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping business leaders from professing adherence to churches that refuse all medical care, then disclaiming their responsibility to provide insurance entirely. It's hard to conceive of an exception that protects against the first situation without allowing businesses to abort coverage outright through legal maneuvering.

It will take the court granting certiorari on several other lawsuits before there's an adequate line established, and this case really should have been the last one granted cert, not the first, because there's likely to be an awful lot of abuse in the meantime as a result of this decision being interpreted in an overly broad fashion.

And 50+ years of trans fats. (The dangers were discovered way back in the 1950s.)

Just so long as you're aware that "erase everything" is useless against law enforcement, who start by shutting down your system and cloning the drive, then booting your machine off of the clone. In fact, it's worse than useless, because it qualifies as attempting to destroy evidence, and is trivially provable by comparing the original to the clone. So you'll go to jail just for trying that.

Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.

Of course, if one were the sort of person who would build a self-destructing USB stick, it would make more sense to just store part of the encryption key in a RAMDisk. Rebooting the computer wouldn't make any difference, but the rules of evidence require them to shut down the system to clone the drive, so when they ask you if you can decrypt the drive, you can honestly say, "No. You destroyed the key when you shut off the computer."

Of course, you'll probably want to have a backup copy of the key somewhere, in some form, or at least a means of reconstructing it, but because you would only use it if you actually had to shut your computer all the way down, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a place that's easily accessible, nor any place where someone would realistically look. It could, for example, involve walking around the city in a particular pattern known only to you, and typing in the text of all the graffiti you see....

This is where you learn to write automation code so that you are doing lots of work even when you're reading Slashdot. :-D

I wrote a partial C language interpreter in Perl once. Trust me, you can write code that's a lot more complex than a simple text transform. With that said, you don't write that sort of code like you'd write a script. You write it like you'd write a large C/C++ library or framework....

I've never had a drive that did emergency parking until my HD-based MacBook Pro. All my dead drives were too dumb to have the needed sensors, as were the machines that they were in.

With that said, I'm terrified at the aggressiveness with which that MacBook Pro parks its heads. I literally can't pick the thing up and place it gently on my bed without the heads doing an emergency park. I don't have a lot of faith in that drive lasting very long. Non-emergency parking is hard enough on the heads. Emergency parking is downright bad.