I wouldn't virtualize a firewall.

Spaghetti. Definitely spaghetti. A great big, monstrous flying bunch of spaghetti.

Before anyone comments, I know that the iPad OS was a big part of its success.

On one hand, the iPad has been an unqualified success, and Android, other linux, and Windows successors are said to be arriving shortly. On the other hand, part of me wonders how much of the iPad's success was simply due to Apple hype. Had, say, Dell released the exact same hardware, but w/o the Apple imprimatur or OS, would it have sold as well? I rather suspect not.

It me that, like desktop linux and the monorail, the tablet computer is the wave of the future- always has been, always will be.

I can see it now...

"From the people who brought you Roomba and Scooba... it's BOOMBA!"

OK, so the US Supreme Court recently ruled in the most forceful way possible in favor of corporate personhood, the idea that a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law. Fine, let's run with that. Is there any question that, had an individual person committed something like BP clearly has done in the Gulf, whether purposefully or via negligence, they'd be put in jail?

Throw the book at these idiots. Make them pay criminally, not merely by docking their profits a wee bit. Throw chief executives in jail and let them rot. Better yet, give them work release jobs- cleaning up their own mess.

Morons.

http://xkcd.com/695/

I used a version a few months back which was compiled from the pre-release code. It was the Google Chrome browser... that's it. OK, that's not quite it, but the idea of Chrome OS is to remove anything not necessary to load a browser, especially those things which slow the boot process.

I found it interesting, but nowhere near interesting enough for me to keep using it rather than Crunchbang on my Eee 900. If all you want is a browser, period, then you might just like Chrome OS. If you want more than that, you'll take a pass.

More to the point, the genetic differences between human beings of all racial groups are incredibly insignificant. According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, there is an average 0.1% difference between any two randomly-selected human beings, with a maximum difference of 8% between racial groups. This has led to a conclusion that race is largely insignificant at a genetic level. Race is, more than anything else, a social construct.

To paraphrase psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan's One Genus Theory, any randomly-selected human being has far more in common w/any other randomly-selected human being than w/anything else on the planet.

And here, I thought that the Great Firewall of China had been blocking access to politically-charged Websites again.

Your objections are precisely why the individual mandate is a necessary part of this plan. The entire idea of insurance is that payments from everyone- including the healthy- go into a pool out of which the costs of health care provision are paid. If you don't require healthy people to pay into this pool, they don't, and, as you point out, you wind up w/a pool consisting of only the sick. Since a pool wherein the sick subsidize the sicker is not sustainable, you *need* the healthy to pay into the pool.

The payoff for the healthy is that good health is, almost by definition, temporary. You will get sick. You will have an accident and break a limb. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to avoid aging, you *will* get old. And, at that point, you begin to draw money from the very pool into which you have been contributing.

The math isn't exactly complicated.

Yes: healthcare.

The US currently has a limited single-payer system, Medicare. Medicare functions w/a 3% overhead, as opposed to a ~30% overhead for private insurance. And customer satisfaction w/Medicare is markedly higher than that w/private insurance.

Executive summary: the government does health care better than the private sector.

I suppose if this business plan doesn't pan out, we shouldn't say that they went under?

Or, perhaps, if they sign a bad mortgage on their offices, and wind up owing more than the building is work, they'll *really* be underwater.

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

"You don't get rich writing science-fiction. If you want to get rich, you found a religion." * L. Ron Hubbard, Nov. 11, 1948

A few counterpoints which are of particular relevance in the US today:

1) Medicare is implemented w/a rough overhead of 3%, as compared to 20-30% overhead for private insurers. In other words, the government does medical insurance at a lower cost than private business.

2) The private contractors to whom the Bush administration handed work in Iraq did the job for a much higher cost per-pseudo soldier than the US Military would have done. In other words, the government does war cheaper than private business.

Yes, private industry is probably more aggressive about cutting costs than the government. But that's b/c they have a vested purpose to do so: the profit motive. Every dollar spent on actual health care, or a soldier, or on providing high speed Internet access, is one less dollar in the owners' pockets. Hence, all costs- or corners- shall be cut to maximize profits.