Well, the question comes down to what happens if every single person actually does comply with the terms of the rebate and requests it. It seems like either some party (either the company that offered the rebate, or the company that the rebate handling was outsourced to) will be forced to cough up the extra money to cover every rebate, or they will fail to pay out the rebates.

You seem to be assuming that the latter is the guaranteed result, but I don't see that it is. I'm not privy to the details of these contracts, but I would be amazed if they don't, as a general rule, spell out who is responsible for costs that exceed the expected cost of the rebate program.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the portion of the grandparent poster's comment that I was responding to.

If the people who apply for the rebate get the promised rebate, then how could you possibly claim that anyone is being defrauded?

I didn't say that at all. Doing that would be fraud, and should be prosecuted under existing laws. But there are plenty of times when obtaining a rebate is straightforward, and you want to make those illegal as well.

Well, I'm assuming people who can look at an advertised price of $X ($Y before rebate) and make a comparison, which is how most rebate offers that I see are advertised. If it takes you days to do that comparison, you probably are not qualified to be handling money at all.

If the company honors the rebate as promised, and provides the terms of the rebate up front, then it's not a rip-off. If they don't, well, then that's fraud -- there are already laws against it, although I wouldn't mind seeing more enforcement of those laws.

Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice.

I don't like the hassle of rebates myself (when I compare prices, I don't take rebates into consideration), but I don't need the government making that decision for me.

This is a data structures and algorithms course, not a "find code snippets using google" course. In a work environment, the purpose of writing a program is to solve some problem by any means necessary. In the environment of this course, the purpose is to learn how these things are implemented.

The cords would just keep getting tangled up. You're much better off getting the DC model with a big battery pack.

WTF is with those "sponsored links" at the bottom? Apparently even the "disable ads" option doesn't remove them. Oh well, at least I can kill them with adblock.

Considering that the cost to the U.S. of this ebola outbreak is going to be in the billions of dollars, it makes a lot of sense to fund research into vaccines to reduce the cost to us later on, regardless of what other countries are doing.

It's too bad that nobody has invented a method where a link to a full explanation could be included within the summary itself. Maybe when people start using this new-fangled "world wide web" thing, we'll be able to do cool things like that.

More likely they'll have to cancel the project. After all, if it was possible for modern technology to create machinery that works when submersed in salt water, I sure that somebody would have already done it.

If you stay on DST year round, won't schedules eventually gravitate towards everything happening an hour later? And eventually, somebody will get the brilliant idea to switch the clocks forward another hour...

It is misleading, although mostly because the "House Majority PAC" is misleadingly named. I'm not quite sure what they intend to accomplish with that name -- maybe they're trying to make it less obvious which party is benefiting from "outside money"? Their website says that it was formed in 2011, so it's never actually been aligned with the "house majority."

Let's review, shall we?

But then you say:

I don't know any way to reconcile those statements. They are fundamentally contradictory.

Repeated assertion does not make something true. I am capable of recognizing and assessing the arguments on both sides, and I intensely dislike a mode of debate that tries to marginalize or misrepresent the people on the other side.

You keep saying that I support quarantines. That is untrue, and you know it. That is the definition of a lie. If you don't like being called a liar, you should probably stop doing it.

So you believe that a quarantine is never appropriate, under any circumstances? All right; I'll believe you, although I got a different impression from these comments that you made that led me to believe that you thought that quarantining a person who was "actively sick" with Ebola would be reasonable.

Denying the right of the government to impose a quarantine under any circumstances is a consistent point of view, albeit one that is probably not going to get much support.

How about you address what I said, rather than making personal attacks? Do you deny the statement that "Reasonable people can disagree on what that threshold is, and what the restrictions should be?" Based on your last answer, maybe you do. But say so, rather than lashing out.