I wouldn't trust anyone to know what they look at when they read code. Not because I think they're lying, but because other research shows that people often have no idea how they perform complex tasks. So I'd be very skeptical if even your most candid account of how you code or how you read code showed much correlation to how what you actually do when you perform these tasks.

This is one of the things that makes teaching so difficult. If it were just a matter of explaining what you do, it would be simple, but for many tasks you don't actually know. You have to learn all over again when it comes time to teach it.

I don't know how other universal health care systems are run, but in Canada you have a fair amount of choice when it comes to who provides your care. The government isn't directly making any medical decisions or directly providing patient care. In other words, it's single payer, but not single provider. The government essentially acts as a single insurance company, where choices about what care is given are left up to the attending physician and are subject to available resources as in any system.

It's not a perfect system, but it's also not what most people think it is.

That's a pretty silly thing to say. Canada's system is universal and ends up costing the tax payer less. AND the wait times are similar. Overall, I'm pretty happy with our system and how it stacks up to the patchwork of semi-functional and generally inefficient systems that Americans have to navigate.

Pretty much, yeah.

The concept that people would be willing to get sick simply because someone else is paying for the healthcare is idiotic. Aside from the fact that not being sick is incentive enough, most people in your country have private insurance so the cost isn't going to be covered by the government anyway. Should they end up in an emergency room, your argument is still faulty since emergency care has been covered by the government for years and has nothing to do with Obama's health care bill. (Except that having more people ensured will probably keep people out of the emergency rooms.)

It's also incorrect that food poisoning doesn't kill you. Many people recover from it, but it can be deadly.

Something tells me that Windows 7 is here to stay, at least for the next decade or so. I can't see a lot of people switching any time soon.

Exactly!

I understand your fear, but it looks like the market forces in favor of Samsung are orders of magnitude stronger than the legal threat from Apple, for starters. This verdict is not an existential threat to competition. In fact Samsung's next products are unlikely to be in violation of Apple's patents in the first place.

Regardless of what Apple wants (every company wants to get rid of competition) they have to work within the law and the law isn't likely to make Apple a monopoly any time soon.

Blind loyalty to who? I just don't think that there's likely to be a monopoly in phones. There's strong competition and has been for years now and the market is too saturated for one company to make a major share grab at this point. You'd literally have to kill or almost kill one or two of the current platforms for that to happen. Perhaps it's true that Apple wants to kill Android but legally, I don't think it has a leg to stand on.

The S3 doesn't even have a quad core in most markets. But a fast dual core processor is going to give you better performance hands down in a phone while also giving you better power performance. That's why the new iPhone beats it in the benchmarks. Even in a desktop, it's questionable whether there's sufficient parallel workload for a quad core to used efficiently. The clock speed is also irrelevant here: Apple has doubled the performance of the chip by using their own custom ARM core without substantially increasing the clock speed. At this point, ARM chips have a long way to go in terms of IPC performance, and higher clock speeds (and the exponentially higher power they use) are not where it's at.

So I'm sorry, but overclocked quad core processors are not the next (or current) big thing in phones.

That's nonsense. There is exactly zero risk of Apple pushing every other company out of the cell phone market or even of gaining majority market share. It's just not something you need to worry about.

If "ahead" is bigger, heavier and more power hungry then you might be right. If ahead is smaller, lighter, faster and with more available content and software then you're dead wrong.

I don't really care what a company does. If I like their products, I buy them. :) Anything else is silly.

Is anyone else sick of hearing about Apple vs. Samsung?

First, it's not the case that most democratic systems share power among multiple parties. They are a wide variety of democracies in the world. Some systems are more favorable to coalitions than others and therefore are able to accommodate multiple parties. Germany, for example. Systems like Canada's might seem on the outside to be multi-party systems but in nearly every case you have two parties splitting the majority of the vote while any other party is lucky to even get a seat in the government. Coalitions are almost unheard of. Without coalitions, the system inherently favors the area of the political spectrum represented by the fewest parties. (The part of the spectrum where the vote is least divided.)

The Median Voter Theorem also tells us that in a two party system with uni-dimensional issues that the parties gravitate towards one another. For the most part, that's what we're seeing here. Obama has been forced to move quite far to the right of his liberal democratic position in order to compete with Romney who has positioned himself quite far to the left of some of the more radical elements in the republican party on a great number of issues.