Well ... yeah. What better system could you ask for than a federal law that mandates that people buy your product, or else, especially when that "or else" includes fines and the IRS on your neck? And by the way, insurance companies can't pass laws, politicians have to do it for them. Thank you oh so much, Democrats.

And there's no possible way to know how many have paid SO FAR until the deadline has passed? That doesn't seem to stop them when it comes to announcing how many have "enrolled" (whatever their definition of that is).

A Navy laboratory project I was on wanted to buy the source code to MSDOS for a project where we needed to make some custom mods. Digital Research said they were interested, but their lawyers made it living hell. Somehow the Navy lawyers and DR's lawyers finally hammered out an agreement (I remember one of the provisions was that we would never, ever, EVER tell anyone that they had sold the code to us), but it took so many months that we had by then written most of what we needed from scratch, so we decided it was better to just finish that rather than spend whatever ungodly sum they had finally agreed to and still end up having to write the custom code for that.

I remember reading one of Robert Heinlein's novels in which a character (Slipstick Libby, perhaps) was on a rocket ship and dealing with a computer. Via punch cards.

Put yet another way, shut the hell up and do what I tell you.

Chris McAvoy says he's glad he works at Mozilla, where he can say things "without fear of retribution". Evidently he believes that isn't a courtesy that should be extended to the CEO.

What disturbs me most about this story is that the "stressful situations" must essentially be mouse torture. Having to do things like that are why I'd never be able to do lab work involving live animals. I'd probably end up releasing them or smuggling them out and turning them into pets.

You have to start somewhere, and if it's successful in this case, then the rest can follow. What surprises me about this story is that I thought all that data had to be disclosed already. How stupid is it that we have regulations based on data that's isn't made available for independent verification?

This sounds like a potential disaster in the making. What's to prevent someone intent on mischief from creating spoof messages and causing hideous problems because your car thinks cars around it are involved in accidents, stopped, approaching at high speed, etc.? Even better, faking emergency vehicle messages that cause you to pull over and let the spoofer sail on through. A lot of people would be tempted to employ one of those.

Vouchers that go with the kid. If the local government schools are doing a lousy job, let the parents take their kid and the money and go elsewhere. Competition to satisfy those customers and keep the money coming is the shortest and most effective path to reforming the system and keeping it reformed.

FTFA: Teachers unions have vigorously defended tenure, seniority and dismissal rules, calling them crucial safeguards and essential to recruiting and retaining quality instructors.

California teachers are indeed unionized, and are one of the most powerful political forces in the state, which is one reason there's so little change.

To your latter point: if the lawsuit succeeds, existing work rules would be negated by a court. A strike would be pointless, since the teachers' employers would be powerless to reinstate them.

I'd have been happy to have received and invested all of the money that I and my employers paid into the SS system over the years in return for not receiving SS, but that wasn't an option, so yeah, I'm going to want mine. Can I assume that you'll be pushing your elected officials to give you the deal that was never available to me so that you're not in the same place I am later in life, or are you going to bitch at my generation but leave the system you're criticizing in place?

I don't know where you're getting your ideas of what libertarians think, but believing corporations can do no wrong and that there should be no regulation isn't in the mainstream of libertarian thought. Maybe it seems that way to you because libertarians push back against the more insane and intrusive stuff that government does in those areas, so it appears that we hate it all in toto, but that's not the case. We just want to limit government to a sensible role, not the all-encompassing, all-seeing no-sparrow-falls behemoth that it's become.

Somebody explain to me just WHY Yale would have a problem with the same data presented differently. If they're going to this kind of trouble to stamp it out, it must pose a threat of some sort, so what is it?

And it also doesn't mean 99.99% think global warming is real and man-made. There's no breakout of the "We don't know"s, and the "The sun is doing it"s.