That's a terrible comparison. Changing the oil according to the manufacturers recommended specifications *is* preventative care. Reactionary care would be ignoring the oil until the engine starts making clanking noises. At that point, you're performing a full rebuild, replacing all the components that were damaged by the oil system failure.

The preventative option costs $50 a few times a year. The reactionary option costs thousands of dollars.

Obama care isn't going to mandate that you go to the doctor every time you stub your toe.

The libertarian ideal assumes that the nautral state of business is competition, when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation. In a libertarian paradise, one of two things happens:

1. The major insurance companies collude, offering customers no choice in plans. All plans offered have loopholes where the company can easily dump the sick. Customers are given no choice, and insurance companies more or less write a death clause* into their policy,

2. The major insurance companies consolidate to the point where you only have one or two options, neither offering any real choice or competitive reason to chose one over the other. You accept whatever plan is offered.

In either case, start-ups are quickly squelched.

You more or less see this in the drug trade. In mexico, the drug market is more or less deregulated, since the government has no power to control the cartels. While the major cartels do squabble, they prefer not to compete against each other directly, as doing so tends to weaken both, allowing a 3rd cartel to grab for power. Regardless, upstart operations are quickly squashed.

You may argue that this situation is the result of government regulation. I'd agree, but point out that the only thing government regulation has done is artificially raised the value of the commodity. A commodity that is 'necessary' and sufficiently rare or expensive will tend towards the same result if left unregulated (see various oil and communication companies. See also diamonds, where the DeBeers conglomerate created the same artificial scarcity as seen in the drug trade.)

* Prior to the ACA, insurance companies did not have 'death panels' but they did have a 'death clause' in the form of a $3.5 million dollar lifetime cap on coverage. If you hit this cap, your 'pre-existing' condition would disqualify you from purchasing insurance from a competitive provider, and unless you were extremely rich, you clearly would not be able to insure yourself. At this point, you would be stabilized and sent home by the hospital as soon as your medical costs had left your family destitute.

As a side note, the lack of insurance has a tendency of making medical problems worse. Patients won't tend to pay out of pocket for preventative medicine, instead waiting until a medical issue requires emergency care. The ACA can certainly help correct this issue.

Apt platitude: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I can't speak to Doctors, but right now the education industry has pumped out way more nurses than we can employ. If the ACA forces hospitals to expand, the nursing jobs will fill quickly.

Just about everyone on here will want to blame the Republicans but in reality it takes two tango

This is true... in the sense that a hostage crisis requires a hostage taker, a hostage, and a police force.

A courteous, polite response on Slashdot. Was not expecting that. :)

$800 is definitely doable. With components, there's often a sweat spot on the price/performance curve where you can build a powerful system without spending more than $1200 or so. A high-end gaming computer tends to be expensive. With that said, the main benefit of building a machine from components is that some of those components will be re-usable down the road.

Games typically don't benefit from horizontal scaling. Although many games have gone multi-threaded, there are only so many tasks you can hand off to additional cores.

Would have been nice if you'd put a TL;DR at the top that this is an apple propaganda piece.

The specs you listed above are for a gaming computer. Your Mac is a nice machine and it can certainly play some games, but it wouldn't be ideal for that purpose.

Or did facebook pull a MySQL?

So, basically... MySQL pulled a facebook?

The first lesson I learned from the book 'High Performance MySQL' is that one should never use an ORM. Optimizing for ORM queries is virtually impossible.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7707976/php-and-mysql-high-traffic-solution

FWIW: I notice in a later post you mention PDOs... Which look like they won't impact optimization strategies.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing what the benefits of this are. It seems like mSATA drives are more or less on parity with this in terms of size and capacity, but have the benefit of increased longevity, reduced noise, and lower power consumption.

I honestly think spinning hard disks are going to go the way of CRTs within the next 5 to 10 years. And there's a high probability Segate will go with it.

You can MITM a SSL connection if you have access to a valid CA key. However, the attack would not be undetected; you need the sites private key in order to create a duplicate certificate. To create a duplicate certificate, you'd need the site's private key. And if you have that, you don't need a CA cert.

Someone who's paying attention could easily see that the MITM certificate doesn't match the original cert. For example, SSH doesn't use CA key signing. However, clients can still detect a MITM attack because the MITM public key does not match the cached key maintained by the client. (This presumes of course that you aren't performing a MITM attack using the compromised private key.)

It really depends on the phone. My Nexus S has been dropped a dozen times without issue. My wife has been through an iPhone 4 and a Nexus III. Larger phones don't seem to like being dropped.

Screen protectors are different... There's all kinds of shit in my pockets that can scratch even gorilla glass. Plus, the screens are oil resistant, which is nice.

I strongly disagree. I'd happily deploy configuration management tools or an inventory service in environments with 2 hosts. Configuration management isn't just automation; it's also build documentation and a handy gateway between your RCS and your systems.