I live in Australia and most medical practioners dont care how you pay. I bought glasses recently and the optometrist charged me no different because I was claiming on my health insurance (why would they, they get the same amount no matter how I pay)

It should be like that in the US,

Not all lawyers are evil or bad, By far the worst kind is the "Corporate Lawyer". Get rid of those and the world would be a better place.

The difference is that those EULAs are license agreements for software (including the pre-installed software that comes on your new hardware) and there is precedent for it being legal to put those clauses in software EULAs.

Anyone who chooses to pay for cable TV, internet access or cellphone service instead of paying for necessary medical care is an idiot IMO (the exceptions being if not paying for the service will cost more in termination charges than paying for it would or if having the service is essential for the job that person is in or for finding a job for that person)

What is needed is a law or regulation that requires medical care (anything from a visit to a doctor to a prosthetic hand to an MRI to major surgery to a pair of prescription sunglasses) to cost exactly the same amount no matter how it is paid for.

Shouldn't matter whether its being paid for by a government program, by an insurance company, by a corporate health plan or by an individual with cash, it should cost the same amount for the same service.

The only real winner from corn ethanol is giant agribusiness companies who produce the GM corn seeds, sell the massive amount of chemicals the corn requires and makes ethanol from the result. It does nothing to reduce green house gas emissions. It does nothing to reduce the dependance on foreign oil (especially given all the oil-derived products required to grown that corn including the diesel for the tractors and harvesters). And it probably doesn't put all that much extra money in the pockets of small corn farmers.

Ethanol from hemp or switch grass or any number of other plants is much better for the environment, doesn't require anywhere near as many inputs, can be grown on land that other stuff wont grow on, can genuinely reduce dependance on oil (foreign or otherwise) AND can reduce green house gas emissions. But there is no "Switch grass lobby" to fight the corn lobby so everything is pushed to corn ethanol and the planet is worse because of it.

Not only can they deliver supplies to the ISS without the need to pay the Russians to do it but they can probably do it cheaper than the Russians too.

I guess I am spoilt by living in Australia where pretty much all the major universities I know of are well served by good public transport and are surrounded by piles of privately-owned student housing.

If you live in an area where the only way to get from where you live to where you study is private transport (be that a car you own or something else like a taxi) you may not think a car is a luxury.

But if you are doing that, you are also stupid for not living somewhere close to campus (or to public transport links to campus)

With all the noise about OpenSSL lately, running this Coverity test on it (and other security software like GNUTLS) and sharing the results seems like it would be a good thing...

Here in Australia, my experience is that the genuinely local newspapers (limited to specific suburbs or council areas and usually available for free every week) are great as a way of finding out whats going on in the local area. The normal daily newspapers are full of crap and not worth reading.

Here in Oz we dont have state income taxes or state returns to worry about and if you don't want to use an accountant or tax agent to do the return (because you have a simple return), you can just file it electronically with the free government-supplied etax app. (or as a paper form if you really want to)

How do we know that serious security flaws don't exist in the SSL implementations used by Microsoft or other proprietary vendors?

IMO the NSA should be split into 2 agencies.
One would be tasked with protecting the security of data, information, communications and networks of the United States government, its agencies and any entity deemed to be vital to national security. And this does include finding and fixing (or giving to vendors to fix) bugs in software being used by those entities it is tasked with protecting. And developing new protocols and algorithms and systems and hardware and software to protect the stuff it is tasked with protecting. And certifying software, hardware, algorithms, protocols and systems (developed in-house or externally) as being safe (or unsafe) for use in storing, manipulating, handling, transmitting or receiving the stuff it is tasked with protecting.

The other would be tasked with spying on threats to national security. Including monitoring communications, email, data, computers and software belonging to those threats. Yes that includes hacking into the computer of a bad guy who stole classified secrets or launched malware that compromised government systems.

This agency would have constraints placed on it so that it was only monitoring threats and not anyone else and so that it was not compromising global security in the course of carrying out its mission (e.g. it would be prohibited from trying to weaken the security of software/hardware/protocols/algorithms/etc in order to be able to spy on entities using those things)

Remember that when Truman created the NSA, a computer was a device that took up several rooms, there were only a handful in the entire world and only a small number of of people even knew what one was, let alone were able to use one. And the closest thing to digital communications networks were teleprinters. And the biggest threat to national security was a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 bomber with a nuclear bomb underneath.

These days, computers are everywhere and being used for all sorts of things never imagined in the 50s. And the biggest threat to US national security is not a Russian bomber or missile but a terrorist with a suitcase bomb or hijacked airliner. Or a hacker from a foreign intelligence agency.

FPGA vendors probably don't want to open up their specs and stuff because they are worried that opening up everything will give their competitors the secrets to what makes their FPGA "good".

Patents may come into it as well (I dont know how the patent situation is in the FPGA marketplace). And possibly a desire to stop people from being able to just buy the FPGAs at x amount per unit and force them to pay up for the toolchain too.