"I'm absolutely fed up with people basing their knowledge of healthcare reform solely on what government supporters say." There, fixed it for you.

Wrong. The fact that you have permission to do something (for now) has nothing to do with whether you love live in a dictatorship, or more properly, a police state.

The police state simply hasn't come after you, yet.

Don't confuse permission with liberty.

...the phrase "That's why they make shotguns" applies here.

Way too simplistic. The human body is vastly more subtly regulated than that. It's not the number of calories nearly as much as the type of calories. Hormones completely control fat storage and utilization and the type of calories ingested hugely affect hormone secretion.

Deprivation is a miserable weight loss strategy and almost always fails after a short struggle.

The "victims" aren't victims of obesity per se. They, and I used to be a member of that club, are victims of having been systematically lied to by a combination of dumbass "nutrition experts" and the carbohydrate industry/corporate agriculture.

The science regarding mammalian metabolism is well established and uncontroversial among endocrinologists. As one put it a while back "Carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat". I completely ignore the so called Paleo diet, even though I lost 40 lbs. over four years ago and kept it off essentially eating that way. I don't really care what great-great-great granddaddy judoguy supposedly ate. I'm interested in what modern science says. Modern science says that fat utilization and storage are 100% controlled by hormones and hormones are hugely affected by diet. Everything else is superstition.

Hear, hear! I've spent decades building back office applications. The interactivity demanded by my users FAR exceeds anything a browser based system can provide.

Not to say browser based applications aren't great, even the only way to go for some stuff. They really are, but some things (highly data centric, tightly integrated with other software for maximum utility) aps are best handled by "fat client" applications.

What does "get the money out of politics" mean? No one is allowed to tell people about their candidacy? The government would be the arbiter of election information? May Day indeed. Money is power. Politics is power. Anyone who thinks they will somehow remove money from politics is an idiot, or at best childlike.

All you can do is fight over *who* gets to wield it. At least now, bad as it is, I get to contribute to groups that represent my views, even if imperfectly. Seriously, with all the abuses of other moneyed interests,(mine, of course never abuse the system) no one has ever even tried to explain something better to me.

Just some adolescent rant about "getting the money out of politics".

Cannot be reminded of this enough. Should be required reading in school. Of course, no government school would require this.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The "symbolic figurehead" does have the power to either keep bad law from being enacted or at least forcing the Congress to get together enough to override a veto. He/she *could* be force for good, even if not all powerful. Forcing a corrupt Congress to be more open on what they're doing could help. For example, forcing corrupt Republicans to have to vote for some crappy Democrat bill they secretly support (but publically oppose for political purposes) would shine at least a little light on the bastards.

Unfortunately, the ACLU takes the incomprehensible position that somehow the Bill of Rights has an amendment to protect the government's right to keep and bear arms while ALL the rest are for individuals. Bizarre.

I've traveled to Europe and Asia and never told my bank anything and the cards worked fine. I live in MN and have done a ton of business with Home Depot near the Canadian border. One day I got a call from fraud alert the moment my card was being used at a Home Depot in Canada. I know, different country and all, but still, I'm in awe at the fraud detection algorithms.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the time I had to work in a field office to repair files that were constantly being corrupted. No one could figure out the problem until we looked on the other side of the office wall. Right behind the sheetrock wall sub-station sized transformers were being tested. The guys in the shop would run these babies up to leak voltage and then shut them off. We put a recorder on the outlet the computer used and would record huge drops when they powered up the transformer and then 5000v+ surges when they cut it off. Save your work frequently was the name of the game.

Many years ago, another programmer and I were put on a super priority project. The company didn't have any office space so we were put into an empty warehouse nearby that had some tables moved in. We didn't have a phone, but the company gave us a CB walkie talkie. The CEO's secretary had the other one in case we needed anything. When we needed a break, we'd race RC cars around the place.

The purpose of modern government is to protect us from liberty.

Thank goodness Cisco has a champion of truth to appeal to.

He'll, you know, speak truth to power! He'll battle the NSA on our behalf!

He'll, he'll uh... Oh, never mind.