I dunno. Has Obama come out in favor of it yet?

I have family in Canada who aren't happy with the system there and had to come here (US) for treatment due to stupid long waits. I suspect health care is one of those things that works "fine" for the majority of people because the majority of people are "fine" and don't need it. A good friend of mine is permanently disabled and on Medicare, which works "fine" for her, too, aside from a month or so wait to get on it. After that, it appears that when she needs to go to a doctor, she does. When she needs meds, she gets them. When she needs to see specialists, she sees them.

If the US can't come up with an efficient-enough bureaucracy to make it work there, then it's really time to change how you guys do things.

Well, yeah, that's probably true, but even if we do, single payer still means no options. You're happy with your system now, but when it gets changed down the road and you're no longer happy with it, what are you going to do? I can switch plans at work once a year. If I want private insurance, I can pick up the phone and buy it. If I want to see any doctor, I can walk in and pay them. With single payer, what are you going to do? Change countries?

True, it doesn't, but it does delete the key which is used to encrypt everything. With no key, it's gibberish, indistinguishable from random data. Or so claims Apple, anyway. If you have better data, I'd be most interested to see it (and freely admit it's possible ANY vendor is lying about their security precautions).

Personally, I find it quite possible that Joe RandomUser would "delete" pictures, etc, and not know how to do a proper wipe. Heck, I had to look it up, but it took knowing that in general "delete" means "remove the pointer to". Casual users mostly don't know that.

Encryption that works now can be broken a year from now

Not remotely. If you find 256 bit AES broken in a year, let us know.

Exactly. There's one example where you say it works fine, and one where it's apparently pretty bad. Do you see why I don't want to take the crapshoot? It's hard to unwind. If people want to opt in, I don't have a problem with that, but don't compel everyone into the same boat and hope it actually floats. The VA is a concrete example that it might actually be worse.

Ice cream doesn't cause health issues. I eat ice cream. I also exercise 3-6 times a week. That won't stop politicians and their "sin taxes". Maybe your government is wonderful and all that tax money would go to make sick people well, but we mostly turn taxes into bureaucracy. I don't want more.

How's that working out at the VA these days?

That perfectly highlights the problem with having only one option. When that option is bad, you can't go somewhere else.

There's also absolutely nothing anywhere that keeps lawmakers from deciding that people who eat too much ice cream should be taxed on it, you know, to offset the increased healthcare costs they impose on "the system".

This'd be one of those false dichotomies they talk about. You can actually care about both of these. I don't want anybody reading my email or listening to my calls. I also want my property wired to the gills with sensors only I can read. If I choose to share that data with a company, I want a big red button marked "Forget everything you know about me.", and I want them audited to prove that they actually do it.

I'm not so naive as to think I'm going to get those things any time soon, but if enough people want them, ask for them, and don't buy stuff from companies that do otherwise, we'll get them eventually.

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.

Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?

Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.

That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.

Here's what I think is the confounding factor (there always is one): I'd be wondering, "Does that button REALLY deliver a shock, or is it some kind of sham social psychology experiment prop? I bet it's a prop. If it isn't, it won't deliver THAT bad a shock. If it is, I wonder what the researchers will do when I push it?"

The confounding factor is curiosity. They'd have to do *two* sessions with the overly curious.

Eventually the sun will engulf the earth. Long before that I'll die. Before that, I'll change banks, credit cards, whatever. Encryption only has to work long enough, not forever.

Is that because of the distoration insurance causes, though? We don't have to buy cars through intermediaries and they aren't ridiculously jacked up. We don't buy groceries through intermediaries and they aren't ridiculously jacked up. I think part of the reason medical costs have gone nuts, and to a degree education costs, too, is because people are separated from actually paying them. Most people don't pay for their medical costs, they pay for their medical insurance, or rather just a part of it. People don't care what things cost, they care if it's covered by insurance or not. Your premise seems to be that without insurance you'd be paying 3x as much. Maybe competition would drive the price down to what the insurance companies pay.

Woz gets way more hero worship than I understand, but he left Apple WAY before they made flashy smartphones. Like 20 years before in the Apple II/Macintosh days.

KDE, Canonical, and GNOME have all made this huge push into stupid design decisions lately. Canonical with Ubuntu Phone/Tablet and Mir, GNOME with GNOME 3 and treating the desktop like a tablet, Mozilla with FirefoxOS, and KDE with this sort of stuff.

You know what I want out of an open source desktop? A DESKTOP! Seriously. I need a good desktop environment for my COMPUTER where I do actual work. I can't write code on a tablet. I can't write papers on a tablet. I can't do serious design work (anywhere, because I'm not a designer, but specifically also not on a tablet).

If I want to use a tablet, I want to use it to play games and watch movies, and Ubuntu/KDE/GNOME tablets aren't going to have Civilization Revolution, Ticket to Ride, Netflix, or Amazon Instant Video any time soon, so any tablet running those operating systems is going to be just a really crippled computer and a useless tablet.