I wonder if either of you see the irony-- because the government arguably overstepped its bounds by forcing everyone to buy health insurance, now it gets to claim it can overstep its bounds even further by telling you what you can do with your body.

Government is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Maybe we can now take basement-dwelling slashdotters and put them in the body of someone who goes outside and actually contacts other people in meatspace. The only problem I can see is the brightness of the daystar causing sensory overload.

Sorry to crush your cocky statist attitude, but he'd simply assumed the island was privately owned and was incorrect. It has nothing to do with whether he's a libertarian or not, although I'm greatly concerned if the concept of private property is now only the province of libertarians.

No auditor I have dealt with in five years of PCI DSS has demanded software firewalls. They do require that systems be monitored for changes and only critical services be running.

Ironically, the software that most often makes it difficult to run a local firewall is AV software. Symantec is notorious. They need dozens of ports opened. And when you upgrade, suddenly they need a different set.

We gave up our freedom through the ACA, and yet this continues. It's not about being billed, it's about being billed incorrectly and not having any control over the process. The UK has fully socialized health care, yet people are denied care or left to die waiting... sometimes, literally waiting in the ER.

Clearly, giving up more freedom isn't the answer.

I have two recommendations:

1. read your mail daily, in case, you know, you get bill reminders or court orders,
2. Don't trust anyone to pay your bills; verify that they were paid. It's still easier and quicker than using checks.

Goldberg was not a madam. Creepy? Yes.

I told you to keep taking your meds.

You don't understand enough about real estate, or finances in general, to make statements about mortgages or rent.

My mortgage is about $1,200 a month. Could I rent my 2,300 sq ft home for that? Perhaps, but unlikely. And the landlord could kick me out once my lease expired. And he gets to say what I do with the property. And he owns any improvements free and clear, unless we make written agreements.

Besides appreciation, as you pay your mortgage you gain equity. Equity is the difference between the property's value and your loan balance. Even if it doesn't go up in value at all, you "own" that equity. When you rent a property for 10 years and move, you get nothing (except perhaps a little interest on your deposit). When you sell your home, you get back your equity.

Should people not be buying extravagant homes and calling them an "investment"? Indeed, they're a liability, considering the money you have to put into them all the time. But sweeping statements, like "rent is cheaper", doesn't show the whole picture. Right now, rents are still pretty high, so those who can find a way to make deals on property are winning.

Anyone who believed that equality of opportunity meant equality of results is the fool. Just because you were fooled doesn't mean you get to have the government steal from others in order to give you equal results.

We have a half-black, half white man who grew up poor, and had his father walk out on him, and was basically raised by his grandparents-- become President of the United States. Yet this same man (and a Caucasian woman who also grew up poor yet became a US Senator) tells you that you can't make it: you need government to do it for you. Well, apparently the way to succeed if you're poor is to tell everyone they can't do it without government intervention, then get them to vote you into public office.

Stop making excuses.

The AHRA predates DMCA by several years.

Already banned in New Jersey and D.C., and New York and Connecticut have a 7-band magazine limit.

The problem is that we gave Israel a barren land with indefensible borders. Then we complained when they took action to assert themselves. It's like boasting that you gave someone a dilapidated house, then criticize them for cutting down the vines choking it, and for making too much noise sawing and hammering.

Our second problem is that we have voters who never learned in school that there were plenty of African Americans in the military, but they were segregated thanks to progressive President Wilson. They also like to pretend that the Nazi party was ever a legitimate party in the USA, when it's the ever-enlightended Europeans and progressive darlings like George Bernard Shaw who liked both the Nazi party and Stalin.

My first Windows system had all 32 bit drivers, so, don't forget to close the gate when you leave so the unicorn doesn't get out.

Really, you only had trouble if you were using either very low-end, parallel-port attached stuff, or high-end proprietary cards. Everything else-- SCSI devices, PnP cards, and mainstream non-PnP cards-- were supported at launch or within a year. You might have to log onto a BBS to get the driver (since web support sites were still a little primitive), but most people shouldn't have been running anything in real mode. Sometimes the driver was even included in Windows, but if it loaded in autoexec.bat it would prevent the Windows one from loading. All you had to do was comment it out.