So a lot of people heat their homes in the winter with natural gas. In the summer, natural gas bills are low. In the winter, they can be very high.

You can sign up for a payment plan that evens out the costs. You pay more than you normally would in the summer, and less than you normally would in the winter. The monthly charge doesn't change much all year long.

This plan makes it much easier to budget for expenses.

It turns out this approach works well for health care, too. Pay about the same in the summer (when you're young) and in the winter (when you're old).

You see, many young people just aren't very good at planning for the future. For example, many old people would be homeless, and starve on the streets (and die) when they got old, without something like Social Security. The system actually works very well, despite right-wing lies that it doesn't (the only problems are congress borrowing money from Social Security for non Social Security related things).

So the same proven approach is being applied to health care. This is a good idea.

I'm not sure how I could explain the "so what" part to you any more clearly: in a democracy, if there is too much wealth pooling (or the perception thereof), the people will take your money from you, by force, if necessary.

Thus, it's in the enlightened self interest of the wealthy not to get too wealthy (or perceived to be too wealthy).

You can argue until the cows come home how fair or not fair it is for so much wealth to pool to the top. But at the end of the day, if you live in a democracy, and it is the people's perception that the wealthy have gone too far, the people will say Enough Is Enough, and take the wealth from the wealthy, by force, if necessary.

It's in the enlightened self interest of the super wealthy (this includes CEOs) to not allow their massive wealth accumulation to become so severe that The People rise up and take their wealth from them. CEO compensation has pretty obviously crossed the line to the point where the vast majority of people think they are dirty rotten overly greedy bastards.

Wealthy people should consider this sooner rather than later.

The fastest way to get me to uninstall an app is in-game purchases (other than a one-time payment to purchase the full version straight up, with no further fees).

Give me a lite version to evaluate it, then let me buy it straight up. I loathe and detest in-game purchases for gold, gems, or anything else necessary to continue a game, or to speed it up.

Oh, please. Like Facebook, Microsoft, and a dozen other companies aren't following us around on the web, too?

At least Google gives us some really useful software and services in exchange for some of your mostly-not-of-value-to-you privacy. What does a company like Facebook give you except narcissism and a permanent embarrassing history of all your ill-thought out sharing with the whole world?

Companies can and already do install trusted certs on the browsers of their computers, and then MITM the traffic. In other words, https would not stop them from doing any filtering they care to do.

End-to-end encryption is a great idea, but technical people need to make this as simple and idiot proof as possible to maximize adoption. Let me repeat that: it needs to be simple and idiot proof. I know it's popular around here to accuse everyone in the world of being a drooling dolt, especially where technical matters are concerned, but the fact is, people are busy living their lives, working hard, spending time with their family, etc., and have little time left over for technical geekery. A ten page guide that walks you through all kinds of technical jargon and details is not going to cut the mustard. It must be nearly "click, click, click, done" simple.

https is broken by design: it trusts anything the root CAs trust, and you can be sure most or all the CAs around the world are in bed with all the big intelligence agencies.

Yeah, good call there, Alomex. Java's been a real failure and programming languages like Haskell have taken off like a rocket.

<rolls eyes>

Eventually, you'll know why some people might choose the larger but lower spec iPad 2 over the iPad mini.

You'll also learn why people like the zoom button on browsers, why people like smartphones with large screens, etc.

Everyone figures it out eventually...

I would trust the NSA's security guys to get security better than any for-profit company with strong economic incentive to cut corners.

And I realize I'd be handing the NSA the keys to get inside my network -- that's the trade-off I think many people would find worthwhile -- giving the NSA access in exchange for them writing the most secure firmware they possibly could.

I know this is going to sound mighty odd, but hear me out...

I kind of wish the NSA sold things like consumer routers, for which they wrote all the firmware, user interface, etc.

The NSA employs Really Ridiculously Smart People, so then I could count on my router being really, really secure against everyone and everything... except the NSA.

Which would be an OK trade-off for me, and I think would be an OK trade-off for a lot of people...

This is just nonsense, and to see it constantly repeated and modded up is just sad.

C is only simple in the same way a written alphabet with only two letters is simple: sure, you only have to remember the letters A and B (simple!), but actually using it is not simple.

For crying out loud, in C, you can't even do A = B + C; without having a very good chance of invoking undefined behavior. Why? Because in C, overflow or underflow on signed values has undefined behavior!

Access beyond the end of an array and damage data elsewhere in the system (making it often really hard to find)? No problem!

Laboriously managing your own memory (and probably leaking it)? No problem!

What, real strings? Heck no, real men like to take the risk of overflowing the strings and their buffers!

C is filled with literally hundreds of mine fields just waiting to trap the unwary, and often forces you to write a lot of code that would only be a few lines in a higher level language.

C is not simple to use. C is not simple to use.