A few years ago, Intuit released an "update" to Quickbooks for Macs. Upon installation, poof, there goes your entire partition table. Completely unrecoverable. In my case, I happened to be on a business trip and had to get my backup drive FedExed to me. Did Intuit offer to pay for that? Nope. Rat bastards.

Now, I'll grant you that Intuit doesn't seem to give a crap about the Mac but having switched over to the Windoze version of Quickbooks so I could get the Manufacturing edition features, I've come to the conclusion that they don't give a crap about their Windoze customers either given their track record of ignoring enhancements or additions to core functionality and instead trying to push people onto the web.

So, if a company doesn't disclose a breach in 30 days, what happens? They get fined? By the government? Who gets the money? What does a punitive regulation solve? What if the company doesn't themselves find out about the breach for 30 days?

AKA Alpha Males.

People who are able to bullsh*t others into believing their bullsh*t will always trump those with real intelligence and experience who try desperately to pull back the curtain on the "wizard."

Everyone knows (or should know) that the web was built on WTF-8 which explains a lot.

Man, the B.S. is getting deep in here.

Good for them but I highly doubt the phrase "Yahoo it" will catch on.

Look at your bill again. Here's what my APS electric bill looks like for this month for my warehouse space:

Customer account charge $4.16
Delivery service charge $3.33
Demand charge - delivery $0.00
Environmental benefits surcharge $0.97
System benefits charge $0.24
Power supply adjustment* $0.12
Metering* $34.82
Meter reading* $2.24
Billing* $2.48
Generation of electricity* $5.50
Federal transmission and ancillary services* $0.34
Federal transmission cost adjustment* $0.21
LFCR adjustor $0.52
Taxes and fees
Regulatory assessment $0.11
State sales tax $3.14
County sales tax $0.42
City sales tax $1.12
Franchise fee $1.10

Cost of electricity with taxes and fees $60.82. Note that the actual cost of generating the electricity is less than 10% of the total bill.

Wrong. That's because the phone company was DE-regulated thus allowing competitors to break the stranglehold AT&T had. Even so, every time the Feds decide to add a new regulation in the hopes of sticking it to the phone company, they end up tacking on yet another fee to your bill.

We're seeing the effects of regulation now in the healthcare world. Private practices are going the way of the dodo and/or are requiring patients pay an annual fee only so they can afford to pay the paper pushers.

Big deal. Would you dredge up and dispose of the USS Arizona? Would you sell off Gettysburg to real estate developers? The point is that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. The Manhattan Project has tremendous historical significance and peaceniks need to pull their heads out of the sand and remember why we went to such lengths.

You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts. Don't believe me? Take a very close look at ANY of your utility bills and tell me how many fees you are paying that have nothing to do with the thing you are using (the actual electricity, the actual water, etc). ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period. Oh, and they're going to have to hire bunchteen thousand paper pushers to deal with the regulations so you'll be paying their salaries and benefits. And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.

Imagine being able to print reproductions of exotic or extinct wood e.g. tiger or fiddleback maple.

Whenever this debate comes up I'm reminded of two snippets from the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. In the first episode, there is a pre-meeting to discuss what to present to JFK. The head of the national science advisory, ironically played by Al Franken, scoffs at a manned moon mission saying that all we'd get for our 20 billion dollars are some rocks. Later in the series as they show actual historical footage of man-on-the-street interviews as Apollo 11 is making its landing. There's one beatnik who says, "It's a groovy trip but there are a lot more important things to do first." Usually, those folks spout off about eliminating world hunger or affecting world peace or eliminating poverty. Those things, while noble causes, are wholly intractable problems. Americans have spent trillions on trying to deal with them and all we've gotten are more Ship B people. The dreamers still believe that they can be solved by hiring more Ship B people and creating more government programs. These are not engineering problems that are solved by designing something tangible and making it function. Solving engineering problems has the added benefit of being able to apply the knowledge to other engineering problems. Devoting resources to intractable problems only results in increasing the parasitic economy.

Who hasn't seen people stoned out of their gourd waiting in line for the Laserium show?

This SCOTUS case might be relevant:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bi...