A Stephen King book, pretty well written.

Why would they?

I contend that a bank that rakes its customers over the coals in the manner in which you described would quickly have no customers. Word would spread incredibly quickly in today's information age that bank x royally screwed person y and customers would remove their money in droves.

Since the amount of money that a bank can loan is tied to the amount of "reserves" they have on hand, a bank that had any significant number of withdrawals (say 5-10%) would very quickly have its balance sheets become negative rendering the bank insolvent as currently outstanding loans exceed the bank's capital requirements which justify those loans.

Banks compete fiercly for customers with the cost to attract a new customer being quite high. While on the surface it might seem that having more revenue from service charges and fees would be in the best interest of bank x, it clearly would not be worth the tarnished reputation of allowing its customers to be wiped out by some nefarious prankster sending micro-payments.

My point is that sure, banks like to charge fees and penalties, but I think I given compelling reasons why they would be interested in limiting/eliminating the ability of the above mentioned nefarious prankster from wiping someone out.

Every time a law is passed people lose freedom. While each individual law may seem to be reasonable and well-intentioned, the cumulative effect of law upon law upon law is quite restrictive. Additionally, laws are frequently perverted to mean things and to enforce things that they were never intentioned to. Look at abuses of the DMCA, the Patriot act and I am sure countless others that don't come to mind just this moment.

I am sorry, buy why should this be illegal? Why should any respectable government waste everyone's time writing yet another pointless ineffectual over-engineered law that will eventually be abused as it evolves into some sort of tyranical restriction. Why don't banks and other organizations that allow micro-payments simply set a minimum transfer amount such that the amount transferred to the recipient must be positive after any fees are subtracted? Or they could make the sender pay the transfer amount (since in any sort of commerce this cost would be built into the product anyway) OR let the recipient specify (via an account setting) the minimum amount that they will accept as a payment. There are countless ways to avoid negative transfers without getting governments and laws involved. If this happened to me, I would complain to the bank, not the government! If the bank were to be unwilling to provide relief, they must not want me as a customer.

People buy used games because of price. It seems to be that as a game ages, publishers could more aggressively lower the price of a game to continue to attract sales. Just as there are some people who wait for a computer component to be on the market for 6-12 months before purchasing so as to not pay an arm and a leg for performance, there will also be people who do the same thing with games. If the publisher lowers their prices to be competitive with what used shops charge, they would automatically attract sales away the used market. There is no need to use draconian DRM or strong-handed licenses or government legislation.

Despite the reasons for the EHR outage and despite almost any amount of IT planning to mitigate this kind of outage, there are scenarios where such an outage are unavoidable. Working for a hospital, I have seen where both of our WAN circuits have gone down due to fiber cuts by construction contractors outside of our facility (a fairly common occurence in general). There are certainly other ways of procurring connectivity like satellite and cellullar, but these are both prone to their own problems (satellite is affected by the weather and has very high latency and cellular is prone to interference, competes with other cellular users for bandwidth), and are relatively low bandwidth. WAN connectivity isn't really the issue though, Inside of a hospital you can have a dual core network infrastructure and have dual paths to all of your assets, you can have 5000 amp/hour batteries in all of the IDF's, you can over-engineer every aspect of the system and still have a failure somewhere that brings down your system.

Of course, you have to remember that all of this over-engineering costs money. The more money a hospital spends on bulletproofing EHR, the more they have to charge patients or cut corners elsewhere in order to remain profitable. At some point for any system, be it EHR or any other, this process becomes unsustainable as no one could afford the services of the hospital.

Some may see this as a reason why for profit hospitals are bad and why the government should run things. It really wouldn't change. The government is currently effectively bankrupt. We borrow billions from other countries and the Federal Reserve prints up the shortfall causing currency inflation. When our debt becomes so large that our credit rating falters, other countries will be less and less inclined to finance our debts which will bring more inflation as the Fed continues to print the shortfall. Why do people think that the government's budget is any different from a household budget? How long can you keep spending more than you earn and stave off bankruptcy?

The fact of the matter is that a for profit organization has the most incentive to build the most effective and efficient system for dealing with their core business. Of course, governmentrules and regulations and the organizations' leadership (if inept) can stymie this process.

In the Red Dwarf books there was a game called better than life. Basically it made all of your dreams come true (I imagine scantily clad babes would fit into that category) to the point where you would die of hunger rather than turn off the game. Some people just forgot that they were in a game and died for same reason.

Sorry, but most companies aren't in the business of any sort of IT as part of their core business. IT enables their core business, but it is overhead. Whether or not making your own IT cables is cost effective or not is one thing, but it definitely falls under IT. If I took your comment to its logical conslusion I would ask, "Why should his company have a network since networks clearly aren't part of his company's core business?"

These aren't necessarily limited to "terrorism". It seems that these signs could be used in preparing for any number of crimes and perhaps even some legitimate activities (if you were a private investigator for example, there may be others...).

Why is it that nowadays any significantly high profile criminal activity has been reclassified as terrorism? I thought that terrorist acts were supposed to invoke terror in the pursuit of some political end by blowing up/killing buildings/planes/hostages, the idea being that a population would be in so much fear (terror) that they would pressure their government to give in to the demands of the terrorists.

The answer is that there are probably too few of the above classification of terrorists to actually have a war against (as in the war on terror) here in the United States. Those in control need to expand the definition of terror so as to actually have something to have war against. Why have a war on terror at all? Many people are willing to cede their liberty and freedom to catch terrorists of the ilk that perpetrated 9/11 (a la the war on terror) and the government is using that sentiment with regards to the newly reclassified definition of terrorist (pretty much anyone they don't like that they are willing to label as terrorist...protesters, constitutionalists, libertarians etc etc etc. See Missouri's MIAC report which associated supporters of Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr, three presidential candidates all espousing constitutional government)being associated with terrorists. The Bush administration (and now Obama administration) has taken full advantage of the flexibility of the term "terrorist" to assault personal freedoms on an unprecedented scale.

If you see the scales of freedom tipping in the wrong direction, get involved. There are left and right leaning organizations that are trying to restore our freedom:
American Freedom Campaign
The Pen
DownsizeDc.org
The Campaign for Liberty
Restore the Republic
Young Americans for Liberty

MU: Man-made CO2 is a small contributor to overall atmospheric CO2 levels.

Engage the scientific method sections of your brains and challenge the assertions of those inciting the global warming hysteria. Perhaps humans are damning the planet with CO2, perhaps they aren't...but educate yourselves rather than take Al Gore's word for it.

Umm, why are they asking the government for help on this? If they want google to pay for news then they should charge google for the news. Why does the government have to get involved?

We gave them money because if AIG fails, two huge things go down with them. First, Europe's big banks all of them (who used AIG to get cheap insurance--they'd suddenly need new equity on the order of 30-50 billion). Second, money market funds who would be facing much larger losses then they did with Lehman after all of AIG's derivative counterparties get first cut unsecured lenders would take huge haircuts, likely leading to several funds "breaking the buck" and a run on their virtual banks. Since sending $200 billion to AIG is much cheaper than dealing with the carnage those events would cause, the government holds its nose and hopes for the best.

Ok, so AIG is an insurer that insured the mortgage risk of the big banks. All AIG is doing with the bailout money is paying it out to banks in fulfillment of insurance policies. So in effect AIG is the middleman where the government gives money to AIG who then pays it to Citi and BofA and whatever other banks (including foreign banks) took out policies. Why couldn't we have just let AIG fail and bail out these banks as necessary (for those who contend that it was necessary) since thats basically what we are doing anyway?

Leave marriage out of it. Let marriage be something that happens in churches. Let each participant in your aforementioned "gay marriage" in California sign a contract explicitly stating their financial involvement with each other and what would happen if one of them should die. Sort of a combination contract/will.

By doing this everyone could have their cake and eat it too, the religious nuts wouldn't have to allow gays to be "married" in their churches and gays could still get the legal protections of a spouse. Gays could even have their own churches/religious institutions that did recognize gay marriage! Isn't that the idea behind being a FREE country?

My understanding is that governments got involved in marriage in the first place to try to prevent interracial marriages. The whole concept of governments determining who I can love and live with and call my wife/husband/spouse etc is just bollocks. Same should apply to polygamy/polygyny! Who is the government to say that consenting adults shouldn't be able marry/live with however many people they want to. If four men and a woman or four men and four women can get along with each other and live as a family, MORE POWER TO THEM!!

Well exactly, the Federal government has no authority to define marriage of any sort, where does it say in the Constitution that the government has the power to regulate marriage? A constitutional amendment would have to be passed in order for that to fly. Remember, the Constitution and Bill of Rights impose limits on government, not individuals.

Actually, murder is a law on the books that is enforced at the state level...most crime is. There are exceptions, the murder of a federal judge for example.

The government does have the authority to levy taxes, but the must be apportioned amongst the population. Furthermore, any revenue collected needs to be spent on things within the Fed's jurisdiction: interstate commerce, defense etc.

There is even credible data that

1. The 16th amendment was not properly ratified by enough states to be an amendment. An individual went around to each State archive to look up the state votes and published his findings. He was censored by the government for his efforts as they said he was publishing falsehoods. I understand that he sued and was not allowed to enter state archived records to validate his claims.

2. There are contemporary court cases circa the 16th amendment that said that the 16th amendment did not grant the federal government any new taxing powers that it did not have before the 16th amendment. These cases were upheld as recently as 2003. Indeed, participation in the income tax did not become widespread until WWII when people were encouraged to participate in the "victory tax," which was optional. Who of course didn't want to be unpatriotic and not pay? Well it stuck. The IRS used to be an investigative arm of the postal service to investigate postal fraud.

Check out these two propaganda video's featuring Donald Duck as he peddles the income tax:

Vid 1
Vid 2

I concur, I say that the federal government does not have the authority to define marriage PERIOD! It could be three men, a monkey and a mule, but the Federal government couldn't say squat. Now, your state or local government might have something else to say on the matter, but then you are also represented as a larger percentage of the population (ie. more say in what goes on) at the smaller levels of government too.

My significance in a given election:

National level: 1 in 300 odd million

State election: 1 in 5 million

County/City: 1 in 500,000 or so

Where is my voice most heard? If ever a repressive law is passed where I live, there is a good chance I can just move to a suburb or adjoining state, but all bets are off if something inane is made illegal at the Federal level, say blue t-shirts.

say that the rights and powers were limited specifically to that, rather than those just being examples of the general principle. The ninth amendment was added precisely to address that. One of the implications of the 9th amendment is that you're violating the constitution (specifically the 9th amendment) if you try to interpret it in the manner you're suggesting.

Ninth amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Its text here states that the enumeration in the Constitution is not limiting rights of the people by not having them listed in the Bill of Rights. The whole point of the Bill of Rights was to protect the people from government, not to protect government from the Bill of Rights. I think that perhaps in your haste to point out my ignorance that you misconstrued the intent of the Ninth amendment.