Homer Simpson, eh? He's not as stupid as he looks, or sounds, or our best testing indicates...

Just when large CRT monitors became affordable albeit heavy, the companies rolled out smaller flat panels. Not only where they cheaper for them to make, they were cheaper to ship and had much lower field defect rates. So of course they charged more for them.

Similarly right when magnetic drives are near-free, the companies roll out smaller, and in some cases slower SSD's which are less expensive to make, cheaper to ship and over the long run (probably) have lower field defect rates born of their no moving parts. So of course they will charge more for them.

Everything old is new again. Wait and see companies that offer Netbooks with NO storage as an 'option' and then charge up the wazoo for a crappy sized SSD touted as 'premium'.

Number 1:

He better start his own company, because the only idiot that would hire the guy is himself.

Number 2:

Can't wait to NOT BUY A DAMN THING from ANY COMPANY THAT BEARS HIS NAME.

-Hack

Better watch out, because you're next.

You see, they have infiltrated the Federal Government. The same crazies (yes, just like in the movie) just happened to get control of places like California and Detroit first. This is not an R or a D problem. Both parties are infected. They talk freedom and civil liberties while they are in the minority, but as soon as they get into power, they start stripping them away at a faster and faster pace, until the whole damn world either cuts them loose, or the whole world collapses back into the Dark Ages.

The realistic thing to do would be to make the jury a completely random sampling: if you're selected for jury duty, you're going to be on the jury, period. None of this defense/prosecution exclusion based on knowledge, crap.

Yeah, you'd have more hung juries and you'd have more guilty people getting off, but that's not a conviction, upholding the whole "guilty until proven innocent" part.

Another thing to do would be to make the jury randomly selected within the demographic of the defender, but with a bias not only for the defense but also for the offense: in this case, you'd have a statistically higher number of tech workers and government employees, for instance. (Of course, knowing how gov't works, that would certainly bias the jury in his favor.)

Making a "jury of peers" is dicey because it can lead to nepotism and plutocratic results with ease, where no justice is found. Still, I think I would prefer this to the current setup.

You don't know why he wants it, but it's possible as long as he can replace the firmware. As stated above, Seagate et. all usually can help with unusual firmware requests.

... which is EXACTLY what they want, so you become wholly dependent on the hard teet of the gov't, and the party of entitlement will then never be voted out.

a simple disconnect switch on the +12V wire going to the fuel pump mounted within reach of the driver would be cheap and 100% effective.

Just until you get sued into oblivion for unintended deceleration, because some joker/kid/pet thought it would be funny to hit that switch while the car is going 80 mph on the highway. Or people just complain about the killswitch activating mysteriously just before they "happened" to have an accident.

What people do to their own yards is non of the governments business, with a few obvious exceptions. (e.g drug plantations)

I'm not even sure I agree with your exception.

Mostly, it'll cover the subsidies for people who can't afford insurance.

Right, exactly what I said, it'll be paid to insurance companies.

None of that will result in lower premiums (note that there is absolutely nothing in the current healthcare reform bill that is intended to lower healthcare costs). It'll just allow about two thirds of the people currently uninsured who are also too wealthy for Medicaid to get insurance.

I'm lost. How can you have people that now have "free" health care by getting services and not paying for them, passing the cost on to those that do pay (with insurance paying most health care costs), then eliminate that cost passed on, and declare that it can't affect the cost of insurance? Are they going to just increase the margins of insurance and make more, without reducing their premiums? And the hospital, once 100% pay, will they keep their pricing up and just make more profit? I'm curious what effect you think 100% (supposedly) coverage will have on the cost of hospital care and insurance rates. I would have thought it would result in some effect, but obviously I'm not looking at it the way you are.

No, the payoff to the insurance companies is the requirement that everyone get health insurance.

I'm lost. Really, lost. I state that the $1 trillion will go to the insurance companies, and you state "no" as if the $1 trillion won't go to them, then state that it will go to them. You are agreeing with what I'm saying, but in the most disagreeable way possible. You've objected to everything I've said, but contradicted nothing. You just don't like the manner in which I stated it.

Anyways, don't look for cost reductions in the current bill. There aren't any. There aren't even any intentions that costs should go down.

It isn't a zero sum game, but even said, it is a finite sum. There is only so much health care to go around, so I'll treat it like a zero sum for a second. You can't inject $1 trillion into a system and have no effect. Either the profits will shoot up at the expense of taxpayers, or costs will go down. If profits increased by $1 trillion, then some heads will roll. So some costs somewhere have to go down. Maybe not by the whole $1 trillion will go to cost reduction, but some of it must. You pretend that none of it will.

The "goal" is to reduce cost. It reduces cost of insurance to those that can't afford it. It reduces costs to everyone at the hospital because more people will pay their bills. The goal is to reduce cost at the healthcare side by increasing cost at the taxpayer side. It shifts cost so that it reduces healthcare costs. At the cost of taxes, so someone could argue that it doesn't "reduce" cost, but only shifts it, but you didn't make that argument, you just made the argument that it won't affect health care costs.

The driver was knocked out with chloroform and then the umbrella was jammed between the seat and the gas pedal...

It was trying to protect you from the crap known as modern warfare 2 multiplayer.

ActionScript 3 is one dialect of ECMAScript as is Javascript and JScript. Nothing really to do with Java.

The big advantage of commercial software is that the sales revenue allows you to pay people to write it.

Yes, but there are also significant disadvantages. I'd say that there are about 5 major ways for a person to make software available to themself.

1. Write it themself or pay an independent vendor/developer.
2. Hire a vendor that specializes in such software and produces software for others in your industry.
3. Buy packaged, commercial software, including possible code modification by the seller, oneself, or a separate vendor, if possible, or glue and workarounds if not.
4. Form a consortium to produce the software under either a consortium wide use license or an open license.
5. Rely upon the kindness of strangers to write the code for you.

In the real world, all five variations tend to happen in an industry. Option (1) has the main disadvantages of duplicating work which is obviously more costly. Option (2) cuts down on duplicated work, but since an industry-wide vendor has a quasi-monopolistic position and all software is custom, there's a good bit of markup on what you can buy. Option (3) sounds great, especially if need no modification done or little modification and the code is available, as usually a boxed solution is a good deal cheaper than a custom one; however, option (3) in many ways is a special case of option (5)--ie, you're restricted mainly by what's already available and many times no company is producing software close enough to what you need and it's really non-trivial to shoehorn the available software to your needs ("if you build it, they will come" might hold true, but "if you want it, it will be build" doesn't generally hold true). Option (4) seems like an attractive offer, as it can cut down on a lot of costs and needless markup, but one company can effectively run the consortium for their ends, there can be a solid lack of direction which can eat through money, and (in the case of an open license) the software created can significantly reduce the barriers to entry for newcomers. Meanwhile, option (5) alone is usually wishful thinking, unless the software is already mostly made and you're willing to consider option (1) or (2) for improvement.

In short, the story is more complex than "commercial" or not.

Another advantage is that if you pay people to do something, you can hold them accountable for their work and hence increase productivity.

That highly depends. "Fly-by-night" contractors, vendors, etc don't necessarily suffer much from accountability. Once they have your money, they'll provide enough of a piece of software that at least some companies are unlikely to sue over substandard work because the actual return from a lawsuit is less than the costs. And while you can try to blacklist companies/individuals, it's quite possible they'll just move on to another industry while new "fly-by-night" companies/individuals take their place.

In short, accountability really only works if you presume that you can avoid paying them at all or that they have an expectation of multiple/continuous payment and you can deprive them of that. There's enough one-off scenarios, though, that a lot of accountability does not exist in many spheres of industry (or politics, for that matter).

In the end the fact remains: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Just because you don't eat for free at the local soup kitchen doesn't mean you have to get your lunch from a fast food joint.

This is an obvious pump and dump scheme, unless they have somehow unlocked technology previously unseen and unknown by mankind, and have done so for the purpose of playing video games.