I think you might want to revisit what a corporation is. It's a legal construct designed to shield individuals from losing everything if their business goes belly-up.

As for your idea that a corporation is exactly the same thing as a political party... well, it certainly explains the cluster fuck in this country. Congratulations, you ARE the root problem.

I'm wondering: is your car a 1960 VW Beetle or 2CV? Because those are the only cars I can think of where the seats can sag enough to make this a worthwhile proposition.

Or, much more likely, you actually don't do any of this.

A little hint: "GottMitUns" is German and translates to "GodWithUs". Which just so happens to be the motto of the German military army (and a few other groups) until the end of WW2. Generally, it's fairly safe to assume that someone still sporting that motto has some serious hang-ups with German military and groups from 1900s to 1945.

Congratulations, CaptainLard gets it. Sycodon doesn't. I'll make another sweeping generalization: "conservatives can't read". This is fun! I can do this all day.

Do I also get to make sweeping generalizations about conservatives because you don't like government interference except to:
- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control where I go
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in

Just asking whether the "idiots are everywhere" and "generalizations are fun" rules can be abused in the other direction as well.

Spot on. Every single failure I've seen of an internal communications tool that wasn't Email or IM failed because of a lack of one of the three things you mentioned. They are tools, but they need to much more help to grow than something that everyone has to use, like a case system or a CRM.

I worked in the past at a company that did something similar to a "Facebook at work". The number one rule to get people to use it: never, EVER call it "Facebook for work". Call it "Shining Communications Turd", "Chainsaw through productivity", "Free Crack", just don't call it "Facebook for work".

I think Facebook might have a bigger uphill battle here than it thinks.

Where did you work, the NSA?

Erm, what? I know how PageRank works because I read about it as a technical paper in a Computing Journal in 1998, before Google was started as a company. That said, I don't know what came first - the paper or the patent. Pretty sure though that the paper came first, or was at least simultaneous to the patent filing. Finally, most of the stuff in the Google ranking mechanism is as much an algorithm as a kernel is an algorithm. It's a host of ranking modules, tweaks, weights, heuristics, clean-up jobs, maintenance jobs, spider jobs, and a whole crap-load of IT work to make it hum like it does.

Please do enlighten us how it could easily apply algorithms to categorize data to distinguish between personal, protected data, and data of public records that belong to someone else. Just for shits and grins, please create an algorithm that would distinguish between the Washington Post article and the original bankruptcy article.

Wow. So that means that now laws that cannot be followed every time are a good idea? In the case of Google, it means a perpetual fine that cannot be escaped, is completely arbitrary, and applies only to Google.

Everything you posted so far is a damning indictment of exactly why this law is terrible: it's not possible to fully comply, it's arbitrary, it's open to abuse from all sides, and its target is also completely arbitrary.

Technically, you are accurate in your description of why Google needs to follow the law as it is written. However, the discussion we're having is about whether the law should exist in the first law. On that, you're digging your own hole.

Among my commercially insured patients there's a mix of folks who are happier, angrier or ambivalent about changes in their coverage. For some folks things have gotten better (especially among the individually insured whose risk is now spread around) and for many worse, though worsening coverage with each passing year has been the rule.

Regrettably, the cost of insurance comes up frequently in my practice by necessity. Not just with figuring out which medicines an insurance company will reimburse for (down to needing to figure out if they prefer I prescribe capsules vs tablets of the sane medicine) but which procedures are reimbursable, which specialists they can see, how they get psychotherapy, if they can afford a followup visit with me, how their colonoscopy might get billed, or if their finances will be nuked to high heaven if they end up in the emergency department of hospital.

14 years ago in residency I did a rotation in Ireland and was amazed how much different practice was there (at least in rural County Clare) than what I'm used to in the US. Our copay here cost the same as the cost of their entire visit. The state paid for hospitalizations for everyone. Dr Gerry ran his entire practice on a 500 Euro piece of software with one nice lady in the front office and he got paid about the same as his US peers. He also had a nurse who handled much of the lady business. 16 year old girls were counseled on not imbibing more than two (imperial) pints a night.

Here, we need about 5 support people per primary physician to handle all the rules, paperwork, insurance reimbursement, claims and billing; and our computer system costs something on the order for $30,000 per doc per year all told. The Irish marveled at tales of how nuts our system is. Canadians (politely) make fun of it when we're at the same conferences. Seriously, WTF?

As a physician, the new system doesn't feel particularly more intrusive than what we had previously. What we do have is a lot of new patients who were previously uninsured. They don't seem angry about it; they seem happy (to a person, at least amongst the newly insured). And we can get to work preventing their modest problems from turning into gigantic, expensive once that got handled "for free" in the emergency department by spreading the cost of their uncompensated care around to everyone else.

Some of our previously insured patients seemed miffed because, just like before, medical care is expensive and the system is complicated. Some of them who used to blame the insurance companies now blame Obamacare.

I hope you'll (all) forgive me for furthering this part of the discussion, but in my line of work I continue to be mystified about how, say, sin brought about by mankind can result in two very nice, even very religiously adherent parents having a fetus who gets pretty severely bollixed (via isoalloimmunization as above, or the odd infection crossing the placenta, or a bit of chromosome scrambling) and dies before being born? (Or just about as bad, dies in their parents arms shortly after being born?)

My sincere apologies if you think I don't care about this question; it's one of several I care about very much and have great difficulty reconciling. The hospital chaplains' best explanations have amounted to, "Jesus said 'Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me., for such is the kingdom of heaven." Realizing that KJV usage has a different connotation for suffering, there's still a lot of suffering. I've never thought to say to one of these parents that this must be the result of sin. If you have a better explanation I could use to comfort the afflicted - afflicted, in this view, somehow by original sin which seems awfully distant - I'd love to hear it.

Considering the over-reaction we're getting from a lot of people around Ebola - and that includes people who laugh about bureaucrats' overreaction to blinking lights in Chicago and WiFi network names - I'm going to guess that most people are just scared shitless of stuff they don't understand and willing to sacrifice everything to feel safe again.

That doesn't make it any better, but it gives us a better shot at fixing the issue (educate people) than the conspiracy theory approach.

In the US, when you donate blood, you'll be tested for ABO/Rh, and some of the more "minor" blood antigens (minor insofar as they are less frequently implicated in transfusion reactions and pregnancy-related alloimmunization. Most pregnant women will get, in addition to ABO and Rh-D testing, tested with an antibody screen for sensitivity to antigens from other alleles on the Rh locus, Rh-C and Rh-E. The antibody screen also tests for anti-Kell (anti-K, typically the worst of the more minor antigens; we're taught "Kell kills"), anti-Duffy (Fy(a) and Fy(b)), and sometimes anti-Kidd antigens, and once in a while you'll see anti-P, anti MNS, and anti-Lewis, which typically cause little or no harm. (See this Medscape article for a few details.)

The deal is if you are (say) an Rh positive fetus in an Rh negative mom who was previously exposed to another fetus's D antigens (and D is often the culprit) you can get your blood cells nailed by mom's previously-formed anti-D antibodies. You get anemia, jaundice as well, and the potential various bad side effects therefrom (heart damage, brain damage, swelling all over[may not be safe for work]). Similar havoc ensues with anti-K. Preventive therapy with RhoGAM is available to prevent anti-D disease; it's a soup of anti-D antibodies that scavenge any fetal Rh-D positive blood cells that happen to find their way into mom's circulation. It's produced from pooled human blood plasma, though even most Jehovah's Witnesses (since a 1974 church opinion) and Jews (because there's an escape hatch in kashrut for saving human life) find it acceptable for treatment in order to prevent this fairly terrifying surprise G-d had in store for a few unlucky babies.

His duty is to the president, not the public. I have a lot of respect for him that he gave the president his opinion, the president disagreed with him, and he kept his mouth shut in public. I also have a lot of respect for him that he isn't just bashing Obama, but merely strongly disagreeing with him on some decisions the president made. On others, he is actually openly agreeing with him (see his position on "Enhanced Interrogation") - or at least, showing far more agreement than a standard republican would.

Yeah, Panetta was a republican, through and through. He was a security hawk, and never made any bones about it. At the same time, he fully supported the president while he was in office. Just for that, he deserves respect.