Good enough for me.
Unless I'm ripping a ringtone for my phone, then it's 64 kb/s MP3. I tried dropping it to 48, but it became truly, truly horrid.
The insurance market is laughably non-free. You are simply subjected to corporate rationing instead of government rationing, which is no better.
I believe most of the "corporate rationing" you allude to is actually due to existing government regulation. The insurance market, as it stands, is not very free. But it's hardly the fault of "evil corporations".
I don't think my family falls into that camp either. But we do listen to all sides of the debate, and make our own decisions involving our family's health, trying to be as well-informed as we can.
As a result, we don't have our kids vaccinated as infants. There's a lot of concern about thimerosol in vaccines. Is the mercury harmful? Is it not? Does anybody know for sure? Has anybody done studies on those massive quantities of foreign substances (that much mercury would be above acceptable exposure for an adult) being pumped into a 10 pound body? And why do my children even need vaccination against diseases primarily transmitted by sexual activity? In my opinion, that's what's nutty. Some of this stuff is not going to kill anybody with a healthy immune system. Why vaccinate? (I mean, really - chicken pox? A couple inconvenient days of itchy bumps?) Vaccination has become, in some people's eyes, a panacea for every ill. And while I agree that vaccines have saved a lot of people and that I wouldn't want to live in a pre-vaccination world, I think we can apply some common sense in making decisions for ourselves as individuals and not just blindly following the herd.
So we decided by the time #2 came along that we were going to hold all further vaccination until age 5. And I know it's not scientific, but #2 and #3 have had a lot fewer colds and run-of-the-mill illnesses than #1 - who received a good portion of the vaccinations young - did. Our pediatrician looks at us askance at every visit, but we believe, as informed and responsible parents, that we are following the best course for our kids.
No way. I even mentioned iCab in my master's thesis.
I'd say one of the problems is that modern popular culture regards science as evil.
I'd say another problem is that modern government regards science as evil. You can't even buy yourself a decent home chemistry set like those popular 50 years ago. You might be "a terrorist". I'm sure it was bad enough when a nation full of overprotective mothers were worried that Johnny was going to blow himself up with that. Now we've got an overprotective nanny state worried that Johnny might blow up others with that.
Freedom encourages inquiry and discovery, and thereby encourages science. Is it any small wonder that limiting freedom limits scientific curiousity as well?
Non-religious people are just as much "persecuted" by religious people.
However, you don't see multitudes of fundamentalists jumping out to bash every atheist/humanist-slanted post made on Slashdot. From the religious posters here, I almost universally see tolerance. The venomous posts are almost universally made by anti-religionists.
UI for this has been around for quite some time, at least in a few browsers. Unfortunately, the best implementation for Firefox that I've seen, the cmSiteNavigation extension, no longer works with 3.x. Anyone want to update it?
I was thinking that just the other day. I'd like to see the serif, sans-serif, monospace, cursive, and fantasy expanded to something like serif-oldstyle, serif-transitional, serif-modern, and serif-slab (that all default to generic serif if there are none available); sans-serif-grotesque, sans-serif-transitional, sans-serif-humanist, and sans-serif-geometric (again, all defaulting to generic sans-serif); monospace-serif and monospace-sans-serif (ditto); cursive-formal, cursive-casual, and cursive-blackletter (yadda yadda); and fantasy (of which there are too many possibilities to really split out).
Personally, I like the idea of downloadable fonts. How's it any different than downloading images or other media to display in a web page? Except that the text of the page is still usable even if the font can't download, or it's read offline, or viewed in Lynx, or whatever. To me it seems to be a definite improvement.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan