Well, George W did serve almost 6 years as governor of Texas, our 2nd most populous state. He won election twice to that office and resigned it after being elected president the first time. Ronald Reagan was a former governor of California and before that, his most "political" job was being president of the SAG. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both served as governors. You don't have to like Bush or think he was a particularly good governor although he did win re-election which means most voters liked him just fine there, but the fact is that Americans in general do think that serving as governor makes you qualified to run for president. That doesn't mean you'll get elected (Milt Romney, Mike Dukakis, Jimmy Carter in 1980). The last non-politician to mount a somewhat successful campaign to run for the presidency was Ross Perot and he had bona fide business credentials, paid for a privately organized hostage rescue in Iran that went well and made him look like he had King Kong cajones when the US attempt to do the same became a spectacularly infamous failure for Jimmy Carter's administration and played a part in his 1980 loss, and he ran with a narrow but specific platform (NAFTA bad. Paying down US debt good). Fiorina is pretty delusional in that Americans won't elect somebody with zero political experience. If she speaks well on the campaign stops she can make some noise for a while, but the primaries always wear down the non-professional politicians. Perot had to run as a 3rd party candidate using his own money (mostly) and while he was very successful by 3rd party standards in the USA, in the end he did not come close to victory either time he won. He may well have influenced the outcome of the 1992 election though by siphoning more votes from George HW Bush than Bill Clinton.

My best friend is a lawyer (we both live in the USA - don't know where you live off hand and I'm too lazy to check your profile) and we've talked about this very issue, but what you propose is DOA in the USA for a variety of reasons. Lawyers absolutely hate this idea. The standard lawyer response is "But with that kind of risk, people with legitimate grievances will simply not sue rather than risk losing". Of course fewer law suits is not good for lawyers. Most legislators at the state and national level are attorneys. This is simply never going to happen unless maybe non-lawyers gain control of state and national government on a massive scale.

One of the problems with the current system is that the really big companies and rich people can simply throw lawyers at a case to try to win, cost be damned. Disney, for example, is known for rarely losing law suits against them, even when death has occurred. Can you imagine someone losing a wrongful death case against Disney and having to pay $100,000 or more in Disney's legal fees? I have a friend who got divorced in another state when his (now ex) wife basically nutted out and decided to divorce him. She quit her job so she could plead poverty in the divorce case, hired one of her city's most expensive divorce attorneys to represent her, and the attorney took the case knowing full well that the wife had no money at all - none - with which to pay the legal bill. My friend admitted to hiring a cheap attorney to represent him and his attorney did a poor job. The court bought the "poor little girl" argument even though her lack of money was self-inflicted and ordered my friend to pay 100% of her legal bills. Cost him over $30,000 to pay for his ex-wife's attorney fees in addition to the very generous terms she got in the divorce. Keep in mind that this was a simple divorce between average people and not some millionaire/billionaire trying to get out of a pre-nup.

Finally, the US legal system does actually allow for legal fees to be imposed on losing parties in cases where the lawsuit was brought by the losing party and they knew that they had no grounds for it and did it just to stick it to the other party and hope for a lucky verdict in court. But I can tell you that such cases are very rare indeed and even when courts rule that someone was subjected to an unjustified lawsuit that should never have been made in the first place, they almost never award legal fees to the victor simply because doing so sets a bad precedent that it might happen more and more often and having it happen more often might lower the amount of lawsuits, which impacts attorney money and might even lead to a need for fewer courts and fewer judges for those fewer courts.

I live in a suburban area in one the USA's ten largest metropolitan areas. Sorry, but I don't like to be more specific about where I live. On average I experience brown outs once a month. A true loss of power probably occurs 3 or 4 times a year, almost always in conjunction with some type of weather event (ice, snow, heavy rain). In the past I was stupid and never used a home UPS for any computers I had, so from time to time I would have disk drive problems after power outages, even if only brown outs. I also had quite a few PC power supplies fried by brown outs. Switching to UPS devices has stopped this. In fact, we have so many brown outs that I actually have my TV and some electronics connected to a UPS which I use really to protect against the constant brown outs rather than using it to provide power in outages to those devices. I wish power was reliable where I live, but it's not.

You would indeed and I submit their use of Cinavia copy protection on BluRays and DVDs as proof of this. You may be asking "What is Cinavia?" Well, it is a copy protection technology that uses an audio watermark. The watermark appears within the range of human hearing (so you can't just filter away the high frequencies above human hearing to remove it) and doesn't appear to be anything that humans can hear, but all current BluRay players are required by the licensing agreement to support it. How it works is that if a BluRay disc plays and Cinavia is in the audio, the player determines if it is playing an original pressed disc or a copy. If it finds a copy, it shuts down play within 10 minutes of starting and produces a warning message that Cinavia has been detected on a copy and you're not allowed to play the copy.

There is currently quite a bit of hysteria from some consumers in the BluRay field over it because apparently 100% of the people upset about it have kids who ruin their discs and now they "can't make copies". I say that with sarcasm. Well, you can make copies, you just can't make BluRay copies. Non-BluRay players are not required to detect or honor Cinavia, so ripping your BluRays and making MKVs out of them without conversion works fine. Even most BluRay players will happily play such files without checking for Cinavia.

I'd like to point out that Cinavia is not free. Companies that use it pay a fee for using it. I don't know what the price is, but I can tell you that Sony puts it on every BluRay they put out, even those foreign films they release that have limited audiences. For all I know, it may actually cost more to use Cinavia on some of those films than Sony can even make back in sales of the discs. Sony even puts it on a few DVDs and no DVD player is required to detect or support Cinavia, and they still sometimes use it there. The only other studio I know of that has ever used Cinavia more than once is Warner Brothers and they rarely use it. Even Disney has only used it once and they're one of the Hollywood studios most paranoid about people copying their stuff. The lack of use leads me to conclude that the price for using Cinavia is probably quite high and only Sony is crazy enough and consumer hostile enough to pay to use it all the time.

Well, Louie Gohmert is at best eccentric and at worst stupid beyond belief. The fact that he keeps getting re-elected really says a lot about the voters in his district. Do a search on his name plus the words "terror babies" for one of his most, ahem, "interesting" fears. He's never gotten less than 61% of the vote while running for Congress.

Ron Paul is about as crazy as they come, unless you're a Libertarian, in which case he makes perfect sense and everybody else is insane. He's not a current member of Congress, but he inflicted his idiocy on D.C. for years. He didn't lose re-election - he simply retired or else he'd still be promoting his wacko ideas in DC today.

Sheila Jackson Lee is infamous for her use of staffers to do personal errands for her. One staffer was told by his doctor to quit or he would die from the stress. She has proposed more failed legislation than any current member of Congress according to one source. She's been in the top 3 every year in a poll of the meanest members of Congress to work for.

These are just a few of the "distinguished" representatives from Texas.

In the past, I'd have agreed with you, but not any more. Things have really changed in the credit card industry since what we call "the Great Recession" in the USA. In the past, I successfully protested several charges and one time got almost $400 taken off over a dispute with a Hong Kong hotel. Approximately 6 years ago, I bought 2 tickets on a European based airline. I don't want to name them, but let's just say it's not a major carrier and they aren't particularly well known unless you happen to live in the country where they are based. My at the time girlfriend was supposed to go with me on a trip. Her mother had to have emergency surgery and being an only child and her mother having divorced her husband many years ago, my girlfriend had to stay and help and miss the trip. I did not want to go by myself, so I contacted the airline. They said that the tickets were non-refundable. I then asked if I could just get a credit towards a future flight and they said no. So basically their position was that those tickets were only good for the exact flight I booked them and for no other flight. I was not advised of this at the time of purchase, so I protested it. It went on for months. I printed out copies of their entire website, showing the ticket buying process and showing that nowhere on the site did they state their policy about no-refunds, no credits. I provided copies of the email the airline sent me when I bought the tickets, showing that at no point did they mention no refunds, no changes, no credits. The airline's response to my submission was to simply say "We told him he couldn't have refunds" and offer no proof to back it up. After months of wrangling, my credit card company essentially told me that because the airline refused to refund the charge, I was stuck with it, despite my submission that they never told me their refund policy. The bottom line was that my credit card didn't want to eat the charges of the airline tickets and they were unwilling to rule in my favor because they would have had to eat the charges since the airline refused to do a refund. Granted, a hotel charge is a lot less, but I have to warn from my experience that if the hotel puts up even a half assed fight like that airline did against me, that may be enough to prevent you from getting the money back.

It's not Google's problem to report that somebody else made a libelous claim any more than if you tell your neighbor "Hey, that guy John Doe down the street put on the internet that you're a convicted child molester but I know that's not true", your neighbor would have a legal claim against John Doe, not against you for telling him. The fact that Google reports a search result doesn't make them responsible for the content in the USA. Things might be different in Europe though.

I'm not defending Santorum at all because I think he's pretty stupid, but the right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. It's never mentioned. The Supreme Court has ruled that such a right is inferred by the other things in the Constitution, but strictly speaking he does have a valid point. A different Supreme Court such as the current one might well have come to the other conclusion that if it's not mentioned explicitly, it doesn't exist.

John McCain has already said that while he thinks it's a waste of time to try to repeal Obamacare that so many new members of Congress promised to do it that they have to pass such a bill, wait for the President to veto it, and then get on with the serious business at hand so the new members can claim at re-election time that they tried to repeal it, but gosh darn it, just didn't have the votes to override the veto. He said he'd rather the time be spent trying to accomplish something like removing the medical device tax (some Democrats may actually be OK with this idea) than trying to repeal the entire thing, which is never going to happen.

Government isn't going to shrink and probably no libertarian concern you have will be met. My bet is that while the role of the Tea Party has been reduced, there's still too many of those crazy ideologues around and they're going to bog down Congress over trivial matters that most other Republicans don't care about. Congress allows far too much of what I call "tyranny of the minority" to happen, especially in the Senate, and all the obstructionist tactics the Senate Republicans tried recently are now going to be thrown right back at them. Expect a lot of bluster about how unfair this is and how the Republicans will conveniently forget that they used the exact same tactics themselves in this current Congress.

I'm not as hostile towards Erica as some here, but I'm not as sympathetic either as you might think. I graduated college when Reagan was president and I've worked in IT all my professional career. I've had some jobs I liked a lot. I've had others that really sucked. My current job is pretty good and I like my employer a lot, but a few years ago things were different in the job and I was pretty unhappy. Things change in life. Some jobs start off good and get bad. Some start off bad and get good. Some are always good. Some are always bad. Erica started her career at a university in Alaska. Alaska is hardly a place with a lot of black people and university IT jobs are kind of infamous. Typically they don't pay well and they tend to attract certain types of people who aren't exactly go getters. Well, this has been my experience on the East Coast of the USA, but perhaps things are different elsewhere. Maybe in California, for example, university IT jobs are fantastic. But I've got a pretty good feeling that Erica didn't start off with a great job. That probably plays some role in her perceptions. She also worked in Windows which attracts different types of people than Unix/Linux type jobs do. That may also play a role in how things were for her.

Another thing I want to mention is that I work sometimes with other companies' IT departments to solve problems and there's a lot of variability there. Big companies usually have pretty competent IT groups. Small companies? Not always. I know that some small companies have badly overworked IT people who are doing the work of 2 or 3 people by themselves. Sometimes people in bad IT jobs won't leave for various reasons. They may fear change. They may work in an area with limited opportunities. One of my co-workers is a few years older than me and before joining our company he apparently didn't have any IT jobs that weren't horrible beyond belief. Maybe she just found a lot of bad jobs. It sounded like she was pretty happy in the job at Home Depot but got pissy over the pay and not being able to get promoted and left. If you want to work in IT and chase dollars, you can job hop and do that, but I can't promise you that the next job will be better or make you happy. You may get more money and have worse working conditions. And if you want to get promoted, you probably shouldn't go into IT at all. It's not exactly a career path to being CEO. Sounded like she was willing to trade a job that made her happy to try to get more money and she was never able to find a job she liked as much. It happens.

You won't find this in the Wikipedia article, but there are rumors in some intelligence circles that this flight was actually shot down by the Russians and Ukraine took the rap because they could play the "Duh! We so stupid! Not know what we doing! Soldiers were drunk!" card in exchange for some sort of special favor from Russia. That may not be true and it may be that Ukraine really shot it down through incompetence, but I just wanted to point out that there are some who don't buy the official explanation.

Did you talk about Hitler? I think I see a Hitler reference in that comment. Godwin's Law! Godwin's Law!

(This is meant to be a joke.)

Let me give the experience of my best friend. He's probably in upper half of what one would call the Middle Class in the USA. I work for The Man so I've always had health insurance via my job. He is a small business owner. His business employees his wife and between 1 and 3 other employees at any given time, depending on a variety of factors. He does not offer health insurance to his employees. As a small business owner, he's had to get insurance on his own for himself, his wife and one child. He is a Republican voter who almost never votes Democratic. He's not a wing nut, but he is relatively conservative politically. He originally completely opposed "Obamacare", saying the usual Republican stuff about how it was going to be the worst thing ever, destroying the country once it got implemented. He admitted to me that now that he can use the state health exchange that his insurance payments per month have dropped about $300 over what he previously paid and he thinks he has better coverage now. He no longer complains about "Obamacare" although he's still going to vote Republican.

Nooooo!!! Who would flip the hamburgers then? :-)

This. And I say this as a Christian rather than the typical rabid atheist Slashdot poster, but I have zero interest in watching those channels. Plus, OTA reception where I live is absolutely awful except for religious and Spanish channels and Fox. Oh yes - the CW, which I never watch, comes in very well too. The other major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) either can't be viewed reliably or not at all where I live. Plenty of people actually know about OTA TV, but it's not a realistic option for everybody.

I think Netflix's streaming options are horrifically bad in general, but I seem to hold a minority opinion on that one. All I can say is that they consistently fail to have what I'm interested in watching with very few exceptions.