So volunteers working for free is now called socialism?

Wait a second. You mean . . . they wear different clothing on different days? Man, that is totally hardcore!

You are forgetting that some of us smoke because ::gasp:: we enjoy it.

Yeah, but you can't even get to the end of a sentence without gasping. I think I'll stay away from smoking, thank you.

Seriously? You get points for being technologically backwards?

And what if you're not allowed to?

So, leading a boring life is bonus points too?

Retailers abuse the Sales of Goods Act. Products should be made to last a reasonable amount of time, retailers are responsible for 6 years.

Apple were happy to fix my 3 and a half year old iMac for free, Sony fixed my two year old (had a 1 year guarantee) monitor for free. Well, the guys at PC World refused to accept responsibility for a failed motherboard on a 1 year and 1 month old laptop, and wanted to charge me more than I paid for the machine when new just to repair it. Trading Standards told me to go back with a copy of the Sales of Goods Act, PC World promptly fixed it for free. Retailers need to understand this is an unreasonable time for a computer to fail and should repair it, even if out of guarantee, for free.

There should be no reason for tax free repair IMHO. If a machine fails in an unreasonable time, the retailer should fix it. If it is an old machine, the IT company should write it off for tax purposes anyway.

There is a difference between an 18 year old HS student deciding to have sex and a 14 year old HS student deciding to have sex. Only one of them is of the legal age of consent in most western countries. If a child is bound and determined to have sex they will. There is little to be done to prevent it when the child is actively trying to make it happen. However, there are a lot of children (and a 14-16 year old is still a child no matter how much they protest) whom are willing to accept prolonged virginity if the opportunity does not present itself. One of my sisters sought out opportunities to have sex, while my other sister, myself and 2 brothers were willing to wait. Nothing my parents did could prevent her (she ended up nocked up by 19), but their involvement in our lives, and perpetual presence in our home probably kept some of us from having sex earlier than we did.

Furthermore, my wife lost her virginity at 14 and said she felt it was a huge mistake. In fact, most of the women I know who lost their virginity before 18 have told me they wished they hadn't. That's not my perception as a new father, but what women have been telling me for over a decade and I have no reason to believe they lied to me. Many of them did so out of a perception that "everyone is doing it", but felt totally unprepared before, during and after the event. Many of them didn't have sex again for several years after breaking up with their first partner because they didn't feel they could handle it yet (my wife incuded). I realize that the Baby Boomers here in the US believe that they are the first generation to have ever had a good idea, but I though that most /.ers were smarter than that. Cultural norms with regards to age of consent, and age appropriate behavior evolved over time for a reason. They many not be the best, but their is usually a good reason for the norms being what they are/were.

Now, with all of that being said... I don't believe that pushing back the start of classes at the HS by an hour will result in increased teenage sex. The vast majority of students will use the extra hour in the morning to get more sleep. I could see a little more recreational drug use (had a friend who used to get high before school), but it's not like it's going to make kids use drugs that wouldn't have anyway. I've been wanting schools to move start times back for years. I was a morning person in HS, but my older brother was not. I had to get up an extra half an hour early just to get my brother out the door on time. Even as a morning person, I would have appreciated the extra hour of sleep.

I totally agree with you. Sadly, most on here won't, because their l33t Linux users (or they think they are). Do you think Apple has its developers making decisions on UI etc? No way. I guarantee they have a dedicated UI department that designs the interfaces and then gives intructions to the development team to make those UIs come alive via programming. Programmers don't think like ordinary people. Programmers don't seem to mind complex. Or illogical. Ordinary users do.

It's sad to see you marked as a troll, but that's a sign of the pro Linux /. times we're in.

There's a reason why Linux is losing market to others (Windows 7/OS X) - because it's ugly and its' over complex to both install, use and administrate. There is no common logic to it. These very people who've voted your comment down are the cause of this, and the real reason why Linux is losing market share on the desktop (not that it had much to begin with). As a point of example, I was showing off my new MacBook Pro to a friend on Saturday night just gone, and he knows a bit about Macs and is also a Linux enthusiast and you know what he said? "You know, Linux has an expose like application, but they fucked with it so much that they ruined it". Apple got it right, didn't tinker with it just to show how l33t they are. Programming just because you can doesn't make it right. Programming to a defined logical purpose is an altogether different thing. This particular guy was a long time Ubuntu user and evangalist but has now switched (mostly) to Windows 7, because it not only looks good, but it's UI suits him better than Ubuntu's was. Interesting.

You can mod me down as a troll all you like, I don't really care. But, in Ten or so years, when Linux on the desktop is all but dead, and most developers have left it because there's no one to program for, you might understand what I'm saying. Ordinary users drive software. If you have the arrogance of most of the Linux kernel development community, and it seems, the Ubuntu community, and tell your ordinary users to piss off, then you'll lose them. Maybe not all of them, maybe not all of them in one go, but they will eventually move to other operating systems and designers that *listen*.

Dave

Your objections are precisely why the individual mandate is a necessary part of this plan. The entire idea of insurance is that payments from everyone- including the healthy- go into a pool out of which the costs of health care provision are paid. If you don't require healthy people to pay into this pool, they don't, and, as you point out, you wind up w/a pool consisting of only the sick. Since a pool wherein the sick subsidize the sicker is not sustainable, you *need* the healthy to pay into the pool.

The payoff for the healthy is that good health is, almost by definition, temporary. You will get sick. You will have an accident and break a limb. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to avoid aging, you *will* get old. And, at that point, you begin to draw money from the very pool into which you have been contributing.

The math isn't exactly complicated.

You will note the hyperbole in the GPP (which I was replying to) and my post.

The use of sarcasm to refute a blatantly false point is not lost on you, I take?

Your life expectancy is lower because a large proportion of your population do not have access to preventative medicine, or the healthcare system in general. The US system provides for some of its population very well, but for the large majority it is a very poor option.

there is a option, at least as far back as xp that allows explorer windows to run as their own tasks. Why its not enabled by default i have no clue about (except that i have seen some issues with custom icons when doing so).

> The typical lawsuit against a healthcare provider is not suing over any obvious error

You need to stop swimming in the cool-aid and stop getting your knowledge of the courts from the Brady Bunch.

Most medical malpractice suits are infact for medical errors and they don't even represent all of them. Lots of stupid sh*t goes on in hospitals and with doctors that treat medicine like a get rich quick scam. If you are counting on the media to clue you in, then you're probably going to remain ignorant. They want to create headlines and shocking stories. They tend to leave out key details or just get the technical aspects horribly wrong.

This "horribly innacurate yellow journalism" isn't even limited to the torts issue. They do this with everything. That's part of why corporate news is bleeding money.

Those are concessions to the Republicans. If the Republicans get their way they will screw up the bill so badly that the implementation is doomed to fail. Then they can point back and say 'I told you it will fail!'

Guess what, that dell order you made involved people who do not work for dell directly.

Yes, believe me, I'm familiar with that. That's why talking to Dell can sometimes be an unpleasant experience.

Well, that is a problem. Still, most customers, including me, are going to be somewhat irritated that a third-party company is calling them in the first place. Maybe it's OK if they're doing something that doesn't need much knowledge of (in your example) AT&T, like a customer satisfaction survey. But if they're trying to sell me an AT&T product, shouldn't I be talking to AT&T instead of someone else? In that case I want to know it's "Bob's telemarketing and general annoyances."