I do not think the word "flaunted" means what you think it means.

The "Necessary and Proper" Clause in Article One, section 8, clause 18 was implemented to give the federal govt the ability to assume ANY powers not necessarily enumerated in the Constitution.

"The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

The intent of this was spelled out in the federalist papers - basically they understood things would come up they would not foresee and they did not want to tie down the federal govt from doing what it felt was necessary.

"We supposedly pay 17% now, and we live longer lives, have better medical care, and are generally heather than our contemporaries in other countries" Except you're not and you're just making shit up: The US is 38th in life expectancy. Even Cuba does better than the States. Almost every other 'European' nation (plus Japan) does better : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy Your infant mortality is higher also and you're *much* more likely to die before you're 60. http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/ vs http://www.who.int/countries/gbr/en/ And to get that inferior level of healthcare you spend about 3x per capita as a comparable European nation. Good job.

So they close up shop there. They are an INTERNET COMPANY!

As long as they aren't blocked, they can still serve those users in China. And if they aren't blocked, they can still charge for advertising to non-Chinese customers.

I asked this before, and everyone said something to the effect of "THERE ARE BILLIONS OF CHINESE" as a reason why Google should stay. But I'm still not seeing it. Google can operate from anywhere. A local presence provides them very little unless they intend to expand some China-specific business/technology, which they haven't done at all (for any country they are currently in for that matter).

Yeah. One would almost assume it would be easier to switch to alternative sources of energy, bring our troops home, spend a fraction of the military budget on protecting our airliners and ports, and stop sponsoring military dictatorships in the middle east with arms and money.

But, they'd still hate us for our freedom! Or something...

The only reason I bought an xbox was for windows media center. I have played maybe 3 hours of games on it since I purchased it. I tried mythtv with the original xbox, but it just wasn't as elegant. There just isnt a media center out there that is as good as windows media center in terms of the look and feel....there are some solutions out there that contain more functionality though.

Yes I realize this. I was more trying to say that I am horribly biased on this one part of the issue. The only real way for that part to get through is for it to be viable either through insurance (how the bill is now) or through a single payer system (how I would prefer it). Anything else results in what you have already said.

This isnt communism. Read the bill.

Its more fascism. This isnt a government run health care program, its a mandate that buy private insurance from the insurance industry.

Thats not quite communism.

And Single Payer, Universal health care wouldnt be communism either, anymore than the military would be. Not that this bill is Single Payer. The democrats failed to bring real health care reform. What we are left with is a corporate welfare bill, that the democrats will praise like the republicans praised no child left behind and the patriot act. This not to say I support the republicans in anyway. More so that the democrats are just as lame and bought out by the corporations we ask them to regulate.

For some reason SOME people are ok with spending all of our money on military defense, but when it comes to spending it on health defense... certain people cry communism.

I doubt it, because phones are still cheaper and more portable than laptops or netbooks.

You really have all that experience and need all that commenting? I think you need to check your experience at the door. Hell, I've got "two years real world experience outside school", and no one comments their code where I work, including me. I would hardly call them unprofessional or bad programmers, even if occasional things do pop up that seem, and may be, retarded, because it's almost always a big waste of time. After looking at code like that for over two years, across several projects in several languages, I can say it's not as hard to read uncommented code as you make it out to be. In fact, I often skip reading comments for the sheer fact that they're usually incorrect because they're either not maintained as the code is updated or were always wrong.

Except for some extremely obscure pieces of code, generally revolving around optimizations, architecture-specific workarounds, compiler-bug workarounds, etc., have I ever found comments to be useful outside of documenting an API. In point of fact, there will never be a comment stating more correctly what the code is doing than the code itself.

As one caveat, I've seen good use of comments in ASM. However, with the ability to use more advanced assembler features in GCC or LLVM these days, you can put pretty sophisticated names on your code-flow elements and not require nearly as many comments as in the past. And with being able to inline ASM into code for those cases you need it, you can even use sophisticated meta-names for your registers that are obvious to the reader. Also, being the fact that the only person that work on an optimized piece of code would be someone that already knows that architecture's ASM or can learn what they need, you can rest assured that they'll have all the tools necessary to read and modify your code.

Wow, making things up much? There is no reason whatsoever that someone will "try to impose hell on earth" on anyone simply because they say "People who do not follow my religion will not be saved and will go to hell".

I don't give a crap what religion (or lack thereof) people practice. However, you're just blatantly making shit up to bash religion.

I never heard of Geek Squad before Best Buy housed them. Were they something bought by Best Buy? I thought they were just a new department.

That assumes that (1) you are using the "AD" (or CE) year numbering system, and (2) you put the month before the day. You may find that in many areas of the world, either or both of these assumptions is not true.

True, but ...

First of all, Cobol didn't force you to use 2-Digit dates and embedded systems at that time were more memory constrained than they are today so the temptation was high to save space where ever possible. For example, apparently there were devices used in the electrical grid to route power based on expected usage which took into consideration weekends and holidays. Some of these used a 6 digit date which rolled back to 1900 and thus didn't have the right date after 1999 and would have routed power incorrectly resulting in brownouts or wasted power.

Windows serves me well in some applications, Mac serves me well in others. Why would anybody on Slashdot need that explained to them? If you're seriously interested in why somebody would want both, I'd be happy to go into detail. But I hope you're not offended for wanting to know if you're seriously asking as opposed to bucking to be modded up.