It is not a chip, it is just firmware and/or drivers. As for definite information, try scanning money sometime, or copy it if you have a combination scanner/printer. There is a specific yellow dot pattern on currency to avoid having to teach scanners/printers about all currencies in the world. Have a look, it is not hard to see once you know it is there. If you remove the dot pattern, the counterfeit money is not detected as money by machines (not that most people could make money that even the cheapest machines would accept, dot pattern or otherwise).

If you manage to get a scan, you can print it if you enlarge or shrink the notes, then the pattern will not be recognized -- but people get suspicious when they receive double-size currency.

It would be a lot more difficult to tell the firmware not to scan/print guns. A gun does not depend on yellow dots to function.

There are not an insignificant number of cases where a normally responsible person becomes an irresponsible person,

When we're talking about irresponsible enough to commit homicide, yes, that is an insignificant number. (In terms of frequency; of course in personal terms any murder is highly significant to those, to friends and family of both the victim and, in a different sense, the murderer.)

Murder is something people work their way up to. 90% of murder suspects in Milwaukee in 2001 had a criminal record; the same proportion was found in NYC in 2003 through 2005. Keep in mind this is just guys (mostly, some women too) who got caught at previous crimes, more would have committed crimes and not been caught, and more would have displayed irresponsible but non-criminal behavior (the sort of stuff a good mental health system would catch).

The good citizen who suddenly snaps and kills is a favorite fictional trope, but bears little relationship to criminological reality.

Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however.

Citation needed.

However, it is easy enough to understand a reluctance to accept the casual and uncontrolled production of murder weapons.

Roughly 6% of murders are committed with fists and feet. Not only are such weapons produced in an uncontrolled manner, we even give out tax breaks to those that produce them.

I think he meant to say Doctrine of Fair Use.

Also, these are derivative works in most cases. They're not just putting FMV segments up, they're playing the game, adding content (commentaries for instance), and are getting stolen from just as much as Nintendo was previously. This would be like a cover band being required to pay all of their income to the original bands. Some sort of revenue sharing agreement is clearly needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 was pretty decent. as was a Mac. Or Amiga. They all had decent software stacks. Microsoft did the best job selling to businesses as well as consumers. But when there was competition, I often chose non Microsoft stuff.

Also, You were not using outlook in 1993. It didn't exist back then. The first versions came out around 96 or so. It was only bundled with the rest of office in Office 97, before that it came with MS Exchange.

I was talking about the binaries, not the source. The binaries are 256 bytes, as was mentioned in the writeup, but "compressed" they ended up around 260 bytes or so.

That's like complaining that oh no, you need to use Postscript, that's a DRIVER!!!

The point is that the OS comes with the Postscript driver, as well as PPD support. They'll never become obsolete and will always be supported by new versions of the OS.

Wait, MA doesn't have a concept of a life changing event for their enrollement process? That doesn't sound right. If you move into the state or have a baby or something you should be eligible to join regardless of what month it is.

the State has no power to overturn economic realities

Right. And one of those economic realities is that health care is not an area where a "free market" can efficiently allocate resources. Buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power and full knowledge.

If you think corporate profits are the only reason, or even the major factor in the exorbitant expense of health care, you are naive. It's expensive because it takes vast resources to do the job.

It takes no more resources to provide an American citizen with health care than a German or a Japanese one. Yet every other developed nation has better outcome at less cost. The difference is the obscene profits realized by companies like United Health.

Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious

Guess how long I had to wait for United Health to approve an MRI?

there should be no worries about medical records being leaked and/or used against individuals or organizations since the IRS will keep those safe for all of us.

No, the ACA does not allow the IRS to access your medical records.

They're so eager to begin, they simply walked in and seized without explanation approximately *sixty million* medical records in California

The allegation is that they exceeded the authority of a warrant and demanded copies of servers containing records for ten million people from an unnamed company. Is it true? Neither you nor I know. But the suit is unrelated to the ACA.

duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns :) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.

No. It's not.: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko." Please don't FUD on the Duck.

Disposing of humans through disasters, man-made or otherwise, has historically been unsuccessful. When you lower the number of humans that way, birth rates go up dramatically.

It is possible that the increased killing efficiency of a robot-human war would be able to change that pattern.