Well, part of the problem in the UK is successive governments with anti-national healthcare agendas trying to introduce half-cocked "internal markets" and other privatisation-by-stealth initiatives. Last time I had a MRI it was outsourced to a private contractor operating on the hospital grounds.

That's what the current restructuring is about - its supposedly about letting GPs (who aren't government employees) run the system, but since GPs have no idea how to manage a national healthcare system, the reality is that they'll outsource it to big multinational infrastructure companies. The result is a system that combines the efficiency and business sense of government with the humanitarian and social values of big business.

So, really, its a no-score draw: If you can't criticise private healthcare based on the US where its been corrupted by back-door nationalisation, then you can't criticise public healthcare based on the UK where its been corrupted by back-door privatisation.

Personally, on balance, I prefer to get my healthcare from a doctor rather than a salesman, without worrying about whether I can afford it, even if I have to wait a bit for non-urgent treatment.

...and yes, any healthcare system has to make sensible decisions about when to stop throwing money at dying patients. Its not a nice thing to have to do, but no healthcare system has infinite resources - either the money comes from taxpayers or peoples' insurance premiums. Part of the reason why you don't see "pure" free market healthcare systems is people get all upset if people are turfed out on the street to die when there is no longer a business case for treating them.

Pro-tip for astronauts: If the ISS computer suggests another spacewalk to put back the original part so they can wait to see if it fails... watch your back!.

...provided you don't mind a ball and chain for 24 months. If a sexy new phone comes out, another carrier starts offering a better deal (as Three did with the £13/mo deal) or you have a financial crisis, then that contract could cost you.

When I priced up my Note II, contract vs. purchase, there was not much overall difference to the total cost (of course, the deliberately convoluted tariffs make it almost impossible to compare).

What really put me off another contract was that, with my previous on-contract HTC phone, whenever there was an Android update, you first had to wait for HTC to implement it, then you had to wait for T-Mobile to implement it. Also, I wanted to give the Three network a go for a few months to see what it was like (conclusion: works for me).

Here in the UK, we often get ripped off for computers, software and electronics (usually priced as $1=£1*) so its nice to know that there are some things where we have it better than the USA.

Currently paying £13 per month for 200 minutes of voice, 5000 texts and pseudo-unlimited data (HSPA+ in most places). One-month rolling contract, bring-your-own phone. (I don't use much voice - it would be another £12/month for 2000 minutes). Bundled phone contracts are still the norm (at the end of the contract you can usually keep the phone and negotiate a reduced rate) but all the carriers offer SIM-only plans.

(* some of which is down to sales tax, but not all).

or, more likely, a fake fake reality show designed to fool viewers into thinking that the contestants thought they were going to Mars.

(Actually, putting even one "fake" before "reality show" is redundant).

I did stop and think about that question a bit. Its not silly. IE7 can run in standards-compliant mode (CSS box-model) or legacy mode (IE box-model), depending on the doctype. The question is whether IE7 supports the "box-sizing" property in standards compliant mode, to enable the IE7 box model (which some people find more logical) without all the other IE quirks.

Yes - but is it supported by IE7...

Unfortunately, such folks fall into categories like "clients", "customers" or "target audience" and its not such a good idea to tell them "piss off and come back when you've got a decent web browser".

This does all get better the further IE6/7/8 fade into history - if I were starting a site today I could at least ignore IE6/7 - but I'm still seeing significant hits from IE8.

Then new things come along: I was having trouble with 'background-size' recently (handy if you want to use 2x res images to look good on 'retina'-type displays) and I've yet to find a browser that properly supports page-break controls on printouts (yes, I know people who like to print out web pages to read later).

I'd look on it from the perspective of "encapsulation": One person should be able to design what was in the box without knowing how it was going to be placed on the page, a second person should be able to place it on the page and align it with other elements without affecting anything inside.

That would work best if the primary size of the box included the inner margin/padding and border (which the box designer 'needs to know'), but excluded the outer margin (which the 'page designer' needs to match with other elements).

As for the border - the most flexible solution would probably be to have a separate 'inner border' and 'outer border' and leave it up to the designer to ensure that the border fit within the margin/padding if desired: the 'box designer' might want the inner border to match the ambient colour of the image and maybe slightly print the photo to 'seal' it; the page designer might want a fancy frame outside the box.

If CSS did what it said on the tin - separated content from style and layout - then graphic designers wouldn't have to bother their little heads about this sort of thing because they wouldn't need to touch the semantically-marked-up HTML.

Unfortunately, (a) CSS doesn't do what it says in the tin - changing the layout inevitably needs including exactly the right permutation of DIVs in the markup because CSS doesn't have any way of doing what every half-decent DTP package since PagerMaker 1.0 can do: defining a series of frames and specifying how text should flow between them - and (b) anybody who thinks style can be completely separated from content has spent too long reading & writing rigidly structured technical documents.

Hell no! Any idiot knows that a classname should be something semantic, like "rubric". ;-)

...and bad software designers have an even more definite tendency to blame their users. Usability/clarity and appropriateness for the intended user base (in this case, graphic designers) is part of good tool design.

CSS smacks of being a hammer designed by someone who has never seen a nail.

...anybody who has used jQuery will know how powerful they could have been if only browsers had implemented them completely and consistently.

Meanwhile, anybody who has used CSS will wonder what the hell the original intention was, given the arcane kludges needed to produce popular web-page layout effects easily achieved using evil tables and frames, the lack of 'constants' to set standard colours and measurements.You know there's something wrong with a standard when Microsoft's broken box-model implementation makes more sense. However, that's not the fault of the selectors.

Its as if the designers* of CSS had never looked at a web site, used a DTP package, used styles in a WP package, let alone played with a Java layout manager to get ideas about what might work and/or be useful.

(* probably unfair - I'm sure it was a mixture of committee syndrome and the notion that you can define a standard without producing a reference implementation rather than individual failings).

However, its worth remembering that Microsoft are not the only ones to jump on the tabletization bandwagon whether their users like it or not.

Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity have had similar castigation for their new 'post PC' interfaces. However, what with Linux being open source and not having the GUI joined at the hip to the rest of the OS this is less of a problem for Linux users.

Apple have also received flak for the fairly limited tabletization that they've done with OS X.

Problem is, we're in a tablet bubble, coming at a time when everybody who wants a regular PC already has one and PC specs are no longer rising fast enough to make them obsolete after 18 months. I like tablets, think they raise some interesting new possibilities and are great for some uses - but the current attitude is "the solution is mobile technology - now, what was the problem again?".

If they were then, at the typical international airport, you'd notice the large ring of car wrecks around the rental garage. Moving the steering wheel is a helpful hint to remind you to drive on the other side of the road. Swapping the brake and accelerator pedals would be a recipe for unpleasantness.

You know that shop just off Main Street, with the blacked-out windows?

(Trying not to think of the consequences of using super-strong magnets to fake... other types of piercings.)

RTFA. The recall is for a particular type of magnetic toy, not "high power magnets" per se. Its one thing to sell potentially dangerous items - its another thing to package them as toys*.

Also - as someone has pointed out elsewhere - there is a particular problem with older kids using these to make fake tongue piercings - so its not just parents giving them to babies and toddlers who will swallow anything.

Plus - this threat isn't immediately obvious. There have been magnetic toys since the year dot - but not ones that were (a) small enough to swallow and (b) still powerful enough to clamp your intestines together.

Remember that when idiots scramble their intestines, the cost of fixing the mess will still make its way through to your tax and/or medical insurance bill.

* I remember a 1930s book of science experiments for kids that included such gems as making a carbon arc torch from the graphite rods out of batteries using - wait for it - a variable resistor made from two stones in a dish of salty water to cut 110V mains down to 50V**. What could possibly go wrong? They did tell you to wear sunglasses.

**Not only did they skip Health and Safety assessments in those days, I suspect they skipped the "will it actually work?" assessments, too.