Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are the kind of debates in which you are forced to engage if you treat "health care" as a right.

Meh... if you want to drive a car, you're mandated to purchase car insurance, and since no state offers a state-run car insurance system, it's forcing you to buy something from the private sector.

The argument from the right should never have been that it is a mandate policy, but rather their argument should be that it's outside of the bounds of the Federal government... each state still is allowed to establish the exact same mandates.

For instance, Massachusetts has a mandate to purchase healthcare as well, and it was pushed out by the right-winger Romney.

possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.

It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?

The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.

So what? Then raise taxes on gasoline and lower the VAT. The problem is, adding complicated rules artificially increases the cost, which makes everything cost more anyway. A gas tax is simple and elegant, and will have the desired effect without having to setup agencies to enforce the mileage regulations. Also, companies may find a way to "cheat" or find loopholes.

Wow, what a genius. So your solution to the problems of a state (run by Democrats since 1970 except for one year), made bankrupt and a laughing stock of the nation by out of control spending, is to increase the spending and lower the taxes at the same time!? And the problem was caused by allowing those pesky people the right to vote on the government initiatives? And the government in California is too small because the Republicans are keeping it that way?

Could you possibly get any more things wrong in one post? Please tell us that the Sun rotates around the Earth and that the Earth is flat and at least we'll know that you are completely insane. Please do yourself and the rest of us a favor and don't ever speak again.

> Swing, Java3D, Vector/ArrayList, StringBuilder/StringBuffer, Date handling, etc.

This is because, unlike what php did when going from 4 to 5, older constructs have always been supported in Java. In the worst case scenario, older constructs are only "deprecated", then a warning is given to you recommending to use the newer constructs but the older ones continue to work fine.

This sure would be a nice feature to have when deploying php 4 applications into a php 5 platform and it is also one big shops with thousands of lines of legacy code are looking for. It is sometimes called "backward compatibility" and I have no problem with that. ;-)

It provides the greatest infrastructure and options for scalability.

This also shows, at the same time, what I perceive as being the main problem with Java. Scalability, high availability and generally making things enterprise-y does have a big impact on complexity, and as such on maintainability as well.

When rolling out *any* Java application, the tendency is to make sure it's scalable, and that it works in a HA cluster, because it may be difficult to "staple on" scalability and high availability later on. Fair enough?

But what I see all the time is situations where tuning for high availability results in more downtime than it prevents; situations where the scalability options are not used because they were not needed in the first place.

If there is so much focus on using technology that is not needed, at the cost of having low-maintenance systems, then indeed it was technology for the sake of technology. Or in other words, it was fashion dictating the technology to use for the job, rather than actual requirements.

No, I was interested in the difference between stealing and violating an unjust law out of necessity. I have no personal sympathy for tomtom. I do have a personal interest in being able to use my mp3 player without paying people who have done no work at all for me. Although software patents do not exist in my country yet, it's just a matter of time before my legislation gets infected too.

The patent is not about FAT32. It's about a scheme for storing long filenames alongside short ones. Which is something everybody and his dog could devise in a few hours of work. The problem is that even if I, to respect MSFT's IP, invented a better one, it would be of no use to me, because the only scheme we're interested in is the MSFT one, because that's the only one Windows will understand.

Well, the fact that tomtom and MSFT settled out of court should at least give you some doubt about the simplicity of your reconstruction. Anyhow, I was more interested in the moral difference between the two cases. And by the way, IIRC the busybox developers are trying to stop the lawsuits against companies who, according to them, inadvertently violated their copyrights: that makes them different from a patent troll.

Now I don't understand, that's exactly my concern. Why doesn't that scream to you "software patents suck and need to be abolished"?

I think that actually "FLOSS" isn't "ruled" by anyone. Everyone will do whatever he likes. In fact, the usage of mono among "FLOSSies" is growing. I personally use h264 because it's better than Theora and I (still) can do it without breaking the law. I don't use mono to develop new software because I find Java to be (at least) technically equivalent, thus I can choose the solution that IMHO better guards my ass in case somebody in the future decides to use the nuclear option (cfr. the patent wars between Nokia / Apple / HTC to get an early taste).

This isn't terribly shocking. Both agencies also wasted millions of tax payer dollars on the failed "Deep Water" initiative, which sought to modernize some of the Coast Guard's old vessels: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/17/60minutes/main2823448.shtml

SA made GPS accurate to 10m.. With the "SA" feature disabled, you're down to 2m... And with Satelite enhancements, it's more like 20cm !

But that's irrelevant.. Because SA was intended to disable any enemy force from using GPS for accurate positioning - until they realized D-GPS (Differential GPS) made the whole point moot (you take a reference point - you send the signal to the receiver - And therefore - the receiver can deduce the SA introduced clock error - because now you have a ref point .. And believe it or not - it is a United Stated Uniform service - the US Coast Gard - that came up with it to overcome the artificially introduced uncertainty).

However, the military still keep exclusive use of the 1Mhz band (with the 10Mhz being public) - for the only purpose of being able to make real time measurements on tropospheric distortions - so - what happens - is that the military can make 1m accurate reading WITHOUT sat aids.

"If we only relied on our senses, we could assume that it's safe to live next to Chernobyl ffs!"

Maybe. On the other hand, relying on your senses alone, you can determine that the fuana and flora around Chernobyl aren't exactly "right", and decide to live elsewhere.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.html

This is in spite of $160M spent on modernizing LORAN stations over the past 10 years.

There's this thing called the Concorde Fallacy that is relevant here. It doesn't matter how much money you spent, all that should matter is anticipated future costs and benefits. And I think for a 200m redundant navigation system, future costs >> benefits.

Not even close. You might have more success in the future if you can figure out a way to relate your knee-jerk reactions to the actual content of the posted material. I know that expecting you to actually read it is out of the question. Maybe you could find some way to get Mechanical Turkers to poorly summarize it in such a way as to provide hooks for your hastily composed responses.

Do you know anything about China -- or its real estate market?

Trade barriers? Currency pegged to the dollar to increase exports? Nothing new. Japan did it decades ago.

I really doubt we will see a real estate bubble in China during the next decade. They are starting from a much different position. Many people from the country are still moving to the cities. Housing materials are not something that is exactly scarce either. Most of the costs are in construction labor which is something there is little shortage of in China.

That leaves the possibility of an energy crisis. Mind you the chinese are investing in every form of energy you can possibly think of, plus they have vast reserves of cheap coal. So if worst comes to worst, they can ramp up the construction of coal-to-liquids plants (they already have one) and use that instead of oil. They also still have enough of a command economy to rapidly ramp up construction of such plants if necessary. Their economy is quite far from reaching a point of diminishing returns on investment. The gap with "western" countries is still too wide.

The US also does ok with energy having large coal and shale reserves. The areas with the largest problem regarding their energy supply are Japan and the EU.