They can also install crapware and get paid for that. That may help offset the license.

That's not appeal to authority. Appeal to Authority is when somebody says "I am the expert, believe me and don't check the facts". Very unlike the current situation. You are welcome to read through as many publications as you feel like, you are free to participate in the science yourself.
But that's not practical because it would be a full time job, so you need to do what we all do for areas where we can't afford to become experts: identify the best sources, estimate how trustworthy they are assess their current level of knowledge and certainty etc.
Climate science is science and with a minimum amount of checking and research you can tell the crackpots from the serious people. And with some further reading you can get an idea of the serious people's arguments and the level of confidence there is that they are right (i.e. how much data they have, how many different ways they used to reach the conclusion, what's the statistics relevance of the data etc.)

This is definitely science and nobody is asking you to take it on faith as everything is published and debated constantly.
Every time I have seen studies denying climate change they were based on very shallow reasoning and it didn't take long to go through it and see it was crap. On the contrary the evidence for climate change is much more in-depth, comes from many sources and uses very clever methods (looking at trees, animals, ice, satellite data, temperature etc.).

That's a rather accurate and complete description.
I only have a couple things to add.

The quoted price is what you risk paying if you don't have insurance. So a high quoted price is something good for the insurer as it will scare you into buying their overpriced services.
Some insurers might pay more than others for the same service, so one could think they would want to reduce the "quoted price" so they all benefit by paying less. But I am more and more convinced they actually benefit too much from the absence of reasonable public prices and therefore are trying to keep the non-transparent pricing in place.

I am not familiar with many drugs, but the few I know make it clear that your insurer doesn't care about getting you a good price for drugs. The copay of drugs can be 2 to 3 times more than the list price or quoted price of the same drug in France (whereas food, clothing, gas and many other commodities are rather cheaper in the US). This is a clear indication that the insurance company acts like a broker that helps you buy services but it actually doesn't care if you get ripped off. The only meaningful difference is that in France, the insurance company negotiates the list price down. So everybody, even those who don't have insurance benefit from the negotiation.

If we were able to switch insurance providers easily, we would be able to choose the best brokers and also the best coverage. The only issue is that you don't want freeloaders in the system, so you need a minimum level of coverage that people must get. Otherwise they can just go with a dummy insurance for 2$ and then when they are sick they can just benefit from our humanity (i.e. we are human so we won't let them without care when they show up at the emergency room).

Overall, healthcare is an issue that is both social and individual. Therefore it can't be simply handled by pure market or pure governmental solutions. But at least we should make sure we have working market components in the solution and working governmental components too.

That's really an intriguing interpretation of the economics at play. It makes you wonder why anybody would ever pay for penetration testing or audits of any kind...

Well, that was after a long stagnation. And the disruption was so major that there was little connection between the old business and the new. A customer with a Treo or Palm V probably had the same shock switching to an iPhone or a Palm Pre.

Also, webOS came after the iPhone. That makes it less innovative, since most of the differences between an old Pam were pioneered by the iPhone:
- get rid of pen, use fingers
- capacitive multi touch makes keyboard less needed, so get rid of it.
- get modern OS and not 16/32 bit kludgy memory address space
- get real browser
- PDA swallows the phone and not the reverse

Personally, for me the Treo was the time when Palm failed to innovate. Notably, they rejected the low end. I remember seeing 100$ phones, 100$ Palms. But there was no 150$ Palm-phone, only a very expensive Treo.

So, in the end, I'd say Palm is really a company that failed to innovate in time. And note this is really a case of innovating and not inventing. If you look at my bullet list, nothing was really groundbreaking in 2000. So it's not that they were unlucky and the guys in the labs didn't have the "Eureka moment". It's that they didn't look at what was possible and put it together quickly enough.

That's really quite sad, Palm was a company that had understood some really important things about simplicity and focus on the core features.

Actually, Wired has an article on this this month. And it turns out the classic hooks is still better in some respects and are preferred for some occasions where strength, speed and feedback are best.
I suppose when you are outside your home (i.e. where people can see you and gather anecdotal statistics as the ones we discuss), you might want the most reliable, fast and simple gear.
So some of the people we see with old style gear might have more advanced prostheses at home or at work for tasks that benefit from them.

They are likely to not just ask you for your password but other candidates too. A number of whom may be willing to bear witness.
And more than one of their employees will know.
And they probably document what they do when they research employees (e.g. put copy of resume on file, transcript of phone interview, printout of Facebook page etc.).
All these people can be asked questions and getting them all to lie
You see, doing something illegal can be done without leaving any trail. But it takes work, trust, intimidation etc. So it has to be worth it. And frankly, being able to view somebody's Facebook page before hiring that person is NOT WORTH the risk.

There are already lawyers advising companies to order the HR people from stay clear from candidates' Facebook pages, twitter etc.
Facebook's announce might get thousands of employers to consult their lawyers or even just to decide to be safe and not ask for such risky information that is not even really useful...

I was also very impressed by that part of 60 Minutes.
It was striking how Elon Musk (the SpaceX boss) looked on the verge of crying. Apparently seeing Neil Armstrong side against his endeavors was tough to take.

For me, the astronauts siding against SpaceX are defending what they think is the most reliable and proven way to go to space. Their interpretation could be the following:
- Nasa has had success and will have more success with enough funding
- SpaceX is unproven and might be unable to ever achieve what NASA could do
- SpaceX threatens NASA funding by its very existence (Politicians can think "why give NASA billions now if I can wait a couple years and there is a chance SpaceX will do the same for hundreds of millions?")

Let's hope SpaceX or their competitors succeed, otherwise we are going to stay grounded as the US government is not prepared to invest in space conquest.

Thanks, I always knew that my time on Slashdot was not a waste and that I was in fact visiting a true temple of knowledge!

Actually, if you go for the Raspberry Pi+helium balloon, your server could be 100$ as Amazon sells 50$ "meteorological" balloons (30 feet diameter with 15 pounds of lift).
I researched the topic because it seemed cool and safe for kids.
Apparently there are many amateurs who send balloons into near space, notably amateur radio geeks. The field is not new according to Wikipedia (they quote examples in the 60s) but I think it might get a lot more popular as cool payloads are becoming affordable.
Some guys have 300km long Wifi links, so you could talk to your balloon in real time with the right antennas.
You can get cameras, cell phones, small micro servers, flash storage (hard drives are supposed to die at relatively low altitude).

And the thing is, the US government might want to send those to Iran and Syria. So they may pay startups to develop this, adapt TOR and whatnot. But this new frontier seems so obvious for people who love freedom (whatever their definition of it) that we can only expect the Chaos Computer Club, the Pirate Bay and others to get into this too.

Hi,

Don't limit yourself to science fiction. Some old books are actually fun in a way very similar to science fiction. The Anabasis by Xenophon for instance tells the story of 10000 Greek mercenaries stranded in the middle of the Persian empire. I enjoyed the encounters with the foreign people, the way they get organized and are voting all the time etc. All this makes it a bit like the kind of social thought experiment that the best science fiction produces. Except it really happened and they didn't have light sabers but overall I loved it. It brought a lot of the stuff I like in Babylon 5 for instance.

There are also complete NASA shows from the 60s that explain the progress of the effort to land guys on the Moon. My 5 year old watched a 30 minute episode with interest!

Anyway, you are right, if you disagree with copyright holders, a boycott is the best way as they only have themselves to blame and can't accuse 'the pirates'. As you said there is an abundance of content distributed in more open ways. And it's all competing for our limited spare time. And most content is only as worthy as we allow it to be.

I am telling you, Hollywood is turning pirates into boycotters. And they will regret it as they will lose mindshare and the value of their brands will diminish. I admit most of the strategies you outlined don't qualify as "boycott" but reading does and a man can dream, can't I?

If you compare a country where advertisement for drugs is illegal, you can see that:
- new drugs are used just as well (as long as the doctors and patients see the value proposition)
- drugs are actually cheaper in countries where said advertisement is illegal (and we are talking expensive countries here, where most stuff is selling at prices similar to those of the US except for know ripoffs such as Verizon cell phone service or internet).

In such countries the doctors are usually determining what your ailments are and offering what they think are the best corresponding drugs. So drug companies just have to convince these experts that you need the drugs and they will be used. That seems quite reasonable, efficient and reasonably respectful of individual freedom, although there is some abuse (drug companies sometimes offer free seminars in tropical islands for instance).

In the US, advertising to end users also increases some risks that people will ask for drugs they don't really need. When you see the list of side effects, it's easy how to see how this could be quite dangerous and 'give cancer' as was said...

Example: Lovaza is refined Omega3 with some testing done (basically filtered fish oil...). They have ads on TV all the time and the drug is very expensive. You can buy Omega3 for much less from all kinds of supplement manufacturers. That seems to contradict your theory.

Well, Engadget and other sister sites accept Facebook and Google.
I am pretty sure the 3 don't belong to the same company so that sounds like openid is working to some extent.

There is cyanogenmod which is a distribution of Android with more freedom.
After that you can choose not to install the Google Apps, not configure any Google accounts (or have a dummy one).

Avoiding Google on Cyanogenmod means:
- no Google market for apps. You can download packages for Open Source apps, you can use somebody else's market (say Amazon if you don't feel like they are bad for your privacy)
- no gmail, you can use another mail service, choose a non Google mail client
- no Google maps. There is an Open Street Map application but it's not lightweight and seamless (not used it in 6 months though)

I do that on my Nook Color but I actually have a dummy Google account and I use Google books and other Google apps as it's easier. And I got the Google market too as I mostly use the machine for entertainment (i.e read books, listen to music) and development so it's not really a very private device...

Indeed, that's why we need to sue them for discrimination and any other statute that applies.
We just need one high profile case that just settles and their lawyers will be advising all employers to stay clear from Facebook.
And Facebook could help: they could update their terms of service to make it a violation of their terms of service to allow people to look at your Facebook page since it invades the privacy of the other users that trusted you.

Facebook (or Google) has a role here. They can organize the defense of their users. If they don't, I expect people will have a bland Facebook page and do all their fun interaction on some other website that allows nicknames and doesn't let you search by public names...