Go to countries like India. For example, you will get a 60k heart surgery done for 3 to 10 k in the best of the best hospitals, add 1.5 k tickets + some for hotel. Success rate for heart is 98.5 % but if your surgery goes the other 1.5% way then you can't sue. Medicine is a practice, not a science, so risk is yours.

I am on h1b and my company got 62 per hour for my work at a client site and they kept 21 and gave me 41 per hour. Am I cheap?

It is opensource. If you are not able to support yourself then I am afraid you are not adventurous enough to use Linux. Stay in proprietery OS world.

If performance is number one priority then I would say, you should compile your own kernel. The standard distros have a lot of fat in the kernel. I have not tried many distros, so let other slashdotters pick a distro. Take the base distro and then begin kernel compilation, cut out all the drivers for which you don't have the hardware. For example, cd writer driver, tape drive, network card drivers except for the one you use and many many other stuff.. It will take few iterations to get the desired kernel. Enterprise versions are outdated by years, for example compare RHEL kernel with Fedora 15 kernel version. From my experience "enterprise" means crippled distro yet 10+ times expensive.

So is it evolution or devolution in IT age(historical prespective)- Linux users have to pay for Windows users who ignorantly choose a stupid OS. I did quit one of the biggest city's IT department in disgust because they wanted to put antivirus on Linux servers. Call me biased - I immediately loose respect for a person who chooses to implement a solution based on Windows and also for the persons who put a proprietery app on Linux and give root privileges to it. For me it becomes a parasite infested Linux system.

You are bang on the point. Wish to add that malpractice suites are the reason our medicine prices are so high. Get the facts, we know only 0.00001% about how our body works. Medicine is not a science but a practice, similar to religion, there will be failures and success in treatment where how and why part are unknown. Life is entertainment, enjoy it :-)

Once upon a time I worked for a mega city gov as Linux consultant. I had to quit in disgust after the antivirus sales people mcpaid brainwashed the managers to put it on all linux server. As if it was not bad enough that they were running production systems on Vware. I made an good effort to educate the managers by showing them various articles from wiki and explaining the unix design but failed. Vware is another story, I showed them bonnie++ throughput measurement for disk io on a desktop vs a guest on highend esox. From my perspective looked like they deserve each other, but obviously huge kickbacks were involved. Both parties were benefiting each other at tax payers expense. By experience(15 years) I have learnt that whenever such illogical stuff takes place on a large scale you know that recession is around the corner.

Am I not free to do that, Say I am s0ny and I provide top 10 ranking and 8 on the list are produced by s0ny. If people don't like it then they are free to go to 3ftv rankings where only 2 of s0ny's songs are in the top 10 list.

Help me understand here - Is not this like saying, If I provide top10 song rankings and I put Spice girls song at no.2. EU does not like that and sues me to put her song at no 1.

The article looks like an advertisement to me. Just like Verizon vs Att. Here bing/yahoo vs google in the lines of Nigerian scam.

I completely agree. Whatever is born, must die. He seems to have forgotten Newton's third law - To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.

Foreign students excel in American Universities. Therefore it is not higher education fault.

I am a foreigner and since I come from different background I feel that I understand what is wrong with education system here. I have a 6 year old son in USA. He went to Kindergarten at the age of 5 and I was amazed that he is getting graded and taught to spell and recognize words cut put etc.. etc.. I felt this is so wrong to teach children at such young age. I had hoped that K will be mostly play, activities and story telling. After 2 months I withdrew him from the school because I am sure if I had continued then it would have destroyed any imaginative/creative abilities he might be having. He will rejoin K this year.

Quoting Albert Einstein - Imagination is more important than knowledge.

At age 5 the brain is not fully wired(especially boys). Kids memory part is excellent at age 5. The analytical ability develops at a later age(left and right brain have to connect). When we teach kids to memorize and learn, their brains get trained to use memory to learn and thus the analytical brain will never be challenged or used at later ages. They will excel(by reading early) in early classes, say K3 etc. but when they grow up they will not have decision making, logical analysis abilities and will most likely end up at fast food chains taking orders. The best education systems in the world start teaching kids at age 6 or 7. For example Finland.

fantastic analysis, I wish to add little more philosophy to this - If I kill myself then I will save the planet and the environment a lot, so who ever says "save the planet" they should kill them selves first.

To even think that we are in some way superior to the planet and have the ability to decide the fate of our planet is very short sighted thought process. Earth controls us, not the other way. Just enjoy the virtual existence and die the virtual death. I am from the planet, planet is me and I am the planet. The person typing this is a mere virtual identity having no real existence. My body is real and so is the planet, rest is virtual.

So what you mean is that if we get rid of insurance then price should be 100 usd. I was rasied outside usa in another country, so as an outsiders perspective, what I observed here is that people are very very afraid of everything here. From Insurance to Pharma companies, are ripping out money using that fear. When a robber holds a gun and takes away money, people complain immediately. But people are willingly opting for getting robbed by the Insurance industry.

I had employer provided insurance for one year and withdrew once I realized that 1/4th of my salary was being paid by my employer for Insurance. Medical Science can't cure infectious diseases. You would be asking for a very miserable death if you opt for treating infectious diseases other than cuts/bruises from accidents. And penicillin is the medicine for cuts. Medical Science is very good at treating injuries or at surgery. They don't have a cure for anything else. Cuts etc treatment doesn't cost much out of pocket. Surgery is normally a planned activity, so one can always go to another country and get it done for less than 10k. There is no gurantee that one won't die from a car accident today, but we don't worry about it. Similarly there is no need to worry about death from infections. Insurance or no-insurance it does not matter in case of infectious diseases like malaria or TB. There are two outcomes, either you die in couple of months among loved ones or die a very very miserable death in hospital and after bankrupting your loved ones for one or two years.

One more important point is never to take any medication for fever. Fever is our own army, we should not kill fever. I am 36 years old and have been to the dirtiest countries in my life. I know I got infections too because I got fever, and fever has always cured the infection and me without any medication. Taking medication for fever is the worst thing one can do to himself. Taking medicines is equivalent to drinking dishwasher detergents. You are a big colony of bacteria too, so it will kill the bad bacteria in you and half of your good colony inside you. Body's immune system is far superior beyond anyone's imagination, help it and help yourself.

I hate people who work on weekends. Working on weekends means you were not smart enough to finish your work in the allocated project hours. If the project plan is poor and the work is impossible to complete in the regular allotted hours then lodge a complaint with your seniors or the HR and get your Project Manager fired. Freshers like you are generally not smart enough, that is understandable but if your PM also rewards weekend and late hour work then people like you will be inducing an weekend work culture. If that happens to me, that is, if my PM forces me to work on weekends, yes I will do FTP during regular hours. FTP stands for - Full Time Pass. If the FTP privileges are also curtailed then I will start looking for a new job. Simple rule - Time = Money. We earn money to earn Quality time, not the other way i.e. give away the weekend quality time for money. I regularly fire freshers who end up working into weekends.