In the 18th century, there was no other means of delivering mail everywhere. It was a huge investment, and losing money was worth it because it was a big deal. Now days, not so much. I think I'd rather that the USPS subsidy went to building out our broadband footprint in rural areas.

- doug

I don't think that would be enough, but it would be a wonderful start. Why does this have to be big bang, all-chips-in major plan? Why can't we go for the low hanging fruit first?

- doug

I basically agree with you, but look at it a bit differently: The Feds can only do anything well if expense is not a limit. Who won the cold war? Who went to the moon? The Guv'ment can do this stuff, but only at incredible cost. Since health care is a large fraction of GDP, they have to do it on the cheap in a way that the military never has to do. And therein lies the problem: The US Federal government cannot tie its own shoes when it is having to manage costs.

- doug

PS: Full disclosure: I'm one of the non-left American public that you mention, and I trust that if passed, this plan will be a fiasco. I've lived in Europe, and I've seen many of the pluses of Socialised Medicine, and am sure that we can't do it here.

I'm rarely in before 10am, often closer to 11. But I've found that answering a few customer emails at 2am helps. The folks in Asia get an answer sooner, so they're happier. I've done it regularly and that my boss has asked when I actually sleep. It's enough that I don't get any grief when I zone out in the afternoon. I'm not sure how many bosses are like that, but there is at least one of 'em.

Easy: yes, Funny: not so much

Actually, I believe it is specifically the education of women that gets the biggest bang for the buck. I don't remember the logic behind this, just the statement.

1960s movies aren't my thing. Tron was the only pre-War Games movie that I thought of. You should RTFA because we have all seen 4 of the 6 listed before War Games.

- doug

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=who+is+kevin+smith

Of course it does. The world is divided into two parts: The US of A, and targets. If every place was part of the US, then where would we bomb? Shesh, some people just don't think about the important things.

I've been annoyed at the government's use of proprietary formats since some moron at the IRS made wrapped some PDFs in a self extracting ZIP file. The linux tools at the time (the was in the 90s) didn't work well enough, and I had to work around it all. Now days most data files in closed formats have open source viewers, but not all. My son's school uses a bunch of MS only crap and I can't stand it. I have a MS netbook just so he can view everything. If you have any say in how the data is presented, format everything in a linux friendly way.

Likewise, keep IE specific junk off of your webserver.

I also liked someone else's idea of doing a writeup of how much you save annually by not buying close source tools. This can help others in Government/Corporate America make the case of switching to Linux. And any publicity is good publicity.

- doug

While you're right about the chaos, I'm not sure that those who die in the first wave would be lucky. War, chaos, famine, disease, and the like are how the human race has lived for most of its history. Sure, more people are alive now, and few alive today have seen anything remotely similar. Compare the centuries with modern comforts to those without. The future would be bleak, and it isn't the world that I want to live in, but I'd rather take my chances there than just plain die. I'll always take a shot and go down fighting rather than give in for no good reason. Perhaps that is just me.

Oh, I get it. We build a cloud to fight their cloud.