What pressure? The artist is declining to work with Card, and other people are declining to buy the work. As Card is publicly exhorting governments and people to refuse to allow gays to marry, some people are publicly exhorting others to decline to buy the work or work with Card.

Nobody's telling you you can't read or watch it. They're allowing you to hear that they won't help you with their own work to read or watch it.

Card's not being "discriminated against for his beliefs". Some people are refusing to work with him because he uses his fame to exhort people to treat other people badly. Other people are refusing to buy his work because of it.

If you call refusing to associate with an asshole "discrimination for their beliefs", then that is semantically correct. It is also ethically correct.

Prop 8 was passed several years ago. People change, and have changed their minds substantially over prohibiting some people from marrying those they love. Indeed, the campaign to pass Prop 8 showed lots of people for whom it was previously purely an abstract question that it was a very real oppression of very real neighbors and relatives. There are lots of polls showing majorities of Americans now support gay marriage.

Your post suggests that you know nothing about public opinions of gay marriage. It suggests that you are "Conservative" as a matter of pure ideology, regardless of its actual effect on people.

Homosexuals are mccarthyites? How?

Since Card is a heterosexual and a nonconformist, he's free not to marry a man. He's not "prophetic", he's a provocateur.

Because you're not paying attention.

You're right. Please send me your $36.50 ATMega version.

How does the developed world lack imagination? It's producing these devices, and generating the demand for them, and using them in the applications. Indeed most innovation comes from outside the third world. Yes, third worlders are busier just surviving, but the developed world is supplying plenty of imagination.

Your post was sent from the developed world, and shows plenty of imagination.

Now, I won't disagree that plenty of developed worlders are idiots without imagination. But they've outsourced it to people like us, which is how we address the problem. The species lacks sufficient imagination, but that's not really what we're talking about here. There's plenty of imagination to go around, though it would be better if there were more.

More interesting is a $15 Pi with lower HW specs : no audio; no serial (only 1 USB, like Model A); no HDMI (only VGA) or even no video. But also integrated wireless mesh, preferably a snapin daughtercard for either Bluetooth, Zigbee, or even WiFi.

The purpose of these devices is to bootstrap British youth Computer Science education. That education better focus on networked distributed computing, preferably wireless for mobile or just ubiquity. Only one of the machines on the network needs better specs, for human interface. The rest should interface to the many things we have to make smart.

I personally would buy thousands of those low spec devices each year. I'm sure there's a market for hundreds of millions, probably many billion of them. Though most of that market will probably be served by stickon, postage-stamp sized devices powered by ambient (heat, light, flexing) energy and cost under $1, we have to get there steadily. I don't know why Chinese exporters aren't selling Model A and Model B for under $20 already (they're $80+), and a $10- Model C stripped down from there.

Republican Issa's corporate sponsors evidently believe that they've got the Internet set up for whatever harvesting they might desire. So they're leveraging the small House majority (elected by a gerrymandered minority of House voters) they bought into eliminating the power of the Democratic minority, the significant Senate majority, and the reelected Democratic president.

Darrell Issa has spent his career investigating and attacking Democrats. It's cost a fortune, halted government action, and turned up nothing but empty headlines and a blowjob. How about a moratorium on Darrell Issa? I'm voting for that in 2014 by voting for a House Democrat. Only 17 more and Issa can't run anything but his mouth on Fox News.

+1 Agree :)

Private businesses are fare more wasteful, fraudulent and abusive than are Medicare, Medicaid and VA healthcare. Indeed the government is far better at catching these abuses than private business is: private insurance is defined by it; employers administering it are characterized by its incompetence version, gilded with plenty of scamming.

Public health financing in the US is far more effective per dollar than is private. Even apart from the profit collected by terrible insurers, even before considering the public finances far more unhealthy people.

Indeed all of the many Obamacare cost studies by qualified orgs say it's more cost effective. It's primarily designed to reduce public health budgets, though sold on many other benefits.

Everything you said is exactly backwards. Especially the part where the "existing relationship" with one's employer is somehow the correct way to get better compliance with healthcare policies. That relationship could also be used to insist your kids do their homework: your boss as your kids' boss - how about going over your spouse's credit card bills along with the monthly department budget, too?

You're talking from pure ideology, ignoring the actual well established facts. You're devoted to corporatism, though its practice rips apart all the values you likely insist your ideology enshrines. Try looking at the real world, not the one sponsored by your media chaperones.

I love it when my boss hassles me to exercise and eat right. That asshole in HR who's always trying to "forget" my benefits should know that I need viagara, especially right before that birthday long weekend. The executive team's experience making widgets really qualifies them to design and administer the medical care that my family's health and life depend on - because it sells more widgets. I should change my healthcare based on the whims of my new employer, or stay stuck in one workplace because I depend on its benefits. Not.

Employers shouldn't have anything to do with administering healthcare. It's crazy, and perhaps the ultimate corporatist policy. They should mind their own business, literally.

No, insurance is not defined as amortizing costs across time. It's defined by paying across time costs defined by risk, whether or not that risk actually materializes.

Some insurance is for low risk, and indeed designed to spread costs smoothly across time. It's addresses cash flow, and always costs more than paying only for the cost in the event. Other insurance is for high - catastrophic - risk, spread across a pool of risk takers, not all of whom see their risk materialize.

There is no reason that a profitmaking outfit must provide even the low risk maintenance insurance. Indeed, decades (centuries) of practical experience (across the globe) have demonstrated that model poorly finances proper maintenance, at higher cost and far more management by policyholders, than does widespread publicly funded insurance. The idea of competitive profitmakers finding efficiencies in a choosy market sounds great, but in practice it's undeniably a failure. Sick and old and young people are much more suited to being victims than to being savvy consumers, and giant private corps are more suited to exploiting their customers than to serving them.

Because we'd pay for you to be sick as a dog. And you'd die sooner, saving us your Social Security payments. If mental health care were properly covered, nobody would indulge in such self destructive behavior just because it's paid by the public.

Of course cigarettes carry extra taxes to cover the extra costs. Corn syrup should, too, and probably soon will. Indeed every high risk consumable ingredient should be taxed according to its extra risk, to pay its way. Health supplements should get proportional price subsidies. Freedom of choice with personal responsibility - costs internalized instead of externalized. That would be the Conservative platform, if they weren't totally corrupt.