OK, let me break it down. The majority of the doctors in Taiwan DO participate in the national healthcare system. The majority of those doctors are incompetent. The public healthcare system did not cause that; low standards for licensing and poor quality medical schools did. Eliminating the public healthcare system won't improve the quality of care, it will just mean that fewer people will have access to even the crappy care they currently have. Increasing the payouts through the national insurance system might help somewhat, as it might encourage the good doctors to begin participating, and other good doctors who work elsewhere to come to Taiwan, but it would do little to improve the quality of care provided by the rest of the doctors. I am not arguing for or against free healthcare in any country, and I was trying not to get even farther off topic than the post I replied to already had. I am simply saying that in Taiwan, free healthcare can't be blamed for the poor quality of the medical care. Similarly, I would also agree that increasing the funding of the system there would do little to improve the situation.

This is getting very off topic, but I just can't believe this post has been modded informative. I know little about the quality of health care in the UK, and nothing about the quality in Portugal and France, but I lived in Taiwan and still have Taiwanese friends. Blaming the low quality of public healthcare in Taiwan on the national health insurance system is ridiculous. The primary problem is that most of the doctors who participate in it are incompetent. The good doctors who actually went to quality medical schools do not participate in the national insurance program because the payments are much too small. None of my friends--mostly engineers--went to the public doctors for anything except routine matters. I tried it once, since expat workers are also covered, and quickly discovered why. A private Taiwanese doctor I later went to, who got his degree at Yale Medical School, commented that doctors who went to med school in Taiwan "can't diagnose their own ass."

Einstein did NOT believe in a god who is an omnipotent, conscious entity such as followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam worship. As he himself said in the essay The World As I See It, "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."

Sorry, as a former developer turned project and then people manager, your idea of a good manager is my idea of one that is barely adequate. If a manager is even half way competent, he already knows when the projects he is in charge of are expected to be completed, and where they are in the development cycle at any given time. He also knows how to say no if extra work is assigned and the team does not have the capacity to handle it. (OK, if it is being assigned by his boss, he will not actually say no, he will ask which other work needs to be delayed in order to do the new work, which will usually result in it being assigned to another team.) In the case of unexpected unmovable deadlines--such as a trade show the company has suddenly decided to have a presence at, or a meeting with a really important potential client or investor--a good manager will try to shuffle priorities when possible in order to accommodate the request. This may mean transferring people from one project to another, or possibly accelerating work on the front end of a project in order to have a "working" demo, at the temporary expense of back end functionality. If he has a good team, they will accept the need for this even if it means working on something they have no interest in, or having to do more work in the long run. Of course, as a good manager, he will explain to them why the change is necessary and solicit opinions about how best to reach the new deadline.

iTunes is required in order to download applications from Apple's App Store, and unless there has been a recent change, it is not possible to use another application to sync music and other files while using iTunes only to handle applications. This used to be possible with Media Monkey, but an iTunes update earlier this year broke that functionality, and I don't believe older versions of iTunes will work on iPhone OS 3.0.

Media Monkey excels at managing large libraries, and is my favorite player app, as well.

I also worked retail when I was younger, and to me it sounds as if the employees brought this on themselves by arguing with a customer for 2 hours. I assume that when the poster returned with his paperwork, he was dealing with the store manager. If not, that was the employees' first mistake. The manager should also not have let it go on for 2 hours. He/she should have contacted his supervisor, or whomever was the correct person to escalate problems to, as soon as it became clear that the customer was not going to accept the rejection and leave. Quite possibly, the person the poster was dealing with was a jerk who enjoyed screwing with people, or an insecure idiot who can't stand being argued with. I have run into both types more than once in retail settings. Thankfully, they are in the minority, but they do seem to be unusually prevalent in cellphone shops. (I'm happy to say that the guy that I recently dealt with at the AT&T store was not one of them.)

On my most recent trip, I found free wi-fi in the only two airports where I checked for it--San Diego and Phnom Penh.