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Could someone patiently explain to me what's going on? Why is it seen as flamebait? Why do people think it's saying Eich should be punished for his private opinions when I say the exact opposite?

I agree that you say the opposite, but there are subtleties in this issue that can easily be missed by someone (like me) who hasn't followed this story very closely. I believe the nuance that mods have missed in your post was that Brendan Eich didn't just donate to some generic Prop 8 campaign as most news stories say. There is no such thing as "the Prop 8 campaign." There were several groups of people running campaigns to support Prop 8, and some of them were...mean-spirited, to put it lightly. The particular group that Eich supported ran ads with the underlying message that gay parents are doing harm to their children, and that rejecting Prop 8 would be harmful to children in general. Once I understood that (see this story, for example), your arguments made a lot more sense.

No fear of that my friend. The biggest reason is that most US employers are unwilling to put their futures with the IRS into the hands of someone beyond the reach of US law. Generally, employers want the money here, the companies here, the programmers within easy reach, and full auditing on everything. Even if most of the code is done offshore, someone here still has to look it over.

There are a lot of trust issues around this industry. If the bank absconds with your cash, you're out the cash. If the payroll company takes the cash and fails to make your Federal deposit, you can go to jail (you can't pass the buck on that one).

This is what happens when you deal with something not entirely transparent.

Or the left wing scream. When the patriot act extension was passed, Harry Reid was busy with comments like "When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected," speaking about those evil tea party republicans holding the law up trying to amend it while tea party candidates like Rand Paul was asking whether the nation "should have some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land?"

Of course Obama has taken Bush's programs to new heights while arguing legal interpretations of wording to justify the bulk collection of data. One outraged republican said "the suggestion that the administration can violate the law because Congress failed to object is outrageous."

Please stop making excuses for this behavior. Especially when it is pretty easy to find examples that cause them to fail. Plenty of republicans as well as democrats appose this crap. The tea party members actually attempted to limit it at one time but were ignored and scoffed at out of spite. Obama is not running for office any more. If he actually thought the programs some of which were created under his watch, some were expanded from the previous administration, were wrong, then he would not defend them and simply not care about what the republicans or democrats thought and end them as the chief executive officer of the land.

The LA Times story says 1200 gallons. "Thousands of gallons" is a big exaggeration that is probably intended to mislead people. But it's more than 70 gallons.

According to the LA Times, you are incorrect about money raised for/against. http://www.latimes.com/local/l...

get the magnitude wrong.

7.7
8.2
8.0

http://www.google.org/publical...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/c...

http://www.latimes.com/world/w...

You could conceivably find out by looking at these records (which is how they found Brendan's position).

Granted, I took a quick look, and I don't see any CEOs on the list, but I do see some otherwise high-ranked people. For example, Lisa Brummel, who us a corporate VP in Microsoft.

This is a police force where the Chief of Police in the 1990's, Daryl F. Gates, said that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot," which prescription being specifically aimed at those "who blast some pot on a casual basis."

Mr. Gates is no long with us, but not because of any repudiation by the LAPD.

Draft exempt jail guards pretending they're at a crime scene as it happens instead of waiting to be a first responder and think they're their own man, alone on their own like most Americans who have to protect themselves and work for a living and don't have a team of backup buddies to backup their scripted backup buddy bitch mouth, ought to be taken out ...

First responders -- lol. From the way they talk you'd think September 11th was all and only about them instead of the 2,800 or more people that died that day.

LOL, uh you don't know Yugos very well do you?

They can do at least 45MPH! http://articles.latimes.com/19...

Viacom is about to go dark in 800 markets and 5 million homes because they want to nearly double their rate overnight: http://www.latimes.com/enterta...

And TV wonders why it's dieing. Just like the music industry, TV and Movie studios are vastly overestimating the value of their product.

You do realize that the US still produces a significant amount of oil, right? Like 50% of its needs? And that the US is the larger exporter of refined products? And that imported oil would still be refined here in the US thus "creating jobs for Amerikans".

And I'm sure the people of Russia have similar feelings about the US, as do a lot of other countries.

There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.

I'm against gay marriage. I think it's ridiculous that people who aren't religious want to engage in a religious institution. That said, the type of attitude you have is much much worse than anything you could possibly ascribe to me. You wish not to discriminate against gays, fine, but then turn around and want to discriminate against people like Eich and myself.

You're a hypocrite of the worst kind. Eich is free to disagree with gay marriage all he likes. If he breaks a law then you can kick and scream and stamp your feet like a fucking child, until then piss off.

There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.

But the connection between providers isn't the justification for the deal with Comcast. Netflix wanted to put their servers inside Comcast's network using their Open Connect Content Delivery Network that you link to. If Netflix had been able to do that then the amount of traffic carrying Netflix data coming into Comcast's network from other Providers would have dropped considerably, which should have saved Comcast money. However according to this LATimes article Comcast wanted Netflix to subsidize the cost of moving traffic through Comcast's internal network.

Basically Comcast feels they're undercharging their customers for the amount of bandwidth that their customers are using but instead of raising the cost of internet access they want Netflix to pay for it since most people are using Netflix.

This is actually changing quite rapidly as society changes and in a lot of areas of the (rich) world young women are starting to pull in more than men. While the culture in eastern Europe is certainly different, there was an eye-opening study published recently about young couples in the USA. For the first time since the study began more women than men are "marrying down"(here marrying down means marrying someone with a lower educational attainment than they have). This is largely out of necessity, but necessity often times breeds cultural shifts.

Not to mention there are always more poor people being born, and I doubt all the poor women are getting pregnant by rich men....

This is a police force where the Chief of Police in the 1990's, Daryl F. Gates, said that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot," which prescription being specifically aimed at those "who blast some pot on a casual basis."

Mr. Gates is no long with us, but not because of any repudiation by the LAPD.

But those assumptions are a subset what if of a what if. My point is that her initial premise is flawed altogether when she dismisses Satoshi as a pseudonym because it's too "distinctive". But there does exist your possibility that despite the author describing both Satoshi's as "obsessively private" that he did use his real name AND that she had gotten the correct Satoshi, having only looked through the naturalized US citizen database AND that he makes no attempt to hide himself, faking his death or otherwise.

As for the job thing, I can hear it too
"There's this guy that people claimed invented Bitcoin who wants a job here"
"Really, the virtual currency best known for black market drug trades, laundering, and vanishing money? Please, send him in"
"Okay but wait a few reporters followed him here"
"Oh that none of this sounds like a liability at all. Let us wait for him to finish"

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

Personally, I find it unlikely that the CIA would do something so ham handed and transparent. And yet, since the War on Terror and the idea that anything goes when the people you're drowning don't wear matching hats, the CIA and the entire IC has lost all credibility, that I can't dismiss the allegation.

That said, Feinstein is a out of touch 80 year-old that thinks mass surveillance is cool, but at the same time gets upset when the IC spies on allies (like everyone else does), and when spy on her.

As a Democrat and a Californian, I say Fuck Feinstein.

If you're vaccinated, it's not going to affect you. If you're not vaccinated because you can't afford to be, then get Obamacare quickly. If you're not vaccinated because of stupidity, then may God help you.

Right. Because Obamacare is cheap.

/sarcasm

Then there's the real-world problem of doctors who won't take Obamacare patients.

Yay. One wonders if Obama can predict the consequences of ANYTHING he does. He made fun of Palin in 2008 for suggesting Putin would invade Ukraine, and then Obama made fun of Romney for calling Russia unfriendly.

Yep. Tout Obamacare. Just like your Lightbringing Messiah, you live in Fantasyland.

Think I'm kidding?

President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. ...

Yeah. Tout Obamacare.

Think of the chinese, indian, etc workers as the robots. Is it working out so well for the US workers so far? I don't think so. Even when manufacturing is brought back to the USA, far fewer long term jobs are created[1].

And guess what? Foxconn is busy replacing chinese workers with actual robots.

What will the chinese workers do? Some may take your higher end jobs, for 20% your pay: http://articles.latimes.com/20...

His performance reviews were impeccable, and his company considered him the best developer in the building.

Amazon is replacing warehouse workers with robots. There are burger making robots.

The cycle may go on, but it might be rather big and ugly cycle. The people at the top who'd own everything don't need that very many people to keep them happy - how many luxury goods designers and top chefs do they need anyway?

[1] You get some short term construction jobs to build the factories but even there are companies that build buildings quickly out of prefab (that can be made in more and more automated factories) - so the amount of human labour will go down. Buildings might even be 3D printed: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/3d...

p.s. I'm an IT worker in a 3rd world country. From what I gather, I cost less but I doubt I'm less capable than the average Slashdotter (the average quality appears to be dropping too ;) ).

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said "Even with modern technological advances, the warrant procedure imposes burdens on the officers who wish to search [and] the magistrate who must review the warrant application." http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

So we are now losing more of our constitutionally protected rights because getting a warrant "imposes burdens" on the police and magistrates? Their wish to search now trumps our right to protection from unreasonable searches? I think the SCOTUS got this ruling very wrong.

~~

How did it go to hell? It looks like the market price barely had a blip. And that's *despite* Forbes and others declaring it dead.

http://articles.latimes.com/20...

OK. http://articles.latimes.com/20...

Well... we're really not supposed to look. Nothing to see here, move along.

All is fine. After all... almost no one dies in those accidents even when they do happen.

September 18, 1980 â" At about 6:30 p.m., an airman conducting maintenance on a USAF Titan-II missile at Little Rock Air Force Base's Launch Complex 374-7 in Southside (Van Buren County), just north of Damascus, Arkansas, dropped a socket from a socket wrench, which fell about 80 feet (24 m) before hitting and piercing the skin on the rocket's first-stage fuel tank, causing it to leak. The area was evacuated. At about 3:00 a.m., on September 19, 1980, the hypergolic fuel exploded. The W53 warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the launch complex's entry gate; its safety features operated correctly and prevented any loss of radioactive material. An Air Force airman was killed and the launch complex was destroyed.

And then... there are things like this, which is not on the list above because it was not a nuclear accident.
Only a regular accident and a malfunction that still required the military to try to stop a nuclear launch by parking an armored car on top of the silo.

And these were just misplaced.

Or at least avoid any software-controlled devices capable of killing you. And hope you never need a CAT scan. Yeah, can't think of any examples of microwaved people, but you *know* that somewhere in the software there's an extremely rare corner case that will fail to shut off the x-ray source.

Something like this?

This one was operator error. But you'd think there would be better software checks in place so this would be impossible.

The crazy thing is, is that MRI scanners have required the weight of the patient to be entered for many years so it won't cook the patient with RF pulses. The good new is that the CT incidents in the links above caused a nationwide acknowledgement of the dangers of radiation exposure in CT scanners. So it really helped to create the current generation of scanners with significantly lower dosage.

What a coincidence, most Climate Change pushers believe it because that's what their religion--Global Warming--tells them.

The vast majority of reported cases disagree with them, but that's only because the mainstream only reports on the now-accepted stories. There are many, many scientists that can link climate change to the sun rather greenhouse gases, including the lack of temperature increases over the past decade, which is kindly ignored by the mainstream GW community or excused as a blip.

In reality, even one hundred years is a blip to Earth. The Little Ice Age was anywhere from 200 to 500 years and we broke out of it without the assistance of the Industrial Age. Yet, in the 1950s and 1960s, we were worried about "Global Cooling" driving us into a new Ice Age before the advent of Global Warming completely reversing it. The only thing saving the mediocre movement is the age of those participating--teachers are now too young to even know about Global Cooling, and those pushing it are pushing it to people that either do not remember it, or are too stupid to realize it.

We are now looking at Global Warming largely because of rising temperatures in a single decade--the 1990s. Since then, we have had people like Al Gore profiteering off of the Global Warming movement with wildly inaccurate claims that are crazily accepted as fact rather than outlandish theory.

The ridiculous nature of it all cannot even predict year-to-year climate events like hurricane hazards (every year will be the worst, yet we are fortunately disappointed). We can all point to Katrina, but I can easily point to far more devastating hurricanes in areas that were not below sea level and far earlier in history. Yet, we should all be secure in knowing that there is "expert" consensus on models that are inaccurate, and that we largely do not understand.

It's easy to be labeled an expert. It's very hard to actually be one. How many people think that their well-schooled medical doctor, CEO, or professor is an idiot? Why is that suddenly any different when the person is suddenly labeled a scientist?

D'oh! "...which he could not have done as an unmentionable foreigner."

No I don't know the specifics of his allegiance swap occurred, what channels it went through, or how much money greased the rails. He had been living in the US legally for more than a decade at the time (according to the LA Times), which is generally long enough to qualify for citizenship. I do remember it raised a few eyebrows in the (non-Murdoch) Australian media at the time.

Democrats don't like technological solutions

Sure about that?

Or how about we fix the problem by cutting out all the bloat in our education costs?

http://articles.latimes.com/20...
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/pa...

I used to live in Valdez, Alaska which holds the dubious title of the snowiest city in the US. The town itself gets ~325 inches of snow annually, nearby Thompson Pass gets about three times that amount. A couple years ago the town proper was fairly well buried by over 500 inches of snow, with 350 inches falling in December alone. Shoveling the roofs of structures became an emergency, as well as boats. See here for what happens when you don't shovel your boat.

So the lower 48 is having some sort of a snowfall. How cute. Now check this out.

The people you're referring to, who don't have snow tires, are idiots. They also must not traverse hills very often; icy conditions can often prevent that entirely on non-studded tires. There are times when even studded tires won't save you: I've been in a large, heavily laden van on wet ice, where any speed whatsoever would result in fishtailing, and when stopped the vehicle was nudged over to the side of the road by no more than a moderate breeze. Not exactly the conditions you want when you're a hundred miles from anywhere, and just ahead the road plunged down towards a river, a long steep grade with a sharp turn at the bottom. The turn being necessitated by said river and the cliff it had cut. "Drive to the conditions," was it? Sure. After you make every other possible effort in the name of safety, because anything can happen.

You know how I can tell you're from Anchorage? Besides that most people in Alaska live there, you talk about people 'meeting the ditch' as if that were not an immediate threat to life and limb. If it's white-out in the Interior at -50, and you 'meet the ditch' in such a way that your vehicle heater doesn't work, there is a very small chance that you will live long enough to be rescued. No cell service, natch. If you 'meet the ditch' in the Chugach Mountains, you can only hope that the guard rail will save you, or if you're slightly less lucky, you can hope to be dead before your car finishes rolling down umpteen hundred feet of elevation, to (typically) a roiling river.

The issue I have with Anchorage drivers is that they drive like they're in Minnesota or some damn place where the damage to the vehicle is the most important concern, instead of having the proper respect for the lethal conditions outside. We have only the illusion of control over our environment, there. No matter how skilled of a driver you are, all it takes is one stupid animal and an icy patch to wreck your illusions.

In October 2009 the Democrats who were then running congress by a huge majority changed the locks on the capitol hill meeting rooms so they could keep Republicans out when they wanted to. (they did this to stop Republicans exposing the involvement of Democrats in the 2008 home loan meltdown activity at Countrywide, but they then used those locked rooms to exclude Republicans from the secret healthcare reform negotiations which Obama had promised would air in their entirety live on C-SPAN)

Obama did, indeed, promise Obamacare negotiations would air live on C-SPAN before he broke his promise, and journalists from across the political spectrum objected and tried to get the negotiations opened

And here's an admittedly biased link to a TEA Party site, used here to point out their frustration with the fact that the "establishment" wing (the lifetime politicians who like big government) of the GOP keeps doing SYMBOLIC votes against Obamacare but then keeps actually fully funding it. The Washington elites of both parties have done stuff like that to their base voters on many issues for decades, but the internet is exposing it.

Oh, and if you are in denial about the corporate lobbyists who climbed into bed with Obama on Obamacare, here is a link to a story explaining WHY big insurance got on board (they originally fought it, but then they got admitted to the closed-door meetings WE the public were shut out of). Also see this link on big Pharma and big Insurance climbing on board and throwing money at Democrat politicians. While many organizations and lobbying groups were involved in the "secret" negotiations, the names of most of the individuals involved are NOT known to Republicans who repeatedly demanded the names and were denied.

Let me further point out that when the Obama administration thinks a Republican governor is breaking a law, they run to the federal courts - something they have NOT done (so I cannot link to it here) to any governor over his/her refusal to create a state exchange - a tacit admission that the governors are obeying the law.

Since I have validated everything in the post you said was so full of falsehoods, whereas YOU provided NO evidence ANY of the claims was false, that previous post was the correct one and yours was the loser

OnStar has had the ability to remotely disable a car for years

http://latimesblogs.latimes.co...

You got it backwards. Google gets protection from fiber's mortal enemy... the backhoe.

What backhoe would hang around fiber with the threat of dangerous black SUVs around every corner?

:) :)

If you think there is something wrong with historically unprecedented income and wealth inequality, if you fear for the future of democracy when 85 individuals control more wealth than 3.5 billion people, if you are alarmed at the influence of this wealth on politics (to the point where a single individual can bankroll an entire presidential campaign, then you are a Nazi.

No further discussion necessary.

A few individuals have vandalized buses, therefore an entire subject is off limits.

MS refers to Windows as Windows across its website, I can't find an instance of Microsoft and Windows combined. Google searches return "Microsoft Windows", but that is clarifying the company name (in case one is searching for house windows). My operating system is "Windows 7 Home Premium" with a Microsoft copyright notice below the name.

I believe the name was shortened to just "Windows" over time. Going back to the same Wikipedia page as last time, another image shows a disk with "Microsoft Windows" clearly on the label. That goes back to 1985. This article says they didn't even apply for Windows until 1990. It's obvious they started out with a company name + generic name as the product name, and then later on tried to appropriate the generic name.

Did you use 123, Lotus 123, or just Lotus?

I never used it, though the name "Lotus" was familiar. Whether it was fully titled "123" or "Lotus 123" is besides the point, as "123" was a novel use for accounting software (to my knowledge). "Windows" was completely generic in the software industry by the time Microsoft came out with their OS.

I realize I'm probably just feeding a troll. But does what you typed, really convey the thoughts in your head? If so, you may want to seek some professional help.

Our entire government was set up so that nothing happens fast. Very little gets passed without debate, which is good for the country. How's this for gridlock? It passed unanimously in the house, and I believe so in the senate and was signed into law by the president on April 15, 2013. The Patriot act was also passed damn near unanimous, along with invading Iraq. Our founding fathers wanted there to be debate and discussion on everything. Unfortunately they gave us more credit than they should have as they thought we wold put intelligent people in charge of things. Not the retards we've had for several decades now.

When the republicans threatened in the past to pass a bill using reconciliation, which is meant for budgets, democrats screamed about how it would be the end of our way of life blah, blah. Then they used it to pass the ACA. Now it's the republicans who are screaming the same thing. Too bad there is a video record of both of them being adamantly for it when it's to their benefit, and against it when it's not.

(Don't tell me racism has nothing to do with it, because it DOES!)

I'm telling you that if you think that it's all due to racism, you are a fucking idiot. Are there some racists in congress? I'd guess so. Do I believe it's the majority? Well, perhaps the Senate Majority leader Or the current Vice President And again.. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of examples of republicans saying stupid things like this too. But do you really think it affects the way they vote? If so, then Harry Reid must vote against anything the president wants passed. OR could it be possible that he said something that was questionable and not be a racist?

...property taxes start going up and the established population...possibly can't afford their current residence anymore and will be forced to move potentially far from where they currently live.

Luckily, they're able to afford it with their real estate windfall and still have plenty of money left over to put away for retirement. This isn't such a bad problem to have for someone on a fixed income.

But it would be better if property taxes were proportional to the property's actual burden on government services and not proportional to the assessed value of the property. Then these bubbles would have little to no effect on property taxes. California's Prop 13 attempts to achieve the same effect by limiting real estate assessment increases (for tax purposes) below the normal rate of inflation, but this makes the problem worse by pricing young people out of the real estate market. For example, as a recent homebuyer, I pay almost exactly five times as much in property taxes as my next-door neighbor who moved in 37 years ago.

They've been protesting Google buses because this has put gentrification onto the fast track by making areas more attractive to Google employees that otherwise wouldn't have been due to transportation headaches.

Gentrification occurs when a neighborhood in decline sees a lot of investment quickly. When a community invests in itself, outside investment has less of a gentrifying effect. Therefore, a person who protests against something because it might cause gentrification was probably part of the problem to begin with.

AP CS stats spin in Sunday's LA Times by a member of Code.org's Advisory Board: 'Unfortunately, only a narrow band of students - predominantly white and Asian males - is developing the necessary skills to step into these high-paying jobs in computer science. Latinos, African Americans and girls of all ethnic backgrounds are being left behind. In 2013, 29,555 students took the Advanced Placement computer science exam, but only 18% were female, 4% African American and 3% Mexican American...A great majority of today's computer scientists started down their career paths because of "preparatory privilege."'

An interesting potential experiment: See if we could create a better "shadow Congress" by picking representatives at random from each congressional district and state. Yes, we'd have plenty of morons get in there, but I'd be hard-pressed to see how this kind of representation would do worse than our current elected officials.

An interesting example of this: In New Hampshire, there are enough House seats that almost anyone can get in if they are a reasonably good campaigner and actually want to do the job (it pays $100 a year, so most don't). In 1996, the residents of one district elected Peter Leonard, a developmentally challenged maintenance man. And you know what? He did just fine in the state House, and was re-elected once. Full disclosure: I knew him as an elevator operator, and he was really very kind, if not too bright.

My property line also extends upwards.

Time to repost an eerily prescient article from the L.A. Times, way back in 1993, about smart homes.

And while people do say all those things, none of them are the official position of a major political party in the U.S.

"I was told by voting section management that cases are not going to be brought against black defendants on [behalf] of white victims."

--J. Christian Adams, US Department of Justice under Eric Holder (link)

Point taken, but I think the appropriate security/convenience tradeoff needs to be assessed for different situations. Messing up a building's HVAC is going to wreak a lot less havoc that messing up water, power or sewage systems

True. ALthough there might be some business reasons to do so. Imagine making your competitor's HVAC systems go down during important meetings, or in the dead of winter before a big deadline. ANd considering that we live in a country where American on American attacks are political gold: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-christie-bully-20140111,0,3128420.story#axzz2qD3vqu1x

No, I think this is an untapped market of Screwing With Your Competition.

Which explains why hybrid owners are the least likely population group to purchase a hybrid as their next car, amirite?

I tried New York's system and it kept insisting that I wasn't a real person. This was after I entered in personal information which, as the victim of identity theft, made me very uncomfortable entering into an online form (Social Security number, date of birth, etc) but that I rationalized was needed for this process. I did eventually get in, but via a roundabout way that involved signing up for an account with the DMV. Don't ask me what the DMV has to do with health care (beyond using the same login schema).

Yes, but after you signed up through the exchange, did you ever get an insurance card (or even a bill?) from your NY provider? Empire Blue Cross of New York is dropping the ball on their applicants long after they get the data from their exchange.

I've added them and a few more to the list of incompetent insurance carriers, with news stories on BCBS Texas and Illinois as well as Anthem Blue Cross CA.

Technically the 65,915,796 residents who voted for Obama in the 2012 election?

And, as it turns out, many Republicans as well - they are just too ignorant of the actual ACA or brainwashed by their party leaders to realize they support most of the major provisions...

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/01/business/la-fi-mh-obamacare-20131001

Yeah. I too disagree with those who say there will always be new jobs to replace the old jobs.

I'm in the IT line and what a lot of us do is get rid of jobs. If each of those jobs we get rid of is replaced by a new job, then there's no cost savings and we aren't doing our jobs right.

Others say keep the same number of people and have them do more, but when you can replace 5 or more jobs with one job, why would you need to do five times more? The customers and sales aren't increasing five fold for everyone. Maybe a few companies might be growing leaps and bounds but most will be happy to grow just 20-30% year on year. So they'd be using the automation to cut jobs and costs. They may use it to increase production but it's not going to be 5, 10 or even 100 times.

Remarks like "there will always be jobs" without any supporting evidence are deserving of ridicule.

To back up my claims just imagine the US workers as the "humans" and Chinese/Vietnamese/Indian workers as the "robots". So where are the many wonderful new jobs for the US workers who lost their jobs to those foreign "robots"?

Now consider that FoxConn and others are already starting to replace many low end Chinese workers with robots. And there's evidence that there are Chinese workers who can do higher end jobs at reasonable quality for less pay: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-man-outsourced-job-to-china-20130117

So when more robots and other automation start replacing more and more human jobs and the cheaper and more desperate humans start "climbing up the ladder", how can anyone be so confident that there will always be new jobs when there were not that many new jobs appearing when the Chinese "robots" took away the US jobs?

And when some manufacturing was brought back from China to the USA there were actually very few long term jobs created. There were construction jobs as the factories were built, but after that - those factories were highly automated and needed very few workers (and security guards).

So I'd say a form of socialism would be the lesser evil. Many are against people getting wealth for doing nothing, but when the robots have a lot of their jobs, what is there for those people to do? There's just so many FB and iphone apps the market can support. Do you want them to starve or rob and steal? We would however need to have some limits on reproduction that are linked to conservative economic projections. The robots converting the resources of the earth to products and services might be able to support very many people, but there's still no way they or the Earth can support a high exponential population growth. Not everyone wants children so some could give/trade their quota with others. The wealthier ones may have higher quotas too (since they can support more children without relying on the State), however if they don't want to have that many children of their own they could commit to sponsoring other people's children.

This is indeed evil, but I see it as a lesser evil compared to the alternatives. Show me better alternatives and back them up with sound reasoning/arguments rather than wishful thinking.

What I'm proposing won't come to pass automatically since it requires planning and preparation. If you leave things as they are gradually the rich will get richer, and you should realize that while the really rich might end up owning everything they won't need that many people to keep them happy. Unless of course supporting millions of human "pets" becomes some sort of status symbol.

But pets don't get to vote and the rich and powerful are likely to prefer to be Kings/Emperors than to hold elections.