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Check out bodily insurance liability (BIL) in this page -- there is only a finite amount your insurance company pays.

You're not arguing against "cost-effective", you're arguing against incompetence.

I'm actually, in this particular instance, arguing against OP's reductio ad absurdum of "See if it's really cost-effective to test for everything up front." The discussion has digressed from that point, as they so often do.

But yes, incompetence is the real issue of the day (regardless of the medical field), and from what I can tell it's pretty damn rampant among MDs. According to this article, almost every hospital has at least one surgeon referred to as "HODAD," or Hand Of Death And Destruction, and nobody's willing to call them out on it, lest they risk their careers. So not only do we have incompetent doctors performing procedures, we have entire hospitals full of staff covering for their, let's call it what it is, negligent homicides.

Sounds a lot like the Blue Wall of Silence we complain about with cops... but I'd bet cops don't kill 200,000 people every year.

There's also a real problem in the medical industry today with piling on 6 tests when 1-2 will do, either as a CYA or simply to ramp up costs - which is terrible, as it really inflates the cost of getting e.g. an MRI far beyond what it would cost without needless testing.

Which boils down to the same base issue that causes many doctors to be nothing more than legalized dope dealers - profitability.

Just to be precise about the situation, Candidates McCain and Obama were invited to the meetings where TARP was agreed upon. They weren't directly responsible, but neither did either object.

A more accurate writeup.

As for large animals... encourage farmers to take care of a couple. Seriously, a cattle rancher could take in a few rhinos. Have a special pen for them. Make the whole thing tax deductible until there's some way to recoup the cost. These people breed BILLIONS of animals in captivity. We could do the same with rhinos, elephants, etc.

This is happening with a lot of wild animals, no tax deductions necessary.

South African farmers have realized that large animals are huge tourist draws (both for hunters and people who want to see them). There is a full auction market going on, with some groups breeding them and some buying them. Recently a Cape Buffalo stud sold for $2.6 million. Large animal breeding has caught on with a number of species.

Myself, I want to get some flamingos.

http://online.wsj.com/article/...

Didn't you notice incidents such as overt poisioning of oppenents happening in Ukrane politics?

Yep, and the victim — Victor Yuschenko — was the guy, who dared to run against Putin's choice for Ukraine's President. To you the names like "Yanukovich" and "Yuschenko" may appear similar, but a foreign policy expert advising the leader of the free world must be able to keep up.

It's hard to pick the "good guys" when things have got that medieval.

On the contrary, it is very easy — if Putin-TV talks against them, they are most probably alright. The "things" have gotten far more "medieval" in Syria, yet America's sympathies there are perfectly "black-and-white", for some reason. That we no longer have "good options" in Syria can be blamed on Obama and his Department of State. If he does not act quickly, there may be no "good options" left in Ukraine either.

"The FCC has so far not reclassified broadband as a utility, and providers have fiercely opposed such a move, saying it would cause innovation and investment to collapse."

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

You mean like in New Jersey where Verizon reneged on a contract to roll out fiber to all of New Jersey after the residents paid for it???

The number of felons that voted in the election were larger than Franken's vote margin of "victory." I seem to recall there were other problems as well.

Felons for Franken

Franken won the election due to vote fraud and lawyers.

Al Franken is one of the most intelligent, ethical, fair, and progressive-minded people in the Senate.

Really? Then you'll be interested in the items below. I assume you'll agree with him since you describe him as " one of the most intelligent, ethical, fair, and progressive-minded people in the Senate."

The NSA Has at Least 1 Liberal Friend Left: Sen. Al Franken

It's pretty lonely to be the National Security Agency right now. The revelation of a massive data-collection program has left many progressive senators criticizing the agency, from Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. But one of the other most liberal senators in Congress is so far speaking out in NSA's support: Al Franken.

Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, knew about the data-mining. Or at least that's what he told Minnesota's WCCO on Tuesday. "I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people," Franken said. The senator also believes the data collection has saved American lives:

I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us, and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism. There are certain things that are appropriate for me to know that is not appropriate for the bad guys to know.

Franken defends NSA surveillance

The Minnesota lawmaker told the St. Paul CBS affiliate that he "was very well aware of" the classified government programs that gathered personal data on telephone and Internet users.

“I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism,” Franken said, adding that "this is not about spying on the American people." Franken also defended the program as striking the right balance between national security and the right to privacy, echoing recent assurances from the White House.

“There are certain things that are appropriate for me to know that is not appropriate for the bad guys to know,” Franken said.

The senator also said it was appropriate for the Justice Department to investigate Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old defense contractor who has claimed responsibility for the leak.

Well, who can argue with Al Franken since he is "...one of the most intelligent, ethical, fair, and progressive-minded people in the Senate"?

Unfortunately Al Franken owes his election to vote fraud.

Felons for Franken - Illegal felon voters may have handed Democrats 60-vote majority.

Did illegal felon voters determine the outcome of the critical 2008 Minnesota Senate election? The day after the election, GOP Senator Norm Coleman had a 725 vote lead, but a series of recounts over the next six months reversed that result and gave Democrat Al Franken a 312 vote victory.

The outcome wound up having a significant impact, giving Democrats the critical 60th Senate vote they needed to block GOP filibusters. Mr. Franken's vote proved crucial in the passage of ObamaCare last December in the Senate. The next month Democrats lost their 60-vote Senate majority with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Ever since Mr. Franken was declared the victor, the conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has combed through records comparing lists of those who voted with criminal rap sheets. It found that at least 341 convicted felons voted in Minneapolis's

A new refinery hasn't been built in the US since 1976...because there are zero new players in the refining industry, not because the government has some eviiiil conspiracy preventing them from doing so.

FTFY.

It's cheaper for existing players to upgrade their existing plants than build shiny new ones and it's a double win when you get to shut down half of them down for "maintenance" at the same time and jack up gas prices

It's fairly easy to make any person into a criminal under US law.

Please, name an American blogger so prosecuted after being critical of the US government.

The worst we've seen so far is the increased IRS-scrutiny of government critics, but that, somehow, is usually Ok with the same folks, who like comparing NSA with KGB.

Thanks for the link to TFA. (I included a hyperlinked version for the benefit of the copy-paste impaired).

Reading that WSJ article allowed me to find the actual scientific paper in Nature Medicine , for those so inclined. Unfortunately it's paywalled except for the abstract and figures but those in the target audience of the paper probably have access through their institutions.

I think that scenario has already played out before a South Korean court.

The summary from the Wall Street Journal:
The Seoul Central District Court rejected all of Samsung's claims against Apple, including a request to pay 100 million won (about US$95,000) in damages. It noted that the two patents are invalid because they can be easily developed using existing technologies.

You can read about it here: http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

In 2012, a Korean court had found that Apple did infringe on 2 standards essential Samsung patents. This is what got Samsung into trouble with the European Union regulators, because you cannot volunteer your technology to become part of a standard and then later hold the industry (or competitors in the industry) to ransom by selectively refusing to license that technology on FRAND terms - this is the same reason that Obama overturned the iPhone ban, by the way.

Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma and FBI agent who is now head of the American Banker's Association came out against Choke Point in a WSJ op-ed a week ago.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

When you become a banker, no one issues you a badge, nor are you fitted for a judicial robe. So why is the Justice Department telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges? Justice's new probe, known as "Operation Choke Point," is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don't like. Banks must then "choke off" those customers' access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.

Justice launched the effort in early 2013 as a policy initiative of the president's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which includes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulatory agencies. Though details are scant—much of the investigation has been conducted in secret—the probe aims to crack down on fraud in the payments system by focusing on banks that service online payday lenders and other services deemed suspicious by the government....

"Not so long ago, colleges still reflected the humanist tradition, which was founded....on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past. "

The problem with humanities is that they don't even teach humanities anymore. Seriously, if you took a Shakespeare class, you already know more about Shakespeare than an English major at UCLA. That is not a joke.

However, English majors will have taken classes about gender, sexuality, and class, which you may not have ever learned.

So in other words, English majors know neither Shakespeare nor Euclid. Is it any wonder they struggle after graduating?

New Google Mission Statement: "Don't continue to be evil after we've been called out on it in the tech press."

More like "don't continue to be evil after being called out on it in court".

Seriously - how does the fact Google got sued over the practice not get mentioned here?

In the US, all those "oil company tax breaks" are available to ALL manufacturing companies - including Boeing, Ford, Texas Instruments, etc. And they all take them. How are they "subsidies for oil companies"? If anything they are subsidies for manufacturers - which includes solar and wind. They are not exclusive to oil.

On your list, how many of those subsidies are restricted to oil companies only? I know for a fact that at least in China, solar and wind (and magnets and silicon - the bases for windmills and solar cells) get not just 0% interest loans, but direct ownership of solar panel manufacturers. Which itself carries massive benefits within China.

So again, which of those subsidies you outline are available only for oil? Especially in the US - which is the relevant country here, given we're talking about the Koch brothers? I'd suggest that NONE of the subsidies in the US actually exist as oil-industry-only subsidies. And that you'll find them heavily used by other industries as well. But you will find 30% Federal subsidies for solar purchases. And we see that solar is subsidized by the US Federal Government at the rate of nearly $1,212 per $1 for coal, per kW hour generated. Who's getting what subsidies?

Three Felonies A Day, by Harvey Silverglate, Constitutional Lawyer:
http://www.harveysilverglate.c...

It is impossible to even count the number of Federal crimes:
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Sorry, but that 90% figure is sensationalist and just another way to say "look, we're getting screwed by the 1% more than we used to! Torches and pitchforks now!" and ultimately isn't useful. Why? Because practically nobody ever paid 90%, and furthermore the rich paid less of a burden then than they do today. Why? The tax system worked a lot differently then. It was the top marginal rate on an income above $300,000 for single, $400,000 for married. In order to effectively be paying 90%, they had to make over $2 million per year. Keep in mind that that kind of money was practically unheard of during that time.

Even if you adjust for inflation, you'll find less people making that amount then than there are today, mainly because all economies were much smaller, there was less money to be made, and overall there was much less wealth that even existed to begin with (and yes, the amount of "wealth" does increase as economies grow, which means there's more to go around.)

Bottom line: Today the rich DO pay a higher portion of taxes than they did then, even when adjusted for inflation. I'll let an investment broker do the explaining here:

In 1958, approximately two million filers (4.4% of all taxpayers) earned the $12,000 or more for married couples needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans paid about 35% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.

In contrast, the share of taxes paid by the bottom two-thirds of taxpayers has fallen dramatically over the same period. In 1958, these Americans accounted for 41.3% of adjusted gross income and paid 29% of all federal taxes. By 2010, their share of adjusted gross income had fallen to 22.5%. But their share of taxes paid fell far more dramatically—to 6.7%. The 77% decline represents the single biggest difference in the way the tax burden is shared in this country since the late 1950s.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

So you see, even though the top marginal rate was higher back then, the rich paid LESS taxes than they do today. So stop with this Michael Moore bullshit (sorry, just that 90% figure gets thrown around so often, but it doesn't mean what the typical person thinks it would mean; as is typical in Michael Moore fashion.)

Have a nice day.

For example, wait times were down for VA doctor visits in Arizona and waiting times in the ERs in UK's NHS are down, the government has no problem finding ways to lower certain metrics... And rewarding employees for their efforts!

Wall street journal is saying that the deal is worth about $325 millio, which is about a tenth of what the lawsuit was aiming for. Assuming the lawyers take a 25% cut, each individual in the class of 64000 should get about $2500.

I heard that airline pilots are getting paid shit now unless you're in a big plane:
http://blogs.wsj.com/middlesea...

That's not true. It was true in 2012 but not in 2013 or 2014. The carriers have been trying to prevent the formation of an Apple monopoly in the USA and pushed Android subsidies up to Apple levels. Apple is currently negotiating for yet another increase for the iPhone 6 so this may happen 4Q2014 but for about 18 mo it wasn't the case.

Why would carriers push other manufacturers subsidies up that would cause then to spend more money.? If anything, carriers are trying two things to spend less on subsidies:

1. Encourage contract customers to buy cheaper Android phones so they could spend less on subsidies.

http://www.phonearena.com/news...

2. Move away from a subsidy model and offer 0% financing on the phone so that the customer pays for the phone and plan separately.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Now moving away from subsidies could hurt Apple, but would a consumer really balk at paying $25/month for an iPhone over paying $18/month for a high-end Android?

Apparently there aren't enough welders in America. Not everyone needs to be in IT, or graduate from college.

The truly poor still have access to Medicaid in Idaho. The program didn't go away. It just didn't expand it to people above the poverty line.

Truly poor? Do you think someone who makes $2,800 a year isn't poor? http://www.idahostatesman.com/...

In my understanding, single non-disabled people aren't eligible for Medicaid in Idaho at all. http://www.medicaid.gov/Medica...

What do you do with these people? Do you leave them to die, like they do in Texas? http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

And then the Federal Government orders the State to massively expand Medicaid. My State just doesn't have the resources to do it. It isn't because people don't care, we just don't have the income. 90% of the Students in my School District are on free or reduced lunch. Median Family income in my town is $31,000 per year.

The federal government offered to pay for your expansion of Medicaid. Most of that money would come from the federal government, and it would continue for at least the next several years. That's because people in other (mostly Northern, Democratic) states, like my own New York, are willing to help other parts of the country get essential needs like health care. If the federal government dropped support for Medicaid in the future, you could have changed the program then.

How can you not afford health care? If your child has a life-threatening illness, do you say, "I can't afford it, I'll just have to let her die"?

You can't do without health care. Your choice is to pay for private insurance, or to pay for it through taxes. Paying through taxes is cheaper. When you cross the border into Canada, they don't have any problem paying for health care.

Idaho can afford to put people in jail for 10 years on a marijuana charge. How come you have enough money for prisons for non-violent crimes but you don't have enough money for health care for the poor? http://cjonline.com/news/2013-... http://www.ktvb.com/news/7-inv...

Idaho has enough money. They're just spending it on the wrong things. Do you want to spend it on schools and health care, or do you want to pay for drug-sniffing dogs and prisons?

The thing is, the NYT has a lot of high quality articles still, even if their newsroom is all liberal. They go deeply into subjects and do good research. You shouldn't believe everything they say, and if it's important, you should verify; but they give you good overview of the world.

Another high quality newspaper is the Wall Street Journal. If you're looking for print, it can't be beat, for similar reasons. The main difference is the WSJ focuses more on economic issues, and the NYT focuses more on social issues.

The editorial staff of both newspapers is mediocre, but the quality of the guest editorials can't be beaten, in both papers. You have ex presidents, or the commanding officer of the armed forces of Lebanon. Maybe you don't agree with the guest editorials, but they are often worth reading, more than the average blogger.

Will this be similar to how apple "broke the monopoly on ebooks" http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Possibly, Apple tried to save us from an Amazon monopoly and failed.

Ever heard of getting a third party GPS for like $99 at costco with lifetime maps?

Yes, and they suck compared to a smartphone because they aren't integrated with anything. I have some left over from the Old Days.

Really, you think that is fair? Would it work the other way as in i think apple should be mandated

Get the stick out of your ass man. I was talking about car regulations. Any device can charge by USB now so your griping looks like lunacy.

"breaking the car manufactures monopoly on in-car mapping..."

Will this be similar to how apple "broke the monopoly on ebooks" http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Or how they "Broke the monopoly on hiring". http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/...

Ever heard of getting a third party GPS for like $99 at costco with lifetime maps? When it gets old i just throw it out and get a newer/faster/whatever one.
Far cheaper then getting the fancy in-dash model and not being able to replace it.

"One thing I really wish would happen would be to have the car industry be also mandated to provide third-party access to all of the screens"

Really, you think that is fair? Would it work the other way as in i think apple should be mandated to provide third party access to their very lucrative add-on market (cords, chargers, etc).
Why should the auto industry be "forced" to open up to a company which is known for vendor lockin?

Flying cars are technically possible.

Flying cars however are not desirable for everyday drivers: they have a hard enough time managing 2 dimensions, we don't need them to occupy a third. So unless they're fully automatic in flight mode (with manual control disabled), flying cars can only be flown by trained pilot.

Rename them "manned drones" and outsource the piloting to third world countries. Problem solved, since the FAA is OK with drones in U.S. airspace.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

The IRS loses billions every year to fraudulent returns. All you have to do is get a pre-paid debit card, find someone's social security number and name, and have the IRS deposit the money to the pre-paid card. Since it's anonymous, catching them is hard.

The Economist article mentions that other studies have determined that alcohol is the most common factor in murders in Australia, Finland and Sweden. Searching for more studies related, I noticed the WSJ has an interesting site called Murder in America that allows you to sort and visualize murder information http://projects.wsj.com/murder...

I'm not sure you understand what a Ponzi scheme actually is. Bitcoin isn't one. MtGox, however, appears to have been simply a case of embezzlement.

As for the rest of your rant, yes, you can buy groceries with Bitcoin. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

There isn't any way for an HFT company to see an order "on its way" to an exchange.

Leaked info? No, try sold your information, and it's not insider trading. It's called Payment for order flow where brokers sell your intent to buy or sell to HFT companies. Before the trade takes place.

Quote from WSJ posting on 4/6/2014: "Shares of E*Trade Financial Corp. ETFC +0.05% , Charles Schwab Corp. SCHW +0.27% and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. AMTD +0.26% tumbled last week amid concerns that regulators would ban a practice that allows brokerages to collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue by selling orders to middlemen who use high-frequency strategies to trade with the brokers' customers. The practice, called payment for order flow, has gained more attention since the release of "Flash Boys," a book by Michael Lewis that argues the markets are "rigged" to benefit high-frequency traders, allegations that are stirring up long-running questions about the fairness of markets."

The WSJ reports that neither Mozilla nor Google would address the $1B elephant in the room: "Mozilla is negotiating with Google Inc. to renew a search contract that provides most of its revenue. Google is openly supportive of gay rights, so it may have been difficult to renew such a deal with Mr. Eich at the helm, said a former Mozilla insider. Mozilla and Google declined to comment on the negotiations."

Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.

Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Absolutely. Because of you think about it, captains of industry, the WSJ target readership, can't do their jobs on the basis of fantasy. And, they're not the type to form opinions by reading anybody's editorials anyway, so there's no confusIon for them. Whereas the guys who happily parrot the WSJ editorials here are not usually professionally confronted with reinsurance costs for meteorological disasters, or whatever the actual news item covers.

Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.

Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Absolutely. Because of you think about it, captains of industry, the WSJ target readership, can't do their jobs on the basis of fantasy. And, they're not the type to form opinions by reading anybody's editorials anyway, so there's no confusIon for them. Whereas the guys who happily parrot the WSJ editorials here are not usually professionally confronted with reinsurance costs for meteorological disasters, or whatever the actual news item covers.

You mean This link from the Wall Street Journal giving a more reasoned overview of the report?

The one that people calling others "deniers" are censoring so the world cannot see it?

That is a good link. Good enough to try and bury it would seem.

Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.

Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Not sure how many of these are reachable behind the WSJ paywall. But I find it interesting how the WSJ publishes climate change minimizing articles in there "opinion" section and promotes them heavily on their site. At the same time also has excellent well written articles not as easy to find on the climate change in there hard news section.

Opinion piece attempting to poison the well before the report was released.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Fact based real reporting article published today.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Wow, the climate deniers are out in force on Slashdot today.

Well it's funny you should mention an overwhelming show of force, because I have sure seen a LOT of news outlets promoting this most recent bout of religious warming alarmism.

We already know that the warming we will see is not anything to get excited over (with CO2 levels rising, warming has not gone up much so we know that CO2 does not cause runaway warming as posited).

We also know the alarmist models were all way out of whack in prediction of everything bad - from sea level rise to overall temperature increases, the models have predictive lines formed a decade ago that are far higher than actual measurements we take today.

Here's the part where you can tell real science from SCIENCE, the screaming variety. You see, real scientists upon finding the models aren't working would try to find new models that worked. Instead what we get is louder and louder proclamations that WE ARE ALL DOOMED, DOOMED I SAY.

Here's someone that gives a more reasonable overview of the panicky IPCC report - as he notes, the current report is LESS scary than the IPCC's previous report, yet they are playing it up as if it were worse.

And he has something to say about the use of the term "deniers" - basically you and others are misunderstanding the counter argument at hand:

In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming.

This is the outlook of a reasonable man, as all of the "deniers" have been - simply because we see no reason to scare others, or divert money from REAL pollution control efforts to attempt to reduce emissions of a basically harmless gas.

This sort of thing has happened before, and it will happen again. An even better example was when the MV Cougar Ace almost sank, and 4700 brand new Mazda cars hung at a 60 degree angle for several months. They never moved, and they were all in seemingly perfect condition.

Mazda chose to err on the side of caution, rather than risk a lawsuit. Or even worse, there was a very valid concern that they would become "Katrina Cars". A coat of paint, and they would be bundled up and sold in some other unsuspecting country. (On a side-note, the destruction process is really cool!.)

With waivers not being worth the paper they're printed on, it's simply not worth the risk of getting sued.

And finally, there's the "soft damage" to take into consideration? Remember the kid in preschool who "had cooties"? That kid KEPT those cooties, right up until graduation day in high school. Costco might never allow a single jar to hit their normal distribution system, but just the simple fact that the peanut butter even exists at all, is a risk that someone, somewhere, will say, "Whoa, Costco peanut butter might have salmonella."

Play "Telephone" with that for a while, and suddenly Costco can't pay someone to take a jar of peanut butter. This is actually a very safe, very beneficial tactic for Costco.

Now consumers can be absolutely guaranteed that they will never have to think about whether Costco peanut butter is safe.

And in retail, that's money in the bank.

> Other nations can distrust anything they wish, but they have not other useful alternatives than to deal with us, they are our bitches.

That is true in case of some technologies like chips which are expensive to independently develop for less rich/advanced nations. But a good deal of software stuff is quite replaceable, with minimal pain. There are open source solutions or foreign services that are only slightly behind proprietary or US hosted solutions/services. The current surveillance situation simply incentivizes the alternatives and bridges that gap.

Peru did an open source requirement for government work some time ago and other governments were looking at similar stuff. Microsoft wrote that famous letter, 12 years ago, defending proprietary companies; something which is quite indefensible now.

http://opensource.org/docs/msF...

They simply did not have enough incentives until now. This isn't rocket science; its mainly a policy decision. China is developing its own Linux-based OS and has already replaced western social media services and search engine with its own etc. etc.

There is already that project that this will cost us $180 Billion in the near future.
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/...
Let's see if it will bear out.

This time for sure!

No, really. Mastercard and Visa have set the deadline as October 2015. This will be enforced thus: past this date, any merchant that lacks chip-and-PIN readers will be liable for any fraudulent transactions; contrariwise, if the person's bank hasn't issued a chip-and-PIN card but the merchie has a C-and-P reader the bank will be liable.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate...

As I recall, Netflix tried to close down its DVD business but had to keep it thanks to customer rage. The stockholders were pissed too.

If it gets really bad there will be pressure to illegalize automation of certain classes of jobs.

That has already been happening for years. For instance, it is illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey or Oregon.

Tor added 10,000 users which for a country the size of Turkey is lost in the noise. Meanwhile a commercial competitor, HotSpot Shield added about quarter of a million Turkish users in just 12 hours. It'd be nice if the Tor guys made a version that relaxed some of the ultra-paranoid things they do and made a single-hop proxying service for users who don't care much about anonymity and just want to evade censorship.

Personally, I like to point out that the government as tried -- repeatedly -- to count the number of federal laws that exist. It has never succeeded.

One begins to question why ignorance of the law isn't a legitimate defense when the laws cannot even be enumerated.

You are not doing things that you _think_ are illegal _now_. Maybe a bored prosecutor will think differently in a few years and financially ruin you just the same or even manage to convince a jury (of typically: idiots) that you should go away for a long time. Or maybe you develop some ideas that those in power do not like to much the same result.

Also refer to http://online.wsj.com/news/art... "You Commit Three Felonies a Day".

"Glasshole", btw., is already a while old and not my creation.