Blank CD-R media in volume costs well under 40 cents per disc (see here). Assuming you are capturing high-quality images at 2048x1536 pixels in 32-bit color, with no compression, you can store about 50 digital images on each CD. That's a per-image storage cost of less than a penny.
Choosing which pictures to save and which to discard simply to save money on storage costs would be a waste of time (and, by extension, money). Far easier to spend less than a dollar to archive 100 images than to have someone take the time to individually decide whether each picture is worth keeping or not.
The real issue here is simply one of culture and discipline. If keeping complete archives is important, there's no real difficulty. Simply because the edit-on-the-spot functionality exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
Didn't MS get into hot water a couple of years ago because one of the synonyms its thesaurus suggested for "indian" was "savage"? I'm sure they're just going overboard trying to cover their asses and avoid negative publicity over trivial issues. Only in this case it backfired...
This thing isn't exclusive to MS or even the tech world, though. A non-computer-related example: My (ex-)girlfriend and I used to be pretty serious about playing Scrabble. In order to have a standard reference we could use to resolve challenges, we got a copy of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. To our dismay, we discovered that the dictionary had a similar policy: if a word might be considered profane or offensive, it's omitted. Never mind that "sh!t" is a perfectly good English word; it's not in there. We were rather annoyed by this, because it renders the dictionary useless for its intended purpose of arbitrating legitimate and illegitimate plays. (Sure, nobody would challenge "sh!t", which is clearly a word, but what about "sh!t-faced" -- does that have a hyphen, making it illegal, or not, making it a legal play?)
By the way, IIRC there was a version of the FrameMaker publishing software about a decade ago in which, if you ran the term "Quark Xpress" through the spell-checker, the suggested correction was "FrameMaker". Also, I think there was a version of WinWord in which the suggested correction for "zzzzzz" (forgot how many z's) was "sex", which was always good for a laugh.
I'd rather the government didn't take the money in taxes in the first place, and then let me contribute personally to projects like this that I could support (and not support things that I think are a waste of money).
I was going to go on a rant about how consumers of media need to take responsibility for filtering and finding coherent nuggets of information as much as the producers do, but your post said it so nicely that I think I'll go play Age of Empires instead;-)
Admittedly this is just my own personal experience, but I've never found computer *hardware* to be particularly unreliable. (Software, of course, is another story entirely.) I've personally owned six machines that I can think of offhand, and had probably 20+ systems, both desktops and notebooks, that were "mine" in business environments. Yet I'm not sure that during 20 years of daily PC use I've ever had a major hardware failure. Once the read/write heads on the floppy drive of my Dell notebook got detached and the drive had to be replaced. Once I had a defective motherboard BIOS-backup battery that had to be replaced. (Both were quick fixes.) And occasionally I've had some minor fit-and-finish issues like screws working their way loose on notebooks or plastic port covers snapping off. But I can't recall ever having a really serious problem despite pretty heavy travel (often 50-75K actual flight miles a year) and some occasionally serious, if inadvertant, abuse -- I once had a zipper on a backpack work its way open, and my notebook dropped from four or five feet up into the rain-filled gutter of a sidewalk in Manhattan. To my amazement it sustained no damage whatsoever.
The computer industry does have high return rates, but is it because of shoddy hardware quality? I'm not so sure. I suspect it's that computers are still complex and finicky devices, and that a lot of people get them home and get quickly frustrated with the annoyances and complexity. I don't doubt that hardware plays a part there, but I suspect that software is a far bigger contributor to that problem.
As for poor customer service: I'll admit PC service can be pretty lame, but the absolute worst of any industry? Not in my experience. Compared to, say, the phone and cable companies in most cities I've lived in, to say nothing of auto-repair shops, computer hardware companies are shining paragons of virtue when it comes to customer service. (OK, I'm exagerrating a little bit, but seriously -- when I've needed hardware support it's usually been at least minimally adequate. Again, software support is another story.)
I'll also concede that the PC retail business is outrageously bad. Then again, the last time I bought a PC that wasn't mail-order was probably in 1984, so maybe that's why I've managed to avoid some of these hassles.
...but if it is, wow, that would be cool to know. Because the most persistent telemarketer that I get calls from is Qwest, which happens to be my phone company. And they always manage to get me on my cell phone (they are the service provider), to ask me stupid questions like "Would you like to upgrade your plan to 1200 minutes a month?" (when a cursory look at my billing record would show that I rarely use more than about 60). Idiots.
The problem I have with using a cell phone as a primary phone is that, in a lot of areas, reception is still way too spotty for my taste. Hilly cities like San Francisco (past home) and Seattle (current home) seem to be particularly bad. There are times when I can be in my apartment and my cell phone will beep because it's suddenly decided it's "roaming". Other times it just cuts off in mid-conversation -- fun.
also too bad underscore requires pressing shift
on
Apocalypse 3
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· Score: 2
one of the nice things about the dot is that it's a single keystroke. the underscore may be a single character, but (at least on English) keyboards it requires two keystrokes.
of course perl has such extensive string interpolation and other capabilities that this doesn't strike me as a humongous problem.
I, too, hate the whitespace kludge, but then i've always put whitespace around my dots too because print $this . $that just seems more readable to me than print $this.$that, which looks disturbingly like some kind of slightly funky method call.
I used to have a lot of friends in Virginia that I went to visit regularly, and I think there's a pretty good chance I've had sex there at least once. I've never been married, so I guess that makes me a bona fide fornicator!
Wait, what's that siren I hear... uh oh, gotta run! The Fornication Police are on their way!
(p.s. is it not odd that the statute does not specify that the two individuals have to be married to each other? For example, if I am married, and my mistress is married, and we engage in voluntary sex... as I read this, that would not constitute fornication! but perhaps there is a separate law that covers adultery... sheesh, when will the gov't get out of people's bedrooms?)
Good point about the debit cards that work like credit cards -- I hadn't thought of that -- but I have to disagree when you say:
anyone that can get a bank account these days can get a "credit card" for the purposes of this argument.
The fact is, there are lots and lots of people over age 18 who do not have (and perhaps cannot get) bank accounts. (According to this cached page on Google, it's more than 10 million people.) There's a reason that there are so many of those check-cashing outfits in the poorer parts of U.S. cities, you know.
Your comparison equating lack of credit cards with lack of Internet access is misleading. Internet access doesn't require anything of an individual -- you can walk into virtually any library in the country and get on the Net for free. What if public libraries said that you had to have a credit (or debit) card to come in and view the paper copy of Playboy? You can bet that wouldn't fly on First Amendment grounds. Admittedly, the Internet-as-library analogy is a pretty strained one, but my point is that whatever age verification technique gets chosen should not be one with as many obvious problems as using credit cards.
uh, this is a comedy...
on
Review: Zoolander
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...not a historical documentary. I mean, they also alter the skyline to show the fictional Mugato headquarters, and the waterfront to put Zoolander's "School for Kids Who Don't Read Good and Who Don't Do Other Stuff Good" next to the UN complex.
I agree there's a time for historical accuracy, but this movie really isn't it if you ask me.
A number of people here seem to be arguing that the online world should be no different from the real world when it comes to porn, and that you should have to show proof of age just like you do when you try to buy a copy of Playboy at the 7-11 down the street.
It does make me laugh thinking about one thing. Even if buying porn at age 17 or whatever is illegal, what's to stop you from getting the friendly girl next door (or guy, don't want to be choosy about gender or sexual orientation here;-) to get naked, completely consensually, in your presence? I'll admit that such an event didn't occur for a geek like me until I was of legal age to purchase porn anyway, but I've heard plausible rumors that jocks and other popular-type people actually did get to see and touch real live naked people at the tender age of, say, 15.
Seriously, though, isn't there something kind of ironic about the fact that you can, completely legally, see and touch (and do other fun things with;-) real live naked people when you're under 18, but can't legally view pictures of naked people?
...as to almost be laughable. First of all, I'd like to see any evidence whatsoever that viewing "regular porn" increases the incidence of non-consensual sex, aka rape.
Secondly, even if something -- porn or otherwise -- does have an adverse side effect, does that imply you can ban it simply because of that side effect? Take alcohol as an example. The legality of alcohol (assuming you are of appropriate drinking age) unambiguously increases the number of drunk-driving fatalities. However, that fact doesn't mean that you can outlaw alcohol itself. You can only reasonably outlaw the illegal behavior, not the catalyst, if you will.
In addition to the problem you mention about credit-card "borrowing", something like 30% of the U.S. adult population does not have a single credit card. Remember that slashdot readers, who are generally pretty well-educated and probably have reasonable finances (even if they're startving students, they have relatively good job prospects), are not representative of the country (or the world!) at large. Since requiring a credit-card number means requiring more than simple age verification -- it also means verifying that you have decent credit, etc. -- it will exclude people for whom access to this speech is Constitutionally protected. So that won't fly.
What are some good arguments for my employer about why I should be allowed to telecommute?
Identify the benefits of the situation, and be prepared with to discuss workarounds or compromises to accommodate the downsides of telecommuting. (And make no mistake about it -- there will be some downsides; you just need to make the case that they are outweighed by the benefits.)
Here are some of the things your boss probably cares about:
Your actual productivity. You can probably make the argument that you'll be more productive at home because you won't have so many distractions and you won't be tired/frustrated from the commute. Just be sure that you really will be more productive -- for some types of jobs/tasks (particularly those that require very close personal interaction with colleagues) telecommuting can be tough. Also, your home-office environment needs to be conducive to getting work done -- have the right equipment and connectivity, not be interrupted by screaming kids, etc.
Your perceived productivity. This one can be trickier, because some bosses -- and some of your colleagues, too -- can assume the worst and slip into an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude. This can happen even if, in principle, they are good people who support telecommuting. Because it's not perceived as the norm, it can inadvertantly become the target of blame when something goes wrong. If the schedule slips but everyone has seen you in the office for 16 hours a day writing code, they might say "Geez, I guess we shouldn't have changed the requirements at the last minute, huh?" If the schedule slips but you have been at home, the attitude might be "Geez, he sure is a slacker / lousy coder / telecommuting makes him less productive / whatever."
How your boss appears to his boss (or the CEO, or whatever). Your boss might be into the idea, but if he's afraid he'll look bad because his boss expects people to be in the office running around like crazed chickens, he may be afraid.
Loss of serendipity. When you're not in the office, you lose out on some of the casual contact that can be really important. It's very hard to replace that unplanned brainstorming as you stand by the coffee machine in the morning with your colleague or the exchange of information that occurs when you bump into the sales guy in the hallway.
Impacts on the team. There are really at least two sub-factors here. One is the loss of team cohesion that can occur from reduced face-to-face contact. The other is the potential that if you start telecommuting, everyone else will want to as well. Don't underestimate this latter effect: Your boss may trust you to work from home, but if he lets you do it, then he probably has to let everyone else do it to, but what if everyone knows Joe over there would slack off if he could? In a perfect world you wouldn't work with people like Joe, but there's somebody like that in every workgroup, isn't there...
To tackle the real downsides of telecommuting, I'd suggest you find excuses to get into the office with some regularity -- once a month, minimum, ideally more like once a week. As for the perception-driven parts, well, just hope your boss isn't too pointy-haired...;-)
Read it in the NYT (print) this morning. I don't know about six stories, they just said the tunnel itself was blocked with rubble and it appeared to have been from an actual collapse of the tunnel.
...aside from the obvious bragging rights -- "What did you do at the office today, honey?" "Oh, I fabricated a few black holes." -- is that, should this work, it would demonstrate that gravity does not in fact obey the inverse-square law over short distances. It blows my mind to think of it obeying, say, an inverse-seventh-power law, which I believe would imply that the universe really has eight spatial dimensions...
I've been learning to fly general-aviation aircraft (Cessna 172R/S "Skyhawk") and recently ended up sitting next to a female United pilot who was deadheading on a flight into JFK. We got to talking and she tried quite earnestly to convince me that flying a 757 (what she does) is pretty much just like flying a Skyhawk. I was skeptical but it made for a fun conversation:-)
under-$10/hr x-ray techs
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The WSJ today mentioned an airport where the security-screening folks make $6.25 or $6.50 an hour to start.
The fast-food restaurants in the same airport pay workers $7 an hour to start.
My brother does construction mgmt for a big real estate company that builds and manages large office towers worldwide. I spoke to him this morning and he explained the situation, as best he can assess it secondhand:
High-rise buildings are built to control the spread of fires for long enough to allow people to evacuate safely. There is no capability, however, for fighting a truly large fire on a high floor. In modern steel-frame buildings -- and I don't know if the WTC was built recently enough for this to apply -- the steel is coated with a fireproofing material, and the combination of the fireproofing and the sprinkler system is supposed to provide structural integrity for a period of three to five hours. That's supposed to be long enough to evacuate the building safely. After that even the fireproofing is insufficient to keep the steel from heating to a point where it effectively begins to melt, deforming to a point where the building can no longer hold up under its own weight.
In this case, we weren't even looking at a normal fire. The incident began with a massive, high-speed, intentional impact that sheared off multiple beams, exacerbated by a large explosion from fuel aboard the plane. The initial damage was severe. Furthermore, my brother speculates that the impact likely severed the water pipes that reach the upper floors, leaving water gushing from a single point or a relatively small number of points and rendering the sprinklers largely useless.
Buildings do survive aircraft impacts, incidentally: A plane flew into the Empire State Building in the Sixties, I think, and obviously it's still standing. Anyway, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a fire causing a building collapse -- it's more like a very large bomb.
According to the article, the researchers received NSF funding for this. So your tax dollars are going toward development of a device that can run roughshod over the Fourth Amendment. Nice.
I'm so glad to find that somebody else has seen the same logical problems with this single cell = human life argument.
Incidentally, the data I've seen indicates that between 30 and 50 percent of ALL pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions, often before the woman even knows she's pregnant. If life really begins at conception, shouldn't we be worried about rescuing those billions and billions of unborn babies?
Um, I'm not sure I quite understand your interpretation of reproductive biology:
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where a woman can get pregnant, have an abortion, and sell her unborn child on the black market for.. lets say $100,000
I'd be curious to know who would pay $100,000 for an aborted fetus. Perhaps you're assuming some kind of artificial womb technology that could sustain the aborted fetus to term? But if that's the case, then I don't see what's so morally reprehensible about the abortion/uteral transfer, since the fetus wasn't destroyed.
Who's protecting your property rights? The police - the government.
Actually, the libertarian position is that this is precisely one of the very few appropriate roles for government: Protecting its citizens from the exercise of force. In other words, preserving the ability of individuals, who are presumed to have free will, to act in accordance with their own wishes -- so long as those actions do not impede the rights of others to do the same.
You make some good counterarguments regarding the FAA and taxation (though I might still argue that having even half of the fruits of my labors confiscated against my will and squandered on programs I don't necessarily support is an obscenity... nah, I'm not in the mood right now). I do want to dispute the way you conveniently shift the blame for health care costs onto insurance companies, though. The financing of health care is admittedly a mind-numbingly complex issue (trust me, I got a tiny but frightening glimpse of this writing billing software for doctors' offices in a past life)... but insurance companies are hardly the biggest culprit in the escalation of costs. (They may well be a culprit as far as quality of care goes, but that's largely a different issue.) Yikes, as I start to prepare my mental arguments I'm realizing I could spend all night on this, but a quick summary: Consider the costs of developing new treatments and drugs; the fact that employer-paid insurance protects most people from price signals and encourages overconsumption; the fact that government payments for procedures under e.g. Medicare typically come nowhere near covering the actual costs of those procedures, so that privately insured individuals end up paying more than they really should; the cost of litigation and insurance against litigation; and the fact that modern, Western medicine is simply a highly complex, labor-intensive, and technology-intensive business, one that people place great emotional reliance on. Oh, and don't forget those omnipresent symbiotic gremlins of supply (somewhat limited) and demand (effectively infinite -- can you ever be too healthy?). I'm sure there are the usual doses of fraud, poor business practices, and so on to top all this off. Anyway, this is getting way off on a tangent, so I'm gonna hit Submit now and be done with it...
Slashdot Mirror
Choosing which pictures to save and which to discard simply to save money on storage costs would be a waste of time (and, by extension, money). Far easier to spend less than a dollar to archive 100 images than to have someone take the time to individually decide whether each picture is worth keeping or not.
The real issue here is simply one of culture and discipline. If keeping complete archives is important, there's no real difficulty. Simply because the edit-on-the-spot functionality exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
This thing isn't exclusive to MS or even the tech world, though. A non-computer-related example: My (ex-)girlfriend and I used to be pretty serious about playing Scrabble. In order to have a standard reference we could use to resolve challenges, we got a copy of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. To our dismay, we discovered that the dictionary had a similar policy: if a word might be considered profane or offensive, it's omitted. Never mind that "sh!t" is a perfectly good English word; it's not in there. We were rather annoyed by this, because it renders the dictionary useless for its intended purpose of arbitrating legitimate and illegitimate plays. (Sure, nobody would challenge "sh!t", which is clearly a word, but what about "sh!t-faced" -- does that have a hyphen, making it illegal, or not, making it a legal play?)
By the way, IIRC there was a version of the FrameMaker publishing software about a decade ago in which, if you ran the term "Quark Xpress" through the spell-checker, the suggested correction was "FrameMaker". Also, I think there was a version of WinWord in which the suggested correction for "zzzzzz" (forgot how many z's) was "sex", which was always good for a laugh.
I'd rather the government didn't take the money in taxes in the first place, and then let me contribute personally to projects like this that I could support (and not support things that I think are a waste of money).
I was going to go on a rant about how consumers of media need to take responsibility for filtering and finding coherent nuggets of information as much as the producers do, but your post said it so nicely that I think I'll go play Age of Empires instead ;-)
The computer industry does have high return rates, but is it because of shoddy hardware quality? I'm not so sure. I suspect it's that computers are still complex and finicky devices, and that a lot of people get them home and get quickly frustrated with the annoyances and complexity. I don't doubt that hardware plays a part there, but I suspect that software is a far bigger contributor to that problem.
As for poor customer service: I'll admit PC service can be pretty lame, but the absolute worst of any industry? Not in my experience. Compared to, say, the phone and cable companies in most cities I've lived in, to say nothing of auto-repair shops, computer hardware companies are shining paragons of virtue when it comes to customer service. (OK, I'm exagerrating a little bit, but seriously -- when I've needed hardware support it's usually been at least minimally adequate. Again, software support is another story.)
I'll also concede that the PC retail business is outrageously bad. Then again, the last time I bought a PC that wasn't mail-order was probably in 1984, so maybe that's why I've managed to avoid some of these hassles.
I just want to know, so I don't make the mistake of buying anything from that manufacturer ever. Two out of eight months? Completely insane.
The problem I have with using a cell phone as a primary phone is that, in a lot of areas, reception is still way too spotty for my taste. Hilly cities like San Francisco (past home) and Seattle (current home) seem to be particularly bad. There are times when I can be in my apartment and my cell phone will beep because it's suddenly decided it's "roaming". Other times it just cuts off in mid-conversation -- fun.
of course perl has such extensive string interpolation and other capabilities that this doesn't strike me as a humongous problem.
I, too, hate the whitespace kludge, but then i've always put whitespace around my dots too because print $this . $that just seems more readable to me than print $this.$that, which looks disturbingly like some kind of slightly funky method call.
Wait, what's that siren I hear... uh oh, gotta run! The Fornication Police are on their way!
(p.s. is it not odd that the statute does not specify that the two individuals have to be married to each other? For example, if I am married, and my mistress is married, and we engage in voluntary sex... as I read this, that would not constitute fornication! but perhaps there is a separate law that covers adultery... sheesh, when will the gov't get out of people's bedrooms?)
anyone that can get a bank account these days can get a "credit card" for the purposes of this argument.
The fact is, there are lots and lots of people over age 18 who do not have (and perhaps cannot get) bank accounts. (According to this cached page on Google, it's more than 10 million people.) There's a reason that there are so many of those check-cashing outfits in the poorer parts of U.S. cities, you know.
Your comparison equating lack of credit cards with lack of Internet access is misleading. Internet access doesn't require anything of an individual -- you can walk into virtually any library in the country and get on the Net for free. What if public libraries said that you had to have a credit (or debit) card to come in and view the paper copy of Playboy? You can bet that wouldn't fly on First Amendment grounds. Admittedly, the Internet-as-library analogy is a pretty strained one, but my point is that whatever age verification technique gets chosen should not be one with as many obvious problems as using credit cards.
I agree there's a time for historical accuracy, but this movie really isn't it if you ask me.
It does make me laugh thinking about one thing. Even if buying porn at age 17 or whatever is illegal, what's to stop you from getting the friendly girl next door (or guy, don't want to be choosy about gender or sexual orientation here ;-) to get naked, completely consensually, in your presence? I'll admit that such an event didn't occur for a geek like me until I was of legal age to purchase porn anyway, but I've heard plausible rumors that jocks and other popular-type people actually did get to see and touch real live naked people at the tender age of, say, 15.
Seriously, though, isn't there something kind of ironic about the fact that you can, completely legally, see and touch (and do other fun things with ;-) real live naked people when you're under 18, but can't legally view pictures of naked people?
Secondly, even if something -- porn or otherwise -- does have an adverse side effect, does that imply you can ban it simply because of that side effect? Take alcohol as an example. The legality of alcohol (assuming you are of appropriate drinking age) unambiguously increases the number of drunk-driving fatalities. However, that fact doesn't mean that you can outlaw alcohol itself. You can only reasonably outlaw the illegal behavior, not the catalyst, if you will.
In addition to the problem you mention about credit-card "borrowing", something like 30% of the U.S. adult population does not have a single credit card. Remember that slashdot readers, who are generally pretty well-educated and probably have reasonable finances (even if they're startving students, they have relatively good job prospects), are not representative of the country (or the world!) at large. Since requiring a credit-card number means requiring more than simple age verification -- it also means verifying that you have decent credit, etc. -- it will exclude people for whom access to this speech is Constitutionally protected. So that won't fly.
Identify the benefits of the situation, and be prepared with to discuss workarounds or compromises to accommodate the downsides of telecommuting. (And make no mistake about it -- there will be some downsides; you just need to make the case that they are outweighed by the benefits.)
Here are some of the things your boss probably cares about:
To tackle the real downsides of telecommuting, I'd suggest you find excuses to get into the office with some regularity -- once a month, minimum, ideally more like once a week. As for the perception-driven parts, well, just hope your boss isn't too pointy-haired... ;-)
Read it in the NYT (print) this morning. I don't know about six stories, they just said the tunnel itself was blocked with rubble and it appeared to have been from an actual collapse of the tunnel.
...aside from the obvious bragging rights -- "What did you do at the office today, honey?" "Oh, I fabricated a few black holes." -- is that, should this work, it would demonstrate that gravity does not in fact obey the inverse-square law over short distances. It blows my mind to think of it obeying, say, an inverse-seventh-power law, which I believe would imply that the universe really has eight spatial dimensions...
I've been learning to fly general-aviation aircraft (Cessna 172R/S "Skyhawk") and recently ended up sitting next to a female United pilot who was deadheading on a flight into JFK. We got to talking and she tried quite earnestly to convince me that flying a 757 (what she does) is pretty much just like flying a Skyhawk. I was skeptical but it made for a fun conversation :-)
The fast-food restaurants in the same airport pay workers $7 an hour to start.
Perhaps this says something about our priorities?
Ah, thanks for the correction. It makes more sense that it happened in the 40s prior to the widespread deployment of radar, etc.
High-rise buildings are built to control the spread of fires for long enough to allow people to evacuate safely. There is no capability, however, for fighting a truly large fire on a high floor. In modern steel-frame buildings -- and I don't know if the WTC was built recently enough for this to apply -- the steel is coated with a fireproofing material, and the combination of the fireproofing and the sprinkler system is supposed to provide structural integrity for a period of three to five hours. That's supposed to be long enough to evacuate the building safely. After that even the fireproofing is insufficient to keep the steel from heating to a point where it effectively begins to melt, deforming to a point where the building can no longer hold up under its own weight.
In this case, we weren't even looking at a normal fire. The incident began with a massive, high-speed, intentional impact that sheared off multiple beams, exacerbated by a large explosion from fuel aboard the plane. The initial damage was severe. Furthermore, my brother speculates that the impact likely severed the water pipes that reach the upper floors, leaving water gushing from a single point or a relatively small number of points and rendering the sprinklers largely useless.
Buildings do survive aircraft impacts, incidentally: A plane flew into the Empire State Building in the Sixties, I think, and obviously it's still standing. Anyway, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a fire causing a building collapse -- it's more like a very large bomb.
According to the article, the researchers received NSF funding for this. So your tax dollars are going toward development of a device that can run roughshod over the Fourth Amendment. Nice.
Incidentally, the data I've seen indicates that between 30 and 50 percent of ALL pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions, often before the woman even knows she's pregnant. If life really begins at conception, shouldn't we be worried about rescuing those billions and billions of unborn babies?
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where a woman can get pregnant, have an abortion, and sell her unborn child on the black market for.. lets say $100,000
I'd be curious to know who would pay $100,000 for an aborted fetus. Perhaps you're assuming some kind of artificial womb technology that could sustain the aborted fetus to term? But if that's the case, then I don't see what's so morally reprehensible about the abortion/uteral transfer, since the fetus wasn't destroyed.
Actually, the libertarian position is that this is precisely one of the very few appropriate roles for government: Protecting its citizens from the exercise of force. In other words, preserving the ability of individuals, who are presumed to have free will, to act in accordance with their own wishes -- so long as those actions do not impede the rights of others to do the same.
You make some good counterarguments regarding the FAA and taxation (though I might still argue that having even half of the fruits of my labors confiscated against my will and squandered on programs I don't necessarily support is an obscenity... nah, I'm not in the mood right now). I do want to dispute the way you conveniently shift the blame for health care costs onto insurance companies, though. The financing of health care is admittedly a mind-numbingly complex issue (trust me, I got a tiny but frightening glimpse of this writing billing software for doctors' offices in a past life)... but insurance companies are hardly the biggest culprit in the escalation of costs. (They may well be a culprit as far as quality of care goes, but that's largely a different issue.) Yikes, as I start to prepare my mental arguments I'm realizing I could spend all night on this, but a quick summary: Consider the costs of developing new treatments and drugs; the fact that employer-paid insurance protects most people from price signals and encourages overconsumption; the fact that government payments for procedures under e.g. Medicare typically come nowhere near covering the actual costs of those procedures, so that privately insured individuals end up paying more than they really should; the cost of litigation and insurance against litigation; and the fact that modern, Western medicine is simply a highly complex, labor-intensive, and technology-intensive business, one that people place great emotional reliance on. Oh, and don't forget those omnipresent symbiotic gremlins of supply (somewhat limited) and demand (effectively infinite -- can you ever be too healthy?). I'm sure there are the usual doses of fraud, poor business practices, and so on to top all this off. Anyway, this is getting way off on a tangent, so I'm gonna hit Submit now and be done with it...