The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work, but it would work well enough to eliminate any other inconviences.
Or rather, it would make all the other inconveniences seem minor in comparison.
You do pay for roads by the mile, more or less. Road maintenance is funded via gas taxes, so you pay more for driving more. The alternative model is toll roads, which also charge in proportion to distance traveled.
The problem, as I see it, is that our current corporate 'free market' system allows an end run around the checks and balances. A free market contains no checks or balances against the consolidation of power.
The only "power" anyone has in a free-market society is that others have to persuade you to give them things rather than simply taking them. There's simply no need for any sort of check on that kind of "power". As for keeping things that way, that's what the education and critical-thinking skills are for.
I'm going to give your the benefit of the doubt and assume this was not a deliberate misinterpretation...
Hate speech is indeed a kind of free speech. However, not all free speech is hate speech, so the two are not equal. Equating free speech to hate speech would be saying that all hate speech is free speech (true) and all free speech is hate speech (false). Similarly, while some people may advocate a Libertarian ideology out of personal greed, there are plenty of other reasons to support it, such as ethics. (In my opinion Libertarian ideology isn't a very good match for a greedy individual, since the most basic tenent -- the non-aggression principle -- limits one's options for profit to hard work and/or cooperative interdependencies with one's peers, rather than exploitation.)
As for greed, it is not the same as "pursuit of happiness." Greed is an unreasoning desire for more, to take and keep everything one can for oneself, whether or not it brings the individual in question any benefit or happiness in the end. It is a destructive and anti-social emotion, and generally leaves those who let it drive them thoroughly miserable.
Why am I less free because I can get decent health care without being middle class or rich? Why am I less free because there is a safety net incase [sic] I get unemployed so I don't have to starve?
We can talk all day about your "freedom" to make others pay for your health care, your "freedom" to make others suffer to get you through a period of unemployment, your "freedom" to force others to fund police and fire departments to an extent they would not choose and may be unable to afford -- but these are all the "freedoms" of a bandit or extortionist, without regard to the effect that one's actions, and the actions of one's representatives, have on the lives of others. This unlimited freedom of action belittles others and brings out the worst in those who practice it, and can lead only to division, conflict, and general misery.
A free society, by contrast, regards all its members as equals, and does not tolerate, much less systematically endorse, actions which enrich one member at the expense of another, regardless of their relative status or net worth. Its members work together cooperatively, voluntarily, rather than victimizing each other and/or those who lack the strength -- individually or in numbers -- to defend themselves. They protect those weaker or less fortunate than themselves, not because they're forced to, but out of a genuine sense of charity, giving of their own resources and not their neighbors'.
Economically it makes no difference at all. Economically, it makes no difference whether you stab me with a knife while compensating me for the lost work vs. just leaving me alone. The difference isn't economic, it's ethical. It's wrong to take one person's money and give it to someone else (or not), but it's not wrong to not take the money in the first place.
Come on, this isn't that hard. I know there's a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in applying ethical reasoning to political matters, where ethics tend to be seen as a annoyance rather than a guide, but -- at least so far as I'm concerned -- the resulting clarity of conscience is well worth it.
Back to your point, "leftism" isn't bad, it's just not based entirely on greed. In fact, leftism, in theory, is getting back to the family unit, and extending that to helping people not directly related. The whole "we're only as strong as our weakest link" thing. It works on a small scale, but is unwieldy on a large scale, which is the real problem.
I don't think that's the real problem. The real problem, as I see it, is that turning to any level of government to redistribute tax money to the needy is the political equivalent of collecting for charity at gunpoint. Protecting the weak and providing for the needy are extremely worthwhile goals, and supported by many who could never be considered "leftist", but the methods you use matter a great deal.
on the right you have super-rich tax breaks and "back room corporate deals", which gives free money to the fabulously wealthy.
The "back-room corporate deals" I'll grant you, but tax breaks don't "give free money" to anyone; they just take less. Imagine if someone stole 10% of everything you have; I don't think you'd be thanking them for it just because they originally planned to take twice as much.
The Republican Party is not "conservative". That word is only used to get votes. In fact, the Republican Party has put the U.S. government into far more debt.
There are two very different definitions of "conservative", both used in political context, but referring to diametrically opposed ideologies -- much like the term "liberal" in a way, which can mean "classic liberal" (e.g. libertarian) or the modern "Liberal" variant.
The first kind of "conservative" is the political type. In this sense it refers to an ideology based on preserving the status quo, or in extreme cases bringing back the way things were in the past. This type tends to support "stability" and reject change.
The second kind of "conservative" is fiscal, as you describe. The goal here is conservation of resources, particularly financial resources -- "responsibly spending policies" and the like.
The irony is that both Republicans and Democrats can be quite accurately be described as "conservative" (at least compared to each other), in the first and second senses of the term, respectively.
So it follows that places like Afganistan and Sudan are on the top of the freedom list and the scandanavian countries are near the bottom?
You fail at logic. Increasing taxes are but one item among many which impede freedom. All else being equal, the citizens of a country with more taxes and public spending are self-evidently less free than citizens of another country that taxes and spends less, if only because the latter has so graciously granted the freedom to determine the manner in which the products of their labor are to be expended. Your choices of examples are steeped in so many other influences, both positive and negative, that the level of taxation is almost insignificant by comparison. The first two, in particular, demonstrate quite nicely how the combination of strict and intrusive laws and a corrupt, uncaring "justice" system can substitute for taxation; there's no need to take someone's money if you can simply force them to spend the money, or the effort that would've earned said money, on your own pet projects.
Luckily, that sort of direct enslavement isn't tolerated here, at least when it become obvious enough to be widely visibly, so the focus turns to preventing the baser, more power-hungry elements of society from achieving the same goal (profit at others' expense) by more indirect means, such as taxation.
If you enjoy living in a cesspool of pollution, getting 10cents for an 85 hour-week, you're welcome to it, but not in my country.
Since when are unsubstantiated projections and ad hominim attacks "insightful"? Obviously no one wants to work 85 hour weeks for mere subsistence wages, but that is not a realistic threat; freer societies have always had the better working conditions, and higher effective wages. The regulations "guaranteeing" these conditions and wages tend to lag behind the actual changes; the government gets the credit, but "the market" does all the work. Moreover, said regulations tend to make the system rigid and inflexible in the face of changing conditions, often harming those they were intended to protect when times become hard.
Has the brainwashing gone so deep? Libertarians are the worst kind of corporate-enslaved drones, because they have somehow been convinced being ruled by oligarchic, greed-driven, psychopathic organizations is a good thing.
Libertarians in general are thoroughly opposed to being ruled by anyone, whether the "oligarchic, greed-driven, psychopathic organizations" (a.k.a. governments) you mention, or other individuals, or groups of individuals, such as corporations. Perhaps you simply cannot comprehend a mindset which places no credence in the concept of class warfare, one in which all individuals are considered equal under the law, equal in rights. It is indeed a very different view than the typical collectivist paradigm, but it is the product of rational consideration, not "brainwashing".
Your argument is entirely based on the unstated assumption that only the government can provide defensive services. Naturally some defense is required against those who would employ coercion, but the government doesn't have to get involved. In fact, the government cannot supply comprehensive defensive services for the simple reason that any government, by its very nature, must itself employ coercion against those it claims to protect.
Libertarianism is not the same as pacifism. Self-defense and defensive security organizations are an essential part of any free society. Turning to government, however, is a case of destroying the foundations of civil society in an effort to save it. There are perfectly viable alternatives which do not involve systematic endorsement of the very coercion we're attempting to counter.
In LISP, there's the "reader", which takes in a string and generates an S-expression, and there's "eval", which runs an S-expression through the interpreter. The "reader" is safe to run on hostile data, but "eval" is not.
That's not entirely true. In Common LISP, at least, you need to disable the #. reader macro (*read-eval*, I think) before you can read hostile data in relative safety. Normally the form following #. is passed to eval at read time; e.g. "#.(+ 2 3)" reads as the integer five, not a list.
the court did NOT rule that breaking CSS is illegal but distributing the software to accomplish this is illegal
That's merely a technicality. The vast majority of people are neither able or willing to discover and exploit the weaknesses in CSS for themselves, so making it illegal to distribute the known antidote(s) has the same effect as making it illegal to "break" CSS in the first place.
What good does it do you to be permitted to break the copy protection for private use if no one can legally tell you how to do it?
Both you and the sibling poster are missing the point. This is a trivial issue of sentence decomposition:
The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises,
This is what Congress is granted the power to do.
to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;
This is why Congress is granted said power.
but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
Finally, here is a limitation on the manner in which Congress may exercise this power.
Nowhere in this passage does it say that Congress can actually spend the money so collected on any particular program. It only authorizes the collection of revenues to support Congress's Constitutional functions enumerated elsewhere.
If you still feel I'm splitting hairs over the grammar, consider the ideals and personalities of the people that actually wrote this passage, along with the rest of the Constitution. Would they have intended for Congress to have what amounts to a blank check to direct funds toward any end? Remember, the vast majority of them believed in a limited form of government which didn't involve itself in the everyday affairs of its citizens. Ideals can change of time, sure, but the amendment process exists for a reason; you don't just read whatever meaning you want into the original text.
The final point about censorship is that no matter what your personal opinion of it is, you don't have the right to impose your view on others. Even if they're in favour of it and you think you know better.
This point is self-contradictory. Censorship is itself a form of imposing one's own views on others; if it's wrong to impose an anti-censorship view then it is even more immediately wrong to perform the censorship in the first place. Any general injunction against imposing one's own views on others is inherently anti-censorship.
How many cultures used to sanction slavery as part of a viable economic model? I think we've pretty much rejected that today.
That's mainly the result of economic development, not any conscious consensus. Widespread slave labor simply isn't practical in a specialized, high-technology society. A show of force can motivate someone to perform menial tasks, but will not significantly encourage the development of complex skills, or the trust relationships essential to meaningful participating in any team effort.
Regarding your first point: X-Plane is an advanced commercial flight simulator package available for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. It should compare favorably with MS Flight Simulator.
Satellite internet is worse than dialup. In fact, a POTS modem is still required for outgoing traffic if I'm not mistaken. Sure you can get massive bandwidth but all your ping times are measured in seconds, not milliseconds.
You are mistaken. Separate POTS upload links used to be a requirement, but all modern satellite Internet connections are bidirectional. Ping times are a bit high, but still less than one second, not "seconds", and the equipment plays some tricks with the TCP settings to compensate for the delays.
I wouldn't recommend a satellite connection over DSL or cable, of course, but the only real drawback I've noticed compared to dialup is the high monthly cost (~$70). My parents live in a rural area with no DSL or cable Internet available, and they seem happy enough with their 1.5 Mbps HughesNet satellite link, having upgraded from a dialup account earlier this year. Sure, the latency is problematic for real-time online games and VoIP (not that you could do VoIP properly over dialup anyway), but for almost any other task it's a significant improvement.
More concisely, bits use base-10 prefixes whereas bytes use base-2 prefixes. "Theoretical maximums" have nothing to do with it. Bits are treated as though they were an SI base unit, although they aren't listed among the official SI bases. Bytes are not SI (or even pseudo-SI) units, and do not follow the standard SI prefixes. Compound units tend to use SI prefixes (e.g. MB/s -> bytes/microsecond or bytes*MHz -> 10^3 bytes/second).
Kilo in computer terms has always meant the closest approximation available in powers of 2, because digital things can only have 2 states - on or off.
Except when you're talking about frequencies. Or bandwidths. Or just about everything that isn't a RAM chip or a file. Don't create the impression that the binary "kilo-" is universal in IT; it's only relevant in a few cases. Certainly not enough to decide that we can arbitrarily overrule the SI.
One problem with this line of reasoning: the byte is not an SI unit of measurement. SI prefixes only apply to SI units; outside of that domain they have no standard interpretation. Or you you often complain that microcomputers aren't exactly 1/1000 the size of minicomputers?
Face it, bytes were consistently measured in powers of two right up until the HDD manufacturers decided to get creative with their marketing. Compound units (e.g. bytes/second) and pure SI units (e.g. Hz) follow the SI base-10 prefix scheme, and certain external storage formats have since adopted the non-standard HDD storage units, but precedent is solidly in support of kilobyte meaning 2^10 bytes, megabyte 2^20 bytes, etc.
Tor doesn't allow publishers to create content anonymously at all.
Yes it does. One can set up a server at an anonymous public address under a TLD (.onion) only accessible via the Tor network. The clients never see the server's real IP address. Tor Hidden Services.
Ask 10 people if they would not get insurance if they had a guarantee that they would never get a heart attack or diabetes. I'm quite certain they'll say that they still would.
Sure they would get some insurance, but would they get insurance for those specific conditions? Since the insurance company doesn't know what the actual risk is they'd have to assume it's the same for everyone with the same non-GT risk factors; thus, there ought to be a difference in premiums for plans that cover such conditions vs. plans that don't, with the consequences spelled out in the summary.
Of course, if the insurance company had access to the same GT results there would be no significant price differential between the inclusive and exclusive plans. There may be some minor difference, as the GT results may be inaccurate, and the mere lack of predisposition is not a perfect guarantee of good health.
Of course, that's only true in a world where insurance companies don't adjust rates to reflect their actual profit/loss...
Even in such a world there are limits to how high those rates can be adjusted before people choose to accept the risk of bankruptcy, should the event occur, over the certainty of poverty or bankruptcy resulting from the cost of insurance. At some point higher rates can only reduce overall revenues via a decline in quantity, both for individual companies and for the insurance market as a whole.
Does anyone know of a way to only block the "evil" cookies? I'd love something that blocked the tracking cookies, let the shopping cart ones through, and didn't require me to figure out which was which for each and every cookie.
It won't eliminate tracking entirely, but my answer was to accept cookies from all sites, just for the duration of the session. Sites like Slashdot where I maintain an account have an exception in my Firefox cookie preferences which allows them to store cookies indefinitely. Shopping carts work normally, as their cookies don't need to be preserved across sessions.
but the specific complaint about its volatility is at best uninformed.
Is it?
Yes, it is. As was perfectly clear from my prior comment, by "volatility" I was referring to the concept expressed in the original comment that one cannot rely on a link or URL citation to a Wikipedia article to always refer to the specific version of the article that one saw/used oneself. If the linking is done properly this is false, since one can link to or cite a specific version of an article irrespective of future changes.
I agree that it is generally a bad idea to cite a Wiki article in a formal academic setting, but only because -- like any encyclopedia -- it is not a primary source, not because it may change over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Or rather, it would make all the other inconveniences seem minor in comparison.
You do pay for roads by the mile, more or less. Road maintenance is funded via gas taxes, so you pay more for driving more. The alternative model is toll roads, which also charge in proportion to distance traveled.
The only "power" anyone has in a free-market society is that others have to persuade you to give them things rather than simply taking them. There's simply no need for any sort of check on that kind of "power". As for keeping things that way, that's what the education and critical-thinking skills are for.
I'm going to give your the benefit of the doubt and assume this was not a deliberate misinterpretation...
Hate speech is indeed a kind of free speech. However, not all free speech is hate speech, so the two are not equal. Equating free speech to hate speech would be saying that all hate speech is free speech (true) and all free speech is hate speech (false). Similarly, while some people may advocate a Libertarian ideology out of personal greed, there are plenty of other reasons to support it, such as ethics. (In my opinion Libertarian ideology isn't a very good match for a greedy individual, since the most basic tenent -- the non-aggression principle -- limits one's options for profit to hard work and/or cooperative interdependencies with one's peers, rather than exploitation.)
As for greed, it is not the same as "pursuit of happiness." Greed is an unreasoning desire for more, to take and keep everything one can for oneself, whether or not it brings the individual in question any benefit or happiness in the end. It is a destructive and anti-social emotion, and generally leaves those who let it drive them thoroughly miserable.
We can talk all day about your "freedom" to make others pay for your health care, your "freedom" to make others suffer to get you through a period of unemployment, your "freedom" to force others to fund police and fire departments to an extent they would not choose and may be unable to afford -- but these are all the "freedoms" of a bandit or extortionist, without regard to the effect that one's actions, and the actions of one's representatives, have on the lives of others. This unlimited freedom of action belittles others and brings out the worst in those who practice it, and can lead only to division, conflict, and general misery.
A free society, by contrast, regards all its members as equals, and does not tolerate, much less systematically endorse, actions which enrich one member at the expense of another, regardless of their relative status or net worth. Its members work together cooperatively, voluntarily, rather than victimizing each other and/or those who lack the strength -- individually or in numbers -- to defend themselves. They protect those weaker or less fortunate than themselves, not because they're forced to, but out of a genuine sense of charity, giving of their own resources and not their neighbors'.
Economically it makes no difference at all. Economically, it makes no difference whether you stab me with a knife while compensating me for the lost work vs. just leaving me alone. The difference isn't economic, it's ethical. It's wrong to take one person's money and give it to someone else (or not), but it's not wrong to not take the money in the first place.
Come on, this isn't that hard. I know there's a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in applying ethical reasoning to political matters, where ethics tend to be seen as a annoyance rather than a guide, but -- at least so far as I'm concerned -- the resulting clarity of conscience is well worth it.
I don't think that's the real problem. The real problem, as I see it, is that turning to any level of government to redistribute tax money to the needy is the political equivalent of collecting for charity at gunpoint. Protecting the weak and providing for the needy are extremely worthwhile goals, and supported by many who could never be considered "leftist", but the methods you use matter a great deal.
The "back-room corporate deals" I'll grant you, but tax breaks don't "give free money" to anyone; they just take less. Imagine if someone stole 10% of everything you have; I don't think you'd be thanking them for it just because they originally planned to take twice as much.
There are two very different definitions of "conservative", both used in political context, but referring to diametrically opposed ideologies -- much like the term "liberal" in a way, which can mean "classic liberal" (e.g. libertarian) or the modern "Liberal" variant.
The first kind of "conservative" is the political type. In this sense it refers to an ideology based on preserving the status quo, or in extreme cases bringing back the way things were in the past. This type tends to support "stability" and reject change.
The second kind of "conservative" is fiscal, as you describe. The goal here is conservation of resources, particularly financial resources -- "responsibly spending policies" and the like.
The irony is that both Republicans and Democrats can be quite accurately be described as "conservative" (at least compared to each other), in the first and second senses of the term, respectively.
You fail at logic. Increasing taxes are but one item among many which impede freedom. All else being equal, the citizens of a country with more taxes and public spending are self-evidently less free than citizens of another country that taxes and spends less, if only because the latter has so graciously granted the freedom to determine the manner in which the products of their labor are to be expended. Your choices of examples are steeped in so many other influences, both positive and negative, that the level of taxation is almost insignificant by comparison. The first two, in particular, demonstrate quite nicely how the combination of strict and intrusive laws and a corrupt, uncaring "justice" system can substitute for taxation; there's no need to take someone's money if you can simply force them to spend the money, or the effort that would've earned said money, on your own pet projects.
Luckily, that sort of direct enslavement isn't tolerated here, at least when it become obvious enough to be widely visibly, so the focus turns to preventing the baser, more power-hungry elements of society from achieving the same goal (profit at others' expense) by more indirect means, such as taxation.
Since when are unsubstantiated projections and ad hominim attacks "insightful"? Obviously no one wants to work 85 hour weeks for mere subsistence wages, but that is not a realistic threat; freer societies have always had the better working conditions, and higher effective wages. The regulations "guaranteeing" these conditions and wages tend to lag behind the actual changes; the government gets the credit, but "the market" does all the work. Moreover, said regulations tend to make the system rigid and inflexible in the face of changing conditions, often harming those they were intended to protect when times become hard.
Libertarians in general are thoroughly opposed to being ruled by anyone, whether the "oligarchic, greed-driven, psychopathic organizations" (a.k.a. governments) you mention, or other individuals, or groups of individuals, such as corporations. Perhaps you simply cannot comprehend a mindset which places no credence in the concept of class warfare, one in which all individuals are considered equal under the law, equal in rights. It is indeed a very different view than the typical collectivist paradigm, but it is the product of rational consideration, not "brainwashing".
Your argument is entirely based on the unstated assumption that only the government can provide defensive services. Naturally some defense is required against those who would employ coercion, but the government doesn't have to get involved. In fact, the government cannot supply comprehensive defensive services for the simple reason that any government, by its very nature, must itself employ coercion against those it claims to protect.
Libertarianism is not the same as pacifism. Self-defense and defensive security organizations are an essential part of any free society. Turning to government, however, is a case of destroying the foundations of civil society in an effort to save it. There are perfectly viable alternatives which do not involve systematic endorsement of the very coercion we're attempting to counter.
That's not entirely true. In Common LISP, at least, you need to disable the #. reader macro (*read-eval*, I think) before you can read hostile data in relative safety. Normally the form following #. is passed to eval at read time; e.g. "#.(+ 2 3)" reads as the integer five, not a list.
That's merely a technicality. The vast majority of people are neither able or willing to discover and exploit the weaknesses in CSS for themselves, so making it illegal to distribute the known antidote(s) has the same effect as making it illegal to "break" CSS in the first place.
What good does it do you to be permitted to break the copy protection for private use if no one can legally tell you how to do it?
Both you and the sibling poster are missing the point. This is a trivial issue of sentence decomposition:
This is what Congress is granted the power to do.
This is why Congress is granted said power.
Finally, here is a limitation on the manner in which Congress may exercise this power.
Nowhere in this passage does it say that Congress can actually spend the money so collected on any particular program. It only authorizes the collection of revenues to support Congress's Constitutional functions enumerated elsewhere.
If you still feel I'm splitting hairs over the grammar, consider the ideals and personalities of the people that actually wrote this passage, along with the rest of the Constitution. Would they have intended for Congress to have what amounts to a blank check to direct funds toward any end? Remember, the vast majority of them believed in a limited form of government which didn't involve itself in the everyday affairs of its citizens. Ideals can change of time, sure, but the amendment process exists for a reason; you don't just read whatever meaning you want into the original text.
This point is self-contradictory. Censorship is itself a form of imposing one's own views on others; if it's wrong to impose an anti-censorship view then it is even more immediately wrong to perform the censorship in the first place. Any general injunction against imposing one's own views on others is inherently anti-censorship.
That's mainly the result of economic development, not any conscious consensus. Widespread slave labor simply isn't practical in a specialized, high-technology society. A show of force can motivate someone to perform menial tasks, but will not significantly encourage the development of complex skills, or the trust relationships essential to meaningful participating in any team effort.
Regarding your first point: X-Plane is an advanced commercial flight simulator package available for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. It should compare favorably with MS Flight Simulator.
You are mistaken. Separate POTS upload links used to be a requirement, but all modern satellite Internet connections are bidirectional. Ping times are a bit high, but still less than one second, not "seconds", and the equipment plays some tricks with the TCP settings to compensate for the delays.
I wouldn't recommend a satellite connection over DSL or cable, of course, but the only real drawback I've noticed compared to dialup is the high monthly cost (~$70). My parents live in a rural area with no DSL or cable Internet available, and they seem happy enough with their 1.5 Mbps HughesNet satellite link, having upgraded from a dialup account earlier this year. Sure, the latency is problematic for real-time online games and VoIP (not that you could do VoIP properly over dialup anyway), but for almost any other task it's a significant improvement.
More concisely, bits use base-10 prefixes whereas bytes use base-2 prefixes. "Theoretical maximums" have nothing to do with it. Bits are treated as though they were an SI base unit, although they aren't listed among the official SI bases. Bytes are not SI (or even pseudo-SI) units, and do not follow the standard SI prefixes. Compound units tend to use SI prefixes (e.g. MB/s -> bytes/microsecond or bytes*MHz -> 10^3 bytes/second).
One problem with this line of reasoning: the byte is not an SI unit of measurement. SI prefixes only apply to SI units; outside of that domain they have no standard interpretation. Or you you often complain that microcomputers aren't exactly 1/1000 the size of minicomputers?
Face it, bytes were consistently measured in powers of two right up until the HDD manufacturers decided to get creative with their marketing. Compound units (e.g. bytes/second) and pure SI units (e.g. Hz) follow the SI base-10 prefix scheme, and certain external storage formats have since adopted the non-standard HDD storage units, but precedent is solidly in support of kilobyte meaning 2^10 bytes, megabyte 2^20 bytes, etc.
Yes it does. One can set up a server at an anonymous public address under a TLD (.onion) only accessible via the Tor network. The clients never see the server's real IP address. Tor Hidden Services.
Sure they would get some insurance, but would they get insurance for those specific conditions? Since the insurance company doesn't know what the actual risk is they'd have to assume it's the same for everyone with the same non-GT risk factors; thus, there ought to be a difference in premiums for plans that cover such conditions vs. plans that don't, with the consequences spelled out in the summary.
Of course, if the insurance company had access to the same GT results there would be no significant price differential between the inclusive and exclusive plans. There may be some minor difference, as the GT results may be inaccurate, and the mere lack of predisposition is not a perfect guarantee of good health.
Even in such a world there are limits to how high those rates can be adjusted before people choose to accept the risk of bankruptcy, should the event occur, over the certainty of poverty or bankruptcy resulting from the cost of insurance. At some point higher rates can only reduce overall revenues via a decline in quantity, both for individual companies and for the insurance market as a whole.
It won't eliminate tracking entirely, but my answer was to accept cookies from all sites, just for the duration of the session. Sites like Slashdot where I maintain an account have an exception in my Firefox cookie preferences which allows them to store cookies indefinitely. Shopping carts work normally, as their cookies don't need to be preserved across sessions.
Yes, it is. As was perfectly clear from my prior comment, by "volatility" I was referring to the concept expressed in the original comment that one cannot rely on a link or URL citation to a Wikipedia article to always refer to the specific version of the article that one saw/used oneself. If the linking is done properly this is false, since one can link to or cite a specific version of an article irrespective of future changes.
I agree that it is generally a bad idea to cite a Wiki article in a formal academic setting, but only because -- like any encyclopedia -- it is not a primary source, not because it may change over time.