How come addons are a defense for Firefox eating a lot of memory?
Unless Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. have a similar function built in, you aren't comparing apples to apples otherwise. If you start including addons, it would be possibly for a biased tester (MS perhaps? Google? Apple?) to pit FF with the most heavy-weight addons (s)he can find against another browser in a minimalist configuration. It might be reasonable to consider the memory usage, page load times, etc., for each of the browsers in a "typical" configuration, but then you have to decide what "typical" means. For example, I don't use Video DownloadHelper, and I've never heard of Personas Plus, but then again, I'm a bit of a Luddite, despite (because, perhaps?) being employed in IT. Consequently, benchmarks with those addons have little to no bearing on *my* typical usage.
FWIW, and in part to answer your question, "Does anyone run Firefox with no addons?", the only FF addon I typically use is DOM Inspector, because from time to time, I create web pages that include JavaScript. Having said that, I would still agree that Adblock Plus should be included in the "typical" addons list.
The other day, I turned JavaScript off on my browser (I had a reason...maybe testing or annoyed by ads on a page...I don't remember exactly), but forgot to turn it back on after I was done with whatever it was that I was doing. A little later, I opened FF again, and wondered why so much of the content I expected to see in my browser was missing.
As you said, YMMV, but I would say that JavaScript execution time is pretty much every bit as important as page load unless you have limited your web browsing to pages created back in the '90s.
You are entirely correct to say that having the right to do something is not the same as to be right in doing it. If I understand you correctly, then you are saying that YouTube may very well have the right to yank content as it sees fit, but that is not a morally correct choice. In that case, I understand a little more clearly why you claim my argument is a strawman. I disagree, mind you. I still think that if I own, fund, and maintain a piece of property that is provided free-as-in-beer (as YouTube is), then whether or not it is connected to a public utility -- be that the Internet, the telephone network or the highway system -- is irrelevant, and I think that under some circumstances, failing to pull or censor content may very well be an immoral choice.
For example, suppose, hypothetically speaking, that I was a youth pastor (I am, actually). And suppose that I created a public forum, connected to the Internet, where youth could go to discuss things in their lives, ask questions, etc. (I haven't, but it's not a bad idea...). Now suppose a troll starts posting seriously offensive material (kiddie porn? a pedophile searching for victims? maybe some of the kids are using the forum to bully others?). If I didn't censor the forum, it would soon become unusable for its intended purpose.
There are times and places where restricting the free exchange of ideas is a Bad Thing (tm). If we could trust people to be respectful of others and not be inappropriate, then we could have the ideal of no censorship, period (because we would censor ourselves, of our own free will, when it was necessary). But, unfortunately, there are also irresponsible people who will try to abuse the system, and as a result, in the real world, that ideal is not always possible.
No, that's just an abuse of the law, which I thought was supposed to be punishable under the DMCA. Don't see that happen very often, though, which is truly a shame.
But if they're benefiting from the internet, particularly using it is their primary vehicle for delivery, then it should be.
Ummm...no.
Yes, the Government built the (original) Internet. You could even argue that through the grants and subsidies to telcos that allowed the Internet to be grown to its current size. However, if I build, pay for and maintain a web server that is connected to the Internet, and upon which I allow users to post media, opinions or whatever, then as the web server owner, I get the right to say what gets put on it.
Warning! Bad/. car analogy follows!
Your argument is like saying that because the Federal Government built the roads and highways upon which I drive my car, anyone in the country should be allowed to use my car any time they want. And that is completely absurd.
I got it wrong, I thought that Free Speech was a right that could not be abridged by anyone, not even a Corporation.
Yep, you got it wrong.
The Bill of Rights* says absolutely nothing about what individuals or corporations can do. It limits what the Government can do through the laws it passes. So, no, sorry to burst your bubble, but Free Speech is not a right that "could not be abridged by anyone, not even a Corporation." "Free Speech" is a guarantee that the Government shall not pass any laws that prohibit speech. It does not guarantee you a corporate-built, corporate-owned, corporate-maintained forum to say whatever you like, whether or not the corporation that runs the forum likes it or not.
Now there is a contract involved with YouTube the EULA and thats what give them the right to abridge your freedom of speech, They don't have the right, outright to do anything they want to muzzle speech. They have a prior legal agreement with the poster on You Tube.
Ummm...yeah. You just contradicted yourself there, dude. If, as you claim, Free Speech is a right that cannot be abridged by anyone, then a contract abridging your Free Speech would be null and void, since such a contract would, in that case, be prohibited by the First Amendment ("No one, not even a corporation can abridge it", remember?). However, since that is most definitely not what the First Amendment says, then such a contract is valid, and YouTube can pull any video it wants, with or without reason, and there's squat you can do about it except complain and try to raise enough groundswell of public opinion that YouTube relents.
Just be clear about your rights.
Now that I agree with.
*Disclaimer: I live in the U.S. and I have no idea where you live. Therefore, my arguments above may or may not apply in your jurisdiction. Furthermore, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Use your own judgment.
So what would improve this? I think users would like computers to ignore error conditions until they're done with all input related to performing an operation, for starters. Don't want them to click through a warning dialog? Ok... then don't present them with it until the end.
Yikes!!! That sounds all warm and fuzzy, but the first thing that came to my mind was, "Great...the computer detected way back at step one that it can't do anything with the data I am about to enter because my network card failed, so the data won't be stored (no network drive) and it won't be submitted (can't reach the database server). However, it's going to wait until I've taken half an hour to enter everything and *THEN* tell me that I was wasting my time."
Ideally, you could write the data to local storage until it could be submitted, but I've seen web apps do exactly what I described above.
You always, always trap for errors, even if you don't expect them.
Exactly. I've coded this before, and had someone peer-reviewing my code laugh at the "This error message should not be possible. Please contact Sys Admin and explain how you got here, so we can prevent this error in the future." error message I trapped for.
Understanding and perspective are certainly necessary, but definitely not sufficient. Real life is nowhere near as simple as you make it sound. Point by point:
1) If you think of O.P.'s comment as being a metaphor (i.e., hurt them enough to train them), it sounds a lot less sexist. His example is simply the most painful thing he can think of. I still believe the carrot is a lot more effective than the stick, but when you get desperate enough, you use the stick, too.
2) Complete and total bovine scatology (i.e., B.S.) From my personal experience, to help my users get the IP address of their machines, I wrote a script that does an "ifconfig eth0" (yes, the computers were running Linux), then created an icon on the desktop that has a red and white checkered flag and says "Help Me" underneath it. All they had to do was click on the picture, and read what it printed on the screen, but if I had a dollar for every tech that said "no," when asked if there was a picture of a flag anywhere on the screen of their monitor that had "Help Me" written underneath it, I could retire and live like a king in Patagonia. Sometimes, no matter how simple you make it, it isn't simple enough. As the saying goes, if you make something idiot proof, they will just build better idiots.
3) Agreed, no one (frequently including myself) RTFM's -- although I maintain that that is often the result of an FM that is thicker than a dictionary, and written by the lowest subcontractor in India, whose only qualifications are having finished first semester English. As far as reading road maps...well, sometimes, and maybe even "frequently", your users will follow a road map to where they want to go, but that's hardly a given. I have users who want to be (repeatedly) spoonfed everything. As in, they won't take any notes when you are explaining something, and will instead call you for help each and every time they need to perform certain tasks (like dragging and dropping icons from one folder to another, and no, I'm not just making that up). And the user I was thinking of as I typed the example above is probably not the most irritating user in the company. We have a couple of users who constantly break things, then whine to their managers and to mine (actually, to my boss's boss), but then are either unavailable or outright lie about having followed our suggestions to resolve the problem. After enough calls like that (from the same people), and it's really, really hard not to start hating at least some of your users.
4) See #2.
I'm not interested in modding you flamebait. You raise some valid points. However, I would encourage you to extend your empathy to the/.'er who posed the original question. Yes, it's obvious he's feeling some frustration. No, some of his options aren't realistic, but then again, this is/. It's fair enough to assume that the readers here will understand the difference between the things he has realistically tried and his venting. We all do it, including, I would wager, you.
No joke, this is a true story. I couldn't make this up if I tried.
I was a sys admin at a company that had remote sites scattered all over roughly a million square miles of remote wetlands. We had just built a microwave network to cover parts of this area, but previously, we had used another company's wireless Internet service to provide connectivity to some of our sites. We were migrating one of the sites from wireless to our microwave network, and I had a (very non-technical) tech at the remote site being my eyes and hands. I had the tech connect network cables between a router, a switch and all of our equipment, and instructed him to remove the equipment for the wireless network. "Ok," he tells me. Just to be sure, I reiterate that *all* of the wireless equipment has to be removed because we aren't using any of it anymore. Yep, he understands. We begin to troubleshoot the network. His computer is getting an IP address that is on a completely different network than what I have set the router to assign. It's not even close. None of the four octets match. I double-check my router config -- yep, it's good. I walk him through making sure he's getting a DHCP address rather than a static IP address on the PC. Yep, it's DHCP. I have him disconnect his PC, reboot, and read the IP address -- it's an APIPA address, so he definitely doesn't have a static IP address assigned to his network interface. I have him reconnect the PC and I run TCPDump on the router (it's a Linux based router, with a very complete networking toolset) -- he gets the 192.168.x.y address again, but I don't see any traffic on the network interface. I check, double-check and triple-check that there is nothing between his PC and the router other than the Ethernet cable -- nope, just the network cable. I ask him over and over again in every different way I can think of to phrase the question, because it's apparent to me that he is getting an IP address from something other than my router. No, nothing between the PC and the router but a single Ethernet cable. For THREE FRIGGING DAYS we troubleshoot this connection, and the tech sticks to his story -- there is nothing between the PC and the router except for the Ethernet cable. Finally, I'm done. I've tested everything I can think of. I *know* the wireless router is still connected to his computer, so in desperation, I ask one last time, just to be sure, that he has removed the wireless router and plugged the PC into the Linux-based router I had shipped out.
"Let me try that," he says.
If I could have reached through the phone and strangled him, I would have.
I can't speak for other countries, since I'm not familiar with laws outside the U.S., but from the little bit of research I've done (and IANAL, so this is most definitely not legal advice), the laws that regulate what you can photograph and what you can disseminate here are anything but clear cut. It mostly comes down to rolling the dice: what are the odds that someone is going to be offended by a picture you take; if they are offended, what are the odds that they will do anything about it; and if they are offended and do something about it, what do you stand to gain by taking and disseminating the photo compared to what you stand to lose?
I once read a rather lengthy article on the subject (don't have the link handy, unfortunately) that boiled it down to something like this:
Was the photo taken in a private setting?
Is anyone in the photo easily identifiable?
Is anyone in the photo -- particularly if they are identifiable -- a minor?
Is anyone doing anything that might be embarrassing or damaging to their reputation? Note: You still might be okay here if the photograph is considered "newsworthy" -- for example, OJ Simpson driving down the highway in the white Bronco, or a politician being arrested after a DWI.
Is the photo being used for commercial purposes (i.e., sales brochure, advertisement in the paper or yellow pages, commercial on TV, photo offered for sale in a gallery, etc.)?
Do you have deep enough pockets to make it worth anyone's time to seek damages?
The more questions you answer "yes" to in the list above, the more likely you are to have someone come after you if you publish the photo. Of course, this checklist completely ignores whether or not you should publish a particular photo.
That's pretty much irrelevant. As has been said on/. often enough, once it's posted on the Internet, it's essentially impossible to remove it later*.
*Unless what is posted is the only surviving copy of some piece of data that is critically important to you (your masters thesis, the open source project that was going to make you more famous than Linus, photographic evidence that bigfoot and/or the Roswell aliens actually exist, etc.). Then no matter how hard you look, it won't be cached anywhere.
Taken from the parent post. The way things currently exist in the U.S. (or at least where I work, anyway), I have 7.8% to Social Security, 1.8% to Medicare and just over 6.5% to a rather nice medical and dental plan, for a total deduction of just over 16%. Sounds pretty close to what you already have.
Here's my story...I had a kidney transplant 15 years ago. I work for someone else because I can't afford health insurance on my own, and if I were to pay out of my pocket for the anti-rejection medicines that the doctors tell me I will need for the rest of my life, I would spend roughly $12K per month. That's a serious chunk of change, and it assumes that I never have another medical problem of any kind.
However, $12K out-of-pocket is still better than losing 30% of my paycheck to Obamacare (yes, I make more than $40K per year). Looks like even for me, having no health care is better than what Obama is pitching, especially if it went to one of those flexible savings plans where your anticipated health costs for the year are pulled out pre-tax.
Lawmakers since the very dawn of time have been trying to come up with a universal set of rules that would apply in all situations. IMHO, that's a futile effort, unless you can predict every situation that could possibly occur until the end of time. Consequently, it seems better to try to come up with a simple set of laws and allow for the liberal application of common sense. Unfortunately, that solution has its own problems, too (notably that "common sense" is rather a misnomer).
Slashdot Mirror
1) That's (part of the reason) why I use Linux. I need a toolkit that is useful in my job, and telnet is one of those required tools.
2) putty will do telnet.
Better yet, find their contact e-mail off the web page, and use that instead.
Nuts...sed "s/possibly/possible/" in the second sentence. Missed that in the preview.
How come addons are a defense for Firefox eating a lot of memory?
Unless Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. have a similar function built in, you aren't comparing apples to apples otherwise. If you start including addons, it would be possibly for a biased tester (MS perhaps? Google? Apple?) to pit FF with the most heavy-weight addons (s)he can find against another browser in a minimalist configuration. It might be reasonable to consider the memory usage, page load times, etc., for each of the browsers in a "typical" configuration, but then you have to decide what "typical" means. For example, I don't use Video DownloadHelper, and I've never heard of Personas Plus, but then again, I'm a bit of a Luddite, despite (because, perhaps?) being employed in IT. Consequently, benchmarks with those addons have little to no bearing on *my* typical usage.
FWIW, and in part to answer your question, "Does anyone run Firefox with no addons?", the only FF addon I typically use is DOM Inspector, because from time to time, I create web pages that include JavaScript. Having said that, I would still agree that Adblock Plus should be included in the "typical" addons list.
The other day, I turned JavaScript off on my browser (I had a reason...maybe testing or annoyed by ads on a page...I don't remember exactly), but forgot to turn it back on after I was done with whatever it was that I was doing. A little later, I opened FF again, and wondered why so much of the content I expected to see in my browser was missing.
As you said, YMMV, but I would say that JavaScript execution time is pretty much every bit as important as page load unless you have limited your web browsing to pages created back in the '90s.
You are entirely correct to say that having the right to do something is not the same as to be right in doing it. If I understand you correctly, then you are saying that YouTube may very well have the right to yank content as it sees fit, but that is not a morally correct choice. In that case, I understand a little more clearly why you claim my argument is a strawman. I disagree, mind you. I still think that if I own, fund, and maintain a piece of property that is provided free-as-in-beer (as YouTube is), then whether or not it is connected to a public utility -- be that the Internet, the telephone network or the highway system -- is irrelevant, and I think that under some circumstances, failing to pull or censor content may very well be an immoral choice.
For example, suppose, hypothetically speaking, that I was a youth pastor (I am, actually). And suppose that I created a public forum, connected to the Internet, where youth could go to discuss things in their lives, ask questions, etc. (I haven't, but it's not a bad idea...). Now suppose a troll starts posting seriously offensive material (kiddie porn? a pedophile searching for victims? maybe some of the kids are using the forum to bully others?). If I didn't censor the forum, it would soon become unusable for its intended purpose.
There are times and places where restricting the free exchange of ideas is a Bad Thing (tm). If we could trust people to be respectful of others and not be inappropriate, then we could have the ideal of no censorship, period (because we would censor ourselves, of our own free will, when it was necessary). But, unfortunately, there are also irresponsible people who will try to abuse the system, and as a result, in the real world, that ideal is not always possible.
No, that's just an abuse of the law, which I thought was supposed to be punishable under the DMCA. Don't see that happen very often, though, which is truly a shame.
But if they're benefiting from the internet, particularly using it is their primary vehicle for delivery, then it should be.
Ummm...no.
/. car analogy follows!
Yes, the Government built the (original) Internet. You could even argue that through the grants and subsidies to telcos that allowed the Internet to be grown to its current size. However, if I build, pay for and maintain a web server that is connected to the Internet, and upon which I allow users to post media, opinions or whatever, then as the web server owner, I get the right to say what gets put on it.
Warning! Bad
Your argument is like saying that because the Federal Government built the roads and highways upon which I drive my car, anyone in the country should be allowed to use my car any time they want. And that is completely absurd.
I got it wrong, I thought that Free Speech was a right that could not be abridged by anyone, not even a Corporation.
Yep, you got it wrong.
The Bill of Rights* says absolutely nothing about what individuals or corporations can do. It limits what the Government can do through the laws it passes. So, no, sorry to burst your bubble, but Free Speech is not a right that "could not be abridged by anyone, not even a Corporation." "Free Speech" is a guarantee that the Government shall not pass any laws that prohibit speech. It does not guarantee you a corporate-built, corporate-owned, corporate-maintained forum to say whatever you like, whether or not the corporation that runs the forum likes it or not.
Now there is a contract involved with YouTube the EULA and thats what give them the right to abridge your freedom of speech, They don't have the right, outright to do anything they want to muzzle speech. They have a prior legal agreement with the poster on You Tube.
Ummm...yeah. You just contradicted yourself there, dude. If, as you claim, Free Speech is a right that cannot be abridged by anyone, then a contract abridging your Free Speech would be null and void, since such a contract would, in that case, be prohibited by the First Amendment ("No one, not even a corporation can abridge it", remember?). However, since that is most definitely not what the First Amendment says, then such a contract is valid, and YouTube can pull any video it wants, with or without reason, and there's squat you can do about it except complain and try to raise enough groundswell of public opinion that YouTube relents.
Just be clear about your rights.
Now that I agree with.
*Disclaimer: I live in the U.S. and I have no idea where you live. Therefore, my arguments above may or may not apply in your jurisdiction. Furthermore, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Use your own judgment.
So what would improve this? I think users would like computers to ignore error conditions until they're done with all input related to performing an operation, for starters. Don't want them to click through a warning dialog? Ok ... then don't present them with it until the end.
Yikes!!! That sounds all warm and fuzzy, but the first thing that came to my mind was, "Great...the computer detected way back at step one that it can't do anything with the data I am about to enter because my network card failed, so the data won't be stored (no network drive) and it won't be submitted (can't reach the database server). However, it's going to wait until I've taken half an hour to enter everything and *THEN* tell me that I was wasting my time."
Ideally, you could write the data to local storage until it could be submitted, but I've seen web apps do exactly what I described above.
You always, always trap for errors, even if you don't expect them.
Exactly. I've coded this before, and had someone peer-reviewing my code laugh at the "This error message should not be possible. Please contact Sys Admin and explain how you got here, so we can prevent this error in the future." error message I trapped for.
Understanding and perspective are certainly necessary, but definitely not sufficient. Real life is nowhere near as simple as you make it sound. Point by point:
/.'er who posed the original question. Yes, it's obvious he's feeling some frustration. No, some of his options aren't realistic, but then again, this is /. It's fair enough to assume that the readers here will understand the difference between the things he has realistically tried and his venting. We all do it, including, I would wager, you.
1) If you think of O.P.'s comment as being a metaphor (i.e., hurt them enough to train them), it sounds a lot less sexist. His example is simply the most painful thing he can think of. I still believe the carrot is a lot more effective than the stick, but when you get desperate enough, you use the stick, too.
2) Complete and total bovine scatology (i.e., B.S.) From my personal experience, to help my users get the IP address of their machines, I wrote a script that does an "ifconfig eth0" (yes, the computers were running Linux), then created an icon on the desktop that has a red and white checkered flag and says "Help Me" underneath it. All they had to do was click on the picture, and read what it printed on the screen, but if I had a dollar for every tech that said "no," when asked if there was a picture of a flag anywhere on the screen of their monitor that had "Help Me" written underneath it, I could retire and live like a king in Patagonia. Sometimes, no matter how simple you make it, it isn't simple enough. As the saying goes, if you make something idiot proof, they will just build better idiots.
3) Agreed, no one (frequently including myself) RTFM's -- although I maintain that that is often the result of an FM that is thicker than a dictionary, and written by the lowest subcontractor in India, whose only qualifications are having finished first semester English. As far as reading road maps...well, sometimes, and maybe even "frequently", your users will follow a road map to where they want to go, but that's hardly a given. I have users who want to be (repeatedly) spoonfed everything. As in, they won't take any notes when you are explaining something, and will instead call you for help each and every time they need to perform certain tasks (like dragging and dropping icons from one folder to another, and no, I'm not just making that up). And the user I was thinking of as I typed the example above is probably not the most irritating user in the company. We have a couple of users who constantly break things, then whine to their managers and to mine (actually, to my boss's boss), but then are either unavailable or outright lie about having followed our suggestions to resolve the problem. After enough calls like that (from the same people), and it's really, really hard not to start hating at least some of your users.
4) See #2.
I'm not interested in modding you flamebait. You raise some valid points. However, I would encourage you to extend your empathy to the
No joke, this is a true story. I couldn't make this up if I tried.
I was a sys admin at a company that had remote sites scattered all over roughly a million square miles of remote wetlands. We had just built a microwave network to cover parts of this area, but previously, we had used another company's wireless Internet service to provide connectivity to some of our sites. We were migrating one of the sites from wireless to our microwave network, and I had a (very non-technical) tech at the remote site being my eyes and hands. I had the tech connect network cables between a router, a switch and all of our equipment, and instructed him to remove the equipment for the wireless network. "Ok," he tells me. Just to be sure, I reiterate that *all* of the wireless equipment has to be removed because we aren't using any of it anymore. Yep, he understands. We begin to troubleshoot the network. His computer is getting an IP address that is on a completely different network than what I have set the router to assign. It's not even close. None of the four octets match. I double-check my router config -- yep, it's good. I walk him through making sure he's getting a DHCP address rather than a static IP address on the PC. Yep, it's DHCP. I have him disconnect his PC, reboot, and read the IP address -- it's an APIPA address, so he definitely doesn't have a static IP address assigned to his network interface. I have him reconnect the PC and I run TCPDump on the router (it's a Linux based router, with a very complete networking toolset) -- he gets the 192.168.x.y address again, but I don't see any traffic on the network interface. I check, double-check and triple-check that there is nothing between his PC and the router other than the Ethernet cable -- nope, just the network cable. I ask him over and over again in every different way I can think of to phrase the question, because it's apparent to me that he is getting an IP address from something other than my router. No, nothing between the PC and the router but a single Ethernet cable. For THREE FRIGGING DAYS we troubleshoot this connection, and the tech sticks to his story -- there is nothing between the PC and the router except for the Ethernet cable. Finally, I'm done. I've tested everything I can think of. I *know* the wireless router is still connected to his computer, so in desperation, I ask one last time, just to be sure, that he has removed the wireless router and plugged the PC into the Linux-based router I had shipped out.
"Let me try that," he says.
If I could have reached through the phone and strangled him, I would have.
There's the solution, and it saves Google money, to boot. Just use the 300 CCTV cameras to provide real-time street view on Google!
I once read a rather lengthy article on the subject (don't have the link handy, unfortunately) that boiled it down to something like this:
The more questions you answer "yes" to in the list above, the more likely you are to have someone come after you if you publish the photo. Of course, this checklist completely ignores whether or not you should publish a particular photo.
Speak for yourself. I didn't vote for Obama, nor for any of my senators or representatives in Washington, either.
Osama or Obama?
Not that I disagree with you in either case...
That's pretty much irrelevant. As has been said on /. often enough, once it's posted on the Internet, it's essentially impossible to remove it later*.
*Unless what is posted is the only surviving copy of some piece of data that is critically important to you (your masters thesis, the open source project that was going to make you more famous than Linus, photographic evidence that bigfoot and/or the Roswell aliens actually exist, etc.). Then no matter how hard you look, it won't be cached anywhere.
I wonder where you got that 30% figure from?
Taken from the parent post. The way things currently exist in the U.S. (or at least where I work, anyway), I have 7.8% to Social Security, 1.8% to Medicare and just over 6.5% to a rather nice medical and dental plan, for a total deduction of just over 16%. Sounds pretty close to what you already have.
Dang it...sed "s/year/month/g"
I was thinking $12K per year while trying to type $1K per month.
Mod parent up.
Here's my story...I had a kidney transplant 15 years ago. I work for someone else because I can't afford health insurance on my own, and if I were to pay out of my pocket for the anti-rejection medicines that the doctors tell me I will need for the rest of my life, I would spend roughly $12K per month. That's a serious chunk of change, and it assumes that I never have another medical problem of any kind.
However, $12K out-of-pocket is still better than losing 30% of my paycheck to Obamacare (yes, I make more than $40K per year). Looks like even for me, having no health care is better than what Obama is pitching, especially if it went to one of those flexible savings plans where your anticipated health costs for the year are pulled out pre-tax.
Lawmakers since the very dawn of time have been trying to come up with a universal set of rules that would apply in all situations. IMHO, that's a futile effort, unless you can predict every situation that could possibly occur until the end of time. Consequently, it seems better to try to come up with a simple set of laws and allow for the liberal application of common sense. Unfortunately, that solution has its own problems, too (notably that "common sense" is rather a misnomer).
I stand (or sit, rather) corrected. It has been a while since read the books ;)
What you already have rarely stays exciting. This is why affairs happen.
Then you have no imagination ;)
It's been a while since I've read the book as well, but IIRC, the Chinese received a warning shot across the bow before the Really Bad Stuff occurred.