Nintendo's management seems incapable of admitting that their current situation is the direct result of them seeing if they can make a human ouroboros by shoving their heads so far up their asses they're nibbling on their stomach lining. Their hardware is woefully underpowered, they are not embracing small developers even remotely as well as their competition and no one wants to admit the obvious. They didn't have to release the Wii U when they did. They could easily have afforded to release a new console around last Christmas with similar specs to the XBone PS4. They could have even released one that was a bit weaker, but broke even and gotten third party support by waving most of the licensing costs for the first two years for anyone willing to make a game for their system. Heck they could have create a Nintendo quality Ouya-like system and turned the console market on its head.
But Nintendo did what Nintendo does. They pretended that their brand is still so strong that they can do what they've always done and ignore the fact that Microsoft opened half of the seals of the video game apocalypse by creating the XBox which is a steady progression from gaming toy to a powerful, dedicated and cheap entertainment PC that is open to developers. The fact that Super Mario World 3D sold so poorly when it came out should have been an indicator to Nintendo that they need to clean house and hire people who seem to actually understand what is going on in the market today. This isn't 1992. Nintendo faces real competition with much stronger backing than Sega ever could have brought to bear.
Pass a resolution calling for the prosecution of all federal agents who engaged in the practice of "parallel constructions" and in particular try the entire clandestine side of the DEA as a criminal conspiracy operating under color of authority for its major role in that.
Is it just me or do the people who want you to work in open offices sound like the nobility in Downton Abbey?"
Lord Grantham (Robert) and his family regretted having to change with the times to become more efficiency-focused in their dealings with their renters and workers. These people are gleeful by comparison.
If people (or more likely corporations) are ideologically opposed to contributing back to the communtiy because they dont want to mix "their valuable IP" with the communities IP then are a dead weight to us.
And yet even there they are doing something good by using it. This is especially true of FOSS frameworks, libraries, etc. The more jobs that use them, the more value knowing the work becomes and that means you attract more potential contributors. Besides, at some point you run into situations like when Microsoft decided to add intellisense support to jQuery and build solid support into Visual Studio. Then a lot of these people suddenly stiffen up when a company with that clout decides to throw in some of its IP lot with the project.
while pointing out that the fossil fuels industry is also heavily subsidized by government
Every single, solitary last time I've seen this argument trotted out by environmentalists, leftists, etc. the only thing they can point to is the various governments involved giving them tax credits. In their minds, letting the fossil fuel industry keep more of its revenue is akin to the various loans and other goodies thrown at the clean energy sector.
The most likely explanation is that most of those societies are poorer and tend to place far higher levels of prestige in degrees that tend to hold lasting value in the marketplace. Engineering is one of the very best examples of that. Can you even imagine a woman who isn't literally intending to turn her degree into nothing more than a chance to find a husband in India or China saying to her parents that she'd turn down a prestigious engineering school to study Political Science, Art History, Women's Studies, "Business" (of which she could learn more by running a food truck than going to most Business Schools)? Of course not.
Let's be a little logical about this. Western women have far more social freedom than Eastern Women. If there is any region less likely to suppress women from following their natural desires it'd be us. Eastern Women are not different creatures from ours. The difference is that engineering is more prestigious there and there is a much higher need for Eastern Women to major in something worth a damn because the consequences of getting a shitty degree that confers no middle to upper class prospects is much higher.
I have a 5.5 year old MBP and it runs Mavericks almost perfectly as well as it ran Leopard. The case for not upgrading to Mavericks if you have a x86 Mac that is the age of mine or newer is based almost entirely on being a curmudgeon who doesn't want someone telling him to just move onto the next version. The vast majority of the refuseniks are likely not savvy users objecting to the "iOSification" of MacOS X or something like that, but ordinary idiots who blink at you with a blank expression when you ask what version of OS X they use. "Huh? Macs haver versions?" Yeah. My wife and I have met a lot of casual Mac users who don't seem to understand that no, really, MacOS X has versions just like Windows and that using the same OS X that came with your Mac three or four years later is like saying "I don't need that service pack shit" on Windows.
Why do you assume that the NSA's charter entitles them to break the laws of other countries?
For the same reason that most of the world thinks they're perfectly within their rights to conduct espionage on US soil. That is to say, in the entire recorded history of humanity, governments have never taken a principled opposition to breaking another government's laws when it suited their interests. Your viewpoint is not enlightened, it's just ahistorical and naive.
In an ideal system, the NSA would be by law required to wiretap all public officials and directly publish their communications to the Library of Congress with a daily transcript of "dirty conversations" sent to the FBI and appropriate OIG for human analysis. Given how Congress operates these days, and how successful they've been at pushing back on FBI attempts (post ABSCAM) to reign in congressional corruption, part of me while deeply opposed to what the NSA has been caught doing wants to see the NSA ordered to go Stasi on them.
Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. 'Is that clear?'"
The "grudges" that most Christian denominations hold against each other, if one can even call them grudges by now, are by and large substantially less the fighting over operating systems by geeks. The Catholics officially regard baptized Protestants as Catholics who are out of communion with Rome. The term is "separated brethren," not "those damn heretics" now. Likewise, most Protestant denominations, even conservative ones, may harshly criticize the Catholic Church on issues of doctrine but regard observant Catholics as fellow Christians. The level of animosity is significantly less except on the outliers than Stross realizes, but then as far as I know he's an atheist and like most atheists he tends to think far too highly of his knowledge of religion especially Christianity.
If you think that what they are doing is not a crime, try to do the same and get caught
The same is true of taxation, but I don't see you complaining about that either. The government has natural authority which individuals do not when there exists a legitimate government. One of those is defense and intelligence gathering is now as critical to national defense as any weapon system if not more so.
The fact is that the NSA needs these tools for the same reason the Army needs weapons ranging from small arms to weapons of mass destruction. It needs tools that let it collect signals intelligence on foreign targets. And yes, that includes our "allies." They do it as much to as we do it to them. It's understood that it happens. Even the British and Canadians wouldn't be shy about collecting Top Secret data on our operations that we want to keep from them if they could acquire it without jeopardizing their highly productive and close relationship with the US.
Americans should be outraged that the NSA is now deeply integrated with federal law enforcement per 9/11 "reforms" that all but created an integrated security state. That puts our rights deeply at risk. Prior to 9/11, the most the NSA could legally do was inform Customs and the Coast Guard that smugglers were en route to US territorial waters or airspace. Now, they're damn near as much of an intelligence arm for law enforcement as the military.
What we need is an iron clad, black letter of the law statute that says that no data the NSA collects on Americans is legally admissible unless the communication was collected abroad, occurred entirely outside of US territory and is specifically of a nature that is dangerous to our national security.
DHS is clustered heavily in DC and the areas immediately outside of DC within the beltway. The cost of moving to this area just to work could easily add $10k-$12k in debt or lost savings for just a single summer. This is simply not an internship that makes sense for any student who comes from a family lacking real wealth.
Is that the NSA is now an arm of law enforcement. The new FISA statute requires them to turn over actionable law enforcement intelligence they acquire during lawful FISA spying. That means literally any crime, not just serious violations of national security. If the NSA's spying still was only legally usable against you where your behavior intersects with federal war powers (meaning you're a terrorist, spy or foreign mole) I doubt most people would care.
What the NSA should be doing is lobbying to have that part of FISA not only removed, but replaced with black letter of the law statutory language that unequivocally makes their intelligence inadmissable in a court of law under penalty of tainting every charge prosecutors bring including ones wholly unrelated to what the NSA gathered. This would make the NSA useless to law enforcement and allow them to get back to focusing on supporting the military which was their main reason for being in the first place.
How about we respect the fact that the plane is the property of the airline and let them set policy accordingly. I mean holy crap on a cracker Batman, civility will break down because someone is talking (at most likely) conversational volume on a cell phone on a long flight that already has cranky and cramped adults, babies and drunks.
One thing that/. readers often fail to take into consideration is that many companies may find that it's easier to outsource to a company with a solid reputation for hiring good people than to try to hire good people on its own. For smaller companies in particular, there's a hiring bootstrap problem here. They have to hire the right people who will be able to identify the candidates to build a solid IT team. A lot can go wrong, and many companies may in fact benefit from outsourcing to a reputable company who they can sue the hell out of if there is an issue and a highly paid consultant can point the finger at them cutting corners to make a few extra bucks.
States rights is not about allowing oppression, but allowing the people of a state to organize a government fitting their culture. Our current system does not allow this. Rather, it forces each state to adhere to what the federal judiciary and Congress believe should be a one-size-fits-all vision of America. Anyone who has looked at a "red/blue map" of America knows that we are dividied country, now more than ever in our history, and we need to devolve decision making down to the community level as much as possible. Most of our bad federal policies these days come from forcing all important decision making as high up the government food chain as possible rather than letting communities decide. So now you have a culture war between Chicago and the rural South and Midwest over gun rights because the federal government is inextricably involved that the two views cannot coexist within their communities.
As America becomes more diverse, poorer and the federal government more strained we will face a choice. Either we can devolve decision making to communities to take pressure off of the central government or face the inevitable acrimony as large minorities decide to break away because they are tired of having their visions consistently crushed by a small majority.
The further down decision making is pushed, the easier it is for political rights to be upheld. It's easier for a minority (political, racial or otherwise) to rebel or relocate when most decisions are made at the local level than the federal level. The further down you go, the smaller the political authority you are challenging. It's easier to challenge a mayor and sheriff than a governor; it's easier to rise up against a governor than the President with the backing of the US Army. It's much harder to justify federal involvement in an armed conflict between a revolting minority in one city when the federal government is not being challenged.
If you are budgeted 40 hours a week for six months, you can only work 40 hours/week for six months as a government contractor, salaried or not. Those are literally the only hours you can legally bill to the customer. That means that if you do 80 hours a week with only 40 paid, the business has literally taken away your ability to make a salary for those remaining 3 months unless they have new coverage. It is worse than normal salaried over time.
CGI was selected in part because they were one of only a handful of companies that got on the task order from DHHS that covered this and many other big CMS contracts. This system is designed to make it extremely difficult to just start a business and put out a bid. The justifications for it are very flimsy and center around things like making sure that some fly-by-night company doesn't get the contract/screening out junk bids. Poblem is, they don't actually work. In many cases, they just let the "primes" that win the slots act as funnels for the actual work done by subcontracts which just adds to the cost of the contract.
Another thing, if the reddit thread on this was correct, CMS needs to do what the DoD increasingly does with overtime which is to scrutinize or reject invoices with more than 80 hours per two weeks per employee unless the overtime was either authorized or can be explained in reasonable terms. Overworked government contractors don't get rich; their employers do at the expense of the employee and government. One thing often left unappreciated by the general public is that unpaid overtime is literally stealing employment from the employee because a salaried employee is only authorized to bill so many hours to a contract during a period of performance.
Put the territory under some sort of corporate or government control and let the employees in charge of the territory use deadly force to stop the poachers. Works quite well in Africa where their game reserve rangers can put a.308 through you quite legally if they catch you hunting endangered species.
Or Kucinich. Only a radical like Paul or Kucinich would have the ideology and the stones to order the FBI to dismantle the DEA's special operations division and treat every employee of the same as a probable criminal conspirator who conspired to systematically perjure themselves to win cases in federal court. You won't get this from a "mainstream guy" because moderates are moderates almost invariably because they either stand for nothing or have the intestinal fortitude of a freshly butchered lamb. One of the best articles I've ever read on moderates and why moderates have such a pernicious history in American politics is "The Paranoid Center" by Reason.
If the threat was as real as they say it is, the CIA's clandestine service would be the largest it's ever been since the agency was founded and Bush/Obama would have told them to take the kid gloves off in dealing with Al Qaeda. By that I mean the CIA (or MI6 here) would have been given carte blanche to go abroad and use the full playbook of nasty espionage tactics. You'd think a "Mossad times ten" had suddenly hit the major terrorist networks.
They succeeded because the governor accepted a system that doesn't do it all, but gets right what it does. That is totally bass ackwards from how government normally does it in the US. It's pretty normal for 1.0 to be just about everything and the kitchen sink, not a modest product that's well-tested and positioned for rapid iteration through point releases to address bugs the full user base finds and new features.
Goodlatte is a very mixed bag. Very pro strong encryption when that was highly controversial for politicians back in the 1990s. However, he also played a key role in giving us the DMCA and wrote the NET Act (No Electronic Theft Act) which made mass file sharing for no profit even between friends a felony. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out because he's like a compromise between the Republican leadership and the Tea Party. He may in fact be the only Republican who can force a majority of both sides in the party to hear reason.
You can't negotiate a price when you need an ambulance or emergency care.
Simply applying price-gouging laws to the medical profession and outlawing price shifting (ie you cannot legally recoup a poor man's emergency care by adding 20% of it to my bill in ways like a $50 aspirin) would stop most of what you claim the free market cannot fix. It should be so obvious as to be cliche, but since you seem to be a leftist moron, I'll spell it out for you... Free market != laissez faire capitalism. There is a place for price gouging laws to prevent, for example, a hospital from taking an antivenom that costs $400 to make and charging over $30k to administer it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo's management seems incapable of admitting that their current situation is the direct result of them seeing if they can make a human ouroboros by shoving their heads so far up their asses they're nibbling on their stomach lining. Their hardware is woefully underpowered, they are not embracing small developers even remotely as well as their competition and no one wants to admit the obvious. They didn't have to release the Wii U when they did. They could easily have afforded to release a new console around last Christmas with similar specs to the XBone PS4. They could have even released one that was a bit weaker, but broke even and gotten third party support by waving most of the licensing costs for the first two years for anyone willing to make a game for their system. Heck they could have create a Nintendo quality Ouya-like system and turned the console market on its head.
But Nintendo did what Nintendo does. They pretended that their brand is still so strong that they can do what they've always done and ignore the fact that Microsoft opened half of the seals of the video game apocalypse by creating the XBox which is a steady progression from gaming toy to a powerful, dedicated and cheap entertainment PC that is open to developers. The fact that Super Mario World 3D sold so poorly when it came out should have been an indicator to Nintendo that they need to clean house and hire people who seem to actually understand what is going on in the market today. This isn't 1992. Nintendo faces real competition with much stronger backing than Sega ever could have brought to bear.
Pass a resolution calling for the prosecution of all federal agents who engaged in the practice of "parallel constructions" and in particular try the entire clandestine side of the DEA as a criminal conspiracy operating under color of authority for its major role in that.
Lord Grantham (Robert) and his family regretted having to change with the times to become more efficiency-focused in their dealings with their renters and workers. These people are gleeful by comparison.
And yet even there they are doing something good by using it. This is especially true of FOSS frameworks, libraries, etc. The more jobs that use them, the more value knowing the work becomes and that means you attract more potential contributors. Besides, at some point you run into situations like when Microsoft decided to add intellisense support to jQuery and build solid support into Visual Studio. Then a lot of these people suddenly stiffen up when a company with that clout decides to throw in some of its IP lot with the project.
But I don't think you know what it means...
Every single, solitary last time I've seen this argument trotted out by environmentalists, leftists, etc. the only thing they can point to is the various governments involved giving them tax credits. In their minds, letting the fossil fuel industry keep more of its revenue is akin to the various loans and other goodies thrown at the clean energy sector.
The most likely explanation is that most of those societies are poorer and tend to place far higher levels of prestige in degrees that tend to hold lasting value in the marketplace. Engineering is one of the very best examples of that. Can you even imagine a woman who isn't literally intending to turn her degree into nothing more than a chance to find a husband in India or China saying to her parents that she'd turn down a prestigious engineering school to study Political Science, Art History, Women's Studies, "Business" (of which she could learn more by running a food truck than going to most Business Schools)? Of course not.
Let's be a little logical about this. Western women have far more social freedom than Eastern Women. If there is any region less likely to suppress women from following their natural desires it'd be us. Eastern Women are not different creatures from ours. The difference is that engineering is more prestigious there and there is a much higher need for Eastern Women to major in something worth a damn because the consequences of getting a shitty degree that confers no middle to upper class prospects is much higher.
I have a 5.5 year old MBP and it runs Mavericks almost perfectly as well as it ran Leopard. The case for not upgrading to Mavericks if you have a x86 Mac that is the age of mine or newer is based almost entirely on being a curmudgeon who doesn't want someone telling him to just move onto the next version. The vast majority of the refuseniks are likely not savvy users objecting to the "iOSification" of MacOS X or something like that, but ordinary idiots who blink at you with a blank expression when you ask what version of OS X they use. "Huh? Macs haver versions?" Yeah. My wife and I have met a lot of casual Mac users who don't seem to understand that no, really, MacOS X has versions just like Windows and that using the same OS X that came with your Mac three or four years later is like saying "I don't need that service pack shit" on Windows.
For the same reason that most of the world thinks they're perfectly within their rights to conduct espionage on US soil. That is to say, in the entire recorded history of humanity, governments have never taken a principled opposition to breaking another government's laws when it suited their interests. Your viewpoint is not enlightened, it's just ahistorical and naive.
In an ideal system, the NSA would be by law required to wiretap all public officials and directly publish their communications to the Library of Congress with a daily transcript of "dirty conversations" sent to the FBI and appropriate OIG for human analysis. Given how Congress operates these days, and how successful they've been at pushing back on FBI attempts (post ABSCAM) to reign in congressional corruption, part of me while deeply opposed to what the NSA has been caught doing wants to see the NSA ordered to go Stasi on them.
The "grudges" that most Christian denominations hold against each other, if one can even call them grudges by now, are by and large substantially less the fighting over operating systems by geeks. The Catholics officially regard baptized Protestants as Catholics who are out of communion with Rome. The term is "separated brethren," not "those damn heretics" now. Likewise, most Protestant denominations, even conservative ones, may harshly criticize the Catholic Church on issues of doctrine but regard observant Catholics as fellow Christians. The level of animosity is significantly less except on the outliers than Stross realizes, but then as far as I know he's an atheist and like most atheists he tends to think far too highly of his knowledge of religion especially Christianity.
The same is true of taxation, but I don't see you complaining about that either. The government has natural authority which individuals do not when there exists a legitimate government. One of those is defense and intelligence gathering is now as critical to national defense as any weapon system if not more so.
The fact is that the NSA needs these tools for the same reason the Army needs weapons ranging from small arms to weapons of mass destruction. It needs tools that let it collect signals intelligence on foreign targets. And yes, that includes our "allies." They do it as much to as we do it to them. It's understood that it happens. Even the British and Canadians wouldn't be shy about collecting Top Secret data on our operations that we want to keep from them if they could acquire it without jeopardizing their highly productive and close relationship with the US.
Americans should be outraged that the NSA is now deeply integrated with federal law enforcement per 9/11 "reforms" that all but created an integrated security state. That puts our rights deeply at risk. Prior to 9/11, the most the NSA could legally do was inform Customs and the Coast Guard that smugglers were en route to US territorial waters or airspace. Now, they're damn near as much of an intelligence arm for law enforcement as the military.
What we need is an iron clad, black letter of the law statute that says that no data the NSA collects on Americans is legally admissible unless the communication was collected abroad, occurred entirely outside of US territory and is specifically of a nature that is dangerous to our national security.
DHS is clustered heavily in DC and the areas immediately outside of DC within the beltway. The cost of moving to this area just to work could easily add $10k-$12k in debt or lost savings for just a single summer. This is simply not an internship that makes sense for any student who comes from a family lacking real wealth.
Is that the NSA is now an arm of law enforcement. The new FISA statute requires them to turn over actionable law enforcement intelligence they acquire during lawful FISA spying. That means literally any crime, not just serious violations of national security. If the NSA's spying still was only legally usable against you where your behavior intersects with federal war powers (meaning you're a terrorist, spy or foreign mole) I doubt most people would care.
What the NSA should be doing is lobbying to have that part of FISA not only removed, but replaced with black letter of the law statutory language that unequivocally makes their intelligence inadmissable in a court of law under penalty of tainting every charge prosecutors bring including ones wholly unrelated to what the NSA gathered. This would make the NSA useless to law enforcement and allow them to get back to focusing on supporting the military which was their main reason for being in the first place.
How about we respect the fact that the plane is the property of the airline and let them set policy accordingly. I mean holy crap on a cracker Batman, civility will break down because someone is talking (at most likely) conversational volume on a cell phone on a long flight that already has cranky and cramped adults, babies and drunks.
One thing that /. readers often fail to take into consideration is that many companies may find that it's easier to outsource to a company with a solid reputation for hiring good people than to try to hire good people on its own. For smaller companies in particular, there's a hiring bootstrap problem here. They have to hire the right people who will be able to identify the candidates to build a solid IT team. A lot can go wrong, and many companies may in fact benefit from outsourcing to a reputable company who they can sue the hell out of if there is an issue and a highly paid consultant can point the finger at them cutting corners to make a few extra bucks.
States rights is not about allowing oppression, but allowing the people of a state to organize a government fitting their culture. Our current system does not allow this. Rather, it forces each state to adhere to what the federal judiciary and Congress believe should be a one-size-fits-all vision of America. Anyone who has looked at a "red/blue map" of America knows that we are dividied country, now more than ever in our history, and we need to devolve decision making down to the community level as much as possible. Most of our bad federal policies these days come from forcing all important decision making as high up the government food chain as possible rather than letting communities decide. So now you have a culture war between Chicago and the rural South and Midwest over gun rights because the federal government is inextricably involved that the two views cannot coexist within their communities.
As America becomes more diverse, poorer and the federal government more strained we will face a choice. Either we can devolve decision making to communities to take pressure off of the central government or face the inevitable acrimony as large minorities decide to break away because they are tired of having their visions consistently crushed by a small majority.
The further down decision making is pushed, the easier it is for political rights to be upheld. It's easier for a minority (political, racial or otherwise) to rebel or relocate when most decisions are made at the local level than the federal level. The further down you go, the smaller the political authority you are challenging. It's easier to challenge a mayor and sheriff than a governor; it's easier to rise up against a governor than the President with the backing of the US Army. It's much harder to justify federal involvement in an armed conflict between a revolting minority in one city when the federal government is not being challenged.
If you are budgeted 40 hours a week for six months, you can only work 40 hours/week for six months as a government contractor, salaried or not. Those are literally the only hours you can legally bill to the customer. That means that if you do 80 hours a week with only 40 paid, the business has literally taken away your ability to make a salary for those remaining 3 months unless they have new coverage. It is worse than normal salaried over time.
CGI was selected in part because they were one of only a handful of companies that got on the task order from DHHS that covered this and many other big CMS contracts. This system is designed to make it extremely difficult to just start a business and put out a bid. The justifications for it are very flimsy and center around things like making sure that some fly-by-night company doesn't get the contract/screening out junk bids. Poblem is, they don't actually work. In many cases, they just let the "primes" that win the slots act as funnels for the actual work done by subcontracts which just adds to the cost of the contract.
Another thing, if the reddit thread on this was correct, CMS needs to do what the DoD increasingly does with overtime which is to scrutinize or reject invoices with more than 80 hours per two weeks per employee unless the overtime was either authorized or can be explained in reasonable terms. Overworked government contractors don't get rich; their employers do at the expense of the employee and government. One thing often left unappreciated by the general public is that unpaid overtime is literally stealing employment from the employee because a salaried employee is only authorized to bill so many hours to a contract during a period of performance.
Put the territory under some sort of corporate or government control and let the employees in charge of the territory use deadly force to stop the poachers. Works quite well in Africa where their game reserve rangers can put a .308 through you quite legally if they catch you hunting endangered species.
Or Kucinich. Only a radical like Paul or Kucinich would have the ideology and the stones to order the FBI to dismantle the DEA's special operations division and treat every employee of the same as a probable criminal conspirator who conspired to systematically perjure themselves to win cases in federal court. You won't get this from a "mainstream guy" because moderates are moderates almost invariably because they either stand for nothing or have the intestinal fortitude of a freshly butchered lamb. One of the best articles I've ever read on moderates and why moderates have such a pernicious history in American politics is "The Paranoid Center" by Reason.
If the threat was as real as they say it is, the CIA's clandestine service would be the largest it's ever been since the agency was founded and Bush/Obama would have told them to take the kid gloves off in dealing with Al Qaeda. By that I mean the CIA (or MI6 here) would have been given carte blanche to go abroad and use the full playbook of nasty espionage tactics. You'd think a "Mossad times ten" had suddenly hit the major terrorist networks.
They succeeded because the governor accepted a system that doesn't do it all, but gets right what it does. That is totally bass ackwards from how government normally does it in the US. It's pretty normal for 1.0 to be just about everything and the kitchen sink, not a modest product that's well-tested and positioned for rapid iteration through point releases to address bugs the full user base finds and new features.
Goodlatte is a very mixed bag. Very pro strong encryption when that was highly controversial for politicians back in the 1990s. However, he also played a key role in giving us the DMCA and wrote the NET Act (No Electronic Theft Act) which made mass file sharing for no profit even between friends a felony. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out because he's like a compromise between the Republican leadership and the Tea Party. He may in fact be the only Republican who can force a majority of both sides in the party to hear reason.
Simply applying price-gouging laws to the medical profession and outlawing price shifting (ie you cannot legally recoup a poor man's emergency care by adding 20% of it to my bill in ways like a $50 aspirin) would stop most of what you claim the free market cannot fix. It should be so obvious as to be cliche, but since you seem to be a leftist moron, I'll spell it out for you... Free market != laissez faire capitalism. There is a place for price gouging laws to prevent, for example, a hospital from taking an antivenom that costs $400 to make and charging over $30k to administer it.