You are a bit behind the times. Private insurance is now paying less than medicare reimbursement on many E&M codes. See link http://www.physicianspractice.com/index/fuseaction/articles.details/articleID/1434.htm

Medicare used to be the floor but it's apparently becoming the ceiling now.

I have been telling my congress critters that a public option is important to me. I'd love to start my own business but I can't afford to pay for insurance for my family without getting it through an established company.

Secret ballots are a help to prevent vote selling. If you don't know how I voted you don't know if I voted the way you paid me to vote.

In some ways it's actually worse. My wife overheard parents talking about all the tough projects their kids had to do and how the parents ended up doing most of the work. When they asked my wife what she did with her kids, she told them, "We just make them do the work. How else will they learn?"

This was for elementary school. I was shocked as who cares about the kids grades in elementary school? This is the time to learn and do it yourself. My kids do their own planning for science fairs, pinewood derby, and school projects. We help and advise but they have to do the work.

Some where along the line people have forgotten how important failure is. You learn more by failing than getting it right the first time.

I was able to visit one christian private school in the San Francisco Bay area was and looked at one of their geology text books. The chapter on the Earth structure started out saying that since God created the Earth and because people can never hope to fully understand God's will, mankind can never understand the structure of the Earth. I feel sorry for the kids who went to that school.

As someone involved in developing children's software in the mid to late 90s at The Learning Company, we designed games to match standards and tried to avoid multiple choice questions (which is really just one of the lowest levels of Bloom's Taxometry of Learning) and try to move up the hierarchy. The problem is that you really need some kind of intelligence to interpret a child's answers when you get into more sophisticated learning.

Early games that had more sophisticated problem solving like Rocky's Boots or open ending exploring like Millie's Math House got left behind as the things turned mass market and it became important for marketing purposes to put a year in a box.

Games like Lemonade stand teach lots of things having to do with running a business. Predict your sales, market your product, price your product appropriately. Some versions are more sophisticated than others.

Sure Oregon Trail doesn't handle issues when the players diverge from what would be expected behavior on the trail and in a classroom where you are leading a unit on the Oregon Trail teachers should be watching something about what the children are doing. But if you are just playing a game then sure play to win.

And young kids should be using chalk, crayons, and other tactile objects instead of spending too much time on computers. I remember letters from parents and teachers who used my products and it helped kids learn to read but I wouldn't use those programs as a substitute for a teacher but using computer programs and a good teacher are beneficial.

The second to last sentence in the article. Maybe they have. "I want to be the president of China," said three-year-old girl, Liu Xiao Liao. "Then people will be scared of me."

NPR the main organization gets about 2% of revenues from the government. All in competitive grants.

Member stations might get as much as 14% from government (individual stations) and I'll bet most of that goes to stations that service areas thinly populated but I can't find figures.

As for bias, it will depend upon your on point of view but the best NPR shows have a bias to the truth. Air Talk with Larry Mantle has had some of the best reporting on an issue and he is comfortable calling out speakers who don't tell the truth on the air.

I've seen that very few NPR shows will call out a speaker's comments when they contradict fact, no matter if the speaker is conservative or liberal.

As long as the news is just a mouthpiece for groups to put their own spin on facts, truth suffers. We need more reporters like Larry Mantle who call out speakers who don't tell the truth.

No body likes the truth-sayers though (ask any whistle blower) and I doubt there's much of a business model for truth these days.

German or Designer board games often balance things by auctions or player choice. There are still first move advantages but auction do help balance.

Though different game groups often have different balance points. I've played with some groups that valued items differently in Princes of Florence than my usual group did.

Some games like Power Grid reverse the turn order to give advantages to players behind.

And Agricola has different players all picking from exclusive actions where each player is trying to follow their own strategy based on some of their cards (minor improvements and occupations).

Designer board games are fairly well balanced but skill will generally put you ahead. They are often designed to play with the entire family (most have rules about the youngest player going first usually a kid playing against parents).

Sure some of these games can be considered lightly themed, but the interesting part of the games are the mechanics not the theme. Some of the better games have mechanics that go well with the theme. Other games are less successful in matching theme to mechanic. Some of us are more interested in the mechanics though.

If whatever Nasa is working with developers to build is similar to the old Earth Orbit Stations (obviously updated as it's 20 years old)
there is a lot of potential for game play.

Certainly there's no reason to build a Diku type MUD/MMO where each player is a character. It probably doesn't have to be a persistent world either in the sense of going in and moving around, but persistent in keeping track of what projects you have attempted.

They could easily simulate multiple countries or companies racing for objectives. First team to capture a comet and deliver it to moon orbit for volatiles.

They could allow experimentation with different types of fuel. With SSO or stage designs. Try different ways of building a beanstalk.

And on the business side, clearly there's a minimum size but if it is popular enough then they can plan for expansions. It's the web so updating it should be part of the project plan.