For those wondering how wild colors and stripes on ships would hide them from U-Boats -- it didn't. It made it hard for the U-Boat captains to properly evaluate their targets. The colors and pattern would disrupt the length, angle, and speed clues seen though binoculars at a distance, and through the periscope when preparing to fire torpedoes.

Radar didn't exist during WWI, so U-Boats cruised on the surface with lookouts who could eyeball ships or ship smoke at 10 miles, maybe 20 on a good day. Given their 15-18 knot surface speed and 6-8 knot submerged speed, the U-Boat now had only 30 minutes or so to get into proper position ahead of the approaching ship -- about 4000-6000 yards (2-3 nautical miles) ahead and to one side of the approaching target. WWI German torpedoes could travel 6600 yards at 36 knots, for a max run time of just over 5 minutes. A target ship moving at 12 knots would move 400 yards in a minute. A 600 foot ship travels it's length in only 30 seconds. It's this tiny window that the Razzle-Dazzle would screw up. If the U-Boat captain guessed wrong on the ships movement due to painted false bow waves and extra bow/stern lines, the firing solution would be bad.

Remember that the ship view from the U-Boat was usually against cloudy skies of some sort in the North Atlantic. Add in the blue haze with distance, and the yellows, purples, and pinks start to blur into the background blue-gray sky. Now think of that sight through a wet periscope a few feet above the water, and you get the idea.

WWII had a brilliant camoufalge example in the bizarre sounding Pink Spitfires used for reconnaissance. The pink shade was selected to blend against the just-past-sunset twilight sky and clouds when those aircraft flew, and it was very effective.

Hear hear! For all the "Management Science" out there, what actually does work? The Waterfall method is hugely limited in software development, and upper management without a clear view is crippling. I was once part of a project where six teams had each developed their own printer drivers for their modules because management neither thought of it or noticed the duplication. Team isolation prevented sharing as well, so six freshly re-invented wheels.

What is it they are crunching on anyway? Did somebody's new skin break the display engine? Did fixing a wall error crump edge detection or LOS calculations? Did a weapons tweak make the ballistics engine puke? Was there a pent-up demand for crawling ants lighting on a display instead of just a glow? Where are the edges of accountability for these things, and which manager is (not) paying for their miscues?

Granted, starting with a well behaved engine or other project module is always going to be risky when you push it to do new or different things. The upper echelons should be aware of this in their design plans. But flogging the oarsmen when you're completely off course is the wrong way to go -- fix the navigator!

The second attempt caught fire, fell over, and sank into the swamp. The third attempt was more successful!

You forgot:

6 - Profit!

More to the point, peer review is NOT theory validation -- it is supposed to be a final edit by an impartial party to find errors of fact, reason, and presentation. It is never supposed to be the "Stamp of Approval" about the topic, it is only a filter to weed out papers not yet ready for publication.

Theory validation comes from those who read the papers and use the information to test, retest, or modify their own experiments to either confirm, deny, or suggest alternatives to the information presented.

To an IPhone near you: Measles and Angry Measles!

This passes the wife test - 3 years and counting so far :)

We both have iPhones so she even uses the remote to turn on specific speakers when she walks into a particular room.

Unbelievably simple (though a tad pricey) setup. Always works.

Barks' work has been inspirational for Spielberg and Lucas...

from Wikipedia:

those comics were of a remarkable quality! they expanded both my knowledge of history (Greeks, Romans, Vikings, etc) and vocabulary immensely. it was also through Barks' stories i learned English (painfully translating word-by-word with a dictionary). it's sad that those characters and stories got so over-simplified for the "Ducktales" cartoon.

for more info on Barks works, check out:
inducks.org
BarksBase

I thought SSH was created to add more safety. ;-)

"under the watch of Republican presidents"

Repeat after me: "Congress is the only government branch that can raise money and spend it."

Oh, maths is so tricky. But you'd be right if the U.S had 700 Million people.

I believe that the US taxpayers are already paying when illegals with no money end up in Emergency Room ( and get some treatment there, eventually). That means the cost is not that different, it's just if the system is fixed more people actually get to live longer for about the same amount of money spent. Rather than just getting stabilized and dying soon after (wasted $$$) or making regular visits to ER since they don't get proper healthcare and just "emergency care". And here's another thing to think about - the more people cluttering up the ERs = the less ER resources for you if you ever need it. Even if the hospitals don't treat them, their dead bodies could get in the way of your critically injured body.

To me, it just shows how ignorant most US people are. They are already _paying_ lots of money for their broken system (more per capita than UK's NHS). They pay for Medicare, Medicaid. They pay for illegal immigrant ER. They pay to HMOs, etc. And then when stuff happens, way too many of them don't get much after all that paying (the number of healthcare related bankruptcies is very high in the USA). And then the US people scream "No!!!" when their President actually tries to fix it. Maybe he's trying to fix it the wrong way, but plain "No!!!" isn't going to help much, since the system is clearly broken. Why not just come up with better suggestions? If most of the US people don't think it can be fixed or don't want it fixed, that actually reflects rather poorly on the USA and the US people.

Look, if it's all about economics and "who cares about the health of 'stupid people'", then Governments shouldn't really try so hard to discourage people from smoking. Most smokers live till near retirement age then die around then or not long after, add enough tobacco taxes and they're good for the economy. And if they take down a few nonsmokers with them via secondhand smoke, that's good too. Since on average those nonsmokers will still live past their main productive years - after that they're taking more out than they're putting in (they may be entitled to "take out" after all their contributions but hard economic fact is the longer they live the more they'd take out).

Stupid people will say "But dying from lung cancer is expensive!". Here's the bad news, you will eventually die of something. And the odds are it'll be about as expensive, or even more expensive. And if you follow all those health tips on eating well and keeping fit, you'd lower your odds of dying of heart disease and stroke, but that means the odds of dying from cancer (and other stuff) go up.

Oh and if you live really long, keeping a person in a nursing home for a decade or more isn't cheap. Your body or/and mind[1] will fall apart and you'd need help.

So if people want to talk hard economics, that's some hard economics for them.

My suggestion is there should be subsidized healthcare for everyone. BUT it's limited to a finite quota per person. e.g. stuff like max of 400K every 2 years, with a max of 1 million per lifetime, adjusted for inflation and country's finances. Figures are just for example - let the actuarists and economists work it out.

Once you run out, too bad so sad - the country and taxpayers have done what they can reasonably afford for you. If you have money or other source of money, you can still pay full rate at hospitals (private or otherwise). No more taxpayer money for you.

But what if you are some poor but "exceptionally deserving" person?

OK, here's one workaround (I'm not sure how good and practical it is)- other people can choose to apply to sacrifice some of their quota for you (subject to regulations so that stupid and illiterate people don't get conned too much - hey there's no 100% when it comes to stupidity ok?).

How do you stop people from blowing away their quota on useless treatments? I don't know. It depends on how much freedom you want the system to have. I'd say you wouldn't want to allow people to spend their quota on quack doctors.

No shit.

It's "politically correct" to say the civil war was "about slavery" today. It is, however, nearly total bullshit.

The civil war happened because the North had been grumbling about wanting higher tariffs (in their mind, more $ to pay for an increasing budget) and wanting to implement them on the South's main agricultural products. The South saw that this was almost inevitable and wanted out when a President was elected without the electoral votes of a single Southern state.

The civil war was about economics pure and simple. Slavery, and decrees to abolish it, were simply a weapon used by the North for the purpose of psychological warfare via the creation of domestic troubles (loss of farm workers) for their opponents.

It's apparent you're unaware of what a Free Market is. Educate yourself. http://mises.org/

Sorry, but no, it's not sound at all, particularly when applied to life and death situations. We're not talking about some self-entitled "right" to own a big screen TV or a PS3, we're talking about human lives.

Other countries can manage a much better return on the dollar (or euro, yen, etc) for health care. If the US government is so terrible that it cannot do what other governments have already done, then maybe people should try to reform government instead of fighting health care reform?

And how many dollars is "zillions" anyway? Certainly significantly less than the "zillions" paid to transform Iraq from a secular dictatorship into a theocratic one...