More figures, all from 2007, comparing the USA to developed western nations with national health care. See http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html for infant mortality and life expectancy; see http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf for costs. im = infant mortality, L= life expectancy.

United States L= 78.0, im= 6.4, cost $7290, 16.0% of GDP
Canada L= 80.3, im= 4.6, cost $3895, 10.1% of GDP
.
Austria L= 79.2, im= 4.5, cost $3763, 10.1% of GDP
United Kingdom L= 78.7, im= 5.0, cost $2992, 8.4% of GDP
Denmark L= 78.0, im= 4.5, cost $3362, 10.4% of GDP
Finland L= 78.7, im= 3.5, cost $2840, 8.2% of GDP
France L= 79.9, im= 4.2, cost $4763, 11.0% of GDP
Germany L= 79.0, im= 4.1, cost $3527, 10.4% of GDP
Greece L= 79.4, im= 5.3, cost $2727, 9.6% of GDP
Italy L= 79.9, im= 5.7, cost $2686, 8.7% of GDP
Norway L= 79.7, im= 3.6, cost $4763, 8.9% of GDP
Spain L= 79.8, im= 4.3, cost $2671, 8.5% of GDP
Sweden L= 80.6, im= 2.8, cost $3323, 9.1% of GDP
Switzerland L= 80.6, im= 4.3, cost $4417, 10.8% of GDP
Ireland L= 77.9, im= 5.2, cost $3424, 7.6% of GDP
Portugal L= 77.9, im= 4.9, cost $2150, 9.9% of GDP

USA is not worst in class; Ireland and Portugal both have slightly lower life expectancy.

The study cited in TFA only discusses US citizens 65 and above, i.e. those benefiting from nationalized public health care in the form of Medicare. I think the data unequivocally says that people with life-long national health care almost always live longer, and get much more bang for their health care buck.

Overall, life expectancy in Canada and Britain exceed life expectancy in the USA.

Canadian life expectancy = 80.3 years, UK ife expectancy = 78.7 years, and US life expectancy = 78.0 years (in 2007) according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and that's because Canada and the UK have life-long public health care.

But when medicare starts to cover US citizens at age 65, suddenly US citizens have a much better outlook. US citizens lucky enough to survive until age 65 and receive medicare coverage have a longer life expectancy than their British peers.

Actually, if you go back and study the data at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf you'll discover that the US has both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada and almost every developed European democracy (even Germany who absorbed the disaster known as East Germany a few decades back). For what its worth, the US also pays much more per capita for their lower life expectancies. I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...

I think part of the issue here is that IQ tests do not actually measure what they purport to measure. In other words, IQ is supposed to be an innate and immutable indicator of a person's ability. But whatever it is that IQ tests measure, that measurement can be changed by education and cultural circumstances. IQ is supposed to be purely about ability, but in fact it is very much about achievement. And the latest generation of 70 year olds have achieved more, so they score better.

The words that jumped out at me were "prescheduled programming." It sounds like cable card folks still won't have access to on-demand programming. Probably a quarter of our watching is "free" on-demand (i.e. no additional cost), and access to on-demand is a major component of our choice of cable box.

If the FCC isn't going to require that cable card customers also get access to on-demand programming, they haven't fixed much of anything.

Actually, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not authored by Homer. The true author was another blind bard of the same name... (:-)

???? What drive thru degrees????? Many of my grad level courses involved final projects instead of exams. There's still a huge crunch at the end of semester, but it's about the project instead of the exam. Exams are useful for testing theoretical knowledge in mature fields -- such as diff eq or stochastics -- but projects are better tests of applying said theoretical knowledge in an emerging field that a seminar might cover.

Sorry, Rupert! The good folks at SK Hand tools http://www.skhandtool.com/ have had a trademark in SK since 1921. I think you owe them 2/5 of all the revenues BSkyB have taken in since 1989.

Hear hear!

Somebody (I'm too lazy to find the link today) calculated that Big Oil is getting hundreds of billions of dollars per year in subsidies; here's a related link http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-news/spill-highlights-oil-industry-double-game-re-taxes-and-subsidies-06-07.html

I have no qualms with a little of that subsidy being shifted to electric vehicles. If we don't jumpstart the industry, the Chinese certainly will, and it's a damn sight better having production on our shores rather than overseas.

The original article's claim only makes sense if you ignore how economies of scale ramp up and how costs ramp down.

Bush announced Moon-Mars and provided about a billion dollars of funding to "study" Moon Mars. No one ever said where the remaining hundreds of billions of dollars would come from. Moon Mars never had a chance because no one could fund it. However, NASA took billions from unmanned space science to continue to "study" Moon Mars. It's too bad, but since we're not going to pay for a Moon Mars mission, space science is better off spending those billions on robotic probes than on never-to-be-implemented "studies."

You beat me to it.

I will point out that the $4.7 trillion figure sounds as exaggerated as the loss numbers claimed the RIAA.

Exaggerate? I don't know the meaning of the word!

See http://www.pendrivelinux.com/run-pendrivelinux-2009-in-windows/

Pendrivelinux uses colinux http://www.colinux.org/ to run a linux kernel as a windows process without using any general purpose PC virtualization software.

I have not used pendrivelinux 2009, but I have an earlier version of pendrivelinux based on the Qemu emulator. Here's a link to Qemu USB Pendrivelinux Persistent Linux: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/portable-qemu-persistent-pendrivelinux/

You might want to experiment with both of these options. .

In about 1985, the then governor of Wisconsin wanted to change the license plate motto (America's Dairyland) to something more exciting. A popular suggestion was

Eat Cheese or Die

Unfortunately this suggestion did not survive. I believe the time is ripe to try again to implement this new motto.

If you think I invented phony "facts," see http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/us/wisconsin-s-license-plates-won-t-say-eat-cheese-or-die.html

This is not the kind of problem Apple does well on. Apple is brilliant at honing user interfaces. Search is hard work and takes massive data crunching. It's the kind of work Apple traditionally farms out.

The problem Apple has with the iphone is they just farmed out too much. There's not enough Apple controlled stuff in the iphone for Apple to maintain control. Apple controls email, but that's not hard. Apple doesn't control the voice or data circuits, but those are commodities, so not a problem. Apple farmed out maps. That's more of a problem; only MS and Google do maps reasonably well. Apple farmed out search. That's a problem.

Apple controls the browser, but that's more of a bug than a feature because the browser is so feature-limited that most functions that could be done by websites on a full-featured browser (for example, IMDB or shopping at Lands End) need a dedicated app on the iphone. Apple is rightly afraid of an infection vector thru the browser, but the result is thousands of 'apps' that simply substitute for websites on a fully functional browser.

The upshot is the features of the iphone are too easy to duplicate on other machines. Websites do the job of most apps, and maps and search are already controlled by google. What's left?

Actually there is one thing left, but it's also the kind of hard job that Apple doesn't handle well. Right now we pick phones based on how easy it is to enter data without a keyboard. That's pretty ludicrous when you think about it. If we could input data to a phone by speaking into it how amazing would that be? Yeah, I know, voice rec is hard, but when it comes along it's going to be the only kind of smartphone worth owning. And Apple isn't even working on it.

I can't remember if the funding for the supercollider was already allocated. What I do remember is that the cost projections had a nasty habit of doubling every few years. Whatever was allocated was inadequate. I know it wasn't a case of bait-n-switch, but it smelled just like it. And it should have been built on the grounds of Fermilab so the existing ring could be an injector. Too much politics was played with the supercollider.

In 2004 George W Bush gave NASA the ambitious mission to send men to the Moon and Mars, but he never allocated significant funding for Moon-Mars, see http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/ So all NASA could really do was "study" the mission. And even to do that NASA had to cannibalize other (unmanned) space science missions (maybe that's the explanation for the delay of DSCOVR http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0903/01dscovr/ a mission to Lagrange 1 that had already been paid for designed and built). Just like Bush, Obama is not funding Moon-Mars. However, unlike Bush, Obama is not pretending someone else will fund it.

I agree that wasting NASA money sucks. And I know this sounds more like a "blame Bush" rant than I would like. But I think most fans of space science agree that ordering Moon-Mars without funding it was going to lead to grief at some point.