The U.S has several health care systems operating in parallel:

• At it's basic, the it's a fee for service business, with distortions from the side effects of various laws, regulations, and other systems. One distortion is that I think all states require that providing emergency services cannot be refused - treat first, demand payment later. A lot of uninsured people get treated this way, and if they're too poor to afford insurance, they're usually too poor to pay. This means a lot of money is wasted on debt collection, and a lot of fees just go unpaid. All prices in a hospital are jacked up to cover the losses - so an aspirin tablet in hospital costs $10.
• The insurance system added on changes things. Insurance is usually too expensive for individuals, so it's almost always through employers. The main expense here is the hospitals and doctors trying to get payment. The insurance companies are adversarial, and try to avoid paying as much as possible. They will hire doctors to claim procedures are unnecessary (often as a rubber stamp to meet a quota of rejections), or reject forms for small technical mistakes, etc. Micheal Moore's movie focussed on this. The adversarial system is supposed to prevent unnecessary procedures, but the malpractice insurance industry pushes for more procedures. Meanwhile, insurance plans are far more complicated than needed, to give more opportunities for rejection. People in this system always experience problems, even when the actual health care that they receive is very good. The people with good (expensive) insurance plans are usually happy with it, largely because their company pays the costs, so they don't see any of it.
• Certain categories of people have government payment acting as insurance. Poor, usually children, qualify for Medicaid, and seniors qualify for Medicare. This is basically the Canadian system as well, only not universal. Physicians can "opt out" like they can in Canada, but in Canada there are few payment alternatives, so in practice almost all doctors are part of Medicare. In the U.S, a lot of doctors don't accept Medicaid or Medicare patients.
• Military personnel are covered by a hospital system operated by the government, through the military while serving, and through Veterans Affairs after. This is basically the same as the U.K's National Health System - government run from top to bottom. It actually works well, but suffers from gigantic bureaucracy typical of any large government organisation (just like the military itself, for that matter).

The reforms are meant to lower the cost of health care and insurance in two ways. First, usually people who don't need insurance (young people) don't get it, so those who do typically cost the insurance companies more, and they have to charge more for private plans. If everyone must have it, the costs should drop - this is the reason auto insurance is mandatory, and the result there. The other is to eliminate the non-payment problems of hospitals and doctors, so prices charged will be lower. Overall, this is the system used in Japan, and it works pretty well. It's not a quick fix though - quick fixes are really wanted these days. And ideological meddling and corporate corruption may prevent it from working at all - the U.S has a shortage of patience and reason when it comes to these things.

Most of those thugs are non-government party supporters - either hired, or part of typically criminal activities which support the governing party. Or, occasionally, popular supporters fed propaganda to incite them.

In other words, the money and orders are flowing to the government, not from it. The fact that it's government is incidental, and often irrelevant - see Somalia, where "government" means whatever local crime bosses are on top at the moment, these things also happen.

For the most part, the governments there just leave the people alone - they don't have the resources to do much to them, outside of some large cities (which is where the oppression occurs in corrupt countries). And even within the cities, they can only concentrate on the most prominent.

Africa is an example of "government which governs least" - also should be an example to those anti-government types in the U.S, who want to move towards that system.

There are politically stable, developing areas in Africa. Kenya isn't bad, Ghana and Botswana as well. The problems aren't as simple as "people just have to start working". First, there is culture - stupidly followed tradition gets in the way of a lot of reform. For example, often irrigation projects won't be done because men don't want to work on them - gathering water is women's work.

The long established human habitation means there are a huge number of conflicting cultures. Lack of a unifying culture or language means that almost all concerns people have are local - large scale co-operation is both difficult and suspicious. The same problem held back the Americas until they were "settled"/""conquered" (take your pick). Once a culture dominated wide areas (Spanish, English, Portuguese, French), large scale development followed.

There is a huge infrastructure deficit in Africa. Roads, power, rail, services, supply chains, all need to be developed to make actually getting resources from the source to where they're needed efficient. Part of this is from the cultural differences, but part is from other deficits.

Africa is underpopulated. You'd think with the stories of starvation that it had the opposite problem, but no, the population density is still below many developed places in the world. The average farmer produces only a fraction of what someone in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia or other developed nations does. Some of that is due to energy used for machinery and chemicals, but a lot is simply tradition / lack of knowledge of better practices, and lack of infrastructure to get resources (even just better seeds) to farmers. More people would mean more demand for infrastructure (as well as more and better organisation).

Other people's rules. An example, in early South Africa the mining companies couldn't hire workers - the people lived off the land and had no need for money. The government started levying taxes on the people, forcing them to join the "modern economy", an effect which split up families (the men had to travel days and live at the mines), reduced the amount of food grown and increased real (as opposed to "money based") poverty, lead to illness and death from working conditions - really it destroyed lives. Africa as a whole is being subjected to the same thing, as outsiders decide how the countries should run. This is possible due to some of the factors above, but it can't be ignored that capitalists are greedy (kind of by definition) and verge on psychopaths in their lack of concern for the damage they do.

That's a start on the problems facing Africa.

No, starving people just starve. Egypt is actually one of the most developed countries in Africa, people weren't starving there.

What massive aid donations do is cause more famine because farmers, faced with "free" as the competition, can't make a living growing food, so stop and try to do something else (and join the crowds receiving aid). When the aid stops, those farmers are gone, so there's more starvation unless there's more aid. Aid should be in a form that boosts the local economy - farm subsidies would be better, even though they have their own negative distortions, and don't solve things now.

But starving people won't fix things, if all those other problems remain.

One something: the instruction decoder in x86 is more complex. Another: The overhead of supporting byte-aligned instructions and data access.

There are many more somethings, but I only needed one to prove you wrong (and that between you two, mellon is not the clueless one).

I'm still amazed that almost nobody seems to notice the fact that in Fahrenheit, there are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling (as in, degrees in a half circle, like a dial might use). Meaning Fahrenheit is based on the same physical constants as Celsius, not "human physical comfort" or similar misinformation.

The weirdness of Fahrenheit is that the 0 was moved from the freezing point of fresh water to salt (ocean) water, so now it no longer makes obvious sense.

Anyway, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius make sense as SI units - temperature is a measure of thermal energy over density, neither converts directly to any SI (or imperial) units without a conversion constant (ignoring calories, you still need a constant to convert to joules).

If you're referring to the photoelectric effect, that has nothing to do with ionizing radiation, since metals don't "ionize" (in that way).

But rods and cones are affected by non-ionizing light. More generally, heat also affects tissues, so any non-radiation that is converted to heat (down to microwaves) affects tissue. Even lower on the spectrum, non-thermal low frequency radio waves beamed at certain brain tissues can affect thought, perception, mood and emotion.

What this research is referring to involves how dissolved molecules, which become ionized by interactions with water molecules breaking components apart, might be affected by electromagnetic fields. Since ions are positive or negative, a positive or negative electric field, or a changing magnetic field (as in an electromagnetic field), may physically influence the movement. It's completely possible that a constant electromagnetic field might jiggle those ions enough to prevent or reduce the chemical coupling that would normally occur in, say, bone growth. Even a very weak field, it it were a resonant frequency, could do that.

I didn't mean literally a DSP like you'd find in a CD player, Itanium was always intended to be a server chip. But features like no integer register multiply, in order to keep all integer instructions to a single cycle - integer values have to be moved to floating point registers for multiplication, then back.

I like a lot of the quirky features, especially the extensive use of flags to defer exceptions (like a missed load) allowing speculative operations to work safely before the condition is known. But it was all designed for "avoid unpredictability at all costs" like a DSP, rather than other CPUs designed to manage unpredictability using caches, buffers, multithreading, and so on. And as I said it was successful, but the strengths weren't as useful in the real world as I guess they expected, since the costs of things like memory access and interrupts just keeps rising, and since they can never be eliminated completely, at some point it needs to manage it anyway (remember the i860 had exactly the same problem). And now special hardware like GPUs are being applied to the problems now instead, so the advantage it does have is smaller.

Itanium was basically a DSP, making it fast. But DSPs are terrible for anything with branches, interrupts, traps, etc., so almost every interesting feature added to Itanium exists to compensate for the inherent weakness of a DSP design for non-DSP tasks. It worked out in the sense that it was still fast at DSP tasks while not being slower than regular CPUs at regular tasks, but the DSP style workload turned out to be not significant enough to justify that complexity. And recently GPUs or other hardware (PowerPC Cell extension, coprocessors, multi-core) are being used for that instead.

You're forgetting that Windows wasn't unique, it had competitors: OS/2, GEM, GEOS were the main ones. That was the competition, not Unix. Unix vendors made token efforts to support a GUI, but their efforts like Motif and CDE were a lot like lipstick on a pig.

Microsoft had a few strategies it used. Some could have been done by competitors, such as the major emphasis on developers with VisualStudio, VisualBasic, frameworks like OLE, and so on (there was no good equivalent for the others). Some essentially expanded Window's scope by supplying its own software with Word, Excel, etc. which were integrated into Office. Some involved less honest things, like hidden OS features for MS applications, or actively sabotaging competitors with OS releases (DR-DOS, for example). And a big part was back room deals, leveraging decision makers with money, promises, and threats, like the "per-CPU licensing" which charged a Windows license for every computer shipped, even if it had no Microsoft software on it, making it more expensive to include competing software (like OS/2) because they would have to pay twice. Also the intense fight to kill Apple's QuickTime codec, and the sales force targeting technology ignorant management of companies, taking technology decisions out of the hands of technology specialists.

The final strategy was more of an accidental one: Windows and other software was just so badly designed that it couldn't run on other CPUs. In fact, often it couldn't be made to run using the same CPU on better hardware. Do you remember the "640K limit"? Hardware that got rid of that limit was also incompatible with a lot of MS-DOS and Windows software and drivers - badness was actually required for Windows. With a situation like that, every application that was made Windows compatible became stuck, depending on it. Trying to make software portable was almost as bad as writing two completely different versions, so the first version was always for the bigger market. The race for new versions meant there was always a new version needed, so often no time to work on any other versions, so anything non-Windows just wasn't as good, or just didn't exist.

Hence the "Windows ecosystem" accumulated marketwise, while a very clever CEO leveraged every strategy businesswise, and drove out all competitors - while at the same time requiring Intel x86 compatibility, purely as a side effect.

Since the instruction format hasn't changed (still using 6 instruction bundles), I think Poulson is just ignoring the packing info and being superscalar just like every other high performance chip (Alpha EV6 or EV7 (can't remember) and Power 4 grouped instructions internally, rather than flinging them independently through the execution units - simplified tracking, apparently). Actually I think even the previous version of Itanium gave up on that - runtime data lets you group independent instructions more efficiently anyway, so many people thought it was a waste of time to try to get the compiler to do it when Itanium was introduced. Remember, it was not the first, but the last of a long history of attempts at making VLIW not suck (er. except Transmeta, which doesn't count because it hid the native instructions - essentially it put the instruction grouping into software rather than hardware, and that was never fast enough to work well).

Still, recompiling could make runtime grouping better, so you'd get more speedups if you did. But even existing binaries should benefit.

As I understand it, the Holy Trinity is kind of like that optical illusion which sometimes looks like a vase, and sometimes like two people looking at each other. The picture doesn't change, but your perception does depending on how you look at it - when you look for people, you see people. The Trinity is three perspectives, not two, but it's the same idea - you look for God, you see things as aspects of God, look for Jesus, you see the same things as aspects of Jesus, and so on for the Holy Spirit.

Details are left as an exercise for the deity.

I used microEmacs for a while when I used an Amiga because it came with it. It was probably limited compared to full Emacs but ultimately what stopped me was I couldn't remember all the key combinations, and I found vim for Amiga (it started there).

What made me keep with vim over other alternatives, including various IDEs I tried, is really that using vi/vim is more like having a conversation than doing all the work myself. By that I mean that every change starts with a command, like "i", then text to insert, ten . On its own that's actually more work, but vim understands what I just did and I can hit "." to repeat it - same with other editing commands, including ones which have smarts to them, like "cf.." which deletes from the cursor to the next period, and keeps the period. It remembers what I told it to search for. I can combine these, and a batch of changes can be reduced to "n" and "." keys.

Defining macros using "q" does the same thing, with longer command sequences. What makes it possible is the commands which have slight intelligence which let vim find where you want to make a change (nice regular expressions), copy and paste from surrounding text, and even cancel the macro if a condition isn't right. Simple "repeat these keystrokes" macros don't work that well.

It does take a while to get the experience where the awkwardness of the editing commands is replaced by the power of combining them like that. But I haven't personally used another editor that feels like it's a helper, rather than just a tool.

And I haven't even started on the ":" command line.

As I understand it, the social/political situation is complicated, but you can view it as "Burma" refers to the people (and overthrown democratic government, long disappeared in practice), and "Myanmar" refers to the military rulers and government, and supporters. "Myanmar" is essentially still at war with "Burma" (most of the people still consider themselves Burmese) but it has stopped short of genocide.

After the Boxing Day tsunami, Myanmar used soldiers to prevent aid workers from even attempting to help the injured Burmese, leading to thousands of more deaths. Since these were Burmese and not Myanmar, the Myanmar government didn't even pretend to care about them.

I figured that in the early days of the colonies, most documents were electronic, but for tradition the first printed works would be religious books, kept in the temples for the public to read. They would have a habit of folding the pages to mark the passages they wanted to remember, so the books were printed with corners cut off to prevent this sacrilege.

The same printing equipment was then used for other documents when the colony was more established, hence the cut corners on everything.