When people say "our outcomes are worse," isn't it the case that they're painting with a really broad brush, lumping in the uninsured with the insured? Medicine in the United States is first-rate.

Ancient Greece did this before Rome. In Athens, for example, slaves did all the work. The genesis of Western Culture comes from what the non-slave elite did. On the one hand, they developed theater, sculpture, architecture, philosophy; and on the other hand, they killed Socrates.

I would be happy to accept your $20,000 on behalf of The Human Fund. We are an open source organization providing human contact—via email, telephone, in-person, or through web forums—to individuals like you and companies like yours. If you've read this post, you have already benefited from our service! Your donation will enable us (me, mainly) to spend more time online, providing human contact to others. I eagerly await receipt of your check. Have a blessed day!

Two words: Alger Hiss. Two more words: You're wrong. Two final words: (I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.)

It was not "being a communist"; it was being a member of the Communist Party, a secret political organization swearing allegiance to a foreign government that was nominally our foe and having as its expressed purpose the overthrow of the United States Constitution and government.

If you know of a good book on the history of Japan at that point, I would be interested in reading it. Thanks.

That's not my thing.

The rollout is being delayed until after the 2014 congressional elections. The problem is political, not technical.

There was an article on alcoholism and cultural norms that I read a couple of years ago in the New Yorker: "Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it." Going from memory, the idea was that there is a genetic component to alcoholism. However, whether or not someone with this predisposition actually becomes an alcoholic has much to do with the "rituals" behind alcohol consumption in one's society. That seems to explain why some countries have higher rates of alcoholism ("problem drinkers" who screw up their lives) than other countries. I think it's a broader application of the same idea behind what you're describing. Social setting seems to matter.

Exactly! When a secret program is set up based on the secret interpretation of vague law, what exactly would constitute abuse?

[I]magine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.

You do know that weather alerts and amber alerts can be turned off, but not alerts sent out by the President of the United States, right?

I don't know about you, comrade, but I sometimes wonder what's going on in this country.

My money is on Ray Kelly.

In all seriousness, why stop at guns? Why not an app you can tag your "creepy" neighbors with—you know, for the sake of our children.

Where I work, the he-man programmers there, once upon a time, took the program they wrote in C, and reinvented it in Visual Basic, unthinkingly porting every C idiom and programming convention they knew and even reinventing the built-in event loop for the GUI. They then took their Visual Basic product, years later, and redid it in .NET, writing classes 10,000 lines long and preferring their home brewed, fragile and buggy libraries, to Microsoft's framework. Sorry, but to my mind, the "monkeys" are the ones who given a nail gun would hold it like a rock and pound in nails by hand. I don't buy your "Just-Google-the-syntax-like-any-real-programmer" ethic. I'll take the books and tutorials by industry leaders any day.

Any Lord of the Rings buffs note the name of the security firm mentioned in the article?

A year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center [...] signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records [...]

Apparently, California isn't satisfied with being Big Brother—it wants to be Sauron.