You will see that it is going to turn into single-payer without a single vote being cast in favor of a single payer system. This transition will occur overnight (practically) and it is something that was forseen from the first conception of the plan. It is very simple:

1. 
   In 2014 group health insurance premiums are going to skyrocket mostly because we are moving from a state-by-state "must cover" set of rules to one national set. So if today only plans in California are required to cover acupuncture (or is it acupressure?), in 2014 there is a choice - either it isn't covered anywhere or it is covered everywhere. One national plan requirements set. My guess is that everything covered anywhere will be part of the national plan requirements. That is going to have an effect on premiums.
2. Similarly, in 2014 if your employer's coverage sucks you can (with the government's blessing) get your own plan from the "exchanges". Your employer is then fined around 150% of your policy's cost - if you took it from your employer. This introduces a huge incentive for employers to drop coverage and eliminate the linkage between having a job and having insurance. Employees then go to the exchanges and get a government-subsidized plan which may cost less than their contribution to the employer plan was costing them - so the employee doesn't lose anything. Huge incentive for companies to get out of the insurance game altogether.
3. So now the government is paying these subsidies (which are very large) for nearly 100% of all Americans. The cost of O-Care just jumped from the OMB estimate of around 900 billion to the more pessimistic figures of 2-3 trillion. Maybe more. There simply isn't that much cash lying around for this, even if we eliminate all military forces. So the government is going to be looking for a way to save some serious cash.
4. One way is to start rationing care big-time, probably by reversing the difference between US health care and the way it works in the rest of the world. Most US health care spending is better called dying care as it is spent in the last year of life. But getting people to accept that Granny just has to skip that operation and die a little quicker is going to be tough.
   So, the next best choice for cost control is to get rid of the insurance companies and pay the bills (at a greatly reduced reimbursement rate) directly - just like Medicare. Problem with that is how many hospitals can afford to take a 50% cut in revenue across the board when today it is made up for by private (cash) patients and private insurance? None, that's how many. So we may see a lot of health care providers simply closing up shop under this plan. But the government will be able to dictate how much the government is spending on healthcare... which by the way is how single-payer works.

So, overnight we have single-payer whether we want it or not. It is built into the system and it will show up by 2016. If things happen really fast, we might see it by the end of 2014.

There is more to nuclear weapons than just the unavailability of the materials.

OK, if you have unlimited weight and size and enough material for a complete critical mass, well, maybe you don't have a problem. As mentioned, you throw it together and stand back. It is a little more complicated than that in that you need to assemble the critical mass
so fast that it doesn't melt before going off but in general that isn't a huge problem.

However, if you have a weight and/or size budget or are trying to make a subcritical mass go off, well then you have some problems.

Problem 1 is something called the neutron budget. It takes "n" neutrons to keep a reaction going and building until "boom". If you have a subcritical mass you are going to need a neutron moderator and source. Polonium comes to mind - in the right amount and in the right place. Failing to maintain the neutron budget and you have something that goes "pop" rather than "boom".

Problem 2 has to do with the usual way of setting off a nuclear explosion with explosives. A critical or supercritical mass doesn't need much help, but in order to trigger a subcritical mass you need confinement and you do not need the parts flying away from each other. A simple gun-type assembly isn't going to do it. So you get to find out all about explosive lenses and shaped charges. You need a balanced explosion squeezing the subcritical mass and the neutron moderator together all at once. Failing this and again you get "pop" instead of "boom".

There are a few more problems, but the key point is a sophisticated subcritical mass device has a lot of technology behind it. A critical mass weapon (where there is enough material to make a critical mass without anything complicated) is very, very simple. Very large, but very simple. Simple weapons are unlikely to be delivered by missles but could easily be delivered by a cargo ship or a truck.

The Muslim religion believes it is universal - it applies to everyone. This means that they are free to judge people that are not officially recognized as being Muslim under their laws. It also empowers them to do whatever it takes to convert non-believers (also known as faithless Muslims) into true believing Muslims. Any that do not convert and profess their belief can be killed as being "defective".

This is quite a bit different from the most evangelical Christian sect where it is the job of evangelicals to preach the "word of God" so the non-believers can choose to accept it. If they don't accept it, well, they are damned but that isn't the job of the evangelicals - it is left up to God.

The Muslim faith requires a far more pro-active stance on the part of believers in cleaning up the Earthly realm for true Muslims. If a Muslim does not follow all the tenents of the faith, such as not wanting to get involved in forcible conversions, say, they are guilty of apostay and the penalty for that under Muslim law is death.

Intermixing these two faiths on the same continent is going to lead to trouble. Sooner or later we are going to see "moderate" Muslims being educated in their responsibilities to their faith. Does that mean we will see stonings and beheadings on the streets of the USA? No, but there will be a lot of not-so-subtle pressure for communities to become 100% Muslim or 100% non-Muslim. Then we will have a lot of self-reinforcement of these kinds of beliefs.

Well, what you say sounds reasonable if the assumption is that all the students have the best interests of the other students and the university at heart. This is a ridiculous assumption in today's world.

Sounds like the university took appropriate steps when they were informed that their student was continuing to exploit the vulnerability. It doesn't matter what the student might have said in his defense at that point because he could be assumed to not be acting in the best interests of the other students or the university.

Clearly fixing the problem was outside of the scope of the university. They could wait for the vendor to eventually fix things and all the time wonder how much was going on with one or more students exploiting the vulnerablity, or they could get rid of the student so that hopefully he would stop exploiting their system.

Seems pretty obvious to me. The problem starts with the students not having the best interests of the university or other students in mind. That puts everyone on a adversarial footing and obviously the student is going to be the weaker party.

One architecture that supported "variable CPUs" was S100 where it is was typical to have a CPU card, one or more memory cards, and multiple I/O cards all plugged into a backplane. There were CPU cards for the Apple ][, but these were complete computers on a card that simply allowed use of the Apple ][ I/O.

Given today's multi-gigahertz processors with gigahertz memory access, I would think it would be difficult, if not impossible to effectively separate the CPU and the memory by very much. Similarly, it gets pretty complicated with high speed DMA I/O when you move it away from the memory it is accessing. I'm sure it could be done, but the performance is going to suffer just from the physical distances. Add in connector resistance and noise and you have ample justification for putting the CPU, chipset and RAM in a very small module that then plugs into the rest of the computer for I/O.

The problem with closed and restrictive societies today is the leaders are pretty well disconnect from the civilian population. This disconnect goes far, far deeper than it ever did in the USSR. In the 1950s while everyone was trying to figure out if there was going to be a nuclear exchange between superpowers, in the USSR there were some leaders actually concerned about what would happen to the civilian population should such a nuclear exchange break out.

In both North Korea and Iran it is highly doubtful that there are any such concerns today. It would be inconvenient in both countries if the population tried to rise up and throw the current crop of leaders out - they would of course fail, but the requirement of putting down such an insurrection would be inconvienent for the leaders.

Do not think for a moment that it would affect the level of comfort of the leaders, their lifestyle or their food supply. This is the problem with MAD - threatening a country like North Korea with destruction of their civilian infrastructure and population does not affect the leaders. For the USSR in the 1950s if you wiped out a great deal of civilian infrastructure the leaders would starve. The ranks of the leadership also extended far enough that it would have been impossible to shelter everyone important to the leaders. Today with isolated dictatorships it is entirely possible for the leader to gather their inner circle and really not care about anyone else.

Their food supply is already coming from either special farms for the leaders or is being imported. So what if all of the farms in the country are destroyed? It would be the population suffers, but not the leaders. MAD only works when the "assured destruction" part matters to the leaders of a country.

If you have a gun, and it is loaded and ready to use when someone assults you, your family or your home the difference between having the gun taken away from you or it being used to defend you, your family and your home is training. Owning a gun without any sort of training is like owing a cyclotron - ok so you have one, now what do you do with it? Keeping it in a box on a high shelf and not knowing what to do with it is useless.

So owning a gun isn't all that important. Having sufficient training to pick up a gun, properly target an adversary and if necessary fire with effective results is important. I would offer that people that cannot successfully complete a training course with some kind of live-fire simulation should not be given permits for handguns.

Otherwise we are simply increasing the number of guns waiting to be stolen or used in an otherwise improper manner.

Do you really understand the requirements of charging 10 car batteries in a fast-charge mode?

I believe today you can charge your Volt with a 220V charger running around 40 amps. 220V at 400A (10 batteries) is 88KW, not something completely out of the question for electric supply but certainly getting there. I believe it takes 2-3 hours to charge an empty battery at this rate.

Figure a reasonable car service station would need more like 50 batteries charging in order to handle cars and you are now at 2000 amps at 220V or 440KW. This is up to a significant electric substation, likely supplied with around 40KV. You can't have that just anywhere, so such a service station is going to have to be out in the boonies and the choice of location will be non-existent - it goes where the power company says it can.

Such a service station would require a substantial infrastructure to support it. You aren't going to find it in a logical place, like near a highway or in a suburban shopping mall area. It is going to be in a fringe area next to a large electrical substation. Moving 440KW of power somewhere where it is not today is not something that is easily done - and the transmission line paranoids are going to block any attempt to do so near a residential area.

Yes, but in some states Ethanol in the gas is wonderful!

Here in Iowa the 89 octane blend with Ethanol is $0.10 cheaper than straight gasoline.

This is because of state subsidies to encourage the growth of corn for Ethanol instead of food. Sure, it may use up car engines faster but that is a big advantage for the car manufacturers as well. Everyone wins in Iowa.

Imagine if the government could both own a car company that could produce new, diesel-powered cars and be able to pass laws outlawing the use of gasoline-powered cars...

Our tax problems would be over, instantly, and the government could recoup their entire investment into said car company as they would be the monopoly provider of such cars, at least for a while.

How about a conservation alternative: pick out a state that has legalized all uses of marjiuana and simply take the cars away and replace them with enough pot to keep everyone happy instead.

Imagine what Colorado would be like if everyone simply stayed home and toked up instead of driving? Cleanest air in the country for one thing.

The Lockerbie bomb was sloppy and would fail today for two reasons: detection of nitrates in luggage (yes, it is screened on most flights) and the fact the bomber got off the plane. It is against international regulations to have luggage for a passenger carried on a plane where the passenger isn't flying.

Try sometime getting off an international flight at the last minute. They will pull your luggage, whatever it takes to do this.

Another Lockerbie scenario is impossible today because of both the nitrates screening which does detect Semtex (the explosive used) and the luggage requirements.

What you are missing is insurance. After 9/11 happened it would have been impossible for airlines to fly because without swift action the insurance companies would have said that the airline's own screening was defective and allowed terrorists to crash the planes. This cost the insurance companies big money. There would be no way that airlines would have been flying on 1/1/2002 without some big changes.

So we got the TSA. By removing the screening from the airlines the insurance companies couldn't point to that as a reason to deny insurance to the airlines and therefore flying could continue. I'd say we are pretty much stuck with the TSA until something major happens. No way are the insurance companies going to allow screening to go back to the airlines when they proved they couldn't handle it.

I do not know what the settlements were for passengers on the 9/11 flights, but the total victim compensation fund I have seen says around 7 billion. Billion. That is the reason the airlines have to carry insurance - and like any other business, the insurance company gets to set down some rules. You can assume that passenger screening is something the insurance companies are very, very interested in.

The first issue that should be addressed is does anyone believe that 100% total bulletproof security is even possible today? Come on, do you think it is possible to have large, interlocking systems of computers communicating over a network with 100% security?

I think anyone reasonable will say "Heck no you can't!" There might be a few dreamers that think it is possible, but the amount of effort that would be required is beyond any reasonable standard. So sure, it might be possible to force all medical device manufacturers to use a single operating system designed from the ground up for security - but no such OS exists today, not even OpenBSD, and that puts a little crimp in such plans.

So what do we do? Well, there is the idea that access, all access, needs to be logged. Multiple ways with retention of the logs for nearly forever. Also, multiple verifications that you are who you say you are when logging in. Not just biometrics, but things like having to periodically log in with someone watching who then confirms that you are who you say you are. This would be a start, but just a start, for what would be required.

To go along with this there needs to be the kind of draconian penalties dreamed up in the 15th Century for hacking medical systems. You know, hacker gets caught, hacker gets executed by a crowd of nurses on the evening news. No appeals, no commutation of sentence, just swift death by horrible means. An example for the next person that even thinks of doing something similar. And sure, maybe a few good mistakes to ensure nobody wants to even get near to someone that might do something like that.

There is another solution. Something that Dune mentions in passing and the pseudo-Dune-sequel books describe in more detail. It's call removing computer systems from critical paths because you can't trust them. Face it, today we can rely on the fact that there are people out there with malicious intent to do harm by computer. Whether they get money from it or not doesn't really matter - they are out to make sure that people cannot trust their own computer. Open source doesn't fix the problem - unless everyone is a programmer. Anti-virus "solutions" don't fix anything, they just escalate the battle and cost users money. Even locked-down systems like iOS aren't 100% secure and it is assured that once there is a critical mass of important stuff secured by iOS there will be a really strong incentive to find holes and destroy people's trust.

So, if the choice is between having a machine regulate medications or a human doctor doing it, which is more trustworthy today? Twenty years ago the answer was "machine" but anyone that believes that today is an idiot or completely unfamiliar with current events.

The question today that needs to be answered is what is Amateur radio for, and what is it for 10 years from now?

This isn't silly because a large portion of the "social" aspect of HAM radio has moved to the Internet. I don't see much of a movement to keep it alive, either. There is a very small community out there and it is shrinking.

It is true that historically the FCC HAM regulations were designed to keep operators from stepping on each other and from stepping on commercial and government users of the spectrum. What I suspect is most feared by today's HAM operators is the CB-ification of Amateur radio - elimination of licensing in favor of commercially regulated gear. While a lot of today's users would be OK with that, it would change the entire definition and purpose - which brings us back to the original question.

I don't see the FCC signing on to the Open Source Radio Support Act as proposed. Continuing to regulate by content type is silly and it may be silly to try to regulate by modulation type. It is a nice idea to say that transmissions have to universally decodable, but without a lot of standards and regulation to back them up this isn't going to be all that achievable - specifically reception of a bitstream without any definition is going to be pretty much inpenetratable. Just as today if I give you a binary file without any self-defining header and without identification like a file extension it could be pretty much anything and while it could be coded in a publically defined way without knowing which of thousands it could be renders it unreadable. This is similar to saying that an unknown compression scheme is the same as encryption.

I think today's HAM operators need to have a more compelling case why they are going to continue to exist. The home-brew gear of yesteryear is nearly gone and the "experimentation" envisioned with digitial communications might be nice to authorize but unlikely to ever produce anything of value. I would certainly like to see an openness dedicated to satellite communications, but again who is it for and what would it be used for?