Your life expectancy is then the 11th best in the world.

Disclaimer: I'm from the USA. (I am one of the rare few who find it difficult to call myself 'American'. Aren't the Cherokee, Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, and even Cubans all "Americans"?)

Quite frankly, I'm amazed our life expectancy is so long... People here would be better off eating their own crap than the stuff that passes for 'food' here. The restaurant and fast food industry is completely out of control. Deep fried meats are not supposed to be staples! Try finding a breakfast food whose (small) serving size doesn't include at least 10g-20g of sugar!

Somehow, with little exercise and extremely sugary/fatty food, people manage to live decently long lives.

I have no love for insurance companies, but I can't say everything is their fault. Some how doctors have it in their mind that they should be making $x million per year (individually)... Tell me, why should a doctor spending 15-20 minutes putting a few stitches in a one inch incision cost 'USD $1000'? If there are so few doctors that their time is that valuable, we should be trying to get more, not auction off their time to the 'highest bidder'.

People no longer pay protection money to gangsters... We have hospitals, doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies for that.

When I was in high school in the 1990s, most of the students had TI-85 / TI-89 / TI-92 graphing calculators.

They used the calculators for not only doing two-digit arithmetic (that they couldn't do in their head), but also for taking derivatives, solving quadratic equations, etc...

They would also use the calculator's abilities for storing physics notes (basically cheating) or had simple programs that did physics problems for them...

Anyone with a plain scientific calculator was at a bit of a disadvantage...

We did have a computer lab, but it was filled with mostly 386s (SX,not DX), and a few 486s (which were ancient even then!)... We used the lab for only learning programming (compiling a 'hello world' PASCAL program in DOS took several seconds). For grading, we printed out our programs on an old dot-matrix printer that printed about 1 page per minute...

Needless to say, learning PASCAL programming was an non-required elective...

I was born and raised Catholic. Went to Catholic schools. The parent poster brings up some interesting points.

While many people may agree Scientology is a cult, I suggest we all look inward:

People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
Early Christian followers were threatened, beaten, etc.

Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader;
Jesus is said to have unconditional love for all people.

They get a new identity based on the group;
Followers of Jesus are no longer Jews, Pagans, etc... They are known as Christians.

They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.
The 4 gospels were all pretty much copied from the same source (and long after Jesus died). Each one has a different audience, but the content is largely the same. In this sense, followers have restricted access to information. The Catholic church also regulates which scriptures form the Bible (and which do not). Not all writings of the Dead Sea scrolls made it into the Bible. Throughout time, religion have been used as a means to divide people. In the past, those who have questioned the religious leadership have been excommunicated, or worse...

Even today, try being a Catholic and marrying a non-Catholic in a Church. It is not allowed! The meaning of "Catholic" (as welcoming) only applies to their Cathechism school!

(People may argue that the Catholic Church is no longer a cult, even if there is strong evidence for it being a cult at one time. So I ask you, did the religion change or did society change around it? If you think it is now no longer a cult, does that make you feel better?)

From everything I've read about and seen of Scientolgists and Scientology, they do all of those things.
From everything I have read and know about Catholicism, they do and/or have done all those things.

Contrast that to say...Judaism or Islam, theres a big difference.
Indeed, the other religions spell their name differently.

he won't be bringing the heat til he's out on the mound, he's just trying to make sure he shoulder is fucking healed

From someone whose handle is "sexconker", I have to wonder on which mound you have injured your shoulder...

It said 'worse for the environment'. Using more energy is worse for the environment and will continue to be until ALL our energy comes from clean sources.

I think it is not even that simple.

Any use of energy invaribly causes a change (or prevents a change).

Using "clean" energy in copious amounts will change the environment whether we like it or not:

Let's say the world (with infinite money, resources, etc) goes to 100% clean geothermal energy... The Earth's core gets cooled at a far greater rate than normal, and is an effect that is very likely irreversible. Let's say everyone uses clean wind energy... Air flow patterns disrupted and climate change results.

(And I'm not even including the manfacturing costs associated with extracting the clean energy either!)

Using "clean" energy in copious amounts will change the environment whether we like it or not!

Mass extinctions have occured naturally in the past, and usually there's no known external event (the end of the dinosaurs is an exception)

Ah yes, that class of animals that had large bulky bodies, ate huge amounts of food, and had relatively small brains with primitive instincts... No wonder they were vulnerable to extinction.

Oh, I got carried away -- you were talking about the dinosaurs, not humans.

So it is not unreasonable to expect some of you reading this to live to 150, barring any nasty accidents.

You do realize that there are health and life insurance industries that will do everything they can to prevent this?

I bet someone at Google will get fired soon...

Either 1 of 2 things may have happened:

1) They used Microsoft Bing to search for potential trademark violations
2) They were too lazy and didn't check at all.

But economics is not a zero-sum game. I give you $150 and you give me an hour of labor. We've both benefited by the trade.

In all but the world's oldest profession, I'm inclined to disagree.

Here's one:

Person A runs a tavern. Person B (after a few beers) drives his car into that of Person A. Person B pays $150 to Person C to fix the scratches on Person A's car. Person C uses his $150 income at Person A's tavern.

Who profited by the exchange of $150? Are all three people better off?

Here's another: Person B drinks at Person A's bar. Person A runs a farm to grow barley. The farm uses water that slightly increases (~1%) water prices for 100k other persons. Are person A and B both economically better off for their trade? (Yes). Are persons A,B, and the 100k others all better off? (They might or might not all agree, but what if their generation's children do not!). Even more interestingly, the 1% cost will manifest as slight increases in other goods. Eventually someone will be holding the hot potato...

In examples with larger populations, the zero-sum exists but is more blurry. Fundamentally, most economists seem to think that the optimal solution for a 2-person economy is optimal for an n-person economy. Well, logical induction doesn't work way! (The implication from "n" to "n+1" doesn't exist!) It is well known in Mathematics that optimizing a function with multiple variables not the same as finding the set of variables where each individually optimize the function.

I'm not saying that there isn't value to distributing tasks across people that are specialized at them. I just don't buy the argument that economics is never a zero-sum game. I think in all but the most ideal circumstances, it is indeed zero-sum game. Often the case, the true cost is hidden in the form of time. If the costs do not happen at the same time as the benefits, people only see the benefits for a long time and then lament the cost later.

I realize I may sound like the reincarnation of Marx. Well, I don't like Communism either.

It looks like Microsoft's defence will be that the EULA says ""You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software". They'll probably charge the guy with a DMCA violation...

Legally speaking, what does it mean to disassemble a program? Is it to convert its machine representation into a more readable format? Every processor in every computer does this, it just disassembles to a language that is not composed of English words and numbers. \

If someone owns Visual Studio and another program on their system crashes, what happens? A little dialog box asks the user if they want to debug. If they say yes, Visual Studio fires up with a disassembly view of the program that crashed!

Isn't the entire Wine project basically reverse engineering the Windows APIs?

I just replay the music in my head. This helps avoid copyright infringement suits.

Nay, you only think you are...

I say you are guilty of illegally creating a derivative work based upon copyrighted material.

In the US we have a few (but very few) roundabouts. I can say that I am one of the few to actually have driven through one of these in the US.

I can't say I liked the roundabout intersection. I always found it to be rather indirect and well...roundabout.

. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base.

You mean there was a Republican party that once stood up for civil rights and ended slavery?"
And the Democrats had a strong hold in the southern states and were pro-slavery?

In the past decade, we have already seen Republican party deeply erode civil rights.
And the Republicans are very strong in the southern states [Texas, Louisiana, etc].

What the hell has happened?

I looked into it when the electrical code forced me to replace the illegally retrofitted three conductor grounded outlets in my house with ground-fault circuits. It didn't make any sense to me without a ground... but lo and behold, they do indeed work with no ground at all.

I think you caught the mouse but missed the 1000lb gorilla in the room.

Yes, GFCI protection will work without ground. But the ground wire was invented long before GFCI devices were used.

Imagine something goes wrong in your computer's power supply that causes the 120V wire to touch the side of the power supply case. The power supply case is touching the metal case your motherboard,etc are in. Imagine you touch the side of the case to turn the computer on.

Well, the power supply and case are connected to the ground plug on your electrical cord. Two possiblities happen:
- Your ground wire is connected to neutral at the circuit breaker panel (and only there, no where else!). You do not get electrocuted. If you have a GFCI, it will trip. If you don't, the current will be fairly high (a few amps), and either the powersupply gets fried [and melts whatever is shorting] or the circuit breaker trips (not likely).

- Your ground wire is not connected at your outlet. YOU get fried. If you are lucky, the GFCI will trip *after* several milliamps are flowing through your body. [Hint, a few milliamps for a brief instant can be deadly]

Now you are probably thinking. Well if ground and neutral are connected at the circuit breaker panel, you can be lazy and connect the outlet's ground to the netural [and not run a separate ground wire]. That way you don't get fried. Except you will largely disable GFCI protection (to an extent). But even worse things than that happen. Imagine something causes a device's "hot" wire is connected but the "neutral" is not. Well, if device and outlet are grounded properly, its not so bad, the current will return through the ground wire and the case, etc will be at zero potential. But if someone wires the ground to the neutral and the fault occurs, then the case is immediately raised to 120V potential (whether it is a metallic lamp or a computer). YOU get fried.

There are probably other considerations. I'm an electrical enginner, not an electrican. I can tell you this: don't play games with grounding. It ain't worth it.

A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area.

This sounds like a resounding victory for Capitalism. Unfortunately the negotiated prices also apply to those without insurance.

I have seen a relative's cancer treatment bills amount to almost $500k, but the insurance company only had to pay $200k (and negotiated away the rest). What would have happened if the person didn't have insurance? Most of the extended family would have sell their own home and go homeless just to pay the bill.

Of course, what I show is an extreme case. Divide the amounts by a factor of 10 or 20 for something a bit more minor (injury from accident, heart attack, etc), and the conclusion is the same.

There are two main problems that I see:

1) Doctors & Hospitals only have to cater to insurance companies. The common man (without insurance) can no longer afford them.

2) Insurance companies cannot even put enough pressure on the doctors & hospitals because of the greed of the pharmacutical (sp.) industry. How can 1cc of anything be worth USD $10,000 ?! (only patents and other protections make this possible)

It is almost enough to make me feel sorry for the greedy insurance companies. They may make profits, but only by wrestling them from the even greedier doctors, hospitals, and drug companies.

The 19th century medicine was more civilized in some respects. People could go to their local doctor easily. They may have been drinking flavored rum as medicine, but at least it gave them hope with a cost that was expensive, but not prohibitive.