There's a fundamental problem with your assumptions. You started off thinking that healthcare should have a cost at all. If it's a "basic human right" then the answer is that the government should provide it, gratis.

I was/am against the new healthcare crap because its an ineffective bandaid on a terribly broken system. It does basically nothing to address issues with the healthcare system, and instead just creates ways to give care to people who can't afford it, by making others pay.

I don't claim to have answers for how to fix things, but what we've got isn't near fixed. For starters, why don't we require licensed physicians to "donate" a percentage (hopefully less than 50%) of their billable hours to people who can't afford to pay them. Or, why not get rid of insurance companies all together. Just go down to a single plan for everyone, and anyone who wants something else has to pay out of pocket. You may think "oh god who can afford that" but the problem is the prices for the shit are so outrageous. Maybe congress should take a look at the side of malpractice premiums and figure out how to lower those, so that everyone's insurance can be lower. Maybe if we make doctors "donate" some of their hours, we can exclude them from civil liability for anything that goes wrong during those hours.

There are about a million things that could be done to *start* to correct the problems with the *system*. Instead, they decided just pour more money into it. That doesn't sound right to me.

You are only required to buy auto insurance if you drive a car. Don't want to pay for auto insurance? Don't drive.

You are only required to buy health insurance if you are alive. Don't want to pay for health insurance? Don't live.

Kinect .

First TFS and TFA both make reference to problems which "keep super computers busy for days." That's pretty misleading since the bees are only dealing with "a few hundred" flowers. At brute force that would take your cell phone maybe a couple minutes to solve.

But really no details are given. Do the bees still travel to all of the flowers? I'd imagine they might just decide to skip one or two if they don't fall close enough to the path to be worth it. They don't say what they did (probably nothing) to validate that the bees actually found the shortest path. Did the "graph" that they gave the bees include a section where a greedy algorithm would fail? What is more likely is the bees haven't solved it, but found a decent approximation.

I think this is what you get when you let bee researchers write math/computer science articles.

It always takes two pictures in rapid succession. That's how the person reviewing them can tell how fast you were going. If your car is in the same location in both pictures, you weren't going through the light. If your car is at the line in the first picture, and half way through in the second, then you're screwed.

How do people not know this? It's not that hard to figure out.

I "played" the winning "game" for about 5 minutes. I think I "played" all the way through. Outside of the few bad grammatical errors, this was not entertaining at all. It's not even a game. It is a mildly interactive narrative. You are in this girl's room, and you can click on things in the room and she will talk about them. ("Oh, that's a picture of my friends..."). There's a print out of a violence prevention website she talks about. The main "goal" seems to be the cell phone you click it you'll learn a boring sob-story about a friend of hers with an abusive boyfriend. Then the credits roll. This does not qualify as a game. It would not teach anyone anything.

If would take an extra 5-10 minutes to add a "choose your own adventure" to this and actually provide a mild form of entertainment where you get to decide what happens, and maybe in one version you convince the friend to get help or something. This fails on so many levels. But I guess, if anyone ever wants to win a game design contest, anyone could win this if they were able to put in more than 30 minutes of effort into the "design." (I admit the art was decent, that's really the only redeeming quality.)

If you did manage to tear a "rift" in the "side" of a star, nothing would really happen. The inside of the star is also the center of gravity of the star. The plasma doesn't want to escape, it is being pulled always towards the center of mass of the star. Your rift would pretty much instantly disappear as the gravity of the star continues to pull on the material around it, the star will pretty quickly turn spherical again.

The only way to destroy a star would be to completely scatter all of its material out over an extremely wide area. Keep in mind, solar systems and their stars are formed by giant disks of dust slowingly being pulled together by their own gravity until they form stellar bodies. So to permanently get rid of the star, you'd have to spread it out over an area larger than it's solar system, or it would just re-form again eventually.

A successful global effort to "put democracy on hold" for any reason would be proof enough to me that this planet is not worth saving.

To "own"? Let's not kid ourselves here... there's no real ownership involved unless there is a way to get DRM-free files in 720p off the device using anything other than your eyeballs. I seriously doubt there is, which makes this just a really expensive rental service. I'm sure there are already lots of services which feature renting movies from all 6 major studios while taking your money and laughing about it.

In this case we aren't talking about spacecraft under extreme conditions. We're talking about a typical consumer vehicle under normal operating conditions.

Similarly, in my area it's because of requirements for schools based on the number of families in the area. In many instances the county will force the builder to make age-restricted communities or not build at all because the surrounding schools cannot handle additional kids.

I keep pretty much everything I ever wrote for fun or school in ~/Code. It's more than I thought it would be, actually.

~$ cd Code
~/Code$ find . -regex ".*\.\(php\|c\|h\|cpp\|hpp\|cs\)\$" -print0 > list
~/Code$ wc -l --files0-from=list
362698 total

Not including code for work, of course.