In that case there's no solution anyway, so the only question becomes whether you do it like in Sweden, i.e. where the patient in most need gets the best surgeon at the best hospital, or you do it likt in the US, where the "richest" patient gets the best surgeon in the best hospital.

And that's, incidentally, why we have much, much better outcomes for the same money.

But in general the answer to your question is "yes". In Sweden you can go to any hospital/doctor to seek treatment. If the same treatment is available by your own county, you can be made to wait a couple of weeks, but even that's not a hard rule, if you push, you can go directly. It's not uncommon for your local doctor to discuss with you where you'd want to go, when you're going for a speciality that is of the "one of a kind in the country" that you seem so afraid you'll miss.

No, I pay out the nose. No question about that. :-) However, I pay a lot less than you do, since that how insurance works (or rather, I pay about the same, but get much, much better care for my money). If you have a large pool with no individual management then insurance gets dirt cheap. Ask any insurance company, it's individually that costs money. (That's why so called group plans for i.e. home insurance you can get from e.g. your union in Sweden are so popular. They're usually about a quarter of the cost for the same service, and that's not because insurance companies are cutting their profits.)

Now, of course your "podiatrist" spiel is just silly. With health care based on need, you'll just be sent home if it turns out that you don't actually have a need. And that's the way it should work. Now of course, if you'd actually go to the doctor because you're to lazy to cut your own toe nails, I'd prefer our system. If you think that's why you're at the doctor there's a good chance there's something wrong with you, but at the other end of your body, and I'd much better that you'd actually go to the doctor then, then not being able to, due to cost. I'd much prefer to have those people in the hands of psychiatrists than running around complaining they can's see a doctor.

No, it's usually yearly for kids, and that's quite frankly often enough.

Also, dentistry (same as in the US) is usually not part of the universal healthcare, but a separate system, so there's a lot more variability in dental care than healthcare proper in the EU. In Sweden for example, only kids (until 18 yo) get free dentistry, as an adult you have to pay your own. Unless of cours it becomes a systemic health care problem.

It's less of a surprise if you consider its pedigree. Al Jazeera took over many if not most of the staff of the Arabic BBC world service channel that was shut down by the BBC as a response to Saudi censorship demands.

So, with that kind of heritage, it's not that surprising that they should be good at what they do.

Nope. As a computer scientist educated in both logic and engineering, it's pretty clear who's words needs to be taken with a grain of salt and who's doesn't.

Hint: it's not his... Misreading "statics" for "statistics" is a huge enough warning flag.

Sure, but that also made it unpopular for its "excessive" wounding effects. That's one reason it was changed. (Even though you aren't signatories to the relevant conventions, you still profess to follow them).

But this is getting off topic. :-) We were talking about the vaunted firepower of the SMLE. While the Lee Enfield might have scared the Germans at Mons, it was past its prime by WWII. Now, 20 (or indeed 30) rounds out of a (semi) automatic that's a whole 'nuther ballgame, the capabilities of the round itself notwithstanding.

Sure, if you want to discuss the particulars I have no beef with what you say. I was just pointing out that 5.56mm is much more marginal than previous rounds had been, just because the lower ends of the spectrum was being investigated, something that hadn't been done before (well, regarding humans at least, even the bigger cartridges were often marginal against horses in FMJ...)

When it comes actual wounding mechanisms, it's interesting to note that even 7.62 NATO in certain loading had a tendency to yaw and break (at the cannelure), so 5.56 was not unique in that respect.

No, that's wrong on many accounts. The german reports of withering Lee-Enfield fire are from the first world war. And since the German army had extensive experience from the Lee-Enfield from the first world war, its capabilities weren't a surprise the second time around. Not by a long shot.

But that didn't matter since rifles were passe. The German infantry squad was armed with the Mauser (shortened version of the full length rifle of WWI) throughout WWII. But that didn't matter as the rifle squad had the newly invented general purpose machine gun to form around. It was even considered the sole reason for the squad's existence. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Note that only NCOs etc. were supplied with any kind of automatic weapons, in most cases the "Schmeisser" submachine gun. The rest of the squad was basically there to carry ammunition for the machine gun and to provide flank cover for the crew. And the German rifle squad could definately put more rounds on target than a British rifle squad of the time, the "mad minute" not withstanding.

The sturmgewehr 44 didn't come out until (you guessed it), 1944, and was never a standard rifle squad rifle. It's cartridge was emphatically not developed with any "only need to wound" factor taken into account. Instead it was recognised that most targets were human, and only 150m away or so (max 300). So much could be saved by developing a cartridge for that situation instead of a cartridge that could topple a horse at shorter ranges and a man at 1000m (the original design specifications actually hinged on the effectiveness against horses, as stopping a cavalry charge was still very much the order of the day). So instead the "kurz" round was developed to give rifle like performance out to a couple of hundred meters, but allowing the carrying of more ammunition both on the person and in the gun, and much lower recoil, which becomes important in a fully automatic weapon.

The "wound not kill" design parameters don't come into effect until 5.56mm NATO and the corresponding USSR rounds were introduced in the late sixties/seventies. (As can be observed by their abysmal performance in a full metal jacket to actually stop a man. They still kill without much problem.) Horses were out of the picture when 5.56mm NATO was developed, so that together with "wounding factor" (wound not kill wasn't really a factor when designing rifle ammunitio) is why they got away with such a weak cartridge. Which was actually weaker from the beginning but the Army kept insisting on being able to penetrate a steel helmet at 300m, so the case had to be lengthened and lengthened to fit enough propellant. That gave the unfortunate case dimensions that are with us still to this day.

And it's interesting that the reason for this was a lack of nuclear weapons sophistication. Making a hydrogen bomb required hydrogen (isotopes) as fuel. But how to store it? The first idea was using liquid hydrogen, but then you need a railway car full of cryogenic equipment to keep it liquid. That's the design parameters the Soviets used for their ICMBs, i.e. we need to be able to shoot a railway cart to the US. Teller and co. then realised that by using lithium in the Teller-Ulam design you could make the bomb much, much smaller and lighter, and the US ICBM were designed with that in mind, i.e. we need to shoot a family car to the Soviet union. (The Soviets then got clever, and didnt' actually fire a cryogenic H-bomb, while the US actually did, and then it turned out in Ivy Mike that lithium was the gift that keep on giving...)

So, when the space race started in earnest, the Soviets had these great big bloody rockets, and hence could loft a heavy Sputnik (~80kg) into space without much trouble, while the anemic US rockets barely managed close to a tenth of that (~13kg). It took quite a number of years before US heavy lift capability had caught up.

No, not really. While the article says "government" that's not quite true. In Sweden we have a long tradition of "business as government", and wholly (or partially) government owned businesses. That's what's at play here: The fibre to my house was pulled by the local energy company (district heating and electricity). That company, while wholly owned by the local (municipal) government runs a surplus, and hence isn't subsidised by taxes. But they do enjoy a government monopoly.

What they do, do is provide the basic infrastructure that others can offer their services on, whether that service, be delivering broadband or electricity. Now, in order to do so, they require coverage of their cost, but are not in the market to squeeze it for all it's worth.

Hence I pay $50 a month for 100/100Mbps internet, basic cable and IP telephony. That money goes to my service providers who then (in turn) pay the energy company.

Sure they can. Without exposure no-one will come to their gigs. And the proceeds from those they sure can eat. Well, rather, they can buy stuff to eat, even if money is high in fiber, their nutritional value apart from that is lacking.

Even major acts don't make much money off of selling their recorded music, RIAA has seen to that, but the exposure leads to better other ways to make money. Exposure is basically where the entire game is at.

It's already been said, but it bears repeating. If you want to kill people instead of things you go for radiological warfare, i.e. you rely on fallout, not blast overpressure. (Incidentally, since the military is almost always concerned with other types of targets, they're typically exclusively concerned with blast overpressure, at the exclusion of all other types of effects).

Compare the exercise retold by Stuart Slade where it only took a small portion of the US arsenal to kill as near as all of the Chineese as it wouldn't matter.

Now, that that wouldn't happen, even in a large scale exchange is another matter. Nuclear weapons are far too valuable to use for such a purpose (usually), and there are lots of other strategies that would be tried before a counter population strike.

Yes, I was thinking "shotgun", but your ideas are better. Let's run with it a bit. How about a good old fashioned barrage balloon? Or use it to loft a fishing net, or why not a kite? "Honest officer, here I was just flying my kite, minding my own business and all these drones started to fall all around me, not my fault really..."

Or, for the ultimate thrill. Your own drone/RPV. There have been "dog fighting" competitions between RC-planes for ages, trying to cut someone else's streamer with your propeller. Now you could actually make that game worth your time.

Then there's good old fashioned GPS-spoofing that can be done for cheap. Make the drone land/drop thinking it has reached its destination? It's manna from heaven all over again, only this time courtesy of Amazon... :-)

And you had me all the way up until you had to discriminate against me based on my age alone... :-)

Not all us 46-year olds are as bad as you think. Just so you know. Oh, and now you've had your say, get off my lawn, etc.

Yes, I should have said that I put RISC as beginning with Hennessy & Patterson's work, that became MIPS and SPARC respectively. So we're a bit later than that. And of course when I said "compiler" I meant "optimizing compiler". Basic compilation as you say, was not a problem on CISC, but everybody observed that the instruction set wasn't really used. I remember reading VAX code from the C-compiler (on BSD 4.2) when I was an undergrad and noting that the enter/leave instructions weren't used. My betters answered: "Of course it isn't, they put so much useless stuff in there that it's much too slow..." (Only they didn't use the word "stuff"...)

But yes, the x86 is perhaps more "braindead" than "CISC" from that perspective, I was actually thinking VAX and it's ilk as they were what "RISC" came to replace, since the x86 wasn't a serious contender for workstations/minicomputers when they entered the arena. It was strictly for "PCs", which were a decidedly lesser class of computer, for lesser things. If anything RISC replaced the MC68000 and similar in the workstation space. And even though that was CISC, it was of course a much nicer architecture than Intels ever were, or became.

Yes, but the score boarding takes care of those spills as well. The processor won't actually perform them. But, whether they're visible or not, the compiler still has to optimise as if they're there in order to have a chance to wring out the maximum performance, so whether they're visible or not turns out to not mean that much in practice, rather, keeping them invisible isn't that much of a gain, as the compiler will have to assume that they're backed by invisible ones anyway and you'll take a substantial performance hit if they were ever to go away. (Which they won't as they take up next to no real estate today anyway.)