Ah.. My passport was old. It had a real photograph on it. I need to get a new one, so I guess it will be a printed one.

It's a really long list. You're probably asking about a number for a specific identity. But, I don't really need you keeping it safe for me, I can always get new ones.

I don't mind being a number. I have several. :) You're never really free, unless you can be sure you can *always* travel unmolested. ... unless you want to get molested, but that's another conversation entirely.

Well, I know the DMV in Florida keeps them. A little while back, I asked what my file looked like. It was a slow day, so they turned the monitor so I could see it. They had every drivers license photo I've had since the 80s.

I thought the passport office asked for two. It's been a long time. travel.state.gov says one photo now. I guess they figured out how to scan them finally. :)

Ya, I have been covered by employer insurance on and off over the years. Some have it, some don't. Some plans were great, and others weren't. And sometimes greed just gets in the way of everything. The entire medical industry is greedy. The only part that isn't would be nursing staff. They do most of the work, get most of the abuse from patients and family, and get paid shit.

Two many doctors want the low risk and high return gigs. Treating someone with a spine issue with drugs for the rest of his (my) life is safe. They won't do any new physical damage with it. It also guarantees they'll keep making money for a long as I live (or as long as the insurance will pay for). It's riskier to do the surgery that he (me) needs, and possibly cripple or kill me. He also only gets paid for that incident. After the follow up a few weeks after surgery, I may never see that doctor again.

That's not to say all doctors do that. I've known some who work in the best interest of the patient, and I honestly appreciate them.

We're getting pretty good at killing people though. Now we can do it without risking the lives of anyone on our side.

Well .. People who are being honest, and aren't complete idiots, will be able to tell success stories.

People who have rates that tripled were the ones with such shit plans that insurance wouldn't cover anything.

I was in a car accident before the ACA took effect. I had "good" insurance through my employer. My insurance wouldn't cover the surgery necessary to do pesky things like to let me walk normally again. Most of my prescriptions weren't covered, and those that were, were about 10% less than the cash price.

Then they laid me off. A good part of that was that I was no longer pleasant at work (I was, and am, in a lot of pain). Another part was, my walking speed dropped to about 0.3mph at best. Ya, I bothered to measure it.

Because I was laid off, I couldn't afford $1,200/mo that COBRA offered (the cost of that plan, without the employer paying anything).

When open enrollment started, I enrolled. I was still unemployed, with no income. I was having a hard time finding a job, since it was difficult to walk or drive far. They put me in the Medicaid plan. Communication from Medicaid was non-existent, and the site only said that they would contact me.

I finally got a job, with some people I had worked with before, and now had an income. I went back to the site, and modified my application with my new income numbers. I spent several hours going through the plans, and picked one that was a bit expensive, but covered just about everything. This new plan that covers fuck-all everything, and has a relatively small yearly out of pocket max, cost about $400. That's only a little more than what I was paying for my employer provided insurance. It did take about a week for the insurance company to contact me for my initial payment, and another week for me to get my card. I guess I could complain about that, but considering we're dealing with both the government *and* insurance companies, a couple weeks turnaround from no insurance to having the card in my hand, is pretty damned good.

About the time I got the insurance card I paid for, I got a letter and card from Medicaid. I called them and told them to cancel me, since I no longer needed the free insurance.

I called the doctor, and made another appointment with them. They checked everything out, and surgery is covered. Surgery is scheduled for a few weeks from now.

While I was there, he refilled my pain meds. When I went to the pharmacy, they came up as $100. I hadn't given them the new insurance cards yet, so they redid it. $4/ea.

This last month has been great. I'm getting surgery that I couldn't have with my pre-ACA insurance. My insurance bill is 1/3 of what it was. My meds are effectively free. After I recover from surgery, I'll (hopefully) be pain free. The accident wasn't "bad", but it messed up my back pretty badly. It *might* take 6 surgeries or so. If they all happen within the year, my max out of pocket will be about $4,500. Considering each surgery will cost tens of thousands of dollars, I'm very very pleased.

My only complaint would be that the whole medical industry is still raping us. Medical costs in the US far exceed what they are in other countries. There's no reason an IV bag of saline solution should cost over $1,000, when it takes less than a minute to set up, and the supplies cost less than $5 to manufacture.

Being transported from the accident I mentioned to the hospital cost almost $1,000. It was less than a mile, and all they did was put on a cervical collar, tied me to the backboard, and drove me there. I won't even go into the other insane expenses I've incurred from then until now.

    You're in luck. It was USPTO 75480046. It's since been abandon, as the filer didn't keep up with it. Quick, grab it while you can.

    Funny though, the details say it was only for audio on the Internet. :)

Check their video. It sounded like they wanted to put it in orbit around the Earth. Their video shows it parking out around SEL1, out where ACE is on the 16th year of it's 5 year gig.

So, they don't want to recover it. They just want to park it an awful long way from home. I misread TFS, and was trying to figure out how they'd design, build, and launch a recovery vehicle in 40 days. That would have been really cool though.

uniquilessnessishis?

You know I couldn't resist after a rant like that. :)

Well, what they're using now isn't exactly the safest either. Each generation of any technology improves on the last. Look at cars. In 1970s, when the shuttle design was finalized, you were rolling around in deathtraps. Now cars crumple on impact, airbags deploy all around us. We almost have auto-driving cars in the mainstream (i.e., they're doing road tests now).

If we knew nothing about the idea of cars, and engineers were requested to make every feature found in modern cars was requested, you'd get the same answer. "Impossible." Hell, you'd probably get the same answer in the 1970s.

The same applies to any technology. The PC you're using is nothing like a computer in 1974. I had prolonged arguments with people, who insisted that computers would never go up to 100MHz. They had all kinds of scientific reasons for it.

It's all up to figuring out how to do it. That takes time, it's not a one-shot deal.

Well, lets look at the federal budget, so we can judge on "extra tax dollars".

The 2015 spending budget is $6,293.7 billion.
NASA gets $16.6 billion, or 0.26%, or $52.13 per person.
Defense gets $820.2 billion or 13.1%, $2,575.37 per person.

The F-35 has $875 billion allocated to the project.

Our defense budget isn't just high. Our spending is 36% of the world's defense spending. The US spends about as much as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India, and South Korea *combined*. If we reduced our military spending to the level of the country that spends the most (China), we could trim 452 billion from military spending, NASA could be paid 27 times over.

GE was paid about 10% of the NASA budget for avoiding paying taxes. The taxes they don't pay count for more than the entire NASA budget. GE makes most of it's money from the US government.

You know, I wouldn't mind 1% being dropped from killing people in other countries, or threatening to do it. I wouldn't mind if companies like GE weren't allowed to skip paying taxes, to reduce our tax burden, and double NASA's budget. I wouldn't mind if they skipped trying to build the F-35 fighter, and doubled NASA's budget.

So, which do you want? An airplane that we don't need? Wars that serve no good purposes? Paying corporations for avoiding taxes? Or to advance the knowledge and reach of the human species?

You're totally right. People complain about the NASA budget, but they don't realize how insignificant it is compared to other things. We've spent (and continue to spend) far more on killing people (or the
threat of) in other countries.

NASA's budget is less than 0.4% of the federal budget. The bank bailout was more than has ever been spent on NASA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That's funny that you express that there's no reason to put people on Mars, but you quote Carl Sagan in your tagline.

I ran across this a few days ago.

http://io9.com/5932534/carl-sa...

Maybe you're there because we've recognized we have to carefully move small asteroids around to avert the possibility of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic consequences, and, while we're up in near-Earth space, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to Mars. Or, maybe we're on Mars because we recognize that if there are human communities on many worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less. Or maybe we're on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there - the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we're on Mars because we have to be, because there's a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you.