they need to send Knife Guy and Double Shotgun Dude to Afghanistan and this will be all over in no time.

The results speak for themselves.

ps - It isn't pleasant, but denying people is pretty much always cheaper than treating them. As that process goes on, it gets nastier and nastier, but if you're into cost avoidance, you didn't much care anyways. Nothing is cheaper than denying people care, if you go all the way.

We apparently wasted half a billion dollars to stop "dozens" of criminals from claiming benefits. Doesn't seem particularly cheap to me.

It works great in Germany which has a system we could most easily implement - basic coverage through the coverage with private insurance for anything you want beyond that. Which is pretty much the public option the Democrats are pushing for.

What nobody really ever talks about is how great a job the US private sector is doing with health care.

That because while people can cherry pick a few stats ("people survive prostate cancer 6 months longer!") or a few anecdotes ("a Canadian woman came here to get rid of a cyst while mortgaging her house to pay the bills!"), taken as a whole, our health care system is a failure.

The US gov't can hardly do worse than a system that, unless you're rich, produces poorer outcomes for fewer people with longer wait times at a significantly higher cost.

A Romulan from the TNG/DS9/VOY era goes back in time to kill Kirk and blows up the ship Kirk's father is on. His attack becomes the Federation's first encounter with the Romulans and radically changes history.

TNG Era Spock goes back in time and tries to set things back on course.

Which means the programmer doesn't have any confidence in his/her product to declare it finished.

So why would I want to use it?

Is that the downturn in newspapers is coming at the same time as a massive recession. Under normal circumstances, newspapers might have been able to weather the transition to on-line reporting but right now, a lot of them are simply going to die.

For example, the much-speculated on-line edition of the Seattle PI looks like it'll be less an on-line newspaper and more a web portal that'll disappear within a year of the print edition dying.

One of the things I like about Puzzle Quest and Castle Crashers is that failure doesn't have much penalty. Certainly, you have to restart a level or boss fight, but any XP/gold/etc you've acquired stays with you so the "time penalty" is minimized. You may have lost but you've bettered your character in the process and can make another try incrementally better.