I get my medical care from the VA and am very happy with it. My current Primary Caregiver got his medical education at a university in Egypt, and I'm perfectly satisfied with his abilities. Among other things, I like the fact that when he didn't like the way my Type II diabetes was reacting to my current medications, he referred me to Endocrinology because he knew his limits and didn't find anything wrong with asking for help when he needed it. I'd much rather put my health in his hands than in somebody who went to a more "western" medical school who wasn't willing to admit that he didn't know everything.

Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.

Really? Let's say that you're taking the final exam for a course in Trig that consists in nothing but solving problems (and showing your work) that aren't in the text book. If all you've done is memorize the material but haven't learned how to use it, how are you going to pass the test?

I'm sure that there are many people who'd be much happier if you were, "Not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead."

Excuse me? I served in Tonkin Gulf back in '72, and there wasn't any trouble finding the horizon during the night, as long as we weren't steaming back and forth through a fog bank. Of course, part of it was obscured because we were in sight of land, but there was generally enough to see that celestial navigation wasn't a problem.

And, before you ask, I wasn't involved in navigation, but one of my best friends at the time was.

I got that impression because the way you posted implied that you weren't familiar with Celestial Navigation and didn't realize that you can get a fairly accurate fix with two objects and a very accurate one with three.

Taking elevations at noon only tells you your latitude, unless you have a very accurate clock, and the sun can only be used in that manner at noon (AFAIK).

As it happens, the Sun and the Moon are only two of the many objects that can be used for Celestial Navigation. And, as far as having a very accurate clock, what do you think a Marine chronometer is for and why all ships are required to have at least one?

...the problem is that the concept of similtaneity is fundamentally flawed.

I don't think so. When it comes to physics, I'm an informed layman at best, but I don't think that the concept itself is flawed. The flaw comes in when people try to apply it in a situation where it just doesn't apply. As an example, it certainly doesn't apply at astronomical distances; we can't know exactly where Alpha Centauri is and what's happening there right this minute; we can only know what was going on 4.366 years ago. The idea of simultaneity simply doesn't apply, and most people understand that. The problem here is that most people don't understand relativity deeply enough to understand that when it comes to clocks this accurate the same thing is true: simultaneity just isn't relevant.

That's a very good question; I wish I had an answer. There are, as I see it, two problems with open primaries. First, if only the two leading candidates get on the final ballot, it effectively freezes out small parties, except as write-in candidates. Second, if things are set up so that the highest ranking candidate for each party is on the final ballot, cross-over voters from the largest party can try to arrange things so that only the least electable candidate from the second largest party can win the primary, in effect rigging the main election by hand selecting their opponent.

I also live in California and voted against open primaries. One of the reasons is that I understand that the whole point of primary elections is to let the members of each party decide for themselves who they want representing their party in the general election. Instead, what we got was a system that makes it almost completely impossible for third-party candidates to get onto the ballot, which is exactly what I expected.

That's one way to work, and usually the most popular because much of the theoretical work is done by grad students hoping to get a PhD out of what they find. The other way is to collect as much data about the situation as you can so that you can narrow down the possible explanations. Of course, that way rarely leads to a PhD, so it's not used very often. Quite understandable.

I was never hospitalized when I was in the Navy years ago, but I get all of my medical care now from the VA and have been hospitalized on three different occasions. Almost all of the care I've received at the VA, either in a hospital or as an out-patient, has been very good, and the people there understand that if it weren't for people like me they wouldn't have their jobs. Yes, there are exceptions, but there are bad apples and lazy people everywhere. I'm sorry to read that your experience wasn't as positive, and if there were anything I could do about it, I would.

That being said, I wouldn't use military or VA facilities to quarantine civilians who have been exposed to Ebola unless all available civilian hospitals were full because that's not what military/VA hospitals are for; they have their own job, and they're busy doing it.

This would be a wonderful deal for Comcast if they could get it. They give up a few million subscribers in one city and get a nation-wide monopoly on cable TV and broadband over cable. What's not to like from their POV?

All a terrorist had to do was create the AP on a phone, wait until somebody noticed and reported it, then delete the AP and watch the fun as everybody runs around trying to find it. All the disruption of a bombing without the inconvenience of getting yourself killed or arrested. If that's not what happened this time, it soon will be.

In most parts of the world, having a local volcano erupting is a major problem. In Hawaii, most of the eruptions are either confined to the volcano's crater or the upper slopes, meaning that most of the time it's just an unexpected tourist attraction. (I remember being at Pearl Harbor in '72; there was an eruption of Mauna Loa that caused a bright yellow fountain that could be seen at night from Honolulu, but all it resulted in was a dome inside the crater. Having a lava flow go far enough to threaten homes is quite rare now, and that very rarity is what makes it news. Yes, Ebola is frightening, and potentially more dangerous, but that doesn't make it what's happening in Hawaii less newsworthy.

It's very rare, now, that you download binaries and run them on Linux to install something. Most of the time, what you get is an rpm, a deb or whatever the equivalent is for your distro. Adding malware to such a package without making it uninstallable is not as easy as it is with a Windows executable. I won't say it can't be done, because I'm sure that it can, but I will say it's more work especially as the exact technique depends on what type of package you're working with. And, of course, that gets even more tricky if you're using this service to download updates from your distro's repositories, as you not only have to gimmick the files itself, you have to get the GPG signature to match.