I once knew someone who was naive enough to confuse a patent troll operation with a real Menlo Park skunkworks/invention lab.

She was 22 years old and looking for a job; what's Stephenson's excuse?

You have it backwards. Single-payer advocates aren't pointing to a single system, you are. We're comparing the US with every other system in the developed world.

The US health care system is half as efficient as every other system -- every other country is providing an equivalent level of health for half of our cost. So either the US government is twice as bad as every other government in the world -- possible, although unlikely -- or it will do a better job running health care than the cronies and incompetents of the health insurance industry.

By the way, Medicare has the lowest overhead, by far, of any health plan in the country. It's not perfect, but you're still misinformed.

I suspect it was their old backend system that was preventing them from improving tracking. If the old system couldn't scale, there was no point in scanning letters at all intermediate points -- just origin, maybe one hub, and destination. This new system seems to have the capacity to scale to a very large number of transactions. We'll see if they start offering more tracking data now.

Yes, I'm sure that classifying and pricing are exactly why FedEx charges nearly 20 times as much as the USPS.

More likely, FedEx and UPS are inefficient and poorly set up for everything but regular package delivery to business locations, and it would cost them hundreds of billions to compete with the post office for general delivery. Billions which no one is going to invest in the foreseeable future. Doesn't FedEx still ship your letter from Seattle to SF through Memphis?

No data rights, at the very least. Possibly more.

It's confusing terminology because here "no data rights" means Muni gets complete access to data (but none to source code).

To me the author of the article is deliberately confusing public timetables with transmissions showing the position and expected arrival times of a bus.

No, that's not even an issue. The timetables are entirely public data generated by Muni (SFMTA) and are available many ways including Google Transit's GTFS. The author seems aware of this.

The only issue is about who has the rights to the data generated by Nextbus's proprietary prediction algorithms. According to Muni's spokesperson they have already paid for this data, and presumably have an ironclad contract saying that. Even if this NBIS company is some part of Nextbus's parent company, they have no ability to interfere in this contract.

The good thing about economics is you don't have to do a poll to see if banks were lending or not before TARP. There's financial data that shows they weren't; inter-bank lending had frozen.

Google "TED spread" and "LIBOR." Then go read Calculated Risk, Krugman, and Mankiw for center, left, and right takes on the subject.

While you're at it, I recommend googling "Dunning-Kruger effect." Not only are you patronizing, you think you're smarter than the experts when you don't actually know what you're talking about.

Health care isn't going to be Democrats negotiating with Republicans. I doubt the Republicans are going to contribute anything constructive to health reform, and so far they haven't put anything useful on the table. I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

The current system is great for Republican politicians -- lots of fundraising to be done among rich healthcare CEOs and rich doctors, lots of noble rhetoric about the glories of the free market, the risks of "socialism" and sober warnings about the risks of change (...to the system that every other developed country in the world currently has).

Also, if the government started providing health care as good as the VA or Medicaid, people might realize that the government can be more competent than the market (again, as it is in every other country) and Republicans would be forced to change. Instead, I expect they will try to scuttle the bill and leave us with the status quo, the world's most inefficient health care system by a factor of 2.

It'll be a negotiation like you say, but between Democrats and right-wing/corporate Democrats, or between the more populist Democrats in the House and richer corporate Democrats in the Senate.

Yup. The Roberts court's infinite pity for poor beleaguered corporations such as Exxon and BMW will be replaced by complete concern for the victims of crimes committed by individuals.

Objectively, one would think that corporations would need more and clearer punishment, not leniency. The only thing preventing corporations from behaving amorally is the risk of financial punishment -- CEOs have almost no personal liability. Individual citizens risk criminal punishment, and have to answer to society's moral standards.

EA Sports Cricket is very real.

And you know, football hooligans might even get me to play a Sims game.

If you were driving on a road made of the things, without braking or bouncing, it would indeed be stealing energy, and all the "perpetual motion" type arguments would apply.

In a parking lot, it's very different. When you slow down, your kinetic energy either goes to this electric generator, your brakes as heat, or your shocks as heat.

Probably 2/3 of the comments so far seem to think this is some kind of perpetual motion machine con. Those people should be embarrassed.

It's not. It's simple. It's just slowing cars by converting kinetic energy into electrical, instead of dissipating it as heat in the brakes or converting it to potential energy like a speed bump.

There was a discussion a while back, I think here on Slashdot, about a device that used a revolving door to generate energy. It prompted exactly the same comments. What these people didn't seem to realize is, revolving doors have brakes, and that device replaces the brakes. Same damn thing.

Do you really think the engineers who designed this device didn't think it through? This reminds me why it's never a good idea to discuss physics on Slashdot. I leave it to psychologists to explain why there are so many kneejerk contrarians.

Bad measurables are worse than no measurables. Counting enemy combatants killed didn't get McNamara or the army results in Vietnam.

ACID 3 sure came along at a convenient time for Google's browser marketing strategy. And it was designed so every browser would start from around the same score, not to test the most useful standards or the real-world web, so it wasn't very hard for Google and Apple to get to 100 when they focused on it.

The author of the test works for Google, of course...clearly it's a conspiracy, and frankly one I'm sick of hearing about.

Lend-lease during WWII was free for the British.

Postwar reconstruction, however, was not.

Britain was nearly bankrupt for the next decade -- there was still rationing five years after the war. And the US made out extremely well -- the British even had to devalue their currency while they were borrowing money. They were less able to invest in infrastructure than the French and Germans, and the long term consequences for British industry (the world's most advanced from about 1850-1930) were severe.

The point stands -- international lending can be quite powerful.