Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer, and I've used it in Canada. It has also been available to me in a dozen other countries that I've worked in, but fortunately I never needed it there. It works pretty well. So well indeed that most civilized countries have it.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty sure of it.

Thank you. I've only been to Belfast so far, which was great fun, and I hope to spend more time in both Irelands.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

Regular solid aluminum blocks do not burn in a 20% oxygen atmosphere. There's not enough surface area for oxidation to replenish the heat lost to convection or radiation. So it's safe to use liquid aluminum for molds, for example.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

No, it's more complicated. X86 historically used 80-bit floating point numbers internally and translated to 64-bit as needed. That causes a lot of very subtle bugs if you're not careful - they do not affect the result too much, but they're there. It's easier now, because most CPUs simply use 64-bit floats.

Excel is reproducible. Microsoft worked very hard to make its floating point calculations work exactly the same way on all machines.

SPSS is nice, but it is expensive as hell.

Nope. Numpy doesn't allow you to visually play with the data. You have to write code for everything.

So what's the alternative? There are no good and easy to use software packages to create simple data-intensive apps. The closest alternative was VB6 and if I had to chose between it and Excel, I'd choose Excel any day of the week.

Beloyarsk power plant has a fast-neutron reactor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... ). It's been working without major incidents for about 35 years.

88% efficiency means that out of every 1KWt*hr you pull from your outlet, 0.88KWt*Hr will be used to propel the car. And it's the TOTAL efficiency, including the battery charging overhead.

I have a Chevy Volt with 10.5KWt*hr of battery storage, it takes about 11.2KWt*Hr to charge it completely. So we're talking about ~5% loss during the charging. With other losses in the high-voltage system, the 88% figure seems believable.

What do you mean by 'terrestrial eye'? An eye filled with air instead of liquid? It won't make any difference in efficiency. You really can't make eyes to look much different than they are.

Tried that, still not as easy to use. Also, holders suck. I'm also using my RPi to get statistics from CAN bus and do a couple of other tricks, like emulating OnStar and sending address directly to in-car navigation so that I don't have to enter it manually.