That high-cost form of care adds up too. Here in Canada, publicly-funded health care — together with retail health care costs outside of the public system (like prescription drugs) — cost about 9% or 10% of GDP...I forget the exact number. By the same yardstick, U.S. health care is 13% of GDP. So tlhingan is right, the user-pay system *is* more expensive. Obamacare will have reduced U.S. costs a bit by now, but maybe not by enough to make a dent in the 13% figure.

From www.webelements.com/cerium... "It is the most abundant of the rare earth metals and is found in minerals including allanite, monazite, cerite, and bastnaesite. There are large deposits found in India, Brazil and the USA."

I saw one price point online, $12 per kilogram. To my eye, that's cheap and suggests ready availability. Especially for the ingredient in the CalTech fuel-making process which gets regenerated.

My provincial goverment is using your quick and violent method, in fact, to destroy about 30,000 hard drives.

Well, not exactly *your* method, using bullets. But the same idea.

As they take each old computer out of service during a government-wide system upgrade, they:

1. Remove the hard drive.
2. Drill through it once, using a cordless drill. Right there in the office!

Full munching and recovery of recyclable materials takes place later at a depot. The important thing is to keep citizens' private data private! It's leaks to the media which drives the paranoia, by the way.

In the summer of 1961, as a kid, I got to play tic-tac-toe on the new Axel Wenner-Gren computer at the University of British Columbia. No way can I remember the model, but the Wikipedia article on Wenner-Gren suggests that it was a Wegematic 1000.

It filled a room, and they say its air conditioner was housed in a second room. Ah, tubes... It had something like 32 words of memory. I typed my move on an electric typewriter, and it re-drew the board in typewriter characters a few seconds later.

My older sister used it to customize a job application letter for a number of different companies. That surely is one of the first end-user mail-merges in history.

And to think I'm not 60 yet. Computers really are new!