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So you guys are feeling the pressure these days? You missed the 1400, you're wondering if you're in the next 3600?

I guess you'd also add as another obvious example, Genetic Modified Foods.

Obvious example: "intelligent design"

Hmmm... let me rant in my turn. The "intelligent design" science nonsense is a reaction to others who use the name of "science" to naysay the Bible. But science has no ability to naysay the Bible. The Bible records historical events which did or did not happen, depending on the opinion of various historians and Biblical scholars. Based on my own experiences and understanding of other archeological and geological records, I am inclined to think that basically, they did happen.

Further, the Bible records communications between intelligent beings that did or did not happen. Based upon my own experiences of such communications, I am again extremely inclined to think that they did happen.

Now, science has no way of naysaying that a communication did or did not happen between me and my wife. Does somebody think that science has a way of naysaying a communication between two intelligent beings, 5000 years ago?!?

That, too, is nonsense science.

Rather, you have people who dogmatically disbelieve the Bible, dogmatically believe certain claims made by certain people in the false name of science, and then claim that science disproves the Bible. Then, you have others who dogmatically believe the Bible, and not understanding science any better (thank you, Dewey, for your wonderful education system) than the first group, come up with intelligent design. They'd be better served by just ignoring the idiot naysayer pseudoscientists. But they don't know any better.

Enough of my rant.

I say that such intelligent communications did occur, and science has nothing on them.

I say further, that they do still happen today.

http://media.tscnyc.org/wmedia/2010916S1.asf
http://davidwilkersontoday.blogspot.com/2009/03/urgent-message.html

I had several good teachers. They made a difference in my life. At least a couple recognized I was brighter than average and slotted me for advanced classes and mentored me.

I had similar experiences as well as exact opposite experiences. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Demperio, hated kids. (Why do you become an elementary ed teacher if you hate kids???) She particularly hated boys. And she *despised* me. She'd make fun of me in front of the class, send home letters about how bad I was, and assign me "busy work." One of her assignments was for me to write out the alphabet 26 times every night. Each day, I'd turn and it in, she'd hand it back unmarked. My mother quickly caught on and had me hand in the same paper day after day. The teacher didn't seem to realize (or care) about what we did. I actually dropped out of the second grade for a bit to avoid her. (The principal insisted she was his very best teacher and refused to move me.) The teacher even told me I'd never succeed in life.

My next year, we took standardized reading tests. My teacher saw how well I did on the normal level reading test and insisted I take the advanced level one. When I aced that one, I was put in the advanced reading group. I credit her for not only renewing my love of learning, but for setting me on the path that would lead to AP/college level courses in High School and advanced classes in college.

Years later, I was doing quite well in school and returned to my elementary school to rub Mrs. Demperio's nose in it. They told me that she had retired and moved to Florida the previous year. She couldn't even stick around for me to gloat. I later learned that I wasn't the only victim of her teaching style.

Because, when I was in basic training (Air Force) we were told that we would have to do details(a.k.a. cleaning bitch duties)if we didn't go to church. As a result of this, you see the noobs who attend Catholic church putting their rosaries around their necks like necklaces :) note: that's not what you're supposed to do with them.

So I went to church and became deathly ill from other basic-training sicklings coughing and sneezing, and then insisting on holding hands with me as part of the sing-a-long. Eventually I stopped going to church and discovered that we weren't actually made to do details. Just got to sit quietly in the bay writing letters and relaxing. One of the best-kept secrets in basic training. Hell, if I knew that then I wouldn't have went to church even if I were religious!

Still, the AF is not all that bad when it comes to religion. The worst cases of Christian zealotry seem to occur in the Army.

The review of this book doesn't make it obvious to me. Is this book really about refactoring or is it about query tuning?

IMHO, the former doesn't really need to be db vendor specific. Refactoring should encompass all code and not just the SQL. Looking for ways to refactor from an ORM perspective makes sense such as lazy evaluation and strategic caching.

Query tuning is an important topic with which there are already plenty of resources devoted to it.

as i am reading the comments, trying to think up something snarky...this pops into the old inbox:

Hi, We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page. Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310. As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language. For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html. We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account. Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

FEAR THE GOOGLE!

the script: http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007/12/mobipocket-books-on-kindle.html

Link to the author's reverse engineering blog and script description:

Here.

Link to just the scripts Here.

Anonymous to avoid KarmaWhoring(TM)

This is just precious - the Stasi in the GDR (east germany to most) did exactly the same thing with their suspects.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,484561,00.html
http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/2008/07/body-odor-preserved-and-exhibited-at.html

People being interrogated would frequently be asked to sit with their palms face down on a piece of cloth, usually stuck to the chair. After the interrogation, the cloth would be removed and placed in a jar for later analysis. I don't believe it's ever been admissible as evidence in any western court, but that's obviously what the whole DHS "proof" is all about.

Quite why one would invest so many resources in this when fingerprints and DNA are already reliable forms of identification I don't know, and I strongly suspect that the "indicator" of deception will be flawed for much the same reasons the results of a polygraph are flawed - I can understand how someone who's stressed might well emit a different sort of sweat than someone who's just hot, but trying to define a "liars sweat" reeks (hohoho) of pseudoscience to me.

Who knows, maybe there's something in it, maybe the article is making too much of things, maybe I've got my paranoid hat on. But it still seems worryingly like the whole "this man is the serial killer cos his writing is all weird" argument to me.

Well, for a start, this bug doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Even less inspiring was this quote from the former founder that his "main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow."

Of course, you should be downright worried by the following:

"The reason I am asking you to be very cautious about MySQL 5.1 is that there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.

To prove my points, here is some metrics and critical bugs for 5.1:

* We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1.
* We still have more than 180 serious bugs (P2) in 5.1. Some of these can be found here.
* We have more than 300 known and verified less critical bugs that are not going to be addressed soon. (The total reported number of bugs to the MySQL server is of course much larger)"

Well, for a start, this bug doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Even less inspiring was this quote from the former founder that his "main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow."

Of course, you should be downright worried by the following:

"The reason I am asking you to be very cautious about MySQL 5.1 is that there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.

To prove my points, here is some metrics and critical bugs for 5.1:

* We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1.
* We still have more than 180 serious bugs (P2) in 5.1. Some of these can be found here.
* We have more than 300 known and verified less critical bugs that are not going to be addressed soon. (The total reported number of bugs to the MySQL server is of course much larger)"

.... its only been a few weeks and you seem to have forgotten a key reason why there is no need for these defendants to be heard before a judge. Come on Ray ... you know the RIAA aren't filing any more lawsuits, right? They told us so!!

Yes but you fail to take into account the Oppenheim theorem; I'm surprised at your lack of mathematical knowledge. The Oppenheim theorem, named after the RIAA's 'prince of darkness' Matthew Oppenheim, is as follows:

1. The opposite of anything said by an RIAA spokesman = the Truth.
2. An RIAA spokesman said to congressional committees "we discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August".
3. Therefore the Truth must be that hundreds of new cases have been commenced since August, and cases are even being commenced this month.

(I cheated and did some independent investigation, just to see if it does work. I am proud to say the theorem continues to serve its purpose, which is to enable us to learn the Truth. The real value of this theorem is its practical application which is to save time. Instead of looking things up, researching, investigating, doing depositions, etc., we can just find out the Truth with this simple equation. And its success rate is astounding.)

You Tube is shooting themselves in the foot with many of its decisions. I think Google is spreading themselves thin. I know making this comment well reply, they will see it and something else on my account will not help. I pray not. Disgruntle ex you tuber. Yet a happy Motion Maker. They should learn from Daily Motion, that way it won't have be pulled down, or people mad at them for taking hours putting together videos with other people music. Oh maybe people will start singing more to there own videos..Because of the giant I began the http://broketvnetwork.blogspot.com/

I haven't been able to find is a succinct explanation of what particular legal approach the RIAA takes is unconventional

They're too numerous to enumerate but I've highlighted a small sampling of some of them here and here.

I haven't been able to find is a succinct explanation of what particular legal approach the RIAA takes is unconventional

They're too numerous to enumerate but I've highlighted a small sampling of some of them here and here.

It's evil because it violates your privacy, and there's really no easy way to opt-out

According to Google, there are many easy ways to opt out. One is to click on the big "opt out" button on various pages they have set up exactly for this purpose and have mentioned in their announcement.

On top of this, they also designed a browser plugin to do this for you.

Well..Duh!

http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/2009/01/michigan-muslims-attack-free-speech.html

You bastard! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find replacement tubes for my sarcasmometer?

Just to add little contrast. You can read what happens in US here
http://openbts.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-source-and-self-interest.html
Corporations think they OWN you and your work for the rest of your life, even in California where non-compete agreements are illegal.

Basically either you decide to share and build your business model around it just like Chinese did, or you wont be able to do anything other than work "for the man" in a cubicle.

They're still getting over not being paid any more.

was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking

A very welcome change indeed... ;-)

Or is it dangerous? ....

This Blog and the referenced link shows that reference to PIFTS has been removed from DIGG.

http://chrysler5thavenue.blogspot.com/

I checked Digg and couldn't find it (not a regular Digg user, but it would show up on a search, right?) and yet they show a web page where it is dugg? Okay ... it may be me and my inability to search Digg, or a spoof (but it isn't April 1) but if it is removed from Digg, then I have to assume US government shenanigans.

Needless to say .... I don't use Norton anyway .... but I'd like to know what is going on.

I have an idea...

How about Google stops indexing their web pages and removes them from their database. Oh yeah and deprecate their advertisement down a few tiers so they get even less hits. I'm sure the RIAA and its international clones would consider this evil but the rest of us would relish an internet without their bullshit. Oh or make searching the RIAA direct to http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ instead as the top hit.

It's always interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time. You'll see some tech writer blog about this every few months; sometimes they are a bit boring, but I always learn something from watching a Linux newbie try things out for the first time.

At work, it's the other way with me. I've been using Linux at work since 2000 (I'm a staff person at a university) but my boss recently made his preferences clear: I should run Windows, just like everyone else. So I did what anyone would do in this situation - I blogged about it. I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to write about making a return to Windows:

Linux in Exile

It hasn't been pretty. In short, I find a lot of stuff in Windows to be just plain broken. Nothing is the same, even among different "first tier" applications (that means apps from Microsoft.)

My next post will be about the stupid dialog boxes in Windows. I find them lacking compared to what I expect from Linux.

Digg.com is also trying to bury this story. Stories referencing PIFTS.exe being deleted from search results. Source

There is an effort underway here http://chrysler5thavenue.blogspot.com/

The previous blog entry on this site is that the US is annexing Mexico. Looks like a reliable source to me.

More information can be found at http://chrysler5thavenue.blogspot.com/2009/03/piftsexe.html. There's a lot interesting comments on there as well.

There is an effort underway here http://chrysler5thavenue.blogspot.com/ to figure out exactly what the purpose of this villainous little program is.. You can download it here http://www.mediafire.com/?mnmh35b9d0k (BUT DON'T RUN IT). Right now all the theroes are tentative but we are leaning towards this being either symantec's cooperation with government on cyber spying, or a virus which was accidentally released after symantec themselves was infiltrated by middle eastern hackers (it calls home to north africa).

> Is the sun so obvious that they don't even see it?

That reminded me of this creationist quote:

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isnâ(TM)t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."

http://stupac2.blogspot.com/2007/05/dumbest-creationist-quote-ever.html

The problem with ISS daylight visibility is that the illumination angle will be very small - the side facing outward from earth, not to earth, is illuminated. It will reach maximum brightness only in the nighttime sky.

In fact, ISS already does rival Venus in brightness during a good pass currently, reaching -4. And I have seen it (and filmed it - see http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2008/02/twice-iss-and-bag-of-other-objects.html) descending to the eastern horizon with the sun only 4 degrees under the western horizon.

And yes, Venus is visible in daylight, if you know where to look.

Slashdot is on to something again! I see a continuing series in this!

Stop Robot Nudity Now!

"Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots."

Do androids dream of erotic sheep?

Hopefully they will use this for good instead of using it to promote the LTTE terrorists in Sri Lanka that has caused so much misery to every one http://vosl.blogspot.com/

The UK Government has announced today - to the Daily Telegraph initially - that it will completely remove the offending clause from the Coroners and Justice Bill.

In the report, Jack Straw's minions seem to underplay the impact of the Slashdot article and mass Facebook/NO2ID campaign. Is this because they are worried that this sort of campaign could be launched at any time to keep them honest?

You ever get stuck behind a huge RV with a drunk driver on a narrow road?

What Microsoft should do is really simple: Get their huge, unsafe-at-any-speed public nuisance out of the market and off the 'net and let people willing to do it right get past.

A guy who blogs as joudanzuki described one ideal solution -- split Microsoft into several different companies, one that maintains their current offerings as actively patched legacy software, another that focuses on re-implementing the current stuff on a stable foundation, again as a way to support legacy software.

I'd say it this way -- Microsoft should re-release XP as Wine on a BSD system. (Linux would be impossible because of all the cross-licensing junk they've done now.)

And quit depending, in the System itself, on the band-aid that is UAC.

You don't, by chance, work in software licensing, do you?

boy, you guys are really taking these layoffs hard, aren't you.

I do so hate to ruin a good scare tactic, but elemental lithium supply far outstrips demand. The amount of lithium that has already been found is huge.

http://lithiumabundance.blogspot.com/

"This current estimate totals 28.4 million tonnes Li equivalent to more than 150.0 million tonnes of lithium carbonate of which nearly 14.0 million tonnes lithium (about 74.0 million tonnes of carbonate) are at active or proposed operations."

"This can be compared with current demand for lithium chemicals which approximates to 84,000 tonnes as lithium carbonate equivalents (16,000 tonnes Li)."

"Concerns regarding lithium availability for hybrid or electric vehicle batteries or other foreseeable applications are unfounded."

I voted and then it showed a graph with Serenity having 86% of the votes. A screen shot is posted here.

I grant it appears to be a miss leading GUI design on the pole system.

After you vote it shows percentages and Serenity has 86% of the vote apparently. Screen shot posted here. So either Serenity is winning, or that is the most miss leading user interface I have seen. Perhaps both!

OK, don't get me wrong. I used to be a professional Perl programmer and think Perl is useful for a lot of things. The most recent time I made significant use of the "Swiss army chainsaw" is to write a program to split up the large .html files one gets from free ebooks over at baen.com and make them small enough to be usable with my cell phone's built-in html reader:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-on-nokia-5310-xpressmusic.html

I also still use Perl as a "sed on steroids" when I can't be buggered to figure out how to make a given regex Perl-compatible, such as this real-world example:

perl -pe 's/[0-9]+\/DwMain//;s/\s*//g'

I also have had the privilege of meeting and having dinner with Larry Wall; a very kind person with a very deep and strong faith in God which I respect.

The issue I have with Perl is that it's too big to use in the really embedded space that busybox really thrives in, and is too big to, say, come with the version of MSYS I use. (MSYS is a subset of *NIX for Windows systems that I use when I want the basics of *NIX on a client's Windows machine but don't want to waste time putting Cygwin on their system). My other issue is that Perl code can more easily become unmaintainable "spaghetti code" if there isn't a strong coding style in place and enforced; these days I prefer to use Python when I know a given script is going to be pretty big. Also, Perl's big use when I was a professional Perl programmer, being an excellent cgi-bin language, has by and large been superseded by PHP these days. [1] [2]

Anyway, I don't hate Perl. I still use it; I just feel these days for small stuff sh/awk/sed/etc. make more sense, PHP makes more sense for web monkey applications, and Python (or Java) make more sense for big scripting projects.

[1] Back when I was a Perl pro, I used it mainly for things like data mining and email processing, but that's neither here or there and from a long time ago.

[2] There is, of course, mod-perl, used very notably by Slashdot. There's also mod-python.

Lest people think only government wastes monumental time and effort towards something relatively trivial, Microsoft spent a full year working on a feature one of its developers claims could've been done in a week.

It's a paradox of project management--too many stakeholders or dependencies, and you're going to bog down in red tape. Too few means that no one cares what your project is and won't waste their time helping you, and it'll never see the light of day. Finding a balance is difficult at best in any large organization.

So, instead of forging ahead with novel parallel processor technology, Nvidia thinks that the way to go is to copy last century's dinosaur CPU? It's enough to make a grown man cry. Whoever is in charge of research at Nvidia should be given the boot. What a waste of talented engineers! But it's not too late, Nvidia. Click on the link below and do the right thing. Otherwise, Otellini will tear you a new one and you know it.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis

On a different note, did not Nvidia recently say that the world is moving away form the CPU? I am beginning to think that Nvidia is either scared or bluffing. Otellini made a comment last week to the effect that Nvidia needs a CPU in order to build a GPGPU heterogeneous multicore processor and now there's all this talk about an Nvidia x86 coming out in a couple of years. Does Otellini call the shots at Nvidia? I am not so sure.

Nvidia is right that the days of the CPU are numbered but so are the days of the GPU. The reason is simple. Neither CPU nor GPU provides a universal or homogeneous solution to the parallel programming crisis. The heterogeneous route is pure folly too, if only because it does nothing to solve the crisis. In fact, it makes it worse because it combines two incompatible parallel models on the same dye. A match made in hell.

There is way to solve the crisis but it involves neither CPU nor GPU. Think pure MIMD vector processing. That's where Nvidia should invest its processor R&D resources, all of it. That is, if it wants to dominate the parallel computing industry for the next several decades. Intel would not know what hit it until it's too late. Big money is at stake. BIG.

Yeah, last time I did a comparison it was nightly FF vs. nightly Webkit vs. Chrome's development branch. For benchmarks I used SunSpider and Dromaeo.

Here are the results if you're curious, though they're somewhat stale by now. And here's an addendum where I include numbers for the IE8 RC. The original test used IE8 Beta2.

Yeah, last time I did a comparison it was nightly FF vs. nightly Webkit vs. Chrome's development branch. For benchmarks I used SunSpider and Dromaeo.

Here are the results if you're curious, though they're somewhat stale by now. And here's an addendum where I include numbers for the IE8 RC. The original test used IE8 Beta2.

Actually, he isn't:
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/does-metallicas.html

Also, can we go here?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_jx-KCnvjTuI/SNIvxUZepyI/AAAAAAAAKHk/XQQ8H2ylRK8/s1600-h/hetfieldshopping1.jpg

has now spent the last 10 years making ever-shittier "music" while pulling the ladder up behind him.

...except that the crappy mastering was not done by Lars Ulrich, or Rick Rubin for that matter. Metallica made an album -- a damn good one, I think -- and then the mastering engineer ruined it by participating in the loudness war.

Personally, I think it'd be hilarious if Lars didn't download the original album, but one of the remastered versions that used the Guitar Hero versions as the base. "I made this album, and I can't even get a good-sounding version of it without BitTorrent!"

Image if they got rid of all the SLOOOOW python in ubuntu would run considerably faster.

You don't actually know that. If you optimize without profiling things, you make a mess for yourself and don't actually improve anything.

Consider login time in GNOME. Your method would demand that gnome-settings-daemon be rewritten in assembler. Instead, consider that the login time was halved through careful profiling and algorithmic optimization--which is to say, nothing was rewritten in C.

As for slow performance of Python-based tools in general, note that the performance-critical libraries--cairo, GTK+, your video drivers--are all written in C. Rewriting the frontends isn't going to gain you much. If you disagree, go profile, and come back when you have more than simple kneejerking.

Heck, I just wrote a batch conversion process to move thousands of small XML files into one big XML file in another format. Time to execute xsltproc (in super-duper C!) a few hundred times for a test run? About a minute. Time to use a Perl interface to libxslt, along with parser hooks written as Perl subroutines? About four seconds, since I wasn't invoking xsltproc once for each input file.

Rewriting that project in C would have been time-consuming, error-prone, and utterly pointless.

if he had had any clue BEFORE he went on his insane rants, we might be in better shape and the music industry might be in better shape too.

Lars Ulrich has caused problems trying to stop new artists from entering the system and promoting their music and concerts. Oh wait, right, he's one of the few who got through the glass ceiling and has now spent the last 10 years making ever-shittier "music" while pulling the ladder up behind him.

It's not as simple as that. Medicare in the US is already too expensive, far more per decade than all the discretionary wars, bailouts and other questionable spending. And the coverage is very poor

The Taiwanese system uses smartcards to keep track of expenses and clamp down on fraud. It seems that the US needs to tackle inefficiencies inside the Medicare system before it scales it up to a national health care system like Taiwan. Still if you ignore the siren voices telling you to pour money into a corrupt system and reform it, you could end up spending USD20 per month and getting healthcare that is probably on a par with North Europe, where it costs many hundreds of dollars.

e.g.
http://deadlinepundit.blogspot.com/2008/02/taiwans-healthcare-lessons-in.html

On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rateâ"and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).

Actually even if you don't decide to scale it up, you still need to do something about the inefficiencies, or this will happen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medicare_and_Medicaid_GDP_Chart.svg

The US spends around 5% of GDP total on defense. Actually Medicate is already in trouble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)

The costs of Medicare doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. According to the 2004 "Green Book" of the House Ways and Means Committee, Medicare expenditures from the American government were $256.8 billion in fiscal year 2002. Beneficiary premiums are highly subsidized, and net outlays for the program, accounting for the premiums paid by subscribers, were $230.9 billion.

Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007, or 16% of all federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense. Given the current pattern of spending growth, maintaining Medicare's financing over the long-term may well require significant changes.

According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019. Shortly after the release of the report, the Chief Actuary testified that the insolvency of the system could be pushed back by 18 months if Medicare Advantage plans that provide more health care services than traditional Medicare and pass savings onto beneficiaries were paid at the same rate as the traditional fee-for-service program. He also testified that the 10-year cost of Medicare drug benefit is 37% lower than originally projected in 2003, and 17% percent lower than last year's projections. The New York Times wrote in January 2009 that Social Security and Medicare "have proved almost sacrosanct in political terms, even as they threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run."

Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is projected to grow dramatically in coming decades. While the same demographic trends that affect Social Security also affect Medicare, rapidly rising medical prices appear a more important cause of projected spending increases. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated tha

or this