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MRI in the US is $1500-2500

But but insurance costs, what if the CEO spills a martini on the golf course! That would be a terrible crisis and the hospital needs to insure against that!

(Malpractice cost driving healthcare cost has been debunked. Sure, telling people you ordered 20 tests because otherwise you might get sued sounds good... but the reality is that you ordered 20 tests because they pay you $100 each.)

Can you provide citation or other evidence? Here is one of many reports that state the contrary. Here's another. Here are descriptions of the Xerox Star and Xerox Alto interfaces that don't seem to illustrate these features. Here's video of the Xerox Star, showing the use of dedicated keys, rather than drop-down menus, to carry out basic operations like copy, move, undo, and text formatting, the use of a "Move" key with point-and-click instead of drag-and-drop to arrange files on the desktop or move files into folders, the use of a "Properties sheet" instead of direct editing to change filenames, the use of a Delete key instead of dragging files to the trash, the use of an "Open" key instead of double-click to open a file, the absence of text selecting by dragging, etc.

No it shouldn't. Didn't you study "checks and balances" in school?

You're talking to someone with a Bachelor's in Political Science. Of course I am aware of the standard civics-textbook account. I just don't buy it, and it was my studies that led me to the conclusion I stated above. Specifically, the writings of Sanford Levinson and Robert Dahl (see also this book review by Hendrik Hertzberg) led me to agree with those authors that the Constitution and the federal system it sets up are deeply flawed in many ways and need to be re-thought from the ground up.

Get rid of malpractice.

Already tried that.

Turns out that doctors do all those so-called "defensive" tests because they're paid per-test, and it sounds better to say "I did 20 tests so I wouldn't be sued" instead of "I (well, actually my medical assistant... my time is too important, I have to see 19 other patients and order their tests this hour) did 20 tests at $100 a piece, ka-ching!"

Read More.

Require plain and simple billing from doctors, and insurance companies

Good luck with that. For the doctor to tell you how much you're going to owe him/her, they're going to have to get the insurance company to tell them what they're going to pay for that procedure on that day, which the insurance company has to be dragged kicking and screaming because they don't want the doctor to know what they're supposed to be paid for doing that procedure.

How about medicare and medicaid? Those have been here a long time. Still we need universal health care.

The Moon has been there a long time but we still need healthcare (no less of a non-sequitor).

They were doing it with computers in New York City since about 1980. It's called Compstat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compstat

Before that, they were doing it with maps and pushpins.

There's a similar situation in medicine. Atul Gawande had an article in the New Yorker on using a Compstat-style system for hospitals to find the patients who had the greatest need. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande

The doctor Gawande interviewed said, “For all the stupid, expensive, predictive-modelling software that the big venders sell, you just ask the doctors, ‘Who are your most difficult patients?,’ and they can identify them.”

The same reason we refer to the vagina when we actually mean vulva.
Wait, that's probably not a good analogy on /.

To quote Bluto "Holy Sh*t!!!!!" - I just looked up vulva on Wikipedia!
Well I guess I should say made the mistake of looking up vulva....only believe me it was no mistake in the first place and well lets just start by saying I didn't do much reading.... Geez, after spitting out my coffee, I kid you not I seriously had to double check that I hadn't been redirected to Jimmy's Bomis site instead... but then I realised as there were none of Jimmy's "lesbian strip-poker threesomes" as the NY puts it that no I must have still been on porno^h^h^h^h^h wikipediaI. That article could be the * of the month article....

The summary of the collage entitled "Vulva_Diversity.jpg" is hilarious example with serious and non-serious entries intermixed:

# Female_abdomen_frontal_view.jpg (first row, left)
# Rasur.jpg (first row, center)
# Pubes.jpg (first row, right)
# Human.jpg (second row, left)
# Landing_Strip.jpg (second row, center)
# Hot_pants.jpg (second row, right)

Peter Klashorst, your a sick puppie!

Jimmy if your reading this can you ensure that next time your updating one of your sites that you pick the right one as I thought you'd reduced all that NSFW, NSFS stuff from Wikipedia as part of trying to white wash your porn past.... not that I'm complaining mind you re the actual content itself but your acting like Bill Gates and Steve Jobbs denying they were hackers... oh wait they did....

"Scientology sucks Katie's arse and Tom Cruise due to play bender in upcoming Futurama^h film...." - there back on topic ;-)

A post with porn, bill gates, steve jobs and scientology. hmmm I'm not sure now if I'll now be modded up or down. More likely I'll have an unfortunate accident with a car tomorrow when I'm crossing the road.

They innovated stealing the GUI from apple to... no wait apple did that by stealing from Xerox PARC

Your misuse of the term "stealing" would give an RIA/MPAA spokesman a semi.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

No one said Apple invented USB connectors, docks, etc. But just like Ford and Chevy both make cars if Chevy starts making cars identical to Ford's cars then Ford would kick up a fuss. The only reason such a thing doesn't happen is because patent and trademark issues are taken care of before launching unlike computers where they pretty much do what they want and hope for the best.

And I suspect you'll find most of the crap people such as yourself spew about what Apple stole isn't exactly true. For example, Apple paid Xerox in exchange for them sharing. Xerox has no one to blame but bad management. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Just like their design patents don't patent rounded corners or rectangles but the truth doesn't always suit Android fanboys.

Gold star, I concur. But, sometimes even the best candidate and thoughtful voters need a date with Lady Luck. Per a New Yorker commentary shortly before the election, someone on the President's transition team [should have sent] inauguration tickets to Richard Fuld for managing to screw the pooch so throughly in September '08. Perhaps it was Chris Rock's line that things got so bad, white people said "fuck it, let's give the black guy a try."

ran their first sci-fi issue this month.

Here's his piece "Inspiration for the Fire Balloons"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury

While I remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July, after the uncles had their cigars and philosophical discussions, and the aunts, nephews, and cousins had their ice-cream cones or lemonade, and we’d exhausted all the fireworks, it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.

U.S.A.:

You have NO rights.

Cheers.

If that basic catastrophic insurance is currently over-priced compared to the cost of providing the care, try a non-profit insurance co-op.

The problems:

1: Health insurance is incredibly overpriced. Prior to "obamacare" insurance companies had a lifetime maximum payout of $3M to $5M. Very few people suffer long enough to hit that. A healthy 20 year old could easily get a million dollar whole (ie they WILL pay as long as you don't kill yourself or they find some other way out of it) life policy for about $150/mo. For $450-$750/mo your survivors could get more money from your life insurance company than you'd ever hope to get out of your health insurance company.
2: What passes for "Catastrophic" insurance these days is itself catastrophic. After your thousands-dollar deductible, you're on the hook for 20-50% of the rest. About 60% of personal bankruptcies cite medical problems, 75% of those were insured at least until they were too sick to work and lost their job. http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/insured-but-bankrupted-anyway/

Perhaps care providers are being forced to accept too much of the risk involved in medical advise and treatment (suggesting tort reform),

It's too late to turn back now. Malpractice has taught doctors that if they do 5 times the number of tests to keep from being sued, they make 5 times as much. Stopping the suits now won't change a thing. Also, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all After tort reform, doctors' malpractice rates went down, and the docs spent the savings on new testing equipment.

we're systematically over-paying (and need more competition)

Barrier to entry: hundreds of thousands of dollars of med school bills aren't going to pay themselves. At least for Doctors. Nurse-Practitioners are sprouting up all over and can see you for a discount. Unless you want to see a real doctor.

or perhaps we're simply expecting more health care than we can really afford.

But then little Timmy will die! How can you call yourself a good parent if you don't spend your retirement fund, your other kids' college funds, sell your house, and live in a gutter just to keep little Timmy alive another month?! If the government can't let little Timmy die for religious reasons, how the hell do you expect it to let him die because you're too cheap? http://www.imperfectparent.com/topics/2012/05/10/court-over-rides-parents-decision-to-refuse-treatment-for-infant/

Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
...
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

> To liberals [being rich and conservative], that's reason enough to hate them so those are the only real attacks I've seen leveled against them."

Oh, gee, you don't sound the least bit biased there.

> "So tell me, what have they done that is worthy of the pure, unadulterated hatred that you and others have towards these guys?"

Maybe because they've spent so much money creating "think tanks" to influence the media and give conservatives talking points. They want to abolish most of the government and social programs, including social security, medicare, medicaid, environmental protections, labor laws, undermine public acceptance of global warming, want to dramatically reduce taxes on people and corporations. They will effectively create a feeble government and replace that will a plutocracy of business owners who can pollute as much as they want. Its like they want a return to the year 1900 with dirty cities, child labor, no safety net for the poor or elderly, and at the top of it all are wealthy factory owners who control the government.

Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 1980 presidential election, sharing the party ticket with presidential candidate Ed Clark. The Clark–Koch ticket promising to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve Board, welfare, minimum-wage laws, corporate taxes, all price supports and subsidies for agriculture and business, and U.S. Federal agencies including the SEC, EPA, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, and DOE.... Koch is skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming, and thinks a warmer planet would be good ...

From http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer -

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

All their charitable giving wouldn't make up for the damage they'd do by dramatically reducing taxes on the rich. It's like someone giving you a few bucks to win your affection, then lobbying the government to cut their tax bills by millions, and we're supposed to go "well, he did give me a few bucks, I'm not allowed to think that their government lobbying is bad."

I was also offended by the New Yorker cover, and I think Richard was too.

Nobody should be surprised that there was much that is negative about Steve. I do oppose Apple's way of business, which is high on DRM and control of the user. Were I writing the same piece, I think I could have said it better than Richard.

I think the saddest part is that Dennis Ritchie, who really invented the stuff of our modern world, died around the same time and in comparison to Steve, was unlamented.

> So your solution is don't use social media and you won't have to hide it - even
> though as I said that will not work because they will rightly assume
> you're probably lying (it is simply not the common case),

[...deletia...]

> The end point of this is that almost everyone now uses social media

Wrong. Check out http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ Most English-speaking countries are at approx 50% of the population. As of the time of posting...

* USA 50.72%
* UK 49.63%
* Canada 53.39%
* Australia 51.48%
* New Zealand 51.40%

That's number of accounts divided by population. Stuff that isn't supposed to happen, but does...
* children under 13 with accounts; they merely lie about their age
* people with multiple accounts. E.g. a squeaky-clean one for their employer, and a "real account" under a different name, and multiple accounts to rig Farmville, etc.
* There aren't supposed to be a bunch of bot-accounts, but you can go out and buy 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 "Likes". What does that tell you?

Normally, these bogus accounts can hide in the background. But for small countries it really stands out. Note that Monaco has accounts for 124.31% of its population. Don't believe the 900 million crap you hear.

BTW. I'm not on Facebook.
Wonder why I don't trust Zuckerberg?
It's because I'm not a dumb fuck

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all

"A US military spy plane illegally entered Chinese airspace and collided with a Chinese interceptor, killing the Chinese pilot."

Really?

That's not exactly correct. US surveillance aircraft do not violate China's sovereign airspace, but Chinese fighters would routinely harass US aircraft in what China claims as an "exclusive economic zone" in the South China Sea, not recognized by the US, and not considered sovereign airspace. "The PRC interprets the Convention as allowing it to preclude other nations' military operations within this area, while the United States maintains that the Convention grants free navigation for all countries' aircraft and ships, including military aircraft and ships, within a country's exclusive economic zone."

China's fighters routinely buzzed US EP-3's, and if you're actually asserting that an EP-3 is maneuverable enough to cause a collision with a Chinese J-8 fighter, then you are either deluded, or a member of the PRC's 50 Cent Party. The US EP-3 had to enter Chinese airspace in order to conduct an unauthorized emergency landing on Hainan Island, after which NSA's secure operating system was completely compromised by China, with a US Admiral later observing, “It was grim," and a US official responding to a question of whether China could be "that good" by saying, “they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’"

So yeah, go ahead and assert that China would somehow be a better global steward of human rights.

Hey! We need you! Your students will hate you, your administration will suspect you, you'll be paid a pittance for long hours and much work, you'll be subject to every lawsuit a disgruntled punk can talk his drunken mother into starting, you'll pay for your supplies out of pocket, we may have to lay you off with almost no warning, and we'll be spying on you on-line. But other than that, it's a dream job!

Because it's a New York school. You get paid a good salary, benefits, and a ridiculous pension.

And as detailed in the New Yorker, you can't be fired, unless there is an Act of God.

And even then, you can appeal your firing and probably win.

For example, they paid a teacher not to teach for ten years: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-10/news/31048116_1_rubber-room-problem-teachers-teachers-union

Yes, US and Israeli intelligence - with all the uncertainties that come with such assessment - say that whatever there was, stopped or mostly stopped in 2003 . The NYTimes talks about it eg here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html?_r=1 . The confusion is normal because Western intelligence contracticts everything you hear so how can it take in account the IAEA. This confusion is especially large with the press themselves because they've been exposed to the full load of propaganda.

There have been discussions about the IAEA report and while the IAEA is currently overstating the problems with Iran, careful reading should show they're not making the strong claims people believe they're making. They're not saying Iran is working on a bomb, or probably working on a bomb, and what they're saying is a bit shaky. The Parchin story in particular is weak, and there is no plausible connection between the container for controlled explosions and work on nukes.

Gareth Porter has been following the IAEA work for years now so you could read up on that. Here's Seymour Hersh's articles about the matter.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all

Yes, US and Israeli intelligence - with all the uncertainties that come with such assessment - say that whatever there was, stopped or mostly stopped in 2003 . The NYTimes talks about it eg here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html?_r=1 . The confusion is normal because Western intelligence contracticts everything you hear so how can it take in account the IAEA. This confusion is especially large with the press themselves because they've been exposed to the full load of propaganda.

There have been discussions about the IAEA report and while the IAEA is currently overstating the problems with Iran, careful reading should show they're not making the strong claims people believe they're making. They're not saying Iran is working on a bomb, or probably working on a bomb, and what they're saying is a bit shaky. The Parchin story in particular is weak, and there is no plausible connection between the container for controlled explosions and work on nukes.

Gareth Porter has been following the IAEA work for years now so you could read up on that. Here's Seymour Hersh's articles about the matter.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all

"assassination arm" sounds so subordinate. But yes, there is sufficient confirmation that MEK and Mossad are working together. The US provided the training. Articles about US and Mossad involment are at foreignpolicy, msnbc and the newyorker(in order of publication):

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag
http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/08/10354553-israel-teams-with-terror-group-to-kill-irans-nuclear-scientists-us-officials-tell-nbc-news#star3
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html

Here is an article on it
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer

It's about scientific replication, and that the initial result decrease over repetition.

Schooler says. "One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment."

The saddest thing is that the entire law was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong problem would have been repealing that law that says the ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, then everyone will be lining up for insurance or dying in a ditch. The right problem is why the fuck I need insurance to not go bankrupt if I break my arm. And no, the answer to that one isn't tort reform (seriously, read the article if you think it is.) I don't know what it is, but nobody on either side of the aisle is even bothering to look.

Actually, that is the root point: do you let people die on an ER's doorstep? What if they were in a bad accident, and their insurance papers couldn't be found, say they were in a wallet crammed in a glovebox in a burning car? Who pays then? (If you're going to decide that people aren't helped when they should be, then someone will be liable for that decision.) And therein lies the crux of the matter. Since we can't reliably determine who should be helped, and almost no one says that they shouldn't have been helped after being helped, we wind up with only a single logical conclusion: everyone must pay into the insurance fund because the current system of some pay some don't but everyone gets helped has already been proven unsustainable.

Ron Paul has not addressed this point at all.

When someone cries judicial activism about the court ruling with the constitution it's whining.

What I predict is that the SCOTUS will ignore the fact that the question before them is "is mandating that people buy a product constitutional?" and void the entire act, despite the fact that several parts of it have already gone into effect without the mandate and those parts are doing just fine and would continue to do fine with or without the mandate.

Republicans will cheer for this, despite the fact that they looked the other way every other time the SCOTUS has used some weaselly "jurisprudence" excuse like whining about standing (because destroying the Constitution doesn't injure me one bit) or declaring an issue moot to avoid making a hard decision like "what to do about an american citizen held by the Bush administration without charge for two years" or "what to do when the Bush administration steals the evidence of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens after it has been presented to the court".

The saddest thing is that the entire law was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong problem would have been repealing that law that says the ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, then everyone will be lining up for insurance or dying in a ditch. The right problem is why the fuck I need insurance to not go bankrupt if I break my arm. And no, the answer to that one isn't tort reform (seriously, read the article if you think it is.) I don't know what it is, but nobody on either side of the aisle is even bothering to look.

See, this is the problem here - a lot of the "facts" being constantly repeated are completely made up.

No, he did not post anything online. He posted about it on Twitter; something to the effect of "my roommate has a guy over". Of course that's not nearly juicy enough, so almost every single news story rounded it up to "sex tape posted online!"

Just to reiterate: there were no sex tapes, no pictures, no actual sex, either. He didn't even see anyone naked.

If you're at all interested in learning more about what actually happened, this article goes into a good amount of detail (fascinating read, actually).

And give me a fucking break - "witness intimidation"? He asked his friend not to talk to the cops (rather stupidly, obviously). The friend that was facing most of the same charges and thew him under the bus to get a deal.

And you're a fucking retarded asshole for suggesting the two things are the same.

In this case, the two are the same only in the sense that neither one actually took place.

You obviously haven't read the new yorker article here.

It was extremely more likely that the scorn he received from his mother likely pushed him over the edge. He even took her on "tours of bridges around new york". If thats not a cry for help...

"Clementi wrote a message to Justusboys. He was clearly pained, but there's little to support the idea that he was mortified by the thought that he'd been outed. There are only hints of Clementi's mood in the previous weeks and months. There was his claim that he hated high school, and there were three files on his computer, written in July and early September, whose contents are unknown but whose file names are Gah.docx, sorry.docx, and Why is everything so painful.docx. It may be significant that, on his initiative, he and his mother had taken excursions to bridges around New York; he kept photographs he had taken of the George Washington Bridge on his phone. Paul Mainardi, the lawyer, wondered if Tyler was "in the thinking-about-suicide world" sometime before college. "

The whole story was dramatized by various people with various goals. Alot of it was played out online, and tyler had used the same handle on multiple websites so he was easy to track down.

Personally, i think the whole case could have been solved if they just got in a fight and then had a beer. Of course people would rather write about it online now then even TALK to each other. and they lived in the same fucking room!!

Seriously, read the article. I would say as someone who also has a special interest to spin on this :), that the cause of all the problems can be traced to online vanity and lack of anonymity. Ravi even complained that the guy had a yahoo email address, i mean this is bullshit things ALL kids complain about. However, now all the kids do it online with their real names. This is the problem here, stupid kids stupidity amplified x100 because of the internets.

"Once Ravi understood that he would be living with Clementi, not Picone, he felt that he knew these essential facts: his roommate was gay, profoundly uncool, and not well off. If the first attribute presented both a complication and a happy chance to gossip, the second and third were perceived as failings. "I was fucking hoping for someone with a gmail but no," Ravi wrote to Tam. Clementi's Yahoo e-mail address symbolized a grim, dorky world, half seen, of fish tanks and violins. Ravi's I.M.s about Tyler's presumed poverty were far more blunt than those about sexual orientation. At one point during his exchanges with Tam that weekend, Ravi wrote, "Dude I hate poor people.""

I think that the anon above may have wanted to link this story address rather than the response to the story which was linked above (though that was also interesting).

Thanks much at any rate for bringing our attention to the New Yorker; their writing is pretty well rounded, and the 14 page article is a bit longer than the other news treatments I've seen about the situation.

Here's the story from the New Yorker... Turns out according to this more detailed profile that a lot of what we were told initially about this case was oversimplified or just not true.

Agreed, Stratfor is hardly the biggest offence in terms of budget misappropriation, although the evidence is highly in favour of the 'no money should be spent on this at all' label, and suggests that the intelligence community is gathering huge amounts of unnecessary data because they have no idea what they need. (We have a similar problem in bioinformatics, but ours isn't caused by baseless paranoia.) Budget-wise, the really scary disasters are things like TRAILBLAZER (also mentioned in the article) which are heavily protected from scrutiny through their deep classification. You might further find the connected story of Thomas Drake interesting.

I think the biggest problem here is Dharun's refusal to accept a plea bargain:

A second offer was made in December: no jail time, an effort to protect him against deportation, and six hundred hours of community service.

It seems like a reasonable compromise. I wonder why he turned it down.

How about if they fired them for ANYTHING?

They all just go to the Rubber Room and wait. Full salary full benefits sitting around doing nothing. Not just for poor performance, anything. You could take a machete to a kid and get put on 'leave' to the rubber room.

SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations.

Offtopic, but they also send people out to very remote areas -- one of their missionaries lived with and studied an Amazon tribe and learned some things that challenged some very fundamental western assumptions about universals in human language.

I remember reading an article somewhere, here it is, about a small isolated Amazonian tribe that has no perfect tense. Quite interesting. Their language did seem to influence them quite a bit.

Cheap, unarmored and expendable, but small and hard to hit. I think I've heard of that formula before. Oh yeah ... it was how Doug Lenat beat the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron.

(In fairness, his ships couldn't even move and these things can fly.)

His philosophy speaks to why I don't buy Apple products .. lack of choices.

That's actually why, growing up in the 90s, I preferred Apple products: I was worried we were all doomed to a beige box Windows future and Apple was the only bastion of "choice" where choice didn't represent "Windows" but still actually ran a modicum of software needed to interact with the Windows world.

But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation.

There's a good article from a recent New Yorker that speaks to Jobs' real genius as being exactly what you said: not an innovator per se, but a tweaker and a refiner:

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task."

I have sympathy for the authors of the letter to the WSJ because of the attitudes of people like you. I'm an free thinking, rationally minded, individual. I value my right and capacity to evaluate arguments on their merit and to question the factual basis of other people's assertions. When people jump down my throat and call me a sophist, a "denier", and imply that anything I say must be preconceived notions that I have swallowed whole from some fossil fuel industry shill, all because I presumed to point out something that appears to be erroneous in someone else's statement, it irritates me.

The proposition I was testing (in a totally back of the envelope way) was that the temperature record of the past decade shows evidence of warming. I tested this particular proposition, not because I was hand picking data, but because the poster I responded to had suggested that the truth of this proposition was blatantly obvious. It did not seem so to me, and I believe that my quick calculation verified that intuition. Other than that I did not deny anything.

I specifically said "your argument provides good evidence that the past decade has been significantly warmer than other decades in the past 130 years". That is, a clear longer term warming trend exists. I also noted that "one could definitely argue that this does not constitute evidence against global warming". Which is exactly what you are doing.

I would argue however that the vehemence of your reply displays an attitude that is both characteristic of many people who urge action on reducing carbon emissions (something I support) and antithetical to the scientific mindset. There is much evidence that a person's preconceptions can have a significant impact on the outcome of their research, even with seemingly cut and dried empirical work like measuring the charge of the electron. The potential for bias induced error is undoubtedly much greater in a theoretical and speculative investigation like climate modeling, in which many important variables can only be roughly estimated. Combine with that potential the very real and evident passion displayed by many people who are involved in the research and you have a formula for bad science.

I have degrees in physics and economics. Physics draws conclusions from repeated experiments under carefully controlled conditions. Economics must rely on theory and limited data run through sophisticated econometric models, because the systems under consideration are not subject to control and repetition. Economists try to tease answers from our limited data. Answering a question like "Was the recent stimulus bill effective in promoting economic growth?" is not easy. Ideally we would set up the exact conditions of the U.S. in 2008 and try several runs with the stimulus bill and several without, then compare the results. That, unfortunately, is not possible. One can try to answer the question using mathematical models and computer simulations but the conclusion depends on how you handle your data and set up your model. Indeed, none of the models are able to predict the future trajectory of the economy with accuracy. Which is what I think the authors were getting at. If the climate models are so completely accurate that no reasonable person could possibly question them, then why did none of them predict flat global average temperatures over the past decade? If they're not that accurate, then why are people who ask seemingly reasonable questions about them insulted and shouted down?

I would suggest that climate modeling is much more similar to modelling the economy than to modelling, say, the trajectory of a space capsule. The problem of studying global warming is far more complicated than that of studying the impact of smoking on cancer rates. If we had data on the fates of thousands of Earth-like planets, some of which had been inhabited by carbon emitting civiliz

I think you may've overshot a point here. Yes, he could just order it shut down, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't amass very powerful entities. If Congress or the Senate or another committee hates the President, they're petty enough to vote against all of his initiatives regardless of merit. If you run afoul of the CIA, then no matter who you are, that's going to cause problems for you. Members of Congress have forced each other into voting for pork by attaching it to defense bills and attacking their opponents for lacking patriotism. The fucking NSA and DoJ have been caught conspiring to ruin lives. Robocalling. Filibusters. These are not people who fight fairly.

Did you assume that corruption went no further than simple bribes and kickbacks of lobbying, with no defences should they get caught? How do you think ACTA got so much support from inside the government? The depth and complexity of corruption at the elected and senior levels far outstrips what we see in the newspapers. The system is so utterly entrenched that there is very little hope of fixing it.

No matter who had been elected President, he or she would be receiving the same blame. If anything, the rest of the Democrats let the new guy take the fall. Obama's short and bland track record suggests he was a relative outsider, and that he faced a great deal of adversity when his rhetoric fell upon the ears of the all-too-established old boys' clubs when he got in the door—although I guess you could say that Fox News's lack of pre-election hatred for him might have been some kind of foreshadowing that this was going to happen; either they knew he'd comply, had no chances of winning, or were too afraid of being accused of playing the race card.

we blow horrible amounts of cash on unnecessary (read CYA for lawsuits) tests

And in Texas, we got tort reform and discovered what's really going on is that "we blow horrible amounts of cash on unnecessary (read doctor gets paid per test) tests" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

Actually, profiling has been seriously challenged, there's a nice New Yorker article about it, and several scholarly papers, Alison L and Rainbow L. eds (2011) 'Professionalizing Offender Profiling: Forensic and Investigative Psychology in Practice'. Routledge, London. The charge is that profiling is similar to astrology, make vague claims that could match a variety of scenarios, and pay attention when it fits, not when it doesn't.

Like a lot of forensic techniques, it seems to have jumped from the theoretically plausible to practice, without going through the intermediate step of check that it works. "Junk science" may be a fair characterisation.

I'm not sure if you're referring to Toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or not, but Saddam's security forces had long killed or tortured most vocal dissenters long before the invasion of Iraq. Yes, certainly, some who saw the US as a liberator who saw the US marching in finally took the initiative to speak out, but I think most people knew the truth: the US was only invested in its own interests, not the interests of the Iraqi people. That they should coincide for a time did not mean Saddam or his forces would be destroyed before the US left nor that when the US left another dictator, like one of Saddam's sons, wouldn't seize power and engage in another round of executions.

But, more generally, I just don't think most Iraqis cared. People live out their lives as best they can in the environment that exists. Few people spend their energy to try to change that environment because so many entrenched elements work to stabilize back to that environment that even without the fear of punishment, it seems to be wasted effort. This holds true in the US as much as Iraq and is a major reason there is such political dissatisfaction and yet so little political movement for change. Of course, by the same token, most people don't have a fully realized idea of what would be a better system and so couldn't advocate for that change anyways--I'd have to include myself in that camp as well, since I recognize how many gaps in my understanding of the government world there is. At best, I can only think in terms of moving from one form of democracy to another; I imagine most Iraqis thought in the same terms.

I think the real question is given that the US imposed democracy on Iraqis, how do they now feel about the current system vs the old one. And the truth is, many people liked the old system because it offered things like more stability for things like infrastructure, concerns about personal safety, etc. I only imagine that will change for the better as more infrastructure is built, more political groups settle for non-violent solutions to their troubles, etc. But, that's the optimism of a belief that the free market will solve supply issues, government won't be so deadlocked to not act to the needs of the people, and eventually even the most ardent supporter of a cause will become tired of the killing and seek more peaceful means. The cycle can, of course, begin again given enough motive. And another dictatorship could arise.

In the end, the US's involvement is wishy-washy enough that as much as it might have had a positive impact on Iraq today, it seems more an accidental side-effect than anything.

Why would they start a conflict? Iran has not invaded any other country for some time and seems wise about not falling into that trap..
We might see a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident#NSA_report -
"only information that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to Johnson administration officials"
or as was suggested in 2008 "The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
"Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio"

Actually, this has the American military very worried. In the Millenium Challenge 2002, Red used exactly this tactic and wiped the floor with us in a wargame - 20,000 (virtual) service personnel dead. The military basically said "NUH UH! DO OVER DO OVER!" and restarted the exercise with new rules that would have made such tactics impossible. The leader of OPFOR (retired Marine Corps. Lt. General Paul K. Von Riper) resigned his position as commander of OPFOR in protest.

Then, of course, there was the Trillion Credit Challenge (start at the bolded "I"):

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation o

No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them.

Bull.

Scientology Exposed [May 6, 1991]. [cover art]
  The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power [full text and illustration]

The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology [Feb 14, 2001]

Anonymous is the a geek's carnival Wheel of Fortune. Each week it gets another spin. More often if the crowd gets bored.

Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch did more to harm Scientology's reputation than anything Anonymous did. Google clambake or xenu to find exposures that have been happening for literally decades.

No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them.

Bull.

Scientology Exposed [May 6, 1991]. [cover art]
The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power [full text and illustration]

The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology [Feb 14, 2001]

Anonymous is the a geek's carnival Wheel of Fortune. Each week it gets another spin. More often if the crowd gets bored.

A candidate who to many embodies the corrupting effect of money on politics faces elimination largely because he hasn’t done a good enough job raising slush money.

Did they also buy up www.newtgingrich.xxx?

Actually, this raises an interesting point... while you get lots of lawsuits over re-use of melody lines, in the percussion industry, re-use and adaptation of other people's work is taken for granted. I've never heard of a successful lawsuit over stealing a drum track (although I'm sure at least someone must have succeeded at some point), even though rhythm is just as important to music (and just as much a created work) as melody.

I've never heard of any virus that asks if you want to be infected. You're free not to redistribute any GPL licensed software.

By the way,

(...) viruses helped make us who we are today just as surely as other genes did. I am not certain that we would have survived as a species without them.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_specter

Along those lines, you don't even need to go offworld or into science fiction to find cultures who have significantly different perspectives on religion and experience of language than we do.

Or The New Yorker.

"Liberal" vs. "Conservative" is too broad, there's a special kind of conservatism the activist high court judges favor. I call it power conservatism. It's the idea that a judge's job is to maintain order, and the way to maintain order is to not overturn any established power relationships - always side with those who have power.

Jeffrey Toobin commented in the New Yorker in 2009, that up to then, high court judge Roberts had in every major case before him, sided with power. "The prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff."

Even if you are a conservative, such an attitude should worry you.