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> We have no bananas, contrary to popular opinion, is not copyrighted. But keep on spreading the rumor

Interesting...this scanned sheet music shows a 1923 copyright notice:

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2778&context=mmb-vp

You are most welcome. I am, shall we say, passionate about my blueberries. It was actually in my top ten reasons for retiring to Maine. I kid you not. (Technically, an abundance of easily accessible foods like fish, deer, and my garden. Some take more work than the others.) I do have some wild blueberries on my property. Some of the land is fields gone fallow (I think that's how it's said - I'm interpreting Mainer-speak as a person who's 'from away') and they're often stolen by the birds and bears before I get to them. I have, indeed, yelled at both a moose and a bear to get the hell out of the blueberry field while I'm busy acquiring my treasures. There's enough to go around, they can find their own patch.

I should note, that while the moose is large - it is also stupid. Do not attempt to scare a moose during rutting season, you will not win for he is afraid you're going to steal his mate. As for the bears? Meh... They're cute little buggers. They don't get much bigger than 3-400 pounds. Unless she's got cubs, it's on. They run away when they discovered you've noticed them. They're pretty sneaky though. They're also harmless. Like, literally, won't hurt you unless you do something stupid like crawl under it and hit yourself with its paw. The White Tail Deer eats blueberries too but they're usually too skittish to come into the fields with you. If they do then you don't even need to scare them away. They're harmless. They're also not as stupid as meese (plural for moose).

I have blackberries and raspberries. Those are good but they're not blueberries. The birds eat a lot of those, as do the bears. I don't mind too much because those plants are evil. I must confess to paying neighborhood kids for those. I seldom pick them on my own and, even more seldom, make a special journey to pick them. They have thorns and fight back. Little bastards. The risk isn't worth the reward. If they were blueberries, I'd devise a way.

To answer another question, I found this link:
http://umaine.edu/blueberries/...

It's a whole lot of information about blueberries. Wonderful, nommy, delectable, blueberries. You can never quite be certain which one will be a little tart and which will be the sweetest. I've concluded that it's best to eat them all. You can cram a few in your maw and hope for the average - that seems to do wonders. They're also beautiful in pancakes, muffins, and bread. Some may say that my masculinity is damaged by making these sorts of things. I'll ignore them while rubbing my tummy. Then I'll stab them for making fun of my blueberries.

It's a blueberry. I'd not get this wrong, trust me on this. ;-) It's one of the ones listed here:

http://umaine.edu/blueberries/...

Not all blueberries are blue. They're pink, blue, dark red, some are kind of purple, and some are black - they vary a bit in between the shades. I've also noted your other reply. I'll look into it. ;-) Jams are a pain in my ass. I make a mean jelly, though.

I think there's a bit of a difference between having "good English skills" and spending four or more years of your life taking classes about it

I think there is (unsurprisingly) a lot of misunderstanding among the CS crowd about what an English major actually studies. I was not one myself (journalism and Russian language double-major), but from what I understood from my English major friends in college, it's not poring over obscure grammar rules for four years. It's actually more of a degree in writing and communications, learning how to structure and present information in essay form. It's also studying the various kinds of writing out there for different purposes - ranging from artistic to practical - and learning about how other writers have communicated in the past (literature) and what can be learned from them and applied to written communications today.

You can find an example of typical English 300-level courses here or 400-level courses here. English gets a bad name because there are many unfocused students who pick it as a major because they can't think of anything else to do, but for someone who's serious about it, it can be very intellectually engaging and useful.

Although, to be fair, wood ashes contain phosphorus as well (I think that's less true of soft woods, but I can't find that info right now).

http://umaine.edu/publications/2279e/

When I've used it in my garden, I was mainly thinking about it as a lime substitute. I live in the rainy Pacific Northwest, so the salts that are also found in ash weren't as big of a concern for me (but can be other places).

We don't burn much wood anymore, so I am usually buying lime nowadays.

Ayuh, that we do. They aren't nearly as bad as the fire ants that they have down south though - at least not in my opinion. By the way, I think you're the first fellow Mainer that I've seen on /. but I can't be sure as it's not like they have profiles that identify us as such. Ah well, you're AC and probably won't see this.

I wonder if I should inform them http://umaine.edu/publications/2550e/ that they're in Franklin County too. Too bad I'm lazy.

What advanced stats do you have in mind that can be done easily in Matlab but not in R? And I think your assessment of the relative acceptance of the two is out of date. R awareness is growing fast.

The choice really depends on what you are doing. Matlab is industrial strength engineering software. R is a a powerful statistics oriented programming language. In my experience, R's statistical capabilities are a strength relative to Matlab. Data handling (such as reading a csv file without barfing) is much easier in R than in Matlab. Moreover, Matlab is quite expensive. This is fine in a professional setting, but a showstopper if you're a small operation. The poster can get a student license, but why not use Octave or R? The two languages are actually similar in many respects, see David Heibeler's page.

I know researchers who have ditched Matlab in favor of R/C++. It really depends on what you're doing.

http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Publications/Fund-Reports/2010/Jun/Mirror-Mirror-Update.aspx
http://umaine.edu/ble/files/2011/01/US-healthcare-system.pdf

That covers three different dimensions for measurement, and we lose in every one.

Only governments have the right to use guns

That used to be the case but no longer is.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0910-07.htm

"Privatization" is the primary agenda of the corporate sponsored Tea Party and related movements. The goals are to dismantle the government offices and subcontract those roles to private corporations (on the presumption that government-run organizations are inherently inefficient and waste taxpayer dollars). Multi-national conglomerates already "own" the US Congress through aggressive lobbying, kickbacks for campaign funding, and the promise of highly compensated future roles as consultants, senior executives, or board members for today's politicians, judges, and appointed officials. The mega-corporations are to US government what the cocaine and heroine cartels are to the Mexican government.

To give you an idea, here's a quick summary of the transitions sought or already begun:
WAS - NOW
Regulatory Agencies - Self-regulation

Public Utilities - Same utilities but customers now have to buy through specially qualified "distributors" of the same utility rather than direct

Public Courts - Private Arbitration (many judges today are issuing one-sided pro-business decisions in the hope of landing a better paid position as a private arbitrator at one of the major firms. Arbitration proceedings do not have to follow state or federal rules of procedure, appeals are limited, legal precedant does not apply, there is never any jury of peers, and rulings do not even need to abide by the US Constitution)

Collections Agencies - Sheriffs and Judges (ok, this is a reversal, but not a good one, and one that serves corporate interests and re-institutes debtor's prisons: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jailed-for--280--the-return-of-debtors--prisons.html )

Corrections Facilities - Private Prisons (and much incentive to fill them regardless of guilt or innocence: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal )

CIA - Private contractors (including foreign nationals. No oath of service or duty to uphold the Constitution. Can violate US and international law while not accountable to anyone outside of their employment contract)

US Armed Forces - See above
State Law Enforcement - See above

Public Schools - Vouchers for Private Schools (non-sectarian schools have limited capacity. In a "free market" your kids would likely end up in a fundamentalist religious school). In time the vouchers would go away as they are not a product of the "free market" and make the system unworkable.

Fire Departments - Private Fire Departments http://www.salon.com/2010/10/04/libertarian_fire_department/

The "benefits" of privatization have been debunked for most roles of government http://umaine.edu/ble/files/2011/01/Privatization-BP-08.pdf
But privatization is still pushed as a cure-all in election campaign ads. I could go on, but as I show above, "privatization" eventually eliminates all of your Constitutional rights and protections. Once the corporations OWN the government AND the guns, who is going to help you? I'd rather not give corporations any more rights than they already have, especially since they are now considered "people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission.

Governments do not 'reserve' anything. In a pure free market capitalist economy, if someone is unable to feed themselves (say because a powerful group has decreed 'no one give him any work if you want to do business with us.') then that person will starve to death. Destroyed, and not by a government. Corporations destroy people's lives all the time, and what do you think this financial mess was about? Corporations making money up out of thin air.

The bailouts: bad. The stimulus: meh, not done right. Health care? It's a moral issue. We're the only first world nation without socialized medicine. And we have the least effective yet most expensive system. Look at some figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/why-does-us-health-care-cost-so-much-part-i/

Most recent polls show a supermajority of the population supports radical health care reform and socialized medicine. Despite big pharma spending billions to change public opinion.

I would agree that you're in bad need of facts.

Here you go, fresh hot facts to whack your noodle!

A study that shows that "The United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world". The US is spending per capita is $4,178, while the next runner up is Switzerland at $2,794. That's a whole 1/3rd cheaper!

This article says that the US ranked 37th in a WHO effort to rank health care systems, whereas socialist France was ranked #1, Italy #2.

"The U.S. health care delivery system is by far the costliest on the planet, but comparison studies consistently show Americans get second-rate results by nearly every benchmark.

Here's another article: "But for most all the rest of us, measured by all basic health care outcomes, from infant mortality rates to life expectancy, the United States has steadily fallen from number one in the world to the back of the pack of industrialized nations. The World Health Organization now ranks the U.S. health care system in 42nd place compared to all other countries."

You're not really trying, are you?

Right. Glad we agree.

I have health care coverage meaning I shopped around for the best deal I could find, and saved pre-tax into a medical expenses account. Maybe you've heard of such a thing?

Facts show that the health care system in this country is broken: http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

You can cry 'no true scotsman!' all you like, this is the free market. This is deregulation. Saying, 'Well, we just didn't do it ENOUGH' is lunatic fringe talk, and you know it. Nobody is buying your snake oil anymore.

No problem, since you asked so politely.

I used to use Matlab quite a lot (mostly for prototyping simulations and for visualization; I use C for my "real" simulations which take a lot of CPU time, since they run so much faster in C). I learned R about 2 years ago, and found that it can do pretty much everything Matlab can that I need for my own research.

Anyway, I wrote up a "Matlab / R Reference" that translates the basics between the two packages. It doesn't have highly specialized stuff, but many people have found it handy. I use my own reference quite a bit myself, since these days I mix up commands between the two packages quite a bit. It's available at:
http://www.math.umaine.edu/faculty/hiebeler/comp/matlabR.html

For some reason the U.S. has the most expensive and the least efficient health care system of all developed nations.

Citation required.

Here's one, a quick Google will show you a few hundred others all from the same dozen or so primary sources (US budgets, WHO figures, and so on from a few years). Last year, you spent $1, 975 per-capita on medicare and medicaid. A number of countries provide universal healthcare for less than this.

I actually base it on the fact that providing health care to detainees seems like the right thing to do. Given that the sort of people who like Michael Moore films would (like me) be angry if the US didn't provide healthcare it is hypocrtical to complain when it does. Cost is a secondary issue.

Show me where I said it wasn't the right thing to do. That doesn't change the overall point, which I still contend you missed. Healthcare is better for prisoners of war than for U.S. citizens. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. Everything else is just a justification for why this is acceptable. And that is where we disagree. But me saying it is unacceptable doesn't mean I want to lower the standard of healthcare for the prisoners, but rather raise it for the citizens.

In terms of cost, look at it this way. The base needs to provide health care to the US personnel. There's a marginal cost to providing care to the detainees too, but since they are kept in very controlled conditions this is probably not high per capita compared to the US personnel. It's not like they can injure themselves or get medical problems from a bad diet, because the military control everything they do. There are also a rather small number of detainees (200-500 compared to 9500 US personnel). And foreign military bases are expensive in general and Gitmo is probably more expensive than average since the Cuban government won't cooperate.

Even if it's not negligable, the DOD can just request more money to cover it. DOD resources are practically unlimited anyway.

What about this is even a valid argument? You think it's negligible, but if it's not let's just throw more money at it? They can't hurt themselves? Of course they can. I can break my own arm with nothing but a wall and some force, and I think they have a few walls. But you mean they are monitored and who in their right mind would hurt themselves or others. I don't know, prisoners? And this doesn't account for care of existing conditions or the introduction of a disease, virus, what have you.

The costs of providing health care to Americans is nowhere near negligable. In fact the US spends more on health care per capita than anywhere else

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

There are also 300 million Americans compared to 200-500 gitmo detainees. So the comparison between the cost of providing healthcare to Americans vs Gitmo detainees is absurd. And I'm sure Michael Moore knows this, even if his idiot fans can't accept that he's pulled some slight of hand to make the two situations seem remotely comparable.

First, I never said it was negligible, I said it was negligible as a percentage of what it takes to run a nation. And the fact that we spend more per capita than anywhere else in the world only helps to illustrate the absurdity that Moore is trying to point out; too many Americans go with substandard healthcare. How does that happen in the country spending the most on it?

I don't think you know what a strawman is. Please look it up on wikipedia. I'm sure that rights for gitmo detainees are determined at least partly with what the US can get away with politically. And one of the downsides about freedom is that the government is no longer obligated to give you free healthcare, at least in the US model. If you really prefer gitmo to "working every day and struggling to stay alive" then resign your citizenship (if you are American, otherwise skip this step), head to Iraq and join the people Moore called freedom fighters. Get captured by US forces and I'm sure you can sample the delights of free healthcare at Gitmo.

I went and looked straw man up on Wiki, like you asked. Let's see if I'm close. You setup the argument that we needed healthcare for Gitmo prisoners, something that wasn't being argued beforehand, but deals with a portion of the main argument (the detainees and their healthcare). Then you made the easy argument th

Way to miss the point. And make generalizations to back up your claims while providing no proof. You partly hinge your argument on the cost being negligible.

I actually base it on the fact that providing health care to detainees seems like the right thing to do. Given that the sort of people who like Michael Moore films would (like me) be angry if the US didn't provide healthcare it is hypocrtical to complain when it does. Cost is a secondary issue.

Care to show where you found the financial data for Gitmo?

In terms of cost, look at it this way. The base needs to provide health care to the US personnel. There's a marginal cost to providing care to the detainees too, but since they are kept in very controlled conditions this is probably not high per capita compared to the US personnel. It's not like they can injure themselves or get medical problems from a bad diet, because the military control everything they do. There are also a rather small number of detainees (200-500 compared to 9500 US personnel). And foreign military bases are expensive in general and Gitmo is probably more expensive than average since the Cuban government won't cooperate.

Even if it's not negligable, the DOD can just request more money to cover it. DOD resources are practically unlimited anyway.

And the cost of providing healthcare to American citizens is probably negligible anyway if you look at it as a percentage of the vast cost of running a nation.

The costs of providing health care to Americans is nowhere near negligable. In fact the US spends more on health care per capita than anywhere else

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

There are also 300 million Americans compared to 200-500 gitmo detainees. So the comparison between the cost of providing healthcare to Americans vs Gitmo detainees is absurd. And I'm sure Michael Moore knows this, even if his idiot fans can't accept that he's pulled some slight of hand to make the two situations seem remotely comparable.

Yes, there would be complaints about a lack of healthcare for detainees. That strawman doesn't change the fact that prisoners of war, citizens of foreign nations, have access to better healthcare than citizens of the U.S. who work everyday and struggle to stay alive.

I don't think you know what a strawman is. Please look it up on wikipedia. I'm sure that rights for gitmo detainees are determined at least partly with what the US can get away with politically. And one of the downsides about freedom is that the government is no longer obligated to give you free healthcare, at least in the US model. If you really prefer gitmo to "working every day and struggling to stay alive" then resign your citizenship (if you are American, otherwise skip this step), head to Iraq and join the people Moore called freedom fighters. Get captured by US forces and I'm sure you can sample the delights of free healthcare at Gitmo.

Humans may be living longer, but no thanks to the American system. The U.S. ranks poorly in life expectancy, https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank order/2102rank.html behind most of the industrialized world.

The U.S. also falls well below other inductrial nations in every public health measure, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health which, unfortunately, I can not locate on the web. However, one important measure, infant mortality, is documented at http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf (PDF alert!).

And this dismal performance comes at a per capita cost that's about double the cost in the nations that do better at keeping their people alive longer http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php.

It's no great leap of logic to conclude that in the U.S., the government supports corporate profits as being more valuable than human lives. (DOH!)

Actually spending per head on health is not higher in the UK than the US. I believe that the US spends more per person on medical care than pretty much any other country in the world... so much for the oft-heard rant about socialised medicine! As a proportion of GDP it spends double what most western countries do, if you only take Government health care (Medicare and Medicaid) then it still spends a slightly larger percentage of its GDP than most countries - 6.7% versus an average of 5.8%. Have a look here for instance. The UK actually spends far less than most countries on health care...

I'd say that making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years, is quite 'productive'.

I'm in exactly the same position as the GP, an independent consultant with several healthcare clients, and focusing on changing focus for a variety of reasons. I've also worked in the Canadian healthcare system in a variety of capacities, mostly in imaging and medical physics, as well as for U.S. healthcare companies, and have lived in the U.S. for long enough to experience a bit of the U.S. healthcare system as a client.

The thing to realize is that equating "heathcare dollars" or even "healthcare services" with "making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years" is simply wrong. It is a truism in the healthcare industry that you could take all of the money spent on healthcare in the developed world and spend it on public health in the developing world, and the lifespan in the developed world would hardly change while the lifespan in the developing world would take a great leap forward.

Healthcare adds almost nothing to the average lifespan compared to access to clean water, sewage treatment, and universal education, especially for women. Nor does the actual health of a population correlate very well with health care expenditures: Canada spends a little more than half of what the U.S. does per capita on health care, and we have lower infant mortality and longer lifespans. Sweden spends less than half of what the U.S. does per capita, and has infant mortality rates that are less than half the U.S. rate.

It is also worth noting that the U.S. spends more public money per capita in healthcare than Canada does. That's right: the U.S. government-funded healthcare system spends more per capita than Canada's socialized healthcare system. It just does so in such an astonishingly inefficient way that fifteen percent of the U.S. population doesn't have any form of healthcare insurance whatsoever.

So there are very good reasons to be concerned about the growth of healthcare industries as an economic driver.

Here is the whole article for those who don't have a sciam subscription. Thanks for the pointer to the sciam link,though!

By that logic, it would be cheaper to group the entire country into 1 large group, and have everybody in the country under the same insurance plan. Then, to make it even cheaper, you remove the insurance company, and have a government run insurance plan that takes no profit.

Well...yes.

Most of western Europe has similar or better health indicators than the US, but spends far less on healthcare as a proportion of GDP. Of course there are other factors involved, but...

This paper http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf cites some WHO statistics related to this.

I live in Hong Kong, where the top personal tax rate is 16% (the majority don't pay anything) and the top corporate rate is 17.5%. Even we have a good public health system that works.

Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.

I hate it when just because you want to tax those who have more that you're "socialist". It's stupid poo-flinging arguments like that which've made it so that 45 million Americans are uninsured. Let me quote myself in a post I made earlier on /.:

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario [harpers.org]; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing [washingtonpost.com] their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied [umaine.edu] out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much [newsbatch.com] as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured [census.gov].

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

One very fallacious error that leftists make is that they claim that government should be "compassionate" and forcibly take money from the most successful in society and give it to the poor because all rich people are selfish (or some other theme).
(Mind you, it's Progressives/Social Democrats and populists who like to dish out at the rich. True Liberals don't).

Why should we take from the rich and give to the poor?

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured.

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

You're ignoring that the USA has the highest per capita health care costs in the world. We have the best facilities and doctors in the world for those who can pay for them. But for the uninsured they get screwed paying markups 3 to 10 times higher to see doctors and buy prescriptions compared to the rates insurance companies have twisted doctors and pharmacies down to. So not only do those with with insurance pay more per capita for health care than in any other country, so do the uninsured. You should read this PDF, it's informative. There are better ways to spend billions of dollars than on administrative costs.

I doubt it. The US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country. Almost 3x as much per person as the UK. See here.

It's pretty simple. There are turing complete diophantine equations. (See here, ctrl-f diophantine). The law of mass action can be manipulated into diophantine form. QED

Actually lets take as an example, private healthcare. In the U.S. the vast majority of health care is private. The U.S. has the highest healthcare costs in the world, three times as expensive as canada's per capita.

In the UK, the majority of health care is provided by the NHS. I cant find the link on google, but the the UK has one of the lower spends on health care per capita compared to most of the rest of Europe (about half that of france which is > 2000 pounds per capita per annum) and certainly less than the USA.

The argument pro government services is that the hospitals do not need to take a cut to keep their shareholders happy and it certainly seems to work in some cases.

Well, there is obviously a lot of waste there. Americans spend more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than anybody in the world. 13.6% of GDP goes towards healthcare. The other high-income countries in the world (Western Europe, Japan, Australia) all have universal healthcare, and spend from 5.9% (Luxumbourgh), to 10.6% (Germany) on healthcare. Meanwhile, our healthcare system get's beat on most of the critical indicators. Our infant mortality rate, for example, is 7.2%, compared to France's 4.6%, or Germany's 4.9%. Our healthcare system is ranked the most *responsive* system in the world, but in terms of overall healthcare indicators is ranked 37th.

So we spend more, and we get less. Clearly, something is wrong. It's the job of our public officials to figure out what that is, not make derisive remarks about others who obviously have this healthcare thing figured out better than we do.

Study from whence I got my statistics.

> What I meant was "since your figures are so completely wrong, I don't know wher eyou could possibly have gotten them" ... "top making things up at random"

I hate to be blunt, but are you trolling? Here, lets give you 2004 figures: USA, Britain. Surely you can do this on your own. Oh, and here's a basic primer on healthcare costs internationally; I can get you as many refs as you want.

So, again, I must ask: Are you trolling, or are you really both that belligerant and ignorant at the same time?

> The company I am CTO of provides the software which does insurance claims processing

I may not be the CTO of a medical software company, but I used to do small custom software projects for a medical billing office in Terre Haute, IN. So I'm quite familiar with how they go after people who they think can pay.

I suggest, given your position, you read a primer about the behavioral consequences of people who are uninsured when it comes to seeking treatment. The highlights of one referenced survey of physicians: 97 percent said uninsured patients are having a more difficult time getting access to primary care and therefore are coming first to emergency departments. 94 percent said uninsured patients often have medical conditions that have persisted or worsened because of a lack of early intervention or preventive care. 71 percent said uninsured patients tend to be sicker and have more serious medical conditions than patients with health coverage. 95 percent said uninsured patients are less likely to receive recommended health screening services. 93 percent said uninsured patients lack regular access to medications needed to manage conditions like hypertension or diabetes. 93 percent said it is more difficult arranging or securing follow-up care for an uninsured patient with a serious medical problem than for a patient with health coverage. I suggest you also take note of the referenced studies, which include the fact that unfunded nonfederal hospital care totaled 35 billion in 2001, but the federal government covered 85% of it, which would leave the hospitals with 5.25 billion dollars of liability - a relatively small amount. To put it into perspective, Shriners Hospitals alone spent over half a billion dollars just to fix the Y2K problem . And we're just talking about writing off expenses for hospitals here; the situation isn't so kind for, say, prescription drugs. Imagine, though - the CTO of a medical software community accusing a person of "making up" the life expectancies of Americans, when a simple look at probably the most basic country reference (the CIA world factbook) - among pretty much every other source as well - shows the exact same thing. And seemingly unaware of the costs of our system. If you don't know even the most basic things about the cost and quality of American healthcare, what on earth are you doing with your position?

So while we may spend twice as much on private health care, we don't pay nearly as much taxes, so it more or less evens out. It's also more efficient.

Muahahahahahaha! You're kidding, right? Okay, first, read this, then read this. Oh, and maybe read this. Then, tell me again how the US system is somehow more efficient. Hell, compared to Canada, the US spends 3 times as much, per capita, on health care. And almost a quarter of that is on administrative costs alone! And, continuing the comparison with Canada, if you look at this, you'll see that, on average, an American citizen bears a greater tax burden than a Canadian.

So, tell me again, how is the US system better?

"get yourself a G5"

I just got myself 512 G5 Processors : )

http://www.clusters.umaine.edu/
http://www.clusters.umaine.edu/gallery/xserve

"get yourself a G5"

I just got myself 512 G5 Processors : )

http://www.clusters.umaine.edu/
http://www.clusters.umaine.edu/gallery/xserve

not that this kind of thing would get slashdotted, but Chaitin has a mirror of his website on a University of Maine department of computer science server: Here

Chaitin was given an honorary degree at the University of Maine in 1995, and often gives talks at the school. I'm assuming because the CS department chair at UMaine is an IBM TJ Watson Research Center alumni

I've been getting great download times from the warnerbros server (which, it now occurs to me, is probably thanks to AOL).

Even so, when I downloaded the 3rd animatrix dealie (the best by far), I was getting unheard-of speeds (for me, anyway); something like 5000 kb/sec. Of course, I'm a Colledge Student, but still, I don't get speeds like that for local files!

Seems like a misappropriation of bandwidth to me. Why can't we get these speeds for Linux ISOs?

njord

...changes to the design should be expected to set things back....

THIS IS EXACTLY what makes most large projects unestimatable! You can give all the dates you want but to completely implement a new system---you will always have requirement changes! Ask any of these companies that have SAP come in and replace their core accouting/planning/reports systems and why they end up scrapping the project because it takes three times as long as what they thought (costs 10x as much in lost opportunity) and they still can't customize it like when they had a local IT shop!

If you understand some basic mathematics, take a look at these two links and your eyes will be opened!!
Large Limits to Software Estimation

and for a background on randomness

A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics

This is good stuff!

I would have felt so much better if you would have at least mentioned Turing in your post to Slashdot....go back and do your homework :-)

Slashdot featured a link to a pretty good article that holds a very cute and short intro to how Alan Turing got to his infamous Turing Machine and the start of computers and computer science. It does a quicky mathematical history from Cantor through Hilbert to Godel and Turing.

I have studied computer science and find that certain facts about the history of computer science seem go better with the non-computer scientist audiences (the friends and family I try to explain too what computers are). Your lessons should at least cover the following topics:

Explain what the generalized Turing machine is and how it was (and still is) used to describe the 'limitations' of computing machines.

Explain with as little math as possible what NP means and what impact it has on computing.

Explain Moores law and compare it to other industries to show that computer science is something very very new in our world history.

I recommend reading "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. Both an interesting overview of computing history and future.

Traa
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Godel showed that in any consistent proof system, there are true statements that the system cannot prove. Take for example the statement: "This proof system cannot prove this statement."

This has nothing to do with undecidability, which deals with functions (or sets), not statements. An undecidable function one that no machine can be built to calculate (an undeciable set one which has no decidable function that determines membership of the set).

Actually, Godel's theorm has everything to do with undecidability. Godel's theorem is an "incompleteness" theorm. A system which is incomplete contains undecidable formulae.

I don't think you understand the text book definitions you are quoting and the connections between them.

Check out this interesting transcript of a talk by Chaitin.

Some entire book texts there, etc.

Quite difficult stuff, even for a CS major. Having at least familiarity with automatas and formal languages is recommended, although still far too little.

There's some quite weird stuff in some of his books. I can't say I would recommend reading his stuff without healthy sceptic attitude...

First - you have to prove it within the next two years to claim the cash - come on! We have been working on it for several hundred years. Very cheap publicity shot. Second - citing Goedel, Turing, Chaitin et al, the conjecture may be unprovable!

Here at the University of Maine, our Operating Systems course (COS431) everything is Minix based. It gives you a good handle on how system calls are implemented, mutex, and more.

Our project involves building a complete operating system titled Brain2k. Part I of Brain2k is building a VM which handles specific operations, and file I/O. Part II is a process scheduler allowing 10 seperate Brain programs to run simultaneously. We haven't gotten to Parts III or IV yet.

As for our book, we are using Operating Systems by Tannebaum. It's a pretty good book, uses lots of examples like the Dining Philosopher's Problem, and more.

If you have more questions, please email me!