Other than my server exploding, which is lame, I am not sure what would elicit the hostility from some.
Dude, this is Slashdot, a certain level of hostility was inevitable.
On another note, I'm sorry I got here too late to view the page itself, I, at least, was interested enough to click through from my RSS feed to click your link.
I'm not the guy, but I'll answer on my behalf: because eInk is significantly better when you actually have to just read a lot, without interacting much with the text. It's perfect for fiction and other entertainment reading, and meh for technical books and such - but when 90% of what you read is for entertainment, it's exactly the right device for that purpose. It really is easier on the eyes.
While I agree with you that e-ink is easier on the eyes, there's a key point that I think you missed. Lighting. I might be an unusual use case, but I frequently read in places where I either don't have light available, or for various reasons it's desirable not to turn lights on. For that reason, my ebook reader of choice is an ipod touch (which replaced a Palm T|X), in white on black it's not terribly hard on the eyes, and the back light from the TFT is very nice.
eInk is, of course, inherently incompatible with back lighting, and as far as I know (Though I could very well be wrong about this), the only major manufacturer to make a eInk device with a front light was Sony, and the fact that they only did it on one (now discontinued) model tells me that it probably didn't work that well, even though I never actually tried it myself.
Until a manufacturer comes up with a decent built in lighting scheme for a eInk device, I'm sticking with TFTs.
So, let me go ahead and guess that you live in a first world country somewhere.
You probably lose power what...Once a year? Maybe twice? Every building in a city has running water, right? Oh, and that water is safe, don't have to boil it before you can drink it, let alone use it in a medical situation.
Guess what, there's a big old world out there, most of it can't say that.
I live in a really highly developed area of a third world country. Our power is quite reliable, it's usually not out for more than about 4 hours a week (Nowadays, the service has improved radically over the course of the last about 4 years.). Maybe about 10% of the buildings around here have running water, and about 5% of those have water that's actually safe to drink (Fortunately for me, that includes my water, it tastes nasty, but I'm not going to get sick from it.) Oh, by the way, the hospital here isn't amoung those with running water, nor a backup power system.
As noted though, this place is well above average. There are places in the world where electric service and running water (not of the creek variety) are unheard of... not unusual, not really rare, they've never heard of it.
So, how exactly is your Arduino and motor or your computer temperature control system going to fair without electricity? Well, I suppose we could shove a battery in it...oh wait, but how are we going to charge that battery?
Oh, and PS: the wax incubator came about because scientists discovered (Note that fancy word "discovered", it doesn't mean found it in a book.) a wax which has its liquid-solid phase change at 98F, which means that it will hold that temperature for a long time as it goes through the phase change.
There is a huge difference between a basic concept and a working piece of equipment, especially when you start talking about medical things. I think your major problem is that you're confusing research science with engineering, and dismissing how hard engineering can be. Any how, let's run down the list, shall we?
1. Battery powered surgical lights: Surgical lights aren't just a light bulb in a stand, by necessity, stupefyingly bright, moreover, they're focusable, and here's something you probably have never thought about, and the article doesn't mention, but the ones you find in hospitals are ridiculously delicate, I've run into one with my head as I walked across a room and broke it. Finally, you CAN NOT have to stop to change the battery half-way through a surgery, so you've got to have automatic fail over to another battery, and probably a third reserve battery, just in case. Verdict: The battery and bulb are research science, and the rest is pretty much engineering.
2. Salad Spinner centrifuge: You do realize that when you are doing almost every medical lab test requiring a centrifuge, you've got to spin it for a speficied amount of time with a specified amount of force, spin it too long or too hard (for some tests, even a surge of over speed will ruin the exam.) Go get your salad shooter, try to spin it at an exact RPM for an exact amount of time. Now do it a hundred more times. Easy was it? Verdict: Almost all engineering, though probably with some material science.
3. Wax based incubators: Again, incubators HAVE to be within a very narrow band of temperature, too hot, the baby dies, too cold, the baby dies. So, think you can whip one of these up in your toolshed, eh? What kind of wax are you going to use? How much of it? Are you going to have radiators for the transfer of heat to the incubator? How hot are you going to heat the wax...for that matter, how are you going to heat the wax? Does the wax need to be circulated, if so, how will you do it? Verdict: Huge engineering headaches, plus some science on determining which wax to be used.
Right that makes sense...like NASA, a stupefying amount of medical breakthroughs, or, say, that pesky ARPANET thing.
This is what governments are for. Undertaking endeavors that are too big for private individuals (or companies) to undertake.
You, and more accurately, your attitude irritate me.
100 years ago, you'd've been talking about how the wright flyer II was utterly impractical, that for all it's complexity it only managed to move a person 100 feet! Why not just get a horse or a motorcycle, they were both much more proven technologies, much more efficient and much cheaper.
What your missing is that in order to become proven technology, you gotta build the damn things.
There's only so far you can take things on the drawing board, at some point, in order to make it any better, you've got to actually go out there and do it. You build version 1, look at it and say "Hmm, I bet if we did [this], we could make it even better.". Then you build version 2.
Is this tower that they're proposing building the be all and end all of our power woes? Of course not, but it sounds like it's not too bad a trade off for an early beta. And who knows? Maybe once we have a stable release candidate, the RC will be. (You like the analogy I did there? Yeah, I do too.)
You can access the sealed filings from cases all across the country?
No? Maybe that makes a difference.
I don't see the relevance here.
The only thing I can figure, is that you have a vastly distorted view of EMR. I think a uncomfortably large portion of the populace has b\ought the shit that Siemens is shoveling in their ads.
There isn't a vast network spanning the country of EMRs that can be accessed by anyone connected to it. Not ever spanning a city (with limited exceptions). Each hospital/dr office/whatever has their own system, with their own records. I can't work at SmallRegionalHospital and access the UCLA system,at best (And this is something of a stretch for most EMR systems), I might be able to access the records of SmallRegionalHospital'sOutreachClinic.
Now, I've never worked for one of the huge healthcare corporations, so I don't know whether all of their EMR systems are linked, but I'm tempted to think that they aren't.
I read this entire post, thinking it was well written and seemingly well-informed enough that while most of what you were saying, I knew, I might learn something new.
I reached the end of the second to last paragraph, and I was going to write it off as "informative, but pedantic".
Then I hit the final paragraph, and you were instantly upgraded to "Awesome."
So in other words, they've taken an adjustable dress form and added some motors. Cool, I guess, but I don't really see how it changes anything (except giving them some publicity on Slashdot).
Seems to me the advantage is that in stead of needing to have someone manually change each of the dials to all of the possible configurations for each garment, someone puts the garment on, presses a button, and sits back while it runs through it's paces. That's if the software controlling it can automatically take pictures at each of the setting otherwise the operator has to snap the pic, then press the continue button. I'd be shocked if this was any less than 5 times faster, and probably much faster than that. With that kind of time savings suddenly having pictures of each item at each level actually becomes practical.
Oh and as a side note, it looks like the form is MUCH more adaptable than all but the highest end dress forms, and perhaps more adaptable than even those (Though to be fair, it's been about 8 years since the last time I shopped for a dress form.)
Are you suggesting that it's possible to post ANY ask slashdot and not get a bunch of smarmy, self-important useless posts and/or flames?
'Cause I wouldn't have thought that possible.
While it's true that the presumption of innocence is a good thing, and should not be taken for granted, and it would probably be better for the sake of US security as a while if bin Laden could have been taken alive and interrogated (leaving aside the connotations of torture.) and stand trial.
At the same time I don't think that it is ever justified to force police officers to take someone alive at the risk of their own or bystander's lives...by extension, this applies to the soldiers who were sent in after bin Laden.
Nothing I know or might surmise about bin Laden suggests that he was the type to interlace his fingers behind his head.
If he died with a gun in his hand, then his life was well worth the exchange against the lives of the soldiers who were there.
I, for on, would like to point out one of the inherent weaknesses with the whole BMI thing. Namely, I'm 6'8", in order to qualify as a "healthy" weight, I'd have to weigh in at 227 lbs. Having actually weighed that much in the past, anyone looking at me could tell you that I'm decidedly underweight at that point....The system just doesn't handle the extremes all that well.
Would I then be penalized in AZ for maintaining a healthy weight, because I would be "obese" by the numbers?
I'd like to think that of course I wouldn't, people would recognize the unfairness in the situation, but then, these are politicians, and I've seen enough of them in action to know the truth.
I work in (real) medicine, I'm a fervent believer in it, and I use the phrase "Big Pharma", not to degrade the medical practices, but rather the business decisions.
My favorite example is the drug Zofran, it is the gold standard in chemo anti-nausea meds (with some arguments to be made for pot, but I'll not get into that.). We're talking the chemo patients who haven't been able to keep any food down for a week, and nothing else worked, unless they had particularly good insurance, Zofran was the last option, and it almost always worked...the reason it was the last choice is that it was sold for a bit over a thousand dollars a dose.
When it came off patent, and the generic manufacturers got started on it, would you care to guess how much they were selling it for?
Go ahead, guess.
Nope, you're wrong, about a dollar fifty a dose.
Now, I can have some sympathy for the argument that they need to recover the R&D costs, but due to what amounts to legal maneuvering, they managed to extend their patent for basically 15 years from FDA Approval to it coming off-patent...Did they really need 15 years of about a 70,000% markup?
That's my favorite example, but it's far from the only one.
In my teens I spent a lot of time playing with electricity, and was shocked more times than I can count. Never caused any issues.
The rule of thumb I was taught was that if your fingernails didn't turn black, then you're fine, if they do, then go ahead and mosey on down to the ER.
Always served me well.
Though I suppose there should be a proviso that if it causes an arrhythmia, then again you should see a doc, but that only happened to me once, so it's a low probability outcome.
More like people who have insurance are more likely to go to their family practitioner. People who don't have insurance are more likely to go to the hospital emergency room because the hospitals are prohibited from turning anyone away for anything.
That's not actually quite true. The EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) mandates that any patient presenting to an ER that receives Medicare reimbursement must be evaluated, and receive any treatment necessary to stabilize them sufficiently that they are no longer in danger of losing life or limb (roughly, the actual language is denser, but that give you an idea.)
There are a few other laws which chime in about making ERs see patients, but EMTALA is the big one. What this means, then is that if you come in with a sniffle, or any other "trivial" problem, the ER is obligated to evaluate you, but then they can punt you back to the street once they're done with that, if you're not going to croak.
Now, here's where it get's a bit tricky, people who work in emergency medicine, by and large, believe whole heartedly that every patient deserves the best care...they're sick, we're here to make them better. Everything else is administration's problem. Combine that with the fact that triage and the MD's eval are usually the largest part of the expenses for a "trivial emergency", and we wind up treating pretty much anything that walks through the door.
Yes, because only MS is evil enough to consider such a thing. Actually, it sounds like something more up Apple's alley.
So, I'm not really a fanboy either way, but just to point out a fact:
Windows 7 requires that you enter a 20 digit alphanumeric key, then runs you through the whole WGA thing, which has in the past had false positives which (to give them credit) don't actually make your computer unusable, but do reduce the functionality.
To contrast, do you know what you have to do to validate an install of OS X (or before that, Finder)? Not a damn thing. Install it and go.
As I understand it, the bill you're referencing is almost exclusively aimed at school cafeteria programs (Actually, everything I've heard about it says it is exclusively aimed at them, but I'm not so much a fool as to believe that there isn't some pork somewhere in a bill that big.). Specifically, raising reimbursement rates for free/reduced meals (and I presume subsidies for the "Full priced" meals as well.). This is primarily intended to make the meals healthier, as you can feed a kid for a lot cheaper if you feed them crap, but it will have the side benefit of being able to feed them more (if you serve better food, but not as good as was envisioned.)
I went to school in an inner city. 96% of the kids at my junior high were on free or reduced lunch. one of the primary reasons that the school district never cut Saturday sessions and summer sessions (actually off-track sessions, the district was year-round.) in all of the budget crises they had (and believe me, an inner-city district in California has plenty.), is because they allow the school to make sure that some kids who otherwise wouldn't, got at least two meals a day.
Now, when you talk about how it's the parent's fault, in some of the cases you're right, but in others you're not. Either way, that's not the kid's problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's deplorable what's happened to NASA's budget, but I don't think it's really reasonable to say that we shouldn't feed kids so NASA can launch.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than my server exploding, which is lame, I am not sure what would elicit the hostility from some.
Dude, this is Slashdot, a certain level of hostility was inevitable.
On another note, I'm sorry I got here too late to view the page itself, I, at least, was interested enough to click through from my RSS feed to click your link.
I'm not the guy, but I'll answer on my behalf: because eInk is significantly better when you actually have to just read a lot, without interacting much with the text. It's perfect for fiction and other entertainment reading, and meh for technical books and such - but when 90% of what you read is for entertainment, it's exactly the right device for that purpose. It really is easier on the eyes.
While I agree with you that e-ink is easier on the eyes, there's a key point that I think you missed. Lighting. I might be an unusual use case, but I frequently read in places where I either don't have light available, or for various reasons it's desirable not to turn lights on. For that reason, my ebook reader of choice is an ipod touch (which replaced a Palm T|X), in white on black it's not terribly hard on the eyes, and the back light from the TFT is very nice.
eInk is, of course, inherently incompatible with back lighting, and as far as I know (Though I could very well be wrong about this), the only major manufacturer to make a eInk device with a front light was Sony, and the fact that they only did it on one (now discontinued) model tells me that it probably didn't work that well, even though I never actually tried it myself.
Until a manufacturer comes up with a decent built in lighting scheme for a eInk device, I'm sticking with TFTs.
Sorry, you're confusing your online troll communities, that would be /b/ that says "Pics or it didn't happen.".
Don't worry, it's a common rookie mistake
So, let me go ahead and guess that you live in a first world country somewhere.
You probably lose power what...Once a year? Maybe twice? Every building in a city has running water, right? Oh, and that water is safe, don't have to boil it before you can drink it, let alone use it in a medical situation.
Guess what, there's a big old world out there, most of it can't say that.
I live in a really highly developed area of a third world country. Our power is quite reliable, it's usually not out for more than about 4 hours a week (Nowadays, the service has improved radically over the course of the last about 4 years.). Maybe about 10% of the buildings around here have running water, and about 5% of those have water that's actually safe to drink (Fortunately for me, that includes my water, it tastes nasty, but I'm not going to get sick from it.) Oh, by the way, the hospital here isn't amoung those with running water, nor a backup power system.
As noted though, this place is well above average. There are places in the world where electric service and running water (not of the creek variety) are unheard of... not unusual, not really rare, they've never heard of it.
So, how exactly is your Arduino and motor or your computer temperature control system going to fair without electricity? Well, I suppose we could shove a battery in it...oh wait, but how are we going to charge that battery?
Oh, and PS: the wax incubator came about because scientists discovered (Note that fancy word "discovered", it doesn't mean found it in a book.) a wax which has its liquid-solid phase change at 98F, which means that it will hold that temperature for a long time as it goes through the phase change.
There is a huge difference between a basic concept and a working piece of equipment, especially when you start talking about medical things. I think your major problem is that you're confusing research science with engineering, and dismissing how hard engineering can be. Any how, let's run down the list, shall we?
1. Battery powered surgical lights: Surgical lights aren't just a light bulb in a stand, by necessity, stupefyingly bright, moreover, they're focusable, and here's something you probably have never thought about, and the article doesn't mention, but the ones you find in hospitals are ridiculously delicate, I've run into one with my head as I walked across a room and broke it. Finally, you CAN NOT have to stop to change the battery half-way through a surgery, so you've got to have automatic fail over to another battery, and probably a third reserve battery, just in case.
Verdict: The battery and bulb are research science, and the rest is pretty much engineering.
2. Salad Spinner centrifuge: You do realize that when you are doing almost every medical lab test requiring a centrifuge, you've got to spin it for a speficied amount of time with a specified amount of force, spin it too long or too hard (for some tests, even a surge of over speed will ruin the exam.) Go get your salad shooter, try to spin it at an exact RPM for an exact amount of time. Now do it a hundred more times. Easy was it?
Verdict: Almost all engineering, though probably with some material science.
3. Wax based incubators: Again, incubators HAVE to be within a very narrow band of temperature, too hot, the baby dies, too cold, the baby dies. So, think you can whip one of these up in your toolshed, eh? What kind of wax are you going to use? How much of it? Are you going to have radiators for the transfer of heat to the incubator? How hot are you going to heat the wax...for that matter, how are you going to heat the wax? Does the wax need to be circulated, if so, how will you do it?
Verdict: Huge engineering headaches, plus some science on determining which wax to be used.
Clearly best practices in education environmental control have dramatically changed since I was in school.
I seem to recall the days when the temp spiked over 110, the response was "Open the windows"...to where THE SUN WAS!
Oh, and my lawn? Get off it.
This was well reasoned, well informed and well written.
This of course leads to a question:
What the hell made you think this comment had any place on slashdot?
Right that makes sense...like NASA, a stupefying amount of medical breakthroughs, or, say, that pesky ARPANET thing. This is what governments are for. Undertaking endeavors that are too big for private individuals (or companies) to undertake.
You, and more accurately, your attitude irritate me.
100 years ago, you'd've been talking about how the wright flyer II was utterly impractical, that for all it's complexity it only managed to move a person 100 feet! Why not just get a horse or a motorcycle, they were both much more proven technologies, much more efficient and much cheaper.
What your missing is that in order to become proven technology, you gotta build the damn things.
There's only so far you can take things on the drawing board, at some point, in order to make it any better, you've got to actually go out there and do it. You build version 1, look at it and say "Hmm, I bet if we did [this], we could make it even better.". Then you build version 2.
Is this tower that they're proposing building the be all and end all of our power woes? Of course not, but it sounds like it's not too bad a trade off for an early beta. And who knows? Maybe once we have a stable release candidate, the RC will be. (You like the analogy I did there? Yeah, I do too.)
You can access the sealed filings from cases all across the country?
No? Maybe that makes a difference.
I don't see the relevance here.
The only thing I can figure, is that you have a vastly distorted view of EMR. I think a uncomfortably large portion of the populace has b\ought the shit that Siemens is shoveling in their ads.
There isn't a vast network spanning the country of EMRs that can be accessed by anyone connected to it. Not ever spanning a city (with limited exceptions). Each hospital/dr office/whatever has their own system, with their own records. I can't work at SmallRegionalHospital and access the UCLA system,at best (And this is something of a stretch for most EMR systems), I might be able to access the records of SmallRegionalHospital'sOutreachClinic.
Now, I've never worked for one of the huge healthcare corporations, so I don't know whether all of their EMR systems are linked, but I'm tempted to think that they aren't.
Why?
HIPAA.
A credit union that I used to belong to offers true credit cards: https://www.sccfcu.org/asp/products/product_2_3.asp
I read this entire post, thinking it was well written and seemingly well-informed enough that while most of what you were saying, I knew, I might learn something new.
I reached the end of the second to last paragraph, and I was going to write it off as "informative, but pedantic".
Then I hit the final paragraph, and you were instantly upgraded to "Awesome."
So in other words, they've taken an adjustable dress form and added some motors. Cool, I guess, but I don't really see how it changes anything (except giving them some publicity on Slashdot).
Seems to me the advantage is that in stead of needing to have someone manually change each of the dials to all of the possible configurations for each garment, someone puts the garment on, presses a button, and sits back while it runs through it's paces. That's if the software controlling it can automatically take pictures at each of the setting otherwise the operator has to snap the pic, then press the continue button. I'd be shocked if this was any less than 5 times faster, and probably much faster than that. With that kind of time savings suddenly having pictures of each item at each level actually becomes practical.
Oh and as a side note, it looks like the form is MUCH more adaptable than all but the highest end dress forms, and perhaps more adaptable than even those (Though to be fair, it's been about 8 years since the last time I shopped for a dress form.)
Are you suggesting that it's possible to post ANY ask slashdot and not get a bunch of smarmy, self-important useless posts and/or flames? 'Cause I wouldn't have thought that possible.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=qq+english+linux
I doubt very much that there will be a 200% price increase.
Big pharma will, however, gladly take a brand new patent out on each antibiotic+sugar as the old patent is running out.
Much more lucrative, that.
While it's true that the presumption of innocence is a good thing, and should not be taken for granted, and it would probably be better for the sake of US security as a while if bin Laden could have been taken alive and interrogated (leaving aside the connotations of torture.) and stand trial.
At the same time I don't think that it is ever justified to force police officers to take someone alive at the risk of their own or bystander's lives...by extension, this applies to the soldiers who were sent in after bin Laden.
Nothing I know or might surmise about bin Laden suggests that he was the type to interlace his fingers behind his head.
If he died with a gun in his hand, then his life was well worth the exchange against the lives of the soldiers who were there.
I, for on, would like to point out one of the inherent weaknesses with the whole BMI thing. Namely, I'm 6'8", in order to qualify as a "healthy" weight, I'd have to weigh in at 227 lbs. Having actually weighed that much in the past, anyone looking at me could tell you that I'm decidedly underweight at that point....The system just doesn't handle the extremes all that well.
Would I then be penalized in AZ for maintaining a healthy weight, because I would be "obese" by the numbers?
I'd like to think that of course I wouldn't, people would recognize the unfairness in the situation, but then, these are politicians, and I've seen enough of them in action to know the truth.
I work in (real) medicine, I'm a fervent believer in it, and I use the phrase "Big Pharma", not to degrade the medical practices, but rather the business decisions.
My favorite example is the drug Zofran, it is the gold standard in chemo anti-nausea meds (with some arguments to be made for pot, but I'll not get into that.). We're talking the chemo patients who haven't been able to keep any food down for a week, and nothing else worked, unless they had particularly good insurance, Zofran was the last option, and it almost always worked...the reason it was the last choice is that it was sold for a bit over a thousand dollars a dose.
When it came off patent, and the generic manufacturers got started on it, would you care to guess how much they were selling it for?
Go ahead, guess.
Nope, you're wrong, about a dollar fifty a dose.
Now, I can have some sympathy for the argument that they need to recover the R&D costs, but due to what amounts to legal maneuvering, they managed to extend their patent for basically 15 years from FDA Approval to it coming off-patent...Did they really need 15 years of about a 70,000% markup?
That's my favorite example, but it's far from the only one.
"Hi, I started Wikileaks" works well in Sweden.
Initially, anyhow.
In my teens I spent a lot of time playing with electricity, and was shocked more times than I can count. Never caused any issues.
The rule of thumb I was taught was that if your fingernails didn't turn black, then you're fine, if they do, then go ahead and mosey on down to the ER.
Always served me well.
Though I suppose there should be a proviso that if it causes an arrhythmia, then again you should see a doc, but that only happened to me once, so it's a low probability outcome.
More like people who have insurance are more likely to go to their family practitioner. People who don't have insurance are more likely to go to the hospital emergency room because the hospitals are prohibited from turning anyone away for anything.
That's not actually quite true. The EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) mandates that any patient presenting to an ER that receives Medicare reimbursement must be evaluated, and receive any treatment necessary to stabilize them sufficiently that they are no longer in danger of losing life or limb (roughly, the actual language is denser, but that give you an idea.)
There are a few other laws which chime in about making ERs see patients, but EMTALA is the big one. What this means, then is that if you come in with a sniffle, or any other "trivial" problem, the ER is obligated to evaluate you, but then they can punt you back to the street once they're done with that, if you're not going to croak.
Now, here's where it get's a bit tricky, people who work in emergency medicine, by and large, believe whole heartedly that every patient deserves the best care...they're sick, we're here to make them better. Everything else is administration's problem. Combine that with the fact that triage and the MD's eval are usually the largest part of the expenses for a "trivial emergency", and we wind up treating pretty much anything that walks through the door.
Sorry, that was perhaps a trifle pedantic.
I can't believe someone would take the time to write such a ridiculous, meaningless and idiotic comment.
Welcome to slashdot.
Yes, because only MS is evil enough to consider such a thing. Actually, it sounds like something more up Apple's alley.
So, I'm not really a fanboy either way, but just to point out a fact:
Windows 7 requires that you enter a 20 digit alphanumeric key, then runs you through the whole WGA thing, which has in the past had false positives which (to give them credit) don't actually make your computer unusable, but do reduce the functionality.
To contrast, do you know what you have to do to validate an install of OS X (or before that, Finder)? Not a damn thing. Install it and go.
As I understand it, the bill you're referencing is almost exclusively aimed at school cafeteria programs (Actually, everything I've heard about it says it is exclusively aimed at them, but I'm not so much a fool as to believe that there isn't some pork somewhere in a bill that big.). Specifically, raising reimbursement rates for free/reduced meals (and I presume subsidies for the "Full priced" meals as well.). This is primarily intended to make the meals healthier, as you can feed a kid for a lot cheaper if you feed them crap, but it will have the side benefit of being able to feed them more (if you serve better food, but not as good as was envisioned.)
I went to school in an inner city. 96% of the kids at my junior high were on free or reduced lunch. one of the primary reasons that the school district never cut Saturday sessions and summer sessions (actually off-track sessions, the district was year-round.) in all of the budget crises they had (and believe me, an inner-city district in California has plenty.), is because they allow the school to make sure that some kids who otherwise wouldn't, got at least two meals a day.
Now, when you talk about how it's the parent's fault, in some of the cases you're right, but in others you're not. Either way, that's not the kid's problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's deplorable what's happened to NASA's budget, but I don't think it's really reasonable to say that we shouldn't feed kids so NASA can launch.