But the user is king. It doesn't matter who trained the user what to expect, if the user expects something, you should tailor your software to their expectations
Did you know that the Ford T, the most sold car of its time, a car so popular that when the 10,000,000th car rolled off the line, a full 10% of the cars in the entire world were from Ford, didn't have the the gas, break and clutch in their now all too familiar locations?
How do you think all those car drivers felt when they got into a car with a different pedal layout? Scared, no doubt, but in the end, just because something is popular and widespread, it doesn't mean it's the best solution to a problem.
My biggest issue with using tablets (the external kind) is the lack of direct and precise feedback. With my mouse it's at rest and I'm moving muscles very little to get a response.
With pens they are never really at rest. It's either so close to the table that the cursor is jumping all over the place, touching and thus triggering a ton of inputs, or not close enough to move the cursor, giving me no clue where the bloody thing will jump the next time.
And unlike a mouse I can't just lift the pen away from the surface and move it to the other edge or middle, because that's not how they work.
What I would like to see is a large tablet with a screen underneath. Shouldn't be a touch sensitive screen, just one that works with the pen, so I can see, what I'm doing directly, i.e. the table's width/height is the screen's pixel width/height. Then it doesn't matter if the table is 4x6 inches, 8x12 or whatever, because I'd have a direct visible connection with it.
Isn't this just typical of the American South and Bible Belt?
Here we have a very visible proof of evolution in action (one species moving into a new area and out competing everything else), and what does the Alabama state government do? They try to eradicate that proof in a foolish attempt to show that an intelligently designed ecosystem is better, especially when it's helped by God's chosen: man.
I say to the silent majority of Americans who aren't buying into intelligent design, that you should rise up and fight this atrocity. Go out there and plant Cogongrass in your nears gardens, parks, forests and wildlife areas! Viva la Evolutión!
</joke>
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
So, even with this fundamentally implausible drive method, we still need to carry nearly 7 times as much fuel as mass of the rest of the ship.
Is that necessarily a big issue?
If we go back to matter+anti-matter reactions, you'd need some matter to annihilate. Any human expedition will have to carry food and water in large quantities, and if we can annihilate the human waste directly, we can save weight on toilet facilities. If we use large amounts of water as a shield against radiation, we get "free" radiation shielding and drinking water in one, and our fuel store just ended up having two extra functions = more weight reduction. Well, water used as radiation shielding is probably a lot heavier than something like lead.
At decent temperatures (the ones we'd need for human habitation in the ship) water is very easy to transport as well, so there are no need for highly complicated fuel pipelines. Can be done with very lightweight plastics built directly into the plumbing systems.
I'm sure there are lots of other ways you could cut down on the weight requirements as well.
One thing that confuses me a little bit, is that if you reduce the acceleration to 50g and up the travel time to 12 days you still end up with a delta_v of 5.1 e8. That way we can keep halving and doubling and ending up with constantly having that much energy.
Using the Motion Example from Hyper Physics, I get some rather different numbers: Halfway distance (where you need to turn around) is 2,143,589,742,000 meters. Initial velocity: 0 m/s Acceleration: 982 m/s^2 That solves for time = 66,073.92 seconds (18 hours, 21 minutes, 13.92 seconds) Final velocity: 64,884,591.80 m/s (21.64% of the speed of light)
If we change it to 30 m/s^2 (just over 3 g) we solve for v_max = 11,340,872.3 m/s (3.78% of c) and time 4 days, 9 hours, 1 minute.
At 9.82 m/s^2 we get 7 days, 15 hours, 32 minutes and v_max = 660,739.2 m/s (0.22% of c).
At those speeds even 1 g would be sufficient. We can easily pack enough food etc. to last for a 3 month expedition into space. How Stuff Works says ~400 kg food and 1,500 litres of water per person for a 2 year expedition. If we're doing 3 months total (2 months on Pluto, 14 days out, 14 days back) you'd only need about 250 kg of food per person. That's a tiny amount.
If we use your formulas again: I = Isp*Mr = 3e8*Mr kg m/s
3e8*Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2*2 (*2 as we have to slow down again) Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2 m/s*2/c Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*0.0044 907.44 Mr = 0.5 Mr + Ms 907 Mr = Ms
Now we're down to carrying 1.2 kg of fuel for every ton of spaceship for the improbable type of drive. Up that to a 1:1 ratio and I think something like fusion becomes readily attainable? 2 tonne of fuel to 1 ton of spaceship would probably considered an insane leap forward.
But, again, this is something I only have very little knowledge about, and I know that most of that is probably incorrect. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if I screwed up the calculations. I'm just a very curious kind of guy:D
Made me think "damn, I would love to see what a Serenity (Firefly) type battlescene would be like in that engine.
Hundreds of ships, big and small on either side just duking it out and you in the middle trying to get to the space port on the planed.
Lol... just got to the end where the pilot docks the plane. Now that's a neat trick - don't think it'd work so well with a carrier group though.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Even then, accelerating at 100g for 6 days is implausible, due to the fuel mass requirements
Isn't that a matter of the type of energy conversion?
If we use an 2H_2 + O_2 => 2 H_2O reaction we get about 1.56×10^7 J/kg of energy. If we use nuclear fission, we get about 1.5×10^13 J/kg If we use nuclear fusion, we get about 6.3×10^14 J/kkg If we use matter-antimatter, we get 9×10^16 J/kg
The gains in energy density results in a massive reduction of weight (or increase of payload).
Now, I tried doing the maths for the energy needed to accelerate just 1 kg at 100 g for 6 days, but I ended up with a result with some very odd units: 5,090,688 m×kg/s.
Best thing I can think of is kinetic energy: E = ½ × m × v^2. We already know that we end up with units of kg and m/s (mass and velocity), so just substitute.
But, I noticed something when checking Pluto: At its closest it is 29.65834067 AU from the Sun. Align everything and we get a minimum distance of 28.66 AU from Earth to Pluto. 28.66 AU in 6 days is 8,270,12 km/s. 10 days it's 4,962.36 km/s
Now, my physics isn't exactly the best in the world, especially when dealing with something that is moving at 1.66 to 2.75% the speed of light.
Anyway, 1 kg moving at 4,962.36 km/s has 1.23 × 10^13 joules of energy in it. This is 1/1000th of the total energy output from a matter-anti-matter reaction of 1 kg. It is even less than what we can get from 1 kg of nuclear fuel. But we would need about 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen and oxygen.
But it's very unlikely that my maths for that bit is correct. The numbers are probably correct, but the energy needed to accelerate to those speeds etc. are very suspect, simply due to the mechanics of it all and so on.
I am sure there are some moderate simple formulas for working out the mechanics of this idea. I'm not expecting anything like (a+b+c*d+e)/(f*g), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's down to something workable like a 4th degree polynomials with mass, distance and travel time in some way.
The really silly things about laws against wearing ear plugs in a car is that it is perfectly legal to have the car stereo turned up so loud, that you can't even hear a fog horn being used in seat next to you.
At most you'll be risking a fine for noise pollution, not reckless driving
Granted, that could be both politicians and zombies, but I'm preparing for the worst: Zombie Politicians. Don't believe me? This one was just a prototype!. They're amongst us, they cannot think, they cannot be stopped, they're learning AND THEY'RE RUNNING THE COUNTRY!
The lunatics were right! We ARE losing the country. Zombie Jesus save us all!
I seem to recall a case from the UK, where two CDs filled with tax information from about 10 million people were left on a train or bus.
Thankfully all the data on the CDs was encrypted.
Typically the password(s) were written on the CDs.
So, no, encryption does nothing but add a layer of security theatre for data breaches. Notification should still be required.
Add the following requirements:
What was copied
How was it copied (i.e. CDs forgotten on a bus, laptop stolen, physical entry onto facilities, remote access etc.)
How was the data protected (i.e. not at all, encrypted etc.)
How effective is the chosen encryption (i.e. not at all, 40 bit DES, 4096 bit Blowfish etc.)
Were the passwords compromised as well (i.e. yes it was on the CD, possibly, no etc.)
What measures are being taken to prevent this happening again (i.e. nothing, passwords won't be shipped along with data, better security against remote access, fired the responsible manager etc.)
Probably a few more requirements as well. That way those who really want to know can be told, and those who don't care will just throw the letter away anyway.
Also add very very steep fines for not disclosing data breaches. If the chance of it being known that a breach has occurred are 1%, make the fines 200x the cost of notification and expected loss of business. Hell, add mandatory non-suspendable jail time for the responsible managers (including board members).
Pictures or it didn't happen. The only way that happens in a modern TV is if you set it on fire!
I had a 42" plasma, that was made in 2004. Not even HD ready. At full load, it never peaked above 350W (I used a meter because I was curious) during a two week period. Average when it was turned on was just over 280W. Turned off it drew 6W of power from the socket.
The only thing your TV is doing when it's powered off is powering the power indicator and running a small circuit board to power it back on when the remote is used.
I'd rather research cheap and clean power sources and keep poor people in their cars.
What's wrong with low income housing? Are you seriously suggesting that poor people shouldn't have access to running water, decent sized beds or even a toilet?!?
Well, there could be some other reasons for wanting to know.
If you build a moon base, you could use these spots for some interesting stuff. Like infra-red observatories, which I think need to have a cold sensor to increase sensitivity.
The superconductors would also give you essentially free cooling for particle accelerators, but I've no idea how large those craters are, nor if that'd even be useful.
Most large ISPs use OC-192 as the backbones of their infrastructure. You'd need more than 10,200 of those to handle that data load, and that's ignoring the overhead.
Or to put it into numbers that the RIAA can understand: 1.5707309 * 10^9 music CDs every single day.
At 15 pieces of music per CD and $80,000/song that's $1.88 * 10^15 dollars/day flowing through that network. That's 632 times larger than the US federal budget for 2008.
No, you're not missing anything. I used Google to calculate the number: 135 GB.
However, I did have to do a bit of checking up, and I found out what was wrong: 1.06 TB
Capitalization isn't just important in husbandry.
when I did my 135 GB calculation, I checked their website and found that their lowest capacity unit was 150 GB, so I expected that I was right and the kb vs kB error hadn't crossed my mind.
Enterprise NAND is a high-endurance SLC NAND device that offers an endurance rate of 1 million WRITE/ERASE cycles. Thats 10 times the 100,000-cycle average for SLC. Our Enterprise NAND is optimized for intensive storage applications where device life is the top priorityapplications like high transaction data servers (banking) or enterprise SSDs.
So, while my math was off by a factor of 8 (or a bit shift, as the shift key should have been pressed), it turns out that there are actually SLC NAND chips available that increases write endurance by a factor of 10. This reduces the minimum space required to 108 GB.
But very nice catch. And informative - made me go find out if it was still possible.
The heart rate monitor is actually a fun thing to have.
I usually only wear it when I'm on my bike, and I do find it quite fun to see just for how long I can keep my heart rate at 170+, 175+ and 180+. I'm 32, so my target should really be around 160, but I'm still in really bad shape, so I'm constantly above that if I want to feel like I'm doing something.
But when I started this back in June I could hit a peak of about 180 for maybe a minute before I'd feel like I was dying, and now I can hold 180+ for several minutes. My resting heart rate has dropped from about 80 (!!!) to roughly 65 as well.
I'm using this as a fun toy, and I honestly think that if approached properly in gym, you could get the disinterested kids more interested. If you're giving them grades in gym class (btw, wtf?), don't grade them on how well they play football or whatever, as that'll take away the bad players' motivation. Grade them on how well they've done. If you're already in great shape at the start of the school year and you don't improve, give them an A. If they start in great shape and end up in bad shape, give them a C- or D or something. If they start out in lousy shape and end up in great shape (entirely doable while you're still fat) - give them an A or an A+. Start lousy and keep that - give them a C- or a D.
If they "need" plastic surgery, they're treated like everybody else, i.e. pay for it.
If they "need" to be vaccinated against swine flu along with their partner, they'll hung out to dry in the news papers, and be turned down by the agency in charge of the limited supply, because they aren't on the list of people who are prioritized. At least that's how it works in Denmark.
I never said we were absolutely equal, as some people tend to get star struck, if I get testicular cancer in Denmark I will get the exact same treatment options as Svend Auken did. And since you don't know who that is, he was a bit like Ted Kennedy. Well liked, charismatic, leader of one of the biggest parties in Denmark, but without the baggage.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that the Ford T, the most sold car of its time, a car so popular that when the 10,000,000th car rolled off the line, a full 10% of the cars in the entire world were from Ford, didn't have the the gas, break and clutch in their now all too familiar locations?
How do you think all those car drivers felt when they got into a car with a different pedal layout? Scared, no doubt, but in the end, just because something is popular and widespread, it doesn't mean it's the best solution to a problem.
My biggest issue with using tablets (the external kind) is the lack of direct and precise feedback. With my mouse it's at rest and I'm moving muscles very little to get a response.
With pens they are never really at rest. It's either so close to the table that the cursor is jumping all over the place, touching and thus triggering a ton of inputs, or not close enough to move the cursor, giving me no clue where the bloody thing will jump the next time.
And unlike a mouse I can't just lift the pen away from the surface and move it to the other edge or middle, because that's not how they work.
What I would like to see is a large tablet with a screen underneath. Shouldn't be a touch sensitive screen, just one that works with the pen, so I can see, what I'm doing directly, i.e. the table's width/height is the screen's pixel width/height. Then it doesn't matter if the table is 4x6 inches, 8x12 or whatever, because I'd have a direct visible connection with it.
Speaking of cooler chips, [H]ard|OCP's review found this card to have reduced power draw and temperatures compared to the 4870 and GeForce GTX 285.
It does vary depending on the load the card is under (duh), but for a card that is about twice as powerful as its predecessor, it's quite impressive.
I be hidingz in ur bedroom
I bringz baseball bat to ur face
Isn't this just typical of the American South and Bible Belt?
Here we have a very visible proof of evolution in action (one species moving into a new area and out competing everything else), and what does the Alabama state government do? They try to eradicate that proof in a foolish attempt to show that an intelligently designed ecosystem is better, especially when it's helped by God's chosen: man.
I say to the silent majority of Americans who aren't buying into intelligent design, that you should rise up and fight this atrocity. Go out there and plant Cogongrass in your nears gardens, parks, forests and wildlife areas! Viva la Evolutión!
</joke>
Is that necessarily a big issue?
If we go back to matter+anti-matter reactions, you'd need some matter to annihilate. Any human expedition will have to carry food and water in large quantities, and if we can annihilate the human waste directly, we can save weight on toilet facilities. If we use large amounts of water as a shield against radiation, we get "free" radiation shielding and drinking water in one, and our fuel store just ended up having two extra functions = more weight reduction. Well, water used as radiation shielding is probably a lot heavier than something like lead.
At decent temperatures (the ones we'd need for human habitation in the ship) water is very easy to transport as well, so there are no need for highly complicated fuel pipelines. Can be done with very lightweight plastics built directly into the plumbing systems.
I'm sure there are lots of other ways you could cut down on the weight requirements as well.
One thing that confuses me a little bit, is that if you reduce the acceleration to 50g and up the travel time to 12 days you still end up with a delta_v of 5.1 e8. That way we can keep halving and doubling and ending up with constantly having that much energy.
Using the Motion Example from Hyper Physics, I get some rather different numbers:
Halfway distance (where you need to turn around) is 2,143,589,742,000 meters.
Initial velocity: 0 m/s
Acceleration: 982 m/s^2
That solves for time = 66,073.92 seconds (18 hours, 21 minutes, 13.92 seconds)
Final velocity: 64,884,591.80 m/s (21.64% of the speed of light)
If we change it to 30 m/s^2 (just over 3 g) we solve for v_max = 11,340,872.3 m/s (3.78% of c) and time 4 days, 9 hours, 1 minute.
At 9.82 m/s^2 we get 7 days, 15 hours, 32 minutes and v_max = 660,739.2 m/s (0.22% of c).
At those speeds even 1 g would be sufficient. We can easily pack enough food etc. to last for a 3 month expedition into space. How Stuff Works says ~400 kg food and 1,500 litres of water per person for a 2 year expedition. If we're doing 3 months total (2 months on Pluto, 14 days out, 14 days back) you'd only need about 250 kg of food per person. That's a tiny amount.
If we use your formulas again:
I = Isp*Mr = 3e8*Mr kg m/s
3e8*Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2*2 (*2 as we have to slow down again)
Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*660,739.2 m/s*2/c
Mr = (0.5*Mr + Ms)*0.0044
907.44 Mr = 0.5 Mr + Ms
907 Mr = Ms
Now we're down to carrying 1.2 kg of fuel for every ton of spaceship for the improbable type of drive. Up that to a 1:1 ratio and I think something like fusion becomes readily attainable? 2 tonne of fuel to 1 ton of spaceship would probably considered an insane leap forward.
But, again, this is something I only have very little knowledge about, and I know that most of that is probably incorrect. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if I screwed up the calculations. I'm just a very curious kind of guy :D
I found this video showing off combat.
Made me think "damn, I would love to see what a Serenity (Firefly) type battlescene would be like in that engine.
Hundreds of ships, big and small on either side just duking it out and you in the middle trying to get to the space port on the planed.
Lol ... just got to the end where the pilot docks the plane. Now that's a neat trick - don't think it'd work so well with a carrier group though.
Isn't that a matter of the type of energy conversion?
If we use an 2H_2 + O_2 => 2 H_2O reaction we get about 1.56×10^7 J/kg of energy.
If we use nuclear fission, we get about 1.5×10^13 J/kg
If we use nuclear fusion, we get about 6.3×10^14 J/kkg
If we use matter-antimatter, we get 9×10^16 J/kg
The gains in energy density results in a massive reduction of weight (or increase of payload).
Now, I tried doing the maths for the energy needed to accelerate just 1 kg at 100 g for 6 days, but I ended up with a result with some very odd units: 5,090,688 m×kg/s.
Best thing I can think of is kinetic energy: E = ½ × m × v^2. We already know that we end up with units of kg and m/s (mass and velocity), so just substitute.
But, I noticed something when checking Pluto: At its closest it is 29.65834067 AU from the Sun. Align everything and we get a minimum distance of 28.66 AU from Earth to Pluto. 28.66 AU in 6 days is 8,270,12 km/s. 10 days it's 4,962.36 km/s
Now, my physics isn't exactly the best in the world, especially when dealing with something that is moving at 1.66 to 2.75% the speed of light.
Anyway, 1 kg moving at 4,962.36 km/s has 1.23 × 10^13 joules of energy in it. This is 1/1000th of the total energy output from a matter-anti-matter reaction of 1 kg. It is even less than what we can get from 1 kg of nuclear fuel. But we would need about 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen and oxygen.
But it's very unlikely that my maths for that bit is correct. The numbers are probably correct, but the energy needed to accelerate to those speeds etc. are very suspect, simply due to the mechanics of it all and so on.
I am sure there are some moderate simple formulas for working out the mechanics of this idea. I'm not expecting anything like (a+b+c*d+e)/(f*g), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's down to something workable like a 4th degree polynomials with mass, distance and travel time in some way.
The really silly things about laws against wearing ear plugs in a car is that it is perfectly legal to have the car stereo turned up so loud, that you can't even hear a fog horn being used in seat next to you.
At most you'll be risking a fine for noise pollution, not reckless driving
We've had stories of Zombie Salmon, rats that walk despite broken spines and now we're told that those with no brain activity can learn?!?
Granted, that could be both politicians and zombies, but I'm preparing for the worst: Zombie Politicians. Don't believe me? This one was just a prototype!. They're amongst us, they cannot think, they cannot be stopped, they're learning AND THEY'RE RUNNING THE COUNTRY!
The lunatics were right! We ARE losing the country. Zombie Jesus save us all!
I seem to recall a case from the UK, where two CDs filled with tax information from about 10 million people were left on a train or bus.
Thankfully all the data on the CDs was encrypted.
Typically the password(s) were written on the CDs.
So, no, encryption does nothing but add a layer of security theatre for data breaches. Notification should still be required.
Add the following requirements:
Probably a few more requirements as well. That way those who really want to know can be told, and those who don't care will just throw the letter away anyway.
Also add very very steep fines for not disclosing data breaches. If the chance of it being known that a breach has occurred are 1%, make the fines 200x the cost of notification and expected loss of business. Hell, add mandatory non-suspendable jail time for the responsible managers (including board members).
Pictures or it didn't happen. The only way that happens in a modern TV is if you set it on fire!
I had a 42" plasma, that was made in 2004. Not even HD ready. At full load, it never peaked above 350W (I used a meter because I was curious) during a two week period. Average when it was turned on was just over 280W. Turned off it drew 6W of power from the socket.
The only thing your TV is doing when it's powered off is powering the power indicator and running a small circuit board to power it back on when the remote is used.
6 to 10W I might buy, but not on a modern TV.
Fixed that for you.
What's wrong with low income housing? Are you seriously suggesting that poor people shouldn't have access to running water, decent sized beds or even a toilet?!?
</joke>
And who said the solar panels would be superconducting or placed inside the crater?
Well, there could be some other reasons for wanting to know.
If you build a moon base, you could use these spots for some interesting stuff. Like infra-red observatories, which I think need to have a cold sensor to increase sensitivity.
Additionally 33 Kelvin is low enough that you can use at least one iron based superconductor for energy storage. That way you can have huge arrays of solar panels or similar, and just dump surplus energy into a superconducting magnetic energy storage.
The superconductors would also give you essentially free cooling for particle accelerators, but I've no idea how large those craters are, nor if that'd even be useful.
Only US English uses billion to mean "1,000,000,000". In most other languages that use the word billion it means "1,000,000,000,000".
And there are a hell of a lot more outside the Commonwealth than there are in the US.
First of all, no one would be using manual storage to transfer the data.
Just throw up some numbers that makes sense to us. Like 99,420.5393 gigabit/second.
Most large ISPs use OC-192 as the backbones of their infrastructure. You'd need more than 10,200 of those to handle that data load, and that's ignoring the overhead.
Or to put it into numbers that the RIAA can understand: 1.5707309 * 10^9 music CDs every single day.
At 15 pieces of music per CD and $80,000/song that's $1.88 * 10^15 dollars/day flowing through that network. That's 632 times larger than the US federal budget for 2008.
No wonder the music industry is in trouble!
I'm pretty sure you mean:
Well, first off the news crews are 100% unreliable and are willing to make shit up
Same for the detectives
Oh, and the televangelist.
And I'm sure those nineteen other passer-bys are completely trustworthy ...
Sounds to me like you have a very thin case there.
No, you're not missing anything. I used Google to calculate the number:
135 GB.
However, I did have to do a bit of checking up, and I found out what was wrong:
1.06 TB
Capitalization isn't just important in husbandry.
when I did my 135 GB calculation, I checked their website and found that their lowest capacity unit was 150 GB, so I expected that I was right and the kb vs kB error hadn't crossed my mind.
I did just check Wikipedia though:
, so that would of course be an option, but Pliant's own website says:
They don't say 180,000+ IOPS though, but "only" 160,000+ so that doesn't affect the math much.
I looked around a bit, and Micron says about their "Enterprise NAND":
So, while my math was off by a factor of 8 (or a bit shift, as the shift key should have been pressed), it turns out that there are actually SLC NAND chips available that increases write endurance by a factor of 10. This reduces the minimum space required to 108 GB.
But very nice catch. And informative - made me go find out if it was still possible.
I smell someone who has been through a divorce.
The heart rate monitor is actually a fun thing to have.
I usually only wear it when I'm on my bike, and I do find it quite fun to see just for how long I can keep my heart rate at 170+, 175+ and 180+. I'm 32, so my target should really be around 160, but I'm still in really bad shape, so I'm constantly above that if I want to feel like I'm doing something.
But when I started this back in June I could hit a peak of about 180 for maybe a minute before I'd feel like I was dying, and now I can hold 180+ for several minutes. My resting heart rate has dropped from about 80 (!!!) to roughly 65 as well.
I'm using this as a fun toy, and I honestly think that if approached properly in gym, you could get the disinterested kids more interested. If you're giving them grades in gym class (btw, wtf?), don't grade them on how well they play football or whatever, as that'll take away the bad players' motivation. Grade them on how well they've done. If you're already in great shape at the start of the school year and you don't improve, give them an A. If they start in great shape and end up in bad shape, give them a C- or D or something. If they start out in lousy shape and end up in great shape (entirely doable while you're still fat) - give them an A or an A+. Start lousy and keep that - give them a C- or a D.
That certainly depends on what's wrong with them.
If they "need" plastic surgery, they're treated like everybody else, i.e. pay for it.
If they "need" to be vaccinated against swine flu along with their partner, they'll hung out to dry in the news papers, and be turned down by the agency in charge of the limited supply, because they aren't on the list of people who are prioritized. At least that's how it works in Denmark.
I never said we were absolutely equal, as some people tend to get star struck, if I get testicular cancer in Denmark I will get the exact same treatment options as Svend Auken did. And since you don't know who that is, he was a bit like Ted Kennedy. Well liked, charismatic, leader of one of the biggest parties in Denmark, but without the baggage.
Only eight million? That's pretty much the entire population of New York City.
You guy sure have some interesting ideas about "only" over there.