Frankly, I don't think that's a manageable standard. I seem to remember Mark Twain saying that it would take all the wise men in the world to answer the questions of just one fool. In effect you would make it possible for a small group of "skeptics" to commit a denial of service attack any AGW research for any reason. Hell, some of the so-called skeptics have already been abusing freedom of information requests to try and prevent scientists from actually working.
You can demand perfection from an imperfect world, but if you expect to get it merely because you demanded it, be prepared for disappointment.
Other than the obvious failure of requiring scientists to answer every question of every fool, I think you're pretty much right that everything needs to be done in as rigorous a manner as possible. I'm just not sure that that isn't the case already. You also have to be careful that you don't get manipulated by clever people with vested interests. You can create doubt about anything by manipulating the facts. On one side you have "information should be shared with everyone" and on the other you have "because they shared their information with everyone we can never know if they're just parroting the same answer". There's money interests everywhere in the climate change issue and they're all pushing for whatever result they think is currently in their best financial interests. It would be easy to lose sight of the truth behind all the agendas.
If you're going to think that way, there's not much point in using Windows at all. Due to inherent flaws in Windows any access to a Windows machine can be subverted into root access, thus hackers are much more likely to target that known flaw than any hypothetical but unknown flaws in Opera.
So... His best bet would be to switch his sister and her husband using Opera (or Firefox, or Konqueror, or Chrome, or something else) on Ubuntu (obviously as a non-root user) or really any non-Windows OS.
Actually I think it deserver "unsightful". But unfortunately, there's no mod for it. The point, I think, is to give an incentive to make moderately healthy food instead of completely unhealthy food. Banning the food itself would be a greater trespass of personal responsibility than targeting their ability to market unhealthy food to children.
Really, there's absolutely nothing about that comment that is insightful in any way.
Obviously someone thought you were being deliberately dense. The obvious conclusion that you should have drawn was the serving terribly unhealthy food was the "taking advantage" part, banning the toy is just the kick to the pants to make them change.
Have they really? Over what time scale? To teach how many children?
Is there really a causation effect between food education and average weight?
Personally, I doubt the weight explosion in the U.S. has much to do with too much food education. There appear to be a lot of different reasons. High fructose corn syrup seems to be a really bad idea, it causes massive weight gain in test rats. Children shouldn't be parked in front of TVs and Video Games. The average age that children start watching TV has gone down from 4 years to 5 months. TV actually depresses a children's metabolism to less than it would be if they were asleep. There's a lot of cheap food out that there has fat, sugar and salt added to make it taste better, even though it makes the food much less healthy. I'm not even talking fast food here. I found a brand of tomato sauce where sugar was the second ingredient, after tomatoes. We're talking 38 grams of sugar per serving. It had more calories per ounce than the box of chocolates across the aisle. That's sugar is there to hide the taste of the poor quality tomatoes used in the sauce. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to buy ingredients based on what you can afford than what's actually healthy to use.
Wow. You certainly examined this issue from every angle.
How about given: 1) These companies use the toys to attract both parents and children. 2) The toys can't be given away because the food fails to meet basic nutritional guidelines.
Maybe these companies will do: 3) Improve the quality of the food to meet the basic nutritional guidelines.
I know, I probably just blew your mind there, be cause who could possible ever have considered that this legislation wasn't aimed at making better parents but at creating a carrot for fast companies to make more nutritious food for children.
If you think this law is about punishing parents, you're have really thought about it at all.
No, it's the pro-copyright stance of many people that has not been entirely thought through. Copyrights are, at best, a necessary evil. The exist to create an incentive to create new works of art and to allow artists to work professionally on their art. They have been corrupted by corporate interests to make a perpetual money machine where new art is suppressed to keep the old art profitable. That runs exactly opposite to the reasons for copyright existing in the first place.
I don't think the possible consequence that if you make something truly great your great-grandchildren will never have to work a day in their life is really a very good incentive. I doubt that's what motivates many, if any, artists.
I'm afraid that there is no such thing as "free political speech". There is just "free speech", or more specifically "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". If you could prove, in a court of law, that copyright was in fact an abridgement of the freedom of speech, that'd be pretty nifty because then no copyrights could exist for anyone. Everyone would be able to use the excuse that someone was exercising their right to free speech when they pirated whatever material they wanted.
Of course, I'm also pretty sure this was probably the very first defense struck down by the courts when the constitutionality of copyright law was first challenged in the courts, so I wouldn't bet on winning with that argument.
You've got it reversed, the point should be "The fact that cleaner air, which we need, may have a warming effect, should only make us fight much stronger against the original sources of the warming itself."
The pollution increases the amount of heat reflected back into space, reducing the pollution reduced the amount of heat reflected and increased the amount absorbed.
You seem unnecessarily hostile and rude, it would have been sufficient and more effective if you pointed out that according to the steam survey the annualized upgrade rate for march is about 10%.
Of course if you annualize the current rate of adoption for Windows 7, it comes out to about 18% leaving us with a rough estimate that about half of the people who are currently upgrading are buying new hardware and half are not.
Nothing you have posted contradicts the person you are responding to.
You need to show that the bulk of Microsoft's [Windows] revenue doesn't come from PC manufacturers to actually make your point. Instead you claim that 35% of gamers haven't purchase a new machine this year because... you don't think they have? I'm not sure about the average replacement time for gaming machines, but 3 years doesn't sound terribly far fetched. Especially if many people were waiting for Windows 7 to be released before replacing an older system.
As for your retail comments, Microsoft does sell many copies of Windows at retail, however, you haven't shown that the revenue from those sales represents a large percentage of their revenues. Also, the 10 million per month figure is licenses sold, which includes pre-installed versions of Windows. Lastly, retail figures for a new O/S tend to be big whenever Microsoft launches a new OS, however, they tend to diminish over time.
I suppose you are indirectly talking about welfare. The question that is often ignored in the debate of welfare is whether it is better for the government to pay welfare to those unable to work, or better to have them begging, borrowing, and stealing from working folk.
Most of the analysis that I've seen shows that providing a minimal standard of living to those who are unable to work is far cheaper than the alternative even with a moderate level of fraud in the system. Sometimes, you have to look at things on a cost/benefit level and recognize that absolute ideals can enslave people just as surely as any master's yolk.
If you believed that welfare greatly reduced the costs of policing, insurance, lost wages and revenues to the point where it costs the government less to run welfare than it does to do nothing about the people on it, would you still consider it theft of your money? If that is the case then the government is taking less of your money than it would otherwise.
After all, it costs the government much less to run welfare programs than the alternatives. The number I found was that each child in a welfare family costs the government $2499 / year, while a child in the foster system costs $21,092. I wasn't easily able to find something that tells what the cost per adult/family on welfare is to the government. However, based on benefits, someone on welfare with no income gets about $10,000 per year, while someone in prison costs about $22,000 per year. Unless the welfare administration costs are extremely high, it should cost significantly less than putting someone in prison.
The point is, that although I understand that there are significant ideological reasons to oppose welfare, I'm not sure the argument that "money is being stolen" has any basis in reality. There's a significant probability that far from costing you money, welfare programs are saving you money that would otherwise have to be spent on policing, enforcement, prisons and other expenses by the government.
You know, without government regulation, it's much cheaper to just say you meet the safety standards. No regulation, no penalties for doing so.
Heck, if you're big enough, heck you can just invent your own safety company, for example, the "Double-plus Good Safety Labratory" to give all of your products the highest marks possible while expressing severe concerns about your competitors products.
Government regulation isn't all bad. Sometimes it's actually a good thing, like the laws that prevent a company from forcing employees to live in company towns where they become essentially slave labour through accounting tricks until they're no longer useful, then they're kicked out loaded of town with no assets and a giant load of debt they'll likely never be able to pay off.
That's the ideal situation for unregulated capitalists: Employees who pay you for the privilege of working for your company. That's the way that mining companies used to be run in the U.S.
If I'm not mistaken that's not exactly right, the majority of congress is elected via the state's gerrymandering procedures that use historical trends to maximize the number of representatives elected from the governing party at the time. The reason incumbents are re-elected most of the time is because each region is stacked towards one of the two parties. Comfortable margins for those in power, and massive landslides for those who are not. Thus sending the maximum number of representatives from the party that controls the state.
I seem to remember there being a web site which was able to predict before the election campaign started who would win every congressional district with a 98% accuracy rating. Essentially, the results are fixed most of the time. There's about 15 (iirc) competitive districts in the entire country.
The U.S. doesn't obey NAFTA rulings or WTC rulings. I think it's been almost a decade now that since the U.S. decided to unilaterally disobey the terms of trade treaties it's signed whenever it was more convenient to not follow them.
The treaties haven't been scrapped because it's worth more to keep it and to ignore the U.S. transgressions, for now.
But we often get U.S. politicians up here threatening us over completely false and made up allegations that the Repbulican party seems to invent. In the waning years of Bush's presidency we were repeatedly told that Canada was the world's biggest having for copyright infringers and that trade with our country would be cut off if we didn't crack down on... phones with cameras in theaters. That's more than a little bit stupid because we're pretty sure China's actually #1, we're pretty sure less 5% of the "infringing" versions of movies were taking by recording a movie in the theater, the vast majority are pre-production copies that are actually sold by people who actually work for MPAA member companies. I could go on an on.
So, yes, this would be used against the U.S.'s closest allies to try and bludgeon us in doing your government's bidding.
Frankly, I think this would be used as a stick to threaten U.S. Allies to try and force the adoption of draconian U.S. style copyright laws. It would most certainly combine in an unpleasant way with ACTA. I have strong doubts that it will have much, if any, legitimate use.
That wouldn't be so bad if the U.S. wasn't already using so many other sticks to bludgeon it's allies. The U.S. needs to consider the consequences of making it less profitable and less palatable for other countries to trade with it.
There's a failure of understanding demonstrated by the post.
Open Source is a democracy, everyone can vote by choosing which project to use and anyone can create a new project based on an older one or a new idea.
However, not every open source project is a democracy. Many of the projects themselves may be run as despotisms or constitutional monarchies, or even democracies.
It is important to understand that any particular open source project is not "Open Source". No single project encapsulates the entire philosophy and community of Open Source.
I understand that it's easier to think of things as a never-changing model, but this is case where you have to model the game a bit. If health insurance rates start getting jacked up a lot, you know what's going to happen?
Single payer health care.
It's the stick the government has and it's the threat that the insurance industry has to fear. Because if they piss off too many people, they'll lose the entire industry.
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
I'm not an American, but I saw an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher where they showcased a "Health Care Bazaar" where thousands of Americans (some who had health insurance) were lining up at 4:00 am to use the free services being provided by a charity that normally operates in third world countries.
According to the people there, many of them had health insurance but wouldn't be able to afford the services otherwise.
From what I understand, about 50,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance or don't have enough insurance.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement):
"It also refers, in a more casual sense, to someone's belief that one is deserving of some particular reward or benefit."
Actually that's quite reasonably apt as a description of the Christian Right who believe they are entitled to salvation (heaven), and forcing their view of morality on everyone else.
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
I used your search and what I found was some different numbers depending on which of the links I clicked on, and no links back to original source for this information. Where's it is credited, it's attributed to the census. On some of the pages they claim it was 7-8 million on others they claimed 10-14 million who had no insurance for the entire year and would have paid for it if they could.
Of course, this doesn't address the other large group of people who are sometimes referred to as "underinsured", and no I'm not talking about the so-called "Invicibles" who don't want to "waste money" on health insurance for themselves. I'm talking about a large and rarely discussed group of Americans who have health insurance but can't afford to actually use it because the deductibles and co-pays are too high and they risk having their rates raised and their insurance cancelled if they do.
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
For all its flaws the U.S. is still superior to government-run hospitals. People can get free care simply by walking into the ER, with the cost borne by the megarich corporations (who can easily afford it). I think that's a good system, and certainly better than if Uncle Sam Care was run like Uncle Sam Amtrak or Uncle Sam Postal Service (both nearly-bankrupt).
Actually, according to every study that I've ever head of, the U.S. (like http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf for example) has middling to poor outcomes compared to other developed nations and pays more than any other country in the world for average, at best, results.
Canada and the U.K. actually get better results than the U.S. for less money. There are certainly horror stories that can be told about every health care system, like the ones linked above. But the pural of anecdotes is not data. When you look at the whole system the most (if not all) of world's government run health care systems are more effective and cheaper than the U.S. system.
The best systems both on results and cost tend to be mixed public/private systems, but for some reason Americans seem to be afraid of such systems.
Of course, that has a lot more to do with economic conditions than the replacement of light bulbs, which as another poster points out has barely begun. Expect demand for power rise by 10%, possibly more, as the EU pulls out of the recession.
The problem is going to be identifying the impact of switching from incandescents to LEDs and CFLs. That's not going to be easy because there's no accurate way of measuring adoption and it's impact on power demand, so it will have to be estimated.
Yeah! I mean, just look at what the lack of building codes has done for Haiti!
Sure, the earthquake that hit Chile was 500 times stronger than the Haiti one, and sure the stricter building codes in Chile meant only 500 people died rather than 300,000, but that's no reason to trade liberty for security.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't think that's a manageable standard. I seem to remember Mark Twain saying that it would take all the wise men in the world to answer the questions of just one fool. In effect you would make it possible for a small group of "skeptics" to commit a denial of service attack any AGW research for any reason. Hell, some of the so-called skeptics have already been abusing freedom of information requests to try and prevent scientists from actually working.
You can demand perfection from an imperfect world, but if you expect to get it merely because you demanded it, be prepared for disappointment.
Other than the obvious failure of requiring scientists to answer every question of every fool, I think you're pretty much right that everything needs to be done in as rigorous a manner as possible. I'm just not sure that that isn't the case already. You also have to be careful that you don't get manipulated by clever people with vested interests. You can create doubt about anything by manipulating the facts. On one side you have "information should be shared with everyone" and on the other you have "because they shared their information with everyone we can never know if they're just parroting the same answer". There's money interests everywhere in the climate change issue and they're all pushing for whatever result they think is currently in their best financial interests. It would be easy to lose sight of the truth behind all the agendas.
If you're going to think that way, there's not much point in using Windows at all. Due to inherent flaws in Windows any access to a Windows machine can be subverted into root access, thus hackers are much more likely to target that known flaw than any hypothetical but unknown flaws in Opera.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/3284
http://news.techworld.com/security/115456/windows-7-inherently-insecure-says-researcher/
http://www.anti-trend.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=1
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/20/1359237/Newly-Found-Windows-Bug-Affects-All-Versions-Since-NT?from=rss
So... His best bet would be to switch his sister and her husband using Opera (or Firefox, or Konqueror, or Chrome, or something else) on Ubuntu (obviously as a non-root user) or really any non-Windows OS.
Actually I think it deserver "unsightful". But unfortunately, there's no mod for it. The point, I think, is to give an incentive to make moderately healthy food instead of completely unhealthy food. Banning the food itself would be a greater trespass of personal responsibility than targeting their ability to market unhealthy food to children.
Really, there's absolutely nothing about that comment that is insightful in any way.
How about they provide actual food instead of "food like products"?
Of course, if they made the food healthy it would probably not taste as good and cost more.
Obviously someone thought you were being deliberately dense. The obvious conclusion that you should have drawn was the serving terribly unhealthy food was the "taking advantage" part, banning the toy is just the kick to the pants to make them change.
Have they really? Over what time scale? To teach how many children?
Is there really a causation effect between food education and average weight?
Personally, I doubt the weight explosion in the U.S. has much to do with too much food education. There appear to be a lot of different reasons. High fructose corn syrup seems to be a really bad idea, it causes massive weight gain in test rats. Children shouldn't be parked in front of TVs and Video Games. The average age that children start watching TV has gone down from 4 years to 5 months. TV actually depresses a children's metabolism to less than it would be if they were asleep. There's a lot of cheap food out that there has fat, sugar and salt added to make it taste better, even though it makes the food much less healthy. I'm not even talking fast food here. I found a brand of tomato sauce where sugar was the second ingredient, after tomatoes. We're talking 38 grams of sugar per serving. It had more calories per ounce than the box of chocolates across the aisle. That's sugar is there to hide the taste of the poor quality tomatoes used in the sauce. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to buy ingredients based on what you can afford than what's actually healthy to use.
It's a big mess.
Wow. You certainly examined this issue from every angle.
How about given:
1) These companies use the toys to attract both parents and children.
2) The toys can't be given away because the food fails to meet basic nutritional guidelines.
Maybe these companies will do:
3) Improve the quality of the food to meet the basic nutritional guidelines.
I know, I probably just blew your mind there, be cause who could possible ever have considered that this legislation wasn't aimed at making better parents but at creating a carrot for fast companies to make more nutritious food for children.
If you think this law is about punishing parents, you're have really thought about it at all.
No, it's the pro-copyright stance of many people that has not been entirely thought through. Copyrights are, at best, a necessary evil. The exist to create an incentive to create new works of art and to allow artists to work professionally on their art. They have been corrupted by corporate interests to make a perpetual money machine where new art is suppressed to keep the old art profitable. That runs exactly opposite to the reasons for copyright existing in the first place.
I don't think the possible consequence that if you make something truly great your great-grandchildren will never have to work a day in their life is really a very good incentive. I doubt that's what motivates many, if any, artists.
I'm afraid that there is no such thing as "free political speech". There is just "free speech", or more specifically "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". If you could prove, in a court of law, that copyright was in fact an abridgement of the freedom of speech, that'd be pretty nifty because then no copyrights could exist for anyone. Everyone would be able to use the excuse that someone was exercising their right to free speech when they pirated whatever material they wanted.
Of course, I'm also pretty sure this was probably the very first defense struck down by the courts when the constitutionality of copyright law was first challenged in the courts, so I wouldn't bet on winning with that argument.
You've got it reversed, the point should be
"The fact that cleaner air, which we need, may have a warming effect, should only make us fight much stronger against the original sources of the warming itself."
The pollution increases the amount of heat reflected back into space, reducing the pollution reduced the amount of heat reflected and increased the amount absorbed.
You seem unnecessarily hostile and rude, it would have been sufficient and more effective if you pointed out that according to the steam survey the annualized upgrade rate for march is about 10%.
Of course if you annualize the current rate of adoption for Windows 7, it comes out to about 18% leaving us with a rough estimate that about half of the people who are currently upgrading are buying new hardware and half are not.
Nothing you have posted contradicts the person you are responding to.
You need to show that the bulk of Microsoft's [Windows] revenue doesn't come from PC manufacturers to actually make your point. Instead you claim that 35% of gamers haven't purchase a new machine this year because... you don't think they have? I'm not sure about the average replacement time for gaming machines, but 3 years doesn't sound terribly far fetched. Especially if many people were waiting for Windows 7 to be released before replacing an older system.
As for your retail comments, Microsoft does sell many copies of Windows at retail, however, you haven't shown that the revenue from those sales represents a large percentage of their revenues. Also, the 10 million per month figure is licenses sold, which includes pre-installed versions of Windows. Lastly, retail figures for a new O/S tend to be big whenever Microsoft launches a new OS, however, they tend to diminish over time.
I suppose you are indirectly talking about welfare. The question that is often ignored in the debate of welfare is whether it is better for the government to pay welfare to those unable to work, or better to have them begging, borrowing, and stealing from working folk.
Most of the analysis that I've seen shows that providing a minimal standard of living to those who are unable to work is far cheaper than the alternative even with a moderate level of fraud in the system. Sometimes, you have to look at things on a cost/benefit level and recognize that absolute ideals can enslave people just as surely as any master's yolk.
If you believed that welfare greatly reduced the costs of policing, insurance, lost wages and revenues to the point where it costs the government less to run welfare than it does to do nothing about the people on it, would you still consider it theft of your money? If that is the case then the government is taking less of your money than it would otherwise.
After all, it costs the government much less to run welfare programs than the alternatives. The number I found was that each child in a welfare family costs the government $2499 / year, while a child in the foster system costs $21,092. I wasn't easily able to find something that tells what the cost per adult/family on welfare is to the government. However, based on benefits, someone on welfare with no income gets about $10,000 per year, while someone in prison costs about $22,000 per year. Unless the welfare administration costs are extremely high, it should cost significantly less than putting someone in prison.
The point is, that although I understand that there are significant ideological reasons to oppose welfare, I'm not sure the argument that "money is being stolen" has any basis in reality. There's a significant probability that far from costing you money, welfare programs are saving you money that would otherwise have to be spent on policing, enforcement, prisons and other expenses by the government.
You know, without government regulation, it's much cheaper to just say you meet the safety standards. No regulation, no penalties for doing so.
Heck, if you're big enough, heck you can just invent your own safety company, for example, the "Double-plus Good Safety Labratory" to give all of your products the highest marks possible while expressing severe concerns about your competitors products.
Government regulation isn't all bad. Sometimes it's actually a good thing, like the laws that prevent a company from forcing employees to live in company towns where they become essentially slave labour through accounting tricks until they're no longer useful, then they're kicked out loaded of town with no assets and a giant load of debt they'll likely never be able to pay off.
That's the ideal situation for unregulated capitalists: Employees who pay you for the privilege of working for your company. That's the way that mining companies used to be run in the U.S.
If I'm not mistaken that's not exactly right, the majority of congress is elected via the state's gerrymandering procedures that use historical trends to maximize the number of representatives elected from the governing party at the time. The reason incumbents are re-elected most of the time is because each region is stacked towards one of the two parties. Comfortable margins for those in power, and massive landslides for those who are not. Thus sending the maximum number of representatives from the party that controls the state.
I seem to remember there being a web site which was able to predict before the election campaign started who would win every congressional district with a 98% accuracy rating. Essentially, the results are fixed most of the time. There's about 15 (iirc) competitive districts in the entire country.
The U.S. doesn't obey NAFTA rulings or WTC rulings. I think it's been almost a decade now that since the U.S. decided to unilaterally disobey the terms of trade treaties it's signed whenever it was more convenient to not follow them.
The treaties haven't been scrapped because it's worth more to keep it and to ignore the U.S. transgressions, for now.
But we often get U.S. politicians up here threatening us over completely false and made up allegations that the Repbulican party seems to invent. In the waning years of Bush's presidency we were repeatedly told that Canada was the world's biggest having for copyright infringers and that trade with our country would be cut off if we didn't crack down on... phones with cameras in theaters. That's more than a little bit stupid because we're pretty sure China's actually #1, we're pretty sure less 5% of the "infringing" versions of movies were taking by recording a movie in the theater, the vast majority are pre-production copies that are actually sold by people who actually work for MPAA member companies. I could go on an on.
So, yes, this would be used against the U.S.'s closest allies to try and bludgeon us in doing your government's bidding.
Frankly, I think this would be used as a stick to threaten U.S. Allies to try and force the adoption of draconian U.S. style copyright laws. It would most certainly combine in an unpleasant way with ACTA. I have strong doubts that it will have much, if any, legitimate use.
That wouldn't be so bad if the U.S. wasn't already using so many other sticks to bludgeon it's allies. The U.S. needs to consider the consequences of making it less profitable and less palatable for other countries to trade with it.
There's a failure of understanding demonstrated by the post.
Open Source is a democracy, everyone can vote by choosing which project to use and anyone can create a new project based on an older one or a new idea.
However, not every open source project is a democracy. Many of the projects themselves may be run as despotisms or constitutional monarchies, or even democracies.
It is important to understand that any particular open source project is not "Open Source". No single project encapsulates the entire philosophy and community of Open Source.
I understand that it's easier to think of things as a never-changing model, but this is case where you have to model the game a bit. If health insurance rates start getting jacked up a lot, you know what's going to happen?
Single payer health care.
It's the stick the government has and it's the threat that the insurance industry has to fear. Because if they piss off too many people, they'll lose the entire industry.
I'm not an American, but I saw an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher where they showcased a "Health Care Bazaar" where thousands of Americans (some who had health insurance) were lining up at 4:00 am to use the free services being provided by a charity that normally operates in third world countries.
According to the people there, many of them had health insurance but wouldn't be able to afford the services otherwise.
From what I understand, about 50,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance or don't have enough insurance.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement):
"It also refers, in a more casual sense, to someone's belief that one is deserving of some particular reward or benefit."
Actually that's quite reasonably apt as a description of the Christian Right who believe they are entitled to salvation (heaven), and forcing their view of morality on everyone else.
I used your search and what I found was some different numbers depending on which of the links I clicked on, and no links back to original source for this information. Where's it is credited, it's attributed to the census. On some of the pages they claim it was 7-8 million on others they claimed 10-14 million who had no insurance for the entire year and would have paid for it if they could.
Of course, this doesn't address the other large group of people who are sometimes referred to as "underinsured", and no I'm not talking about the so-called "Invicibles" who don't want to "waste money" on health insurance for themselves. I'm talking about a large and rarely discussed group of Americans who have health insurance but can't afford to actually use it because the deductibles and co-pays are too high and they risk having their rates raised and their insurance cancelled if they do.
For all its flaws the U.S. is still superior to government-run hospitals. People can get free care simply by walking into the ER, with the cost borne by the megarich corporations (who can easily afford it). I think that's a good system, and certainly better than if Uncle Sam Care was run like Uncle Sam Amtrak or Uncle Sam Postal Service (both nearly-bankrupt).
Actually, according to every study that I've ever head of, the U.S. (like http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf for example) has middling to poor outcomes compared to other developed nations and pays more than any other country in the world for average, at best, results.
Canada and the U.K. actually get better results than the U.S. for less money. There are certainly horror stories that can be told about every health care system, like the ones linked above. But the pural of anecdotes is not data. When you look at the whole system the most (if not all) of world's government run health care systems are more effective and cheaper than the U.S. system.
The best systems both on results and cost tend to be mixed public/private systems, but for some reason Americans seem to be afraid of such systems.
has the EU power demand dropped?
Nope.
Actually, it has. Almost 10% in fact.
Of course, that has a lot more to do with economic conditions than the replacement of light bulbs, which as another poster points out has barely begun. Expect demand for power rise by 10%, possibly more, as the EU pulls out of the recession.
The problem is going to be identifying the impact of switching from incandescents to LEDs and CFLs. That's not going to be easy because there's no accurate way of measuring adoption and it's impact on power demand, so it will have to be estimated.
Yeah! I mean, just look at what the lack of building codes has done for Haiti!
Sure, the earthquake that hit Chile was 500 times stronger than the Haiti one, and sure the stricter building codes in Chile meant only 500 people died rather than 300,000, but that's no reason to trade liberty for security.