There's an HP box which is built around supporting Red 4k camera video; apparently it uses a single commodity video card, nothing really top-end but it can drive a 4k display and a couple of 27" 2560x1440 displays at the same time under Windows 8. Here's a link to a blog entry about it with some video.
Are Apple selling 4k displays? The only "major players" I know of with 4k displays on the market right now are Asus and Sony. The review articles I've seen on them have tended to concentrate on gamer applications with high-end video card setups (multiple Titans and the like) in PCs running Windows; I don't think I've seen anyone demoing Apple kit driving 4k displays.
I ran Win8 preview on an AMD desktop for several months. Were there any serious problems (flashing screen, bad power consumption on laptops etc.) reported during the Win8 beta? I can't recall anything that got in the way of me doing stuff.
OK, what does the US intend to give up in exchange for China (and only China, not any of the other minor nuclear powers) becoming more transparent? Does the Chinese government get the right to inspect US WMD installations as a trade-off? I don't think that wold fly and without a counterbalance that makes it worthwhile to them I can't see the Chinese opening the kimono.
Frankly I'd prefer that China engage more actively with India and Pakistan about the situation on their borders; it's well-recognised that WWIII in respect of a limited use of nukes in a regional conflict is most likely to occur in that region than anywhere else and neither India or Pakistan is what one might describe as stable despite being nominal democracies.
I did mention that China and India have a shared border (and with Kashmir too, of course). However they are not shooting at each other at the moment which is not the case with India and Pakistan over Kashmir. I sometimes claim the first real nuclear war was between India and Pakistan in 1998 but it was carried out underground and nobody was killed, when both countries tested several devices with a few days of each other to prove their nuclear capabilities.
I'm not sure that China will become a military and nuclear superpower on the current US model. It has fifty years of US and Soviet history to look back on which probably will deter it from spending trillions on building up a large but ultimately useless strategic nuclear weapons force and it doesn't have the interlocking defence treaty network (NATO, SEATO, South Korea etc.) that requires a world-dominating conventional military presence which is bankrupting the US today. Its military is more defensive with fewer warmaking capabilities and its nuclear weapons program is predicated on local threats rather than world-wide, at least in the short term.
I thought I had explained what I think about the China situation, sorry about that.
China has about the same number of nuclear weapons (200 - 300) as Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel which together are less than half the current US or Russian stockpiles in total. Why should China and only China be a party to a START Lite process, what would the US (and Russia too presumably) give up in trade for them to do so? I could envisage a START Lite treaty between China, India and Pakistan with mutual inspections since there are regional reasons (and a continuing low-grade shooting war between India and Pakistan) but there's no need or benefit for the Chinese to open their kimono to the world other than to please nervous Americans.
The US gave up its IRBMs in part because it was losing the basing rights for them in foreign countries. If you tried to regain them (I presume somewhere convenient near China as it is the current perceived threat) where would you put them? Okinawa? No way. Taiwan? Very destabilising. Burma, Vietnam, the list of non-candidates goes on and on. IRBMs *might* work in Alaska but you already have 450 Minutemen IIIs (with three times the number of warheads that China owns in toto) which could do the same job positioned in the mainland US and of course that doesn't count the four or 5 Ohios you have deployed at any time.
The Topol-M missile has a shorter range than the Minuteman III and the road-mobile Topol-M version is believed to be less capable than the siloed version as well as being obviously more vulnerable to nuclear airbursts compared to the silo-protected base Topol-M and Minuteman III. The extra maneuverability functions designed to avoid threatened US ABM deployments eats into payload which isn't a problem for the Minuteman III mission of course. Most of the other currently deployed Russian ICBMs like the SS-N-18 and -19 are even older than the Minuteman III, some are deployed well beyond their original service life.
The US currently has 450 Minuteman IIIs deployed in hardened silos, the combined Topol-M fleet is less than a hundred in number. On the Chinese side the DF-31/A counts less than 30 by some estimates, not surprising with only 200-300 warheads in inventory. A lot of the nuclear forces of Russia and China are not aimed (so to speak) at the US but at each other so their US-opposing missile systems tend to be less capable than the reverse since the US faces no close-in threats and all of its nuclear weapons have to have global range.
Whatever SSBN platform is built it will be designed around the venerable Trident D5, not a new missile and that D5 will carry the same sort of warhead that the current Ohios carry. Same with the British deterrent where the warheads are not being upgraded but simply maintained. I'm not sure what the French are doing with their own boomers.
As for the Minuteman being outclassed by modern Russian ICBMs, so what if that's true? The Minuteman III is a perfectly capable launch vehicle today and tomorrow. What would really be a problem for the US would be if the Russians started working on a Strategic Missile Defence to, say, defend themselves against the terrifying existential threat North Korean nuclear weapons pose. Scary!
China shares a border with two nuclear-weapons states, India and Russia. It has fought brushfire wars with both of them within the last century and its nuclear weapons development programmes tend towards confronting those short-range threats. The US sits in perfect isolation thousands of miles from any real threats (who cares about Alaska...) so its SLBM and ICBM fleets are its main deterrent force. I'm not sure that the US has any IRBM or nuclear-armed cruise missiles left in deployment.
The Ohios and their replacements are a platform, not a missile or a warhead. The new SSBNs will carry a Trident derivative, probably a slightly tweaked version of the D5 (as will the postulated replacement for the British SSBNs) and the warheads will be the same designs with the same yield and functionality as currently deployed because there is nothing to be gained in spending 50 billion dollars to develop and produce missiles and warheads that would be only fractionally better than what they replace.
A the moment the Chinese have no usable SSBNs never mind the small number (three minimum, one on patrol, one working up, one being refitted and if possible one spare above that) needed to maintain a credible second-strike worldwide retaliatory capability all the other members of the Big Five possess.
As for the capabilities of missile systems the Chinese see India and Russia as their most likely nuclear foes in any future shooting war; unlike the insular and isolated US such exchanges can and probably would be conducted with IRBMs and nuclear-capable cruise missiles hence their interest in developing such weapons and the lesser regard they have for ICBMs and SSBNs.
None of the other Big Five nations or the adjunct non-NPT nations with proven nuclear weapons (Israel, India and Pakistan) allow outside inspection and verification of their warhead stocks; the START deal is purely between the two 800-lb gorillas in the nuclear destruction biz. Just because China is big doesn't mean it's on the same scale as the US and Russia; I'd worry more about India's nuclear weapons stocks as they face an existential threat from their nuclear rivals, Pakistan.
The USAF test-fired one or more missiles recently, it caused a delay for the SpaceX Falcon launch from Vandenberg last month. The missiles in stock will do the job if called upon. There doesn't seem to be any real necessity for a brand-new missile to replace the existing fleet other than as the existing hardware ages out. Any new models would have the same basic capabilities as the older Minuteman III designs so other than fitting them with larger tailfins and spending a lot of money with defence contractors why bother?
The US has very good warheads; over half of all nuclear weapons tests since 1945 have been carried out by the US and there really isn't much room for improvement or a real need to develop new warhead designs. The focus is on maintaining the existing arsenal in a working condition which is what the new Pu facility mentioned in the article is intended to do from what I understand.
As for China its long-range missiles are 1970s technology, liquid-fuelled multistage designs which are cumbersome and vulnerable to pre-emptive attack. They have no SSBN capabilities despite spending a lot of money and effort in trying to develop that capability and they have no long-range bomber force either. China probably has about the same number of nuclear weapons as France or Britain, less than a tenth of the arsenal the US or Russia hold. Bringing them into a START process would be pointless - what counterbalancing incentive could the US offer to the Chinese to get them to reduce their current holdings from 250 warheads down to, say, 100? The US and Russia can negotiate as equals as they have similar stockpiles, the Chinese are a second-rate nuclear force in that regard.
As a foreign student in the UK you're paying fees to study here, you're buying food, paying rent etc. here, you're contributing to the local and national economy. It would cost money and effort to set up a billing system to ask the small number of folks like you to pay for healthcare everyone else around you receives as a right.
I don't know how many jobs in the US depend on the Byzantine healthcare insurance system, how many billions of dollars are sucked away from patient healthcare to shuffle bills around, analyse long lists of treatments and determine case by case whether something should be paid for by the patient or the insurer or sent to arbitration. That workforce has to be thousands of people at least with no perceptible benefit to the nation for the resulting waste of effort and inefficiency.
Not really, but it's complicated. For example a friend's parents had private medical insurance which treated them for assorted ills of ageing up to the point where the privately-insured treatment wasn't enough and more radical treatment (i.e. a lot more expensive and involving long-term intervention) was needed at which point they moved to the NHS who seamlessly took over caring for them.
A problem would occur if someone wanted treatment from both systems, NHS and private at the same time; the risks of conflicting drug regimens and the like are obvious unless complex and expensive coordination systems were put in place.
As for the headline article it's similar in tone and aim to many previous articles over the decades, "NHS in crisis!!!" They started before the NHS was created, dire warnings of doctors leaving the country to avoid working for the Socialist monster, homeless people living in waiting rooms and filling up the Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments, threats of medical tourism by undesirables (many of them with brown skins) from places like the Commonwealth or Ireland looking for free healthcare at white people's expense. If this sort of thing sounds familiar to US readers don't be surprised.
I've had lead-acid batteries explode on me a couple of times. Hydrogen gas is evolved during charging and one time I was welding something at what I thought was a safe distance from a battery on charge when it exploded. Another time starting a small truck the battery also exploded; I think the alternator controller failed and was overcharging the battery and when it restarted there was enough hydrogen vapour trapped under the hood to form an explosive mixture.
My main worry about this sort of wraparound E-Z-Bake oven idea to put batteries in odd corners of a car is the thought that body panels like the roof can easily get hot enough to fry eggs in direct sunlight during summer in many places. Igniting one panel battery will probably trigger the rest of them, of course.
If you had gone walkabout in Fukushima city (as I did a couple of years ago) with your Safecast you'd have seen readings of about 0.7 uSv/h at a height of 1 metre above ground, the standard distance for measuring background radiation in Japan nowadays (assuming your meter was calibrated correctly). Before the 2011 accident and release of radioisotopes from Fukushima Daiichi the figure reported for Fukushima city was about 0.04 uSv/h. The current reported value for Shinjuku in the centre of Tokyo is 0.06 uSv/h by comparison.
It's the law of the land now. To repeal or alter it will take a vote in the Legislature comprising majorities in favour in both the House and the Senate plus a signature by the President. There are complications in that process (supermajority for cloture required in the Senate, possible veto by the President, possible override of any veto by Congress etc.) but that's how it's done in the US, as prescribed by the Constitution. Electing more and better legislators who would vote to repeal or modify the law is up to you and those who consider it important. Going by the votes on the Act over the past few years if you want to work to elect candidates who might do your will then supporting the Democratic Party is probably your best choice.
I'm not an American, by the way but I was in the USA when 9/11 happened. I met with a group of young US citizens a few days afterwards and we talked about the panic that was gripping the US and wondered when things would get back to normal. I prophesied the period of headless-chicken panic (attacks on Sikhs, National Guard soldiers at airports etc.) would last about six months and I was told I was crazy to think it would last that long. This was the USA we were talking about, after all.
In June 2013 67 Democratic and 214 Republican Senators and Representatives voted for the most recent reauthorisation of the Patriot Act. The GOP doesn't seem to want it repealed going by those numbers. Maybe you should push to get more Democrats elected instead.
Dentistry in the UK isn't covered by the NHS per se. Saying that there is financial support via the NHS for dental treatment for low income and unemployed people and some groups get free dental treatment (children, retired people, pregnant women etc.) Cosmetic and expensive work like implants aren't covered by NHS payments but extractions, simple fillings etc. are. The major problem a few years back (your scare story is dated 2007) was that few dentists would take on new NHS patients for logistical and funding reasons. That was fixed and now they actively solicit NHS-funded patients -- indeed I was nearly chased down the street a few weeks back by a dental receptionist determined to sign me up as an NHS patient when I declined private treatment after an examination.
The same non-NHS deal applies with opticians and prescriptions for glasses and contact lenses although some places, like my home nation Scotland, offers free eye testing and a voucher for the first £80-odd towards glasses on a two-yearly cycle.
Private healthcare can be purchased in the UK (google "Harley Street" for details) as can private health insurance (BUPA, for example) but it is supplementary to the NHS and in most cases private patients who suffer serious problems requiring expensive treatment in an ICU or the like tend to get transferred to the NHS when the insurance runs out.
The ITER project is using the old Joint European Torus (JET) at Culham in England as a materials testbed for fusion reactor wall "blankets". One candidate material is lithium as neutron capture will breed tritium and helium. The tritium would be recycled as fuel for the reactor if it is burning deuterium-tritium and helium is non-radioactive and famously inert.
In the UK pubs and licenced restaurants (ones that can sell alcohol) are required to provide tap water free on request. I space out beers with water to reduce the chances of falling over on the way home or getting into an argument with a lamppost. It also reduces my chance of a hangover the next morning as it helps prevent dehydration.
The licenced trade like this idea even though it theoretically cuts into their nightly take as it also reduces the incidences of fighting, assaults on serving staff, puking, furniture destruction etc.
Capitalism depends on the free movement of three things, capital, goods and labour. Socialists and liberals don't want capitalism and they seek to regulate and limit free movement of one or all of the basic factors underlying capitalism. Border controls are a limit to free movement of labour, obviously.
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Elon's Falcon 9 rockets use Rocket Propellant 1 (RP-1) as fuel instead of dangerous gasoline.
Remind me, what's the "snark" tag in HTML5 again?
There's an HP box which is built around supporting Red 4k camera video; apparently it uses a single commodity video card, nothing really top-end but it can drive a 4k display and a couple of 27" 2560x1440 displays at the same time under Windows 8. Here's a link to a blog entry about it with some video.
Are Apple selling 4k displays? The only "major players" I know of with 4k displays on the market right now are Asus and Sony. The review articles I've seen on them have tended to concentrate on gamer applications with high-end video card setups (multiple Titans and the like) in PCs running Windows; I don't think I've seen anyone demoing Apple kit driving 4k displays.
I ran Win8 preview on an AMD desktop for several months. Were there any serious problems (flashing screen, bad power consumption on laptops etc.) reported during the Win8 beta? I can't recall anything that got in the way of me doing stuff.
OK, what does the US intend to give up in exchange for China (and only China, not any of the other minor nuclear powers) becoming more transparent? Does the Chinese government get the right to inspect US WMD installations as a trade-off? I don't think that wold fly and without a counterbalance that makes it worthwhile to them I can't see the Chinese opening the kimono.
Frankly I'd prefer that China engage more actively with India and Pakistan about the situation on their borders; it's well-recognised that WWIII in respect of a limited use of nukes in a regional conflict is most likely to occur in that region than anywhere else and neither India or Pakistan is what one might describe as stable despite being nominal democracies.
I did mention that China and India have a shared border (and with Kashmir too, of course). However they are not shooting at each other at the moment which is not the case with India and Pakistan over Kashmir. I sometimes claim the first real nuclear war was between India and Pakistan in 1998 but it was carried out underground and nobody was killed, when both countries tested several devices with a few days of each other to prove their nuclear capabilities.
I'm not sure that China will become a military and nuclear superpower on the current US model. It has fifty years of US and Soviet history to look back on which probably will deter it from spending trillions on building up a large but ultimately useless strategic nuclear weapons force and it doesn't have the interlocking defence treaty network (NATO, SEATO, South Korea etc.) that requires a world-dominating conventional military presence which is bankrupting the US today. Its military is more defensive with fewer warmaking capabilities and its nuclear weapons program is predicated on local threats rather than world-wide, at least in the short term.
I thought I had explained what I think about the China situation, sorry about that.
China has about the same number of nuclear weapons (200 - 300) as Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel which together are less than half the current US or Russian stockpiles in total. Why should China and only China be a party to a START Lite process, what would the US (and Russia too presumably) give up in trade for them to do so? I could envisage a START Lite treaty between China, India and Pakistan with mutual inspections since there are regional reasons (and a continuing low-grade shooting war between India and Pakistan) but there's no need or benefit for the Chinese to open their kimono to the world other than to please nervous Americans.
The US gave up its IRBMs in part because it was losing the basing rights for them in foreign countries. If you tried to regain them (I presume somewhere convenient near China as it is the current perceived threat) where would you put them? Okinawa? No way. Taiwan? Very destabilising. Burma, Vietnam, the list of non-candidates goes on and on. IRBMs *might* work in Alaska but you already have 450 Minutemen IIIs (with three times the number of warheads that China owns in toto) which could do the same job positioned in the mainland US and of course that doesn't count the four or 5 Ohios you have deployed at any time.
The Topol-M missile has a shorter range than the Minuteman III and the road-mobile Topol-M version is believed to be less capable than the siloed version as well as being obviously more vulnerable to nuclear airbursts compared to the silo-protected base Topol-M and Minuteman III. The extra maneuverability functions designed to avoid threatened US ABM deployments eats into payload which isn't a problem for the Minuteman III mission of course. Most of the other currently deployed Russian ICBMs like the SS-N-18 and -19 are even older than the Minuteman III, some are deployed well beyond their original service life.
The US currently has 450 Minuteman IIIs deployed in hardened silos, the combined Topol-M fleet is less than a hundred in number. On the Chinese side the DF-31/A counts less than 30 by some estimates, not surprising with only 200-300 warheads in inventory. A lot of the nuclear forces of Russia and China are not aimed (so to speak) at the US but at each other so their US-opposing missile systems tend to be less capable than the reverse since the US faces no close-in threats and all of its nuclear weapons have to have global range.
Whatever SSBN platform is built it will be designed around the venerable Trident D5, not a new missile and that D5 will carry the same sort of warhead that the current Ohios carry. Same with the British deterrent where the warheads are not being upgraded but simply maintained. I'm not sure what the French are doing with their own boomers.
As for the Minuteman being outclassed by modern Russian ICBMs, so what if that's true? The Minuteman III is a perfectly capable launch vehicle today and tomorrow. What would really be a problem for the US would be if the Russians started working on a Strategic Missile Defence to, say, defend themselves against the terrifying existential threat North Korean nuclear weapons pose. Scary!
China shares a border with two nuclear-weapons states, India and Russia. It has fought brushfire wars with both of them within the last century and its nuclear weapons development programmes tend towards confronting those short-range threats. The US sits in perfect isolation thousands of miles from any real threats (who cares about Alaska...) so its SLBM and ICBM fleets are its main deterrent force. I'm not sure that the US has any IRBM or nuclear-armed cruise missiles left in deployment.
The Ohios and their replacements are a platform, not a missile or a warhead. The new SSBNs will carry a Trident derivative, probably a slightly tweaked version of the D5 (as will the postulated replacement for the British SSBNs) and the warheads will be the same designs with the same yield and functionality as currently deployed because there is nothing to be gained in spending 50 billion dollars to develop and produce missiles and warheads that would be only fractionally better than what they replace.
A the moment the Chinese have no usable SSBNs never mind the small number (three minimum, one on patrol, one working up, one being refitted and if possible one spare above that) needed to maintain a credible second-strike worldwide retaliatory capability all the other members of the Big Five possess.
As for the capabilities of missile systems the Chinese see India and Russia as their most likely nuclear foes in any future shooting war; unlike the insular and isolated US such exchanges can and probably would be conducted with IRBMs and nuclear-capable cruise missiles hence their interest in developing such weapons and the lesser regard they have for ICBMs and SSBNs.
None of the other Big Five nations or the adjunct non-NPT nations with proven nuclear weapons (Israel, India and Pakistan) allow outside inspection and verification of their warhead stocks; the START deal is purely between the two 800-lb gorillas in the nuclear destruction biz. Just because China is big doesn't mean it's on the same scale as the US and Russia; I'd worry more about India's nuclear weapons stocks as they face an existential threat from their nuclear rivals, Pakistan.
The USAF test-fired one or more missiles recently, it caused a delay for the SpaceX Falcon launch from Vandenberg last month. The missiles in stock will do the job if called upon. There doesn't seem to be any real necessity for a brand-new missile to replace the existing fleet other than as the existing hardware ages out. Any new models would have the same basic capabilities as the older Minuteman III designs so other than fitting them with larger tailfins and spending a lot of money with defence contractors why bother?
The US has very good warheads; over half of all nuclear weapons tests since 1945 have been carried out by the US and there really isn't much room for improvement or a real need to develop new warhead designs. The focus is on maintaining the existing arsenal in a working condition which is what the new Pu facility mentioned in the article is intended to do from what I understand.
As for China its long-range missiles are 1970s technology, liquid-fuelled multistage designs which are cumbersome and vulnerable to pre-emptive attack. They have no SSBN capabilities despite spending a lot of money and effort in trying to develop that capability and they have no long-range bomber force either. China probably has about the same number of nuclear weapons as France or Britain, less than a tenth of the arsenal the US or Russia hold. Bringing them into a START process would be pointless - what counterbalancing incentive could the US offer to the Chinese to get them to reduce their current holdings from 250 warheads down to, say, 100? The US and Russia can negotiate as equals as they have similar stockpiles, the Chinese are a second-rate nuclear force in that regard.
As a foreign student in the UK you're paying fees to study here, you're buying food, paying rent etc. here, you're contributing to the local and national economy. It would cost money and effort to set up a billing system to ask the small number of folks like you to pay for healthcare everyone else around you receives as a right.
I don't know how many jobs in the US depend on the Byzantine healthcare insurance system, how many billions of dollars are sucked away from patient healthcare to shuffle bills around, analyse long lists of treatments and determine case by case whether something should be paid for by the patient or the insurer or sent to arbitration. That workforce has to be thousands of people at least with no perceptible benefit to the nation for the resulting waste of effort and inefficiency.
Can't you book a home visit instead of going to the surgery?
Not really, but it's complicated. For example a friend's parents had private medical insurance which treated them for assorted ills of ageing up to the point where the privately-insured treatment wasn't enough and more radical treatment (i.e. a lot more expensive and involving long-term intervention) was needed at which point they moved to the NHS who seamlessly took over caring for them.
A problem would occur if someone wanted treatment from both systems, NHS and private at the same time; the risks of conflicting drug regimens and the like are obvious unless complex and expensive coordination systems were put in place.
As for the headline article it's similar in tone and aim to many previous articles over the decades, "NHS in crisis!!!" They started before the NHS was created, dire warnings of doctors leaving the country to avoid working for the Socialist monster, homeless people living in waiting rooms and filling up the Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments, threats of medical tourism by undesirables (many of them with brown skins) from places like the Commonwealth or Ireland looking for free healthcare at white people's expense. If this sort of thing sounds familiar to US readers don't be surprised.
I vaguely recollect someone years ago wrote an BASIC interpreter in Excel. It would even generate ASCII graphics. It wasn't fast but...
I've had lead-acid batteries explode on me a couple of times. Hydrogen gas is evolved during charging and one time I was welding something at what I thought was a safe distance from a battery on charge when it exploded. Another time starting a small truck the battery also exploded; I think the alternator controller failed and was overcharging the battery and when it restarted there was enough hydrogen vapour trapped under the hood to form an explosive mixture.
My main worry about this sort of wraparound E-Z-Bake oven idea to put batteries in odd corners of a car is the thought that body panels like the roof can easily get hot enough to fry eggs in direct sunlight during summer in many places. Igniting one panel battery will probably trigger the rest of them, of course.
Somebody once got a group of real Yakuza to review a GTA-style computer game about, you guessed it, Yakuza. It was kinda fun.
If you had gone walkabout in Fukushima city (as I did a couple of years ago) with your Safecast you'd have seen readings of about 0.7 uSv/h at a height of 1 metre above ground, the standard distance for measuring background radiation in Japan nowadays (assuming your meter was calibrated correctly). Before the 2011 accident and release of radioisotopes from Fukushima Daiichi the figure reported for Fukushima city was about 0.04 uSv/h. The current reported value for Shinjuku in the centre of Tokyo is 0.06 uSv/h by comparison.
One of Charlie's comments on his blog described Word as "a rail-mounted Gatling gun firing Swiss Army chainsaws". I want one.
It's the law of the land now. To repeal or alter it will take a vote in the Legislature comprising majorities in favour in both the House and the Senate plus a signature by the President. There are complications in that process (supermajority for cloture required in the Senate, possible veto by the President, possible override of any veto by Congress etc.) but that's how it's done in the US, as prescribed by the Constitution. Electing more and better legislators who would vote to repeal or modify the law is up to you and those who consider it important. Going by the votes on the Act over the past few years if you want to work to elect candidates who might do your will then supporting the Democratic Party is probably your best choice.
I'm not an American, by the way but I was in the USA when 9/11 happened. I met with a group of young US citizens a few days afterwards and we talked about the panic that was gripping the US and wondered when things would get back to normal. I prophesied the period of headless-chicken panic (attacks on Sikhs, National Guard soldiers at airports etc.) would last about six months and I was told I was crazy to think it would last that long. This was the USA we were talking about, after all.
In June 2013 67 Democratic and 214 Republican Senators and Representatives voted for the most recent reauthorisation of the Patriot Act. The GOP doesn't seem to want it repealed going by those numbers. Maybe you should push to get more Democrats elected instead.
Dentistry in the UK isn't covered by the NHS per se. Saying that there is financial support via the NHS for dental treatment for low income and unemployed people and some groups get free dental treatment (children, retired people, pregnant women etc.) Cosmetic and expensive work like implants aren't covered by NHS payments but extractions, simple fillings etc. are. The major problem a few years back (your scare story is dated 2007) was that few dentists would take on new NHS patients for logistical and funding reasons. That was fixed and now they actively solicit NHS-funded patients -- indeed I was nearly chased down the street a few weeks back by a dental receptionist determined to sign me up as an NHS patient when I declined private treatment after an examination.
The same non-NHS deal applies with opticians and prescriptions for glasses and contact lenses although some places, like my home nation Scotland, offers free eye testing and a voucher for the first £80-odd towards glasses on a two-yearly cycle.
Private healthcare can be purchased in the UK (google "Harley Street" for details) as can private health insurance (BUPA, for example) but it is supplementary to the NHS and in most cases private patients who suffer serious problems requiring expensive treatment in an ICU or the like tend to get transferred to the NHS when the insurance runs out.
The ITER project is using the old Joint European Torus (JET) at Culham in England as a materials testbed for fusion reactor wall "blankets". One candidate material is lithium as neutron capture will breed tritium and helium. The tritium would be recycled as fuel for the reactor if it is burning deuterium-tritium and helium is non-radioactive and famously inert.
In the UK pubs and licenced restaurants (ones that can sell alcohol) are required to provide tap water free on request. I space out beers with water to reduce the chances of falling over on the way home or getting into an argument with a lamppost. It also reduces my chance of a hangover the next morning as it helps prevent dehydration.
The licenced trade like this idea even though it theoretically cuts into their nightly take as it also reduces the incidences of fighting, assaults on serving staff, puking, furniture destruction etc.
Capitalism depends on the free movement of three things, capital, goods and labour. Socialists and liberals don't want capitalism and they seek to regulate and limit free movement of one or all of the basic factors underlying capitalism. Border controls are a limit to free movement of labour, obviously.