There's an interesting subset of people that I've noticed here in Silicon Valley, but I'm certain exists elsewhere, consisting of both recent immigrants to the USA from various places as well as natural born citizens, of both genders, and a variety of ages, whose favorite televised sport to watch is American Football. They (we) do this because no other televised sport (in our eyes) has quite so much pre-planning and synchronized teamwork, broken up often for more planning and design. I am a fan of Soccer, Hockey (not baseball... sheesh), and the like, but their non-stop tests of physical ability are not as interesting to watch as the repeated implementation and execution of stellar football plays.
Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" covers this (in a manner of speaking) in the final chapter. More precisely, the self-aware robots that control the world's economy do everything they can to simultaneously preserve their positions as advisers to the human race while dispensing the best advice possible for the continued peace and prosperity of humanity.
Do note, however, that in the continued Asimov universe, mankind really didn't explode out into space until he disposed of the "robotic overlords". Those few cultures ['Spacers'] who held on to their robots slowly stagnated and died off.
Asimov's self-aware robots were never the violent, conquering overlords seen in many other sources of fiction (Terminator, Matrix), nor were they really human-equals (Star Wars, Star Trek), but were rather a crutch for mankind that man needed to discard to truly progress.
Also, please note that I am willfully ignoring anything in the Foundation Universe not written by Asimov, as well as Asimov's last book "Foundation and Earth", for reasons that anyone who has read it will clearly understand.
modest and subdued coverage by CNN about yesterday's record Dow-Jones drop
Aside from it being *the* featured headline story on CNN.com after the markets closed, along with about four or five other headline links to CNN-Money where there was more detailed and gritty coverage? Or perhaps the non-stop TV coverage starting in the afternoon, and then continuing sporadically throughout the day?
There is not so much on yesterday's market in today's news, but CNN.com tends to cover "today"... it's their business model. Now the focus is on today's market, and I'm sure you'll see more updates after the closing bell.
as these liquids freeze well below the 109.3F that dry ice sublimates at.
Aside from their glaring misuse of "at", I think they also may have a slight error on the temperature, as I'm fairly certain that dry ice does not remain a solid at room temperature.
personally don't care much anymore about who's CPU is 5% faster than the other. I choose what gives me the best options.. And I really have had excellent results with AMD's processors in the past. I have a few Core 2 based machines and they're nice too, no doubt. It just doesn't really matter anymore.
When they're about equal, I choose AMD, so that next time I build a computer I'll still have a choice.
I received Half Life 2 for Christmas, a few years back, and had it completely finished by December 28th. I did the same when Ep. 1 came out, and then again for Ep. 2--which is not to say that I was done with the game when I completed it. I'm currently in my 3rd(?) replay of the entire series (HL1, Opposing Force, Blue Shift,..., Portal, Ep. 2) [I'm on PC, so no HL:Decay], and have played HL1 and HL2 themselves more times than I can remember. Even though I can quote Dr. Breen word for word, the game remains interesting--I discover a bit more that I missed each time through.
And I'm close to getting my wife to play Portal. That will be a triumph; a huge success, indeed.
Just as RFID tags do not require batteries to give disclose their location and unique identifiers, modern cell phones also have similar functionality batteries or not...
I am a cell phone designer, and a phone reporting *anything*, even just a handshake, to a tower thousands of meters away takes significant power.
It is possible that the little coin cell battery in most phones could handle the receiving of a signal, and then wake the phone up and have it reply with the main battery, (though to the best of my knowledge we don't let phones do that [and yes, I design power systems]), but if the main battery isn't there, that's a no-go.
Passive RFID is a completely different batch of apples than active cellular communications. Passive RFID has a maximum range of around 10 meters (phased array antennas notwithstanding, but seriously...). You would need a specially designed phone to use some sort of active RFID when the battery is removed, and we don't make those.
Now, this isn't to say that I'm not pissed at the Feds for doing something like this--perhaps even more so than the average user. I can see how they are taking advantage of perfectly innocuous and functional code and systems designed by my co-workers to agreed standards, and then using those standards to make our customers lose their privacy.
I know it was a big deal six years ago, but, as Slashdot has grown, 1000 comments has ceased to be such a grand milestone. Just look at our big issues from the past month:
I looked this up in my old notes, and found the following more detailed explanation. Please pardon my original mistake or two on the issue.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, think of it this way: The word "yom" was also used in Biblical Hebrew in such contexts of "The day [yom] of the Romans" or "The day [yom] of God's wrath", neither of which specifically refer to a 24 hour period.
From the outset, we note that at least some of the acrimony over the interpretation of the Genesis days arises from language differences. Turning biblical Hebrew into English prose and poetry presents some enormous difficulties. Whereas biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of under 3,100 words (not including proper nouns), English words number over 4,000,000. The disparity is even greater for nouns. Therefore, we should not be surprised that Hebrew nouns have multiple literal definitions. The English word day most often refers either to the daylight hours or to a period of 24 hours. As in "the day of the Romans," it is also used for a longer time period. English speakers and writers, however, have many words for an extended period--age, era, epoch, and eon, just to name a few. The Hebrew word yom similarly refers to daylight hours, 24 hours, and a long (but finite) time period. Unlike English, however, biblical Hebrew has no word other than yom to denote a long timespan. The word yom appears repeatedly in the Hebrew Scriptures with reference to a period longer than 12 or 24 hours. The Hebrew terms yom (singular) and yamin (plural) often refer to an extended time frame. Perhaps the most familiar passages are those referring to God's "day of wrath." Before English translations were available, animosity over the length of the Genesis days did not exist, at least not as far as anyone can tell from the extant theological literature. Prior to the Nicene Council, the early Church fathers wrote two thousand pages of commentary on the Genesis creation days, yet did not devote a word to disparaging each other's viewpoints on the creation time scale. All these early scholars accepted that yom could mean "a long time period." The majority explicitly taught that the Genesis creation days were extended time periods (something like a thousand years per yom). Not one Ante-Nicene Father explicitly endorsed the 24-hour interpretation. Ambrose, who came the closest to doing so, apparently vacillated on the issue. We certainly cannot charge the Church fathers with "scientific bias" in their interpretations. They wrote long before astronomical, geological, and paleontological evidences for the antiquity of the universe, the earth, and life became available. Nor had biological evolution yet been proposed. Lamarck, Darwin, and Huxley came along some 1,400 years later."
(Ross H.N. and Archer G.L., "The Day-Age View," in Hagopian D.G., ed., The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation, Crux Press: Mission Viejo CA, 2001, pp. 125-126, as cited by Jones) [I'd link to the online source where I found this, but it's been 403'd]
Of course we'd have to go back to the original language, and also understand that language well enough to understand what a "day" was meant to be in all occurances. It could be pretty flexible, just like we have cultures that don't have much of a number system, and just use their version of "many" pretty early in discussing quantity.
If you go back to the original Hebrew, you find that it's not even that big of an issue because the word "day" doesn't even appear.
I believe the Hebrew word used in Genesis is "yem" (or something like that), which simply means "passage of time"--much like our modern-day "eon" except without the automatic connotation of a long time period (though not excluding long periods of time). In other words, essentially zero context as to how long was the period that was translated into the English word "day".
So, ask them if they are currently being sued or the government is investigating them.
Unless, of course, he works IT for the telecommunications industry. In that case, the army of IP lawyers may not be the best comparison. In the time that I've been employed with my company, the number of simultaneous suits in which we were involved (either as plaintiff or defendant--or both) varied somewhere between 4 and 7.
If somebody asked me that question, I think I'd be better off using the janitors as a comparison.
Hmm... It would appear that Runescape is poised to make a comeback, then. It should be a cinch to port to Android, it can be played in small bites, and it's limited interface makes the phone-migration issues far simpler, too.
Not that I'm thrilled about the possibility or anything--I lost a college roommate to Runescape for a while... I still remember him staying home from class to mine ore and wander through town shouting "Selling cooking pot!"... "Selling pot!"... "Selling high quality pot!".
I believe he made a veritable in-game fortune dealing his pot on the back streets of whatever-ville.
These recent discussion-based articles are great additions to Slashdot. The UNIX/vi/emacs articles bring out Slashdot's aged sages and core demographic, and those of us who are new to the UNIX scene can learn plenty more from the discussion than a 'man' page.
The political discussion articles were, IMHO, great additions to the site, too. Thanks to the brilliance of the moderation system and the myriad views of readers, I could read and participate in intelligent discussions about all 3-4 sides of very important issues and become a more intelligent voter.
So keep the discussion articles coming, Slashdot! You're tapping into your greatest strengths: your readers and your forum/moderation software.
Re:Because its hard to preserve narrative momentum
on
How Do Games Grow Up?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I forgot to mention that I am a huge fan of System Shock 2... but Bioshock? It lost its immersion when I had to spend 45 minutes just killing random stuff to get the next "key". Bioshock felt more like "the game throwing baddies at me" rather than "I'm trespassing in a place that is home to stuff that could kill me", which is the impression I got from System Shock 2.
...Haven't tried Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, yet... I might need to look into that one, then.
Re:Because its hard to preserve narrative momentum
on
How Do Games Grow Up?
·
· Score: 1
There have been rare and special games where avoiding this 'breaking up of the narrative' has been achieved.
Half life 2 has made good progress along these lines, though the best example of a game that plays like a movie/book and yet is fully player-controlled is Deus Ex. I have never seen another game achieve such an overlap of "plot" and "action". You tend to fly into a neighborhood rather than a single building (read: dungeon) and nearly everything you encounter, every person you talk to enhances your immersion in the world. You can have a political discussion with a bartender, or overhear enemy guards discussing the policies of their superiors. An important location may be a warehouse a few stories tall guarded by a dozen or so men, rather than a sprawling castle with hundreds of nameless, faceless enemies. You sneak past one or two guards to get to the computer where you learn more information--it feels as though you have never left the "plot" section of the game.
Have there been more games like this, recently? Deus Ex is ~8 years old, and, having played it through multiple times, I'm hoping that more games of the same style have been produced in the last decade.
I know it's a bit off-topic, but this appears to be quite the momentous day for Slashdot! Two of today's stories have broken the 1000-comment mark, and the top five stories of the day have totaled over 5200 comments!
Can anyone provide any insight as to the possibility of a record having been set in Slashdot's user responses, today?... or if anyone actually cares?
...Maybe it's just election withdrawal... I think I still need my statistics.
When I was 12 years old, I actually did that as a Christmas present to my family/brothers. I wrote boot menus into config.sys and autoexec.bat allowing the computer to be booted with memory optimized for Windows 3.1, CD-ROM free Windows/DOS (saving precious "Conventional" memory), or one of many Game Modes. The game modes replaced the dozen boot disks we once needed (remember those?) by writing their customizations directly into the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.
Sigh... *wipes away a nostalgic tear*
...Well... Now that I think about it, I really did hate those files.
Drop one? I used 0208 sized components on my graduate thesis project. If you so much as breathed funny within a meter radius of these things, you'd never see them again...
...if you were lucky, that is. If you weren't, then you'd just inhale them and be sneezing capacitors the rest of the day.
An interesting point to remember is that the 'seven literal days' aspect didn't come about until a certain translation of the Bible. (I believe this was the Tyndale English translation, but it actually may have been one of the earlier Latin ones.)
The Hebrew texts do not use the specific word "day", but rather a word that, translated, signifies "a passage of time"--somewhat like the English 'eon', but without the automatic connotation of a very long time. Learning this certainly shed some light on the Genesis poetry for me.
As a result of this system, the private healthcare providers have to charge reasonable rates, because they know that people will simply abandon them for the NHS if they don't appear to be offering good value for money any more.
This is really the key making the system work. In a totally "free" and unregulated insurance market with today's giant companies (where, as it has been noted, payouts to customers are an expense that the companies attempt to reduce) the customer will tend to continue getting less and less for his/her dollar as each company is beholden to investors rather than customers.
The clearest solution to this is an "anchored free market". As you describe, there is a government run, nationalized competitor in the market--an elephant in the room that influences the decisions of the other companies. This helps to prevent broad price-fixing and corner-cutting by the fully private companies as the government's anchor keeps the health economy from drifting far from some set of determined standards.
Private companies are free to provide the services they desire at the costs they set, but if they continue to raise costs and cut services, customers will simply drift away from them to the anchor.
For an example of this, look at the USPS. I agree that it is not exactly in the best shape at the moment, but look what it has historically done for the light-shipping industry: The USOS has provided a low-cost, low-service option to customers and 'anchored' the industry, while still allowing private industries such as FedEx and UPS to thrive and grow as full competitors.
Ok, it doesn't have multi-touch (as far as I can ascertain), but it's fast, very functional and I really really want one now.
Sadly (for the rest of us phone developers), Apple went trigger happy on patents for anything that *looks* like a multi-touch touch-screen. There are ways around these patents, but it will take a while before you'll start seeing them spread beyond the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an interesting subset of people that I've noticed here in Silicon Valley, but I'm certain exists elsewhere, consisting of both recent immigrants to the USA from various places as well as natural born citizens, of both genders, and a variety of ages, whose favorite televised sport to watch is American Football. They (we) do this because no other televised sport (in our eyes) has quite so much pre-planning and synchronized teamwork, broken up often for more planning and design. I am a fan of Soccer, Hockey (not baseball... sheesh), and the like, but their non-stop tests of physical ability are not as interesting to watch as the repeated implementation and execution of stellar football plays.
Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" covers this (in a manner of speaking) in the final chapter. More precisely, the self-aware robots that control the world's economy do everything they can to simultaneously preserve their positions as advisers to the human race while dispensing the best advice possible for the continued peace and prosperity of humanity.
Do note, however, that in the continued Asimov universe, mankind really didn't explode out into space until he disposed of the "robotic overlords". Those few cultures ['Spacers'] who held on to their robots slowly stagnated and died off.
Asimov's self-aware robots were never the violent, conquering overlords seen in many other sources of fiction (Terminator, Matrix), nor were they really human-equals (Star Wars, Star Trek), but were rather a crutch for mankind that man needed to discard to truly progress.
Also, please note that I am willfully ignoring anything in the Foundation Universe not written by Asimov, as well as Asimov's last book "Foundation and Earth", for reasons that anyone who has read it will clearly understand.
modest and subdued coverage by CNN about yesterday's record Dow-Jones drop
Aside from it being *the* featured headline story on CNN.com after the markets closed, along with about four or five other headline links to CNN-Money where there was more detailed and gritty coverage? Or perhaps the non-stop TV coverage starting in the afternoon, and then continuing sporadically throughout the day?
There is not so much on yesterday's market in today's news, but CNN.com tends to cover "today"... it's their business model. Now the focus is on today's market, and I'm sure you'll see more updates after the closing bell.
as these liquids freeze well below the 109.3F that dry ice sublimates at.
Aside from their glaring misuse of "at", I think they also may have a slight error on the temperature, as I'm fairly certain that dry ice does not remain a solid at room temperature.
*checks the wiki*
Ah. -109.3 F. Much better.
... except that it's still 'F'.
personally don't care much anymore about who's CPU is 5% faster than the other. I choose what gives me the best options.. And I really have had excellent results with AMD's processors in the past. I have a few Core 2 based machines and they're nice too, no doubt. It just doesn't really matter anymore.
When they're about equal, I choose AMD, so that next time I build a computer I'll still have a choice.
Indeed.
..., Portal, Ep. 2) [I'm on PC, so no HL:Decay], and have played HL1 and HL2 themselves more times than I can remember. Even though I can quote Dr. Breen word for word, the game remains interesting--I discover a bit more that I missed each time through.
I received Half Life 2 for Christmas, a few years back, and had it completely finished by December 28th. I did the same when Ep. 1 came out, and then again for Ep. 2--which is not to say that I was done with the game when I completed it. I'm currently in my 3rd(?) replay of the entire series (HL1, Opposing Force, Blue Shift,
And I'm close to getting my wife to play Portal. That will be a triumph; a huge success, indeed.
Just as RFID tags do not require batteries to give disclose their location and unique identifiers, modern cell phones also have similar functionality batteries or not...
I am a cell phone designer, and a phone reporting *anything*, even just a handshake, to a tower thousands of meters away takes significant power.
It is possible that the little coin cell battery in most phones could handle the receiving of a signal, and then wake the phone up and have it reply with the main battery, (though to the best of my knowledge we don't let phones do that [and yes, I design power systems]), but if the main battery isn't there, that's a no-go.
Passive RFID is a completely different batch of apples than active cellular communications. Passive RFID has a maximum range of around 10 meters (phased array antennas notwithstanding, but seriously...). You would need a specially designed phone to use some sort of active RFID when the battery is removed, and we don't make those.
Now, this isn't to say that I'm not pissed at the Feds for doing something like this--perhaps even more so than the average user. I can see how they are taking advantage of perfectly innocuous and functional code and systems designed by my co-workers to agreed standards, and then using those standards to make our customers lose their privacy.
*sheesh*
"Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
Mu.
I know it was a big deal six years ago, but, as Slashdot has grown, 1000 comments has ceased to be such a grand milestone. Just look at our big issues from the past month:
Press Favored Obama -- 1588 Comments
Obama Launches change.gov -- 1470 Comments
(Useful) Stupid UNIX Tricks -- 2356 Comments
Barack Obama Wins US Presidency -- 3705 Comments
Discuss the US Presidential Election -- 1912 Comments
Discuss "" and Health Care -- 1270 Comments
Discuss "" and The War -- 1211 Comments
Discuss "" and Education -- 1515 Comments
I... I seem to notice a theme...
If you don't want to read the whole thing, think of it this way: The word "yom" was also used in Biblical Hebrew in such contexts of "The day [yom] of the Romans" or "The day [yom] of God's wrath", neither of which specifically refer to a 24 hour period.
From the outset, we note that at least some of the acrimony over the interpretation of the Genesis days arises from language differences. Turning biblical Hebrew into English prose and poetry presents some enormous difficulties. Whereas biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of under 3,100 words (not including proper nouns), English words number over 4,000,000. The disparity is even greater for nouns. Therefore, we should not be surprised that Hebrew nouns have multiple literal definitions. The English word day most often refers either to the daylight hours or to a period of 24 hours. As in "the day of the Romans," it is also used for a longer time period. English speakers and writers, however, have many words for an extended period--age, era, epoch, and eon, just to name a few. The Hebrew word yom similarly refers to daylight hours, 24 hours, and a long (but finite) time period. Unlike English, however, biblical Hebrew has no word other than yom to denote a long timespan. The word yom appears repeatedly in the Hebrew Scriptures with reference to a period longer than 12 or 24 hours. The Hebrew terms yom (singular) and yamin (plural) often refer to an extended time frame. Perhaps the most familiar passages are those referring to God's "day of wrath." Before English translations were available, animosity over the length of the Genesis days did not exist, at least not as far as anyone can tell from the extant theological literature. Prior to the Nicene Council, the early Church fathers wrote two thousand pages of commentary on the Genesis creation days, yet did not devote a word to disparaging each other's viewpoints on the creation time scale. All these early scholars accepted that yom could mean "a long time period." The majority explicitly taught that the Genesis creation days were extended time periods (something like a thousand years per yom). Not one Ante-Nicene Father explicitly endorsed the 24-hour interpretation. Ambrose, who came the closest to doing so, apparently vacillated on the issue. We certainly cannot charge the Church fathers with "scientific bias" in their interpretations. They wrote long before astronomical, geological, and paleontological evidences for the antiquity of the universe, the earth, and life became available. Nor had biological evolution yet been proposed. Lamarck, Darwin, and Huxley came along some 1,400 years later."
(Ross H.N. and Archer G.L., "The Day-Age View," in Hagopian D.G., ed., The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation, Crux Press: Mission Viejo CA, 2001, pp. 125-126, as cited by Jones)
[I'd link to the online source where I found this, but it's been 403'd]
Of course we'd have to go back to the original language, and also understand that language well enough to understand what a "day" was meant to be in all occurances. It could be pretty flexible, just like we have cultures that don't have much of a number system, and just use their version of "many" pretty early in discussing quantity.
If you go back to the original Hebrew, you find that it's not even that big of an issue because the word "day" doesn't even appear.
I believe the Hebrew word used in Genesis is "yem" (or something like that), which simply means "passage of time"--much like our modern-day "eon" except without the automatic connotation of a long time period (though not excluding long periods of time). In other words, essentially zero context as to how long was the period that was translated into the English word "day".
Why do people always decide to grin and bare it on Slashdot? I mean, couldn't they at least include a NSFW tag?
It's just not Kosher, sometimes.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
-- Jamie Zawinski
So, ask them if they are currently being sued or the government is investigating them.
Unless, of course, he works IT for the telecommunications industry. In that case, the army of IP lawyers may not be the best comparison. In the time that I've been employed with my company, the number of simultaneous suits in which we were involved (either as plaintiff or defendant--or both) varied somewhere between 4 and 7.
If somebody asked me that question, I think I'd be better off using the janitors as a comparison.
Hmm... It would appear that Runescape is poised to make a comeback, then. It should be a cinch to port to Android, it can be played in small bites, and it's limited interface makes the phone-migration issues far simpler, too.
Not that I'm thrilled about the possibility or anything--I lost a college roommate to Runescape for a while... I still remember him staying home from class to mine ore and wander through town shouting "Selling cooking pot!"... "Selling pot!"... "Selling high quality pot!".
I believe he made a veritable in-game fortune dealing his pot on the back streets of whatever-ville.
These recent discussion-based articles are great additions to Slashdot. The UNIX/vi/emacs articles bring out Slashdot's aged sages and core demographic, and those of us who are new to the UNIX scene can learn plenty more from the discussion than a 'man' page.
The political discussion articles were, IMHO, great additions to the site, too. Thanks to the brilliance of the moderation system and the myriad views of readers, I could read and participate in intelligent discussions about all 3-4 sides of very important issues and become a more intelligent voter.
So keep the discussion articles coming, Slashdot! You're tapping into your greatest strengths: your readers and your forum/moderation software.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that I am a huge fan of System Shock 2... but Bioshock? It lost its immersion when I had to spend 45 minutes just killing random stuff to get the next "key". Bioshock felt more like "the game throwing baddies at me" rather than "I'm trespassing in a place that is home to stuff that could kill me", which is the impression I got from System Shock 2.
...Haven't tried Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, yet... I might need to look into that one, then.
There have been rare and special games where avoiding this 'breaking up of the narrative' has been achieved.
Half life 2 has made good progress along these lines, though the best example of a game that plays like a movie/book and yet is fully player-controlled is Deus Ex. I have never seen another game achieve such an overlap of "plot" and "action". You tend to fly into a neighborhood rather than a single building (read: dungeon) and nearly everything you encounter, every person you talk to enhances your immersion in the world. You can have a political discussion with a bartender, or overhear enemy guards discussing the policies of their superiors. An important location may be a warehouse a few stories tall guarded by a dozen or so men, rather than a sprawling castle with hundreds of nameless, faceless enemies. You sneak past one or two guards to get to the computer where you learn more information--it feels as though you have never left the "plot" section of the game.
Have there been more games like this, recently? Deus Ex is ~8 years old, and, having played it through multiple times, I'm hoping that more games of the same style have been produced in the last decade.
I know it's a bit off-topic, but this appears to be quite the momentous day for Slashdot! Two of today's stories have broken the 1000-comment mark, and the top five stories of the day have totaled over 5200 comments!
... or if anyone actually cares?
Can anyone provide any insight as to the possibility of a record having been set in Slashdot's user responses, today?
...Maybe it's just election withdrawal... I think I still need my statistics.
When I was 12 years old, I actually did that as a Christmas present to my family/brothers. I wrote boot menus into config.sys and autoexec.bat allowing the computer to be booted with memory optimized for Windows 3.1, CD-ROM free Windows/DOS (saving precious "Conventional" memory), or one of many Game Modes. The game modes replaced the dozen boot disks we once needed (remember those?) by writing their customizations directly into the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.
Sigh... *wipes away a nostalgic tear*
...Well... Now that I think about it, I really did hate those files.
If you drop one, let it go man... it's gone.
Drop one? I used 0208 sized components on my graduate thesis project. If you so much as breathed funny within a meter radius of these things, you'd never see them again...
...if you were lucky, that is. If you weren't, then you'd just inhale them and be sneezing capacitors the rest of the day.
other than the 7 days thing,
An interesting point to remember is that the 'seven literal days' aspect didn't come about until a certain translation of the Bible. (I believe this was the Tyndale English translation, but it actually may have been one of the earlier Latin ones.)
The Hebrew texts do not use the specific word "day", but rather a word that, translated, signifies "a passage of time"--somewhat like the English 'eon', but without the automatic connotation of a very long time. Learning this certainly shed some light on the Genesis poetry for me.
Because, dumbass, fires SPREAD.
If I may, I would like to point out that diseases behave similarly.
Do you think polio and smallpox just got up and walked away one day?
As a result of this system, the private healthcare providers have to charge reasonable rates, because they know that people will simply abandon them for the NHS if they don't appear to be offering good value for money any more.
This is really the key making the system work. In a totally "free" and unregulated insurance market with today's giant companies (where, as it has been noted, payouts to customers are an expense that the companies attempt to reduce) the customer will tend to continue getting less and less for his/her dollar as each company is beholden to investors rather than customers.
The clearest solution to this is an "anchored free market". As you describe, there is a government run, nationalized competitor in the market--an elephant in the room that influences the decisions of the other companies. This helps to prevent broad price-fixing and corner-cutting by the fully private companies as the government's anchor keeps the health economy from drifting far from some set of determined standards.
Private companies are free to provide the services they desire at the costs they set, but if they continue to raise costs and cut services, customers will simply drift away from them to the anchor.
For an example of this, look at the USPS. I agree that it is not exactly in the best shape at the moment, but look what it has historically done for the light-shipping industry: The USOS has provided a low-cost, low-service option to customers and 'anchored' the industry, while still allowing private industries such as FedEx and UPS to thrive and grow as full competitors.
Ok, it doesn't have multi-touch (as far as I can ascertain), but it's fast, very functional and I really really want one now.
Sadly (for the rest of us phone developers), Apple went trigger happy on patents for anything that *looks* like a multi-touch touch-screen. There are ways around these patents, but it will take a while before you'll start seeing them spread beyond the iPhone.