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If you can afford it, and your insurance covers it. Those are the details you're omitting. The US has great healthcare for the privileged elite. Everyone else gets screwed.

Obama!!! He can like... reach out to moderate Republicans... and stuff.

Do you have any information regarding whether or not the gun involved in this case was obtained legally?

I'd recommend the AnalogX vocal filter for Winamp

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/16/smog.warming.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories Pollute to save the planet! Yay!

How do you purport that the efficiency of a public system would be lower than a private one when the US, who has the largest private healthcare system in the world, also spends the most on healthcare as a percentage of GDP (16%, or $1.9 trillion), and consistently ranks as one of the lowest industrialized nations in the world in a number of different surveys?

The formation of a black hole in a fecund universe, according to Lee Smolin and his associates.

The period a pharmeceutical patent can be held, if nothing else. Well, on the flip side the Medicare bill passed by Republicans a few years ago prevents Medicare from negotiating bulk discounts. They are completely disallowed from interfering in the pharmeceutical -> pharmacy supply chain, so Medicare must subsidize drugs at the retail price. Are you saying the salaries of pharmeceutical researchers in the US aren't presently inflated?

My favorite sandwiches are panini. Panini is the plural of the Italian word for sandwich, and is basically an American bastardization. They're typically served on Ciabatta or Focaccia bread (with my preference overwhelmingly being the latter). Focaccia is essentially pizza dough, so a great panini is simply tomato and mozarella.

However the cost of medication as well as the salaries of pharmeceutical researchers massively inflate, making it more difficult for the government to fund public research of the sort that may actually lead to cures. You can either: 1) Reduce government research 2) Raise taxes to pay higher salaries 3) Better regulate the pharmeceutical industry

I'm suggesting public pharmeceutical research as part of a comprehensive socialized medicine program

No. The larger problem is this: to make a viable business of pharmeceutical research, you must subsidize your R&D by patenting your findings then marketing the drug. The patent grants you a monopoly on a basic methodologies for what it hopes to accomplish, so pharmeceuticals charge exhorbatant prices both to profit and to cover their R&D losses. For example, the drug Zofran, sold to cancer patients to relieve the nausea associated with chemotherapy, retails for $75/PILL. To me, that's extortion, or to put it more bluntly, raping cancer victims up the ass. Patents are a necessary evil of commercially subsidized medicine, because without them, there's no way pharmeceuticals could subsizide their R&D. Perhaps what's needed is a shorter amount of time a pharmeceutical can hold a patent on a medicine before it can be generically cloned, especially for medicines which treat potentially terminal problems. Nobody should die because they can't afford expensive treatments. No, but I believe that if pharmeceutical research were a purely public pursuit, the problem of requiring a patent system to make private R&D viable would be solved completely and pharmeceutical research nationwide would focus more on looking for cures, rather than treatments. The tendency to pursue treatments, rather than cures, is a necessary consequence of a privately funded system. Let me ask you this question: would pharmeceutical research be more effective in finding cures if it were all conducted through a publically funded agency? Or, to put it bluntly, what if instead of researching drugs like viagra and cialis, more people were researching HIV/AIDS and cancer?

I'm certainly glad to see this... I'm a liberaltarian who respects gun rights (although personally I prefer knives) I'm also glad the Democrats are getting down to business and not tossing any weird red herrings out there like Bush and the Republicans have been doing for quite some time (e.g stem cells, gay marriage, intelligent design) But then again, they're pretty united in righting what they see as the wrongs of "the course" we have been staying, and gun control is pretty irrelevant when you look at, say, Iraq, or the deficit, or the dissolution of civil rights like habeas corpus. And yes, many, many Democrats voted for that bill, but Harry Reid is already drafting a bill to reverse the clauses that impinged upon the right to habeas corpus, and you can damn well bet that given the uproar it caused many Democrats are now regretting their decision (I'm sure many voted for the bill without knowing about the provisions which strip habeas corpus rights). Plus anything they want to put through either has to get past Bush, or enough Republicans to override Bush's veto.

That trailer was intense

Damn straight! Snow Crash is by far one of my most favorite books. (you have to love any author with the audacity to name a character Hiro Protagonist) Time picked it as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century. I'm still yet to get an answer as to whether or not YT2095 derives his nick from "Yours Truly" in Snow Crash, but I'm guessing not.

Something (perhaps past polls) tells me that people here read books, at least a lot more than most of the population. So, what are you reading now? I'm reading The Long Tail, a book about the transformative power of the Internet in connecting people to niches, so everyone's taste begins to wander farther from the mainstream. If you can capitalize on those wanderers, you can actually make MORE money than if you focus on the mainstream. Why? The answer is a long tail statistical distribution in terms of what people consume: This pattern is seen in a number of online retailers, including Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, and the iTunes Music Store. eBay and Google are working off the same model. Where stores with a physical storefront have limited shelf-space in terms of what they can deliver, they look for a cut-off point in terms of what they keep in stock (shown in maroon) But if you take the area under the maroon part (and assume the yellow part continues for a long, long time) in many markets the area under the yellow part is actually larger than the area under the maroon part, or if it isn't now it's growing much faster than the maroon part. The bottom line is the Long Tail is the place to be right now in terms of your business. The niches are slowly devouring the hits. Viewership of non-network cable and satellite TV channels now have a larger audience than the networks. Movie theaters are seeing a decrease in the total number of moviegoers, even though the population continues to increase. Newspapers are dying as subscription rates continue to fall off. The Internet killed locality, and people are diversifying, and uniting around ideas rather than locations.

To sidestep the question, I think government run programs are the best way to go in terms of pharmeceutical research. Why would a private industry pursue cures when they can simply find expensive treatments? That's not to say that the private sector doesn't pursue cures, but from purely a cost/benefits perspective, investing in a treatment is a lot more sound than investing in a cure.

Yes, he died, that's the friggin' point. It was all a big suicide gesture so he could fly like the other birds for once in his life.

This is absoultely wonderful...

Yeah, Google Docs came out over a month ago. It's basically Writely + Google Spreadsheets.

The Bush administration did everything they pledged not to do following the war: a long, drawn out occupation, "nation building", spending of excessive money. Whatever semblance of a plan Rumsfeld had for post-Saddam Iraq clearly failed. It failed from day one when a lack of border security meant that whatever loot they would've found was smuggled out of the country, while insurgents made their way in. I really liked this picture:

Yeah, I can give you some great advice, but it'd only apply to the US. I know once upon a time in the 60s Cambridge had a great program, but I have no idea what it's like now.

You're good at immitating stereotypes

*boggle* What? Let's review: In case I didn't make it clear: I really like that system.

On the issues, Lieberman is far closer to Democrats, despite the (now defunct) "DINO" (i.e. Democrat-in-name-only) public sentiment about him