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Le sigh. The speed of light is 299792458 m/s. That's the truth! But it's completely irrelevant to this thread. Can you post something on topic? Like something about the Danish healthcare system? Thanks. We all wait, except the people who don't have healthcare. Meanwhile America is paying twice as much as the Danes for inferior care and fewer doctors. That's the truth, Pangloss. Also, do the Danes wait as much as Americans? You didn't even bother to research that topic before taking a pot shot at single payer systems. Try harder? But thanks for playing.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-08-26-ted-kennedy-obit_N.htm Love him, hate him, worry about him accidentally driving off a Marthas Vineyard pier and killing innocent women, the man has been a fixture of the American political system for decades. He will be missed.

Honestly, why do you keep bringing that up? Non-emergency care is rationed under the present private healthcare system in America. To bring it up in the context of universal healthcare is a total red herring. Can you point to a healthcare system where non-emergency care isn't rationed? As far as I can tell, the rationing of healthcare is much worse in America than it is under universal healthcare systems like NHS. I have to wait a week to see a GP. Also, this thread is about the Danish healthcare system, so to start a talking point with "I don't know about Denmark" then proceed on to a total non-sequitur is completly off topic and in especially bad form.

Just received this today and started reading it. Truly Richard Feynman was a god among men. I highly recommend this book to everyone, scientist and non-scientist alike.

It's not only half the cost, it's universal. If you need care you will get it. That's not the case for everyone in America.

For half the price and 50% more doctors? Sure! Why are we paying more than anyone else to be 37th again exactly?

What about cable news, and cable news outlets with audiences eclipsing network TV in audiences? Would most conservatives consider Bill O'Reilly a nutjob? How about Sean Hannity? Glenn Beck? Michael Savage? Yeah, I keep repeating the same names over and over and you continue to ignore them. Perhaps you can address me directly on these four media moguls of conservative insanity. Not what I said dude. But Newscorp's little cable TV channel is #2 in prime time. Not something you can bat an eyelash at exactly there yo. Some might call what you just said (Newscorp hardly owns every media outlet lol!) there a strawman. Please admit that Fox News is a goliath in terms of television ratings, mmkay? That's all I'm saying. Their audiences are rivaling the major networks, in primetime. CNN? MSNBC? Nowhere close. They're an order of magnitude behind Fox in primetime ratings.

If it wasn't your implication that was in the current legislation, my apologies, however the sheer amount of disinformation being disseminated about these bills is maddening.

Which has 1/10,000th the audience (and I think that's being generous)? Also, two of them are television personalities (in addition to their radio shows), one so popular that he's beating the CBS Evening News. There is no comparison there. Likewise with Glenn Beck. And I didn't even bother to mention Sean Hannity. There is no one on the left you can point to who has both such extreme views and such a large audience. The blogs! Yes, those liberals are good at the intarwebs. It's possibly the only medium they succeed in. Possibly because the Internet makes it so easy to link to other sources of information, i.e. supporting your arguments with facts. Newspapers? Magazines? You'll find content on both sides. Everything else? That's the domain of conservatives. They own television and the radio. There is no liberal media bias, certainly not now. Rupert Murdoch singlehandedly made sure of that. So conservative reporters are biased, and liberal ones are just revealing the truth. Got it. I don't know what I was thinking. So you would defend the reporting of the outlets of News Corporation as particularly factual? Do you think Fox News does a good job of reporting the news?

I'm just sad the "debate" going on regarding the bill has more to do with ridiculous strawmen coming out of conservatives (e.g. "death panels") than the actual merits and vices of the bill. I would love to see a calm, rational discussion about whether or not HR3200 or a single payer system would be better, but that's impossible to have when half the country thinks the legislation is going to strip seniors of treatments they're getting presently from Medicare, or for that matter, create "death panels" that decide whether or not you get care. If there's one takeaway from this thread, it's that any attempts at calm, rational debate about the facts at hand are completely impossible thanks to the sheer amount of disinformation that has been disseminated and is actively believed by a large part of the country.

He's normally making segments about how illegal immigrants are destroying America.

This was an interesting passage to read following Jon Stewart's interview with Betsy McCaughey. She made the same argument. This bill is going to mean we deny treatment to the elderly! What? Where's your evidence for that? Where does it say that in the bill? When has any member of the Democratic party suggested that healthcare reform will come at a cost of denying healthcare to the elderly? Perhaps case in point for the OP... this is, by the way, the same argument that underlies the whole "death panels" meme. This is not in the proposed legislation. The argument that healthcare reform is going to result in denying care to the elderly is not based in reality.

Eh? Time limit? Python is free and certainly doesn't have any kind of time limit. What exactly did you install?

You're right, perhaps given their popularity I should regard people like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage as mainstream conservatives. If that's the case, mainstream conservatives are, I dunno, crazy? You are entirely correct there is a double standard. I think most liberals would consider members of the ELF nutjobs, whereas the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage seem to have mainstream conservative support. Oh, and did I mention the sorts of things these people are saying? And audiences of millions are paying attention to and taking to heart? I agree. Considering the obvious right-wing bias of News Corporation and its level of penetration in all forms of mass media, it seems that a considerable portion of the media in America is little more than a right-wing propaganda machine. But wait, they're "fair and balanced" Meanwhile, the likes of CNN juxtaposes sensible liberal moderates against right-wing crackpots, and provides no subsequent analysis, ostensibly out of fear of being labeled "liberal" by, well, I suppose people like Pangloss who self-apply the label of moderate. Liberal says this, conservative says that, end of story, never mind the conservative we interviewed is interjecting blatant factual errors. But were we to point that out the conservatives would call us "biased". I think one would be hard pressed to make the case that "the media" exhibit a liberal bias nowadays. Fox News is a ratings juggernaut. The WSJ seems to care quite little about accuracy in reporting anymore. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSome recent statistics: MSNBC has surpassed CNN in total viewers. I guess CNN's whole attempt to try to be fair and "balanced" for real is blowing up in their face. Partisanship sells. And no where does it sell better than Fox News, who is clobbering both of them in ratings. Glenn Beck draws more viewers in his 5PM slot than CNN and MSNBC do in prime time... COMBINED. Fox is now #2 in prime time, with MSNBC and CNN at #24 and #26 respectively. Ouch. Fox News viewership is up 11% over last year. So let's see... cable news and talk radio are dominated by conservatives. Bill O'Reilly is beating the CBS Evening News for ratings. What media exactly exhibit a liberal bias?

Try to wrap your brain around this: http://www.energizeforhealth.com/sead-faqs.html#What_is_the_Subtle_Energy_Activation_Device_SEAD Did I mention these things cost upwards of $6000?

So here you're basically admitting that the audience for extreme left-wing propaganda is substantially smaller than it is for extreme right-wing propaganda. Michael Savage has the third most widely heard radio broadcast in the United States. The O'Reilly Factor has a larger audience than the CBS Evening News (over 5 million people). You can bluster all you want about the extreme left, but that won't change the fact that extreme right-wing cranks draw huge audiences. Extreme right-wing nutjobs are extremely influential, whereas the extreme left is largely ignored by mainstream liberals.

In humans and other mammals dopamine acts as a motivator to action, and humans especially get a strange dopamine fix off a thirst for information. We are constantly seeking new knowledge, and many find satisfaction in self-improvement in general. If you had the opportunity and knowledge to self-improve your own ability to think, wouldn't you?

LgQj0tL-AjU I've always thought that Lou Dobbs is a bit of a douchebag, but this was a surprisingly positive segment on single-payer healthcare. He notes that Denmark pays half of what the US pays for healthcare (as a percentage of GDP), yet has more doctors per capita than the US, and reports a higher level of satisfaction. It's awesome to see attention being paid in the mainstream media to single-payer systems, especially showing that they don't have to be overly expensive, especially compared to what we're paying now.

I saw a demonstration of model checking recently, using McErlang. They formally verified that a real-world piece of elevator control software was correct (and found some bugs along the way, I believe).

I think our best chance of creating artificial intelligence in the near future is cribbing from biology and trying to recreate the human brain inside a computer.

Even Bill O'Reilly conceded the issue that it's silly to compare Air America to the likes of right-wing talk radio: -wOpbUgAwBE

I think the Singularity would happen as soon as said intelligence became recursviely self-improving.

Correlation does not imply causation, and these studies seem to have conclusions far vaguer that what I've seen reported.

I've been rather curious about British studies reporting schizophrenia induced by cannabis. I recently watched a television program (Britain's 20 Most Dangerous Drugs) purporting to use the latest evidence to rank drugs in terms of harm. Cannabis was rated more dangerous than many other drugs, including amyl nitrate, ecstacy, GHB, anabolic steroids, Ritalin, LSD, and solvents. This really threw me for a loop, especially considering some of these drugs caused dozens of deaths every year (in Britain alone). They claimed one death a year due to cannabis (but didn't say what the circumstances were). Their argument was that 1 in 4 Britons has some sort of genetic anomaly which makes them susceptible to cannabis-induced schizophrenia. They took the cameras into a mental ward and interviewed doctors calling it an epidemic. I've been curious if the British population has a different genetic makeup than the rest of the world which makes them more susceptible to cannabis-induced schizophrenia, as all of the studies on the matter seem to be coming out of Britain, and over here on the other side of the pond the idea that marijuana can induce schizophrenia seems like utter nonsense.