Two problems. First, the idea of "30k+...flu-related" deaths is not quite as concrete as that. General estimates are that 300 some people (mostly children and the elderly) die directly from the flu. The rest of those deaths (which are actually estimated as between 3k and 49k) are simply the result of computer…

There is no evidence from the rest of the industrialized country that healthcare costs go down. Yes, there is universal access to healthcare, I'm not arguing whether that's a bad thing or not, I'm arguing that it is very costly to provide that benefit to everyone and that is where the concern comes in. My only…

"Everyone pitches in..." however is precisely the argument here. Everyone does not pitch in. Some people pay into the system and some do not. Everyone might get health care but that still does not mean everyone is benefitting from the system. As this calculator demonstrates, healthcare cost do not go down for…

The assumption, however, is that all of those services are for the "common good." The States had previously attempted to provide for their own militaries in the forms of militia and while they still exist today as National Guards, the decision was made to ensure the common defense of the Nation as a whole through a…

Excellent job! Huge kudos for bringing scholarly work to this topic and putting it into appropriate context. I appreciate your input on this matter.

Here's how you actually critique movie portrayals: [io9.com]

The article and a lot of the comments seem to assume that "first contact" implies *physical* contact. And maybe I'm wrong but I don't believe that is a requirement for "first contact." In which case, it seems far more likely that our first contact with an alien life would actually be through non-physical means given…

Precisely. The idea of "killing Hitler" is not to try to kill him when everyone else was trying to kill him. It would be to go back in time to before he became a threat, such as whe he was a baby or an aspiring artist. The problem then becomes one of ethics.

You lost me with the idea that she was somehow causing the demise of the company by building this house. As far as I can tell from your article, she owned minority stock in the company and was using her own gains to build the house, not the money from the company. Additionally, while I can see making it an example…

Freakonomics addressed this (I believe) with regards to asking students to identify their race at the start of a test. Because of cultural conditioning, African American students tended to do worse on tests that required this self-identification than on tests that did not require such identification. I don't recall,…

I don't think I understand many of the commentors on here. The point of doing these things was that the participants were willing participants in an experiment and they did not know what the experiment was necessarily testing. But they were probably under the impression (if not directly told) that they were expected…

I'm split between both of you on this one. On the one hand, I like to take copious notes in my books, highlight them, and be able to jump around easily through the book without having to flip through the pages (not all e-books have TOCs as I have painfully learned). And I like to loan my books out to others or bring…

While I acknowledge that the parsecs issue was skillfully reverse explained... the article above is incorrect then in comparing the 12 Parsec Kessel Run to the 365 Day Earth orbit. A more appropriate correlation would have been: