>Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character?
I'm not certain what type of game you want. The obvious suggestions in terms of well-crafted atmosphere and high-quality narrative might be Portal and the follow-on to the above, Deus Ex: HR and Bioshock.
It depends. If all they have is unreliable, inconsistent eyewitness testimony, then it's acceptable to ignore. If they have physical samples they've not tested or electromagnetic readings they've not had analysed, then it's an incompetent blind spot.
"Health spending will rise by 5.8% each year from 2010 to the end of 2020, according to actuaries at the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In 2020 health care will account for one-fifth of America’s economy."
The article goes on to point out that surveys suggest that the Federal government will be liable for a huge amount of medical obligations... and all this will occur in the country which has the most expensive healthcare in the world.
Staggeringly poor article. Projecting out a trend line by effectively assuming sustained exponential growth is completely retarded. It's really the same as the projections predicting that the sustained 1990s bubble would continue and the US debt would be paid off by 2009.
Considering the demographics involved -- the population as a whole is getting older and health care for old people is expensive as all hell -- it seems the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why sustained exponential growth in health-care costs will not take place.
The number of new drugs intering the market is decreasing, and once the patent expires on an existing drug most drugs effectivly become free.
Most importantly we spend twice as much of our GDP on heathcare as most contires with universal heathcare for reduced benifits. If the numbers keep getting worse the government can get involved in the supply side of the equation without reducing benifits to patents.
There's been a rash of people in the last year that think 'to pass' somehow means 'might pass', when it doesn't actually. I've taken to ignoring anything they say.
However, this system also blunts such 'radical edges' as civil unions, equalizing the age of consent, reform of drug laws and large infrastructure reforms.
We should have some way of the public identifying "extraordinary" issues (e.g. online petitions) and then having periodic referendums where the public can vote directly on these topics.
Otherwise, as you point out, there are many topics that will simply be ignored.
Good question. I don't mean the sellers. But rather the accounts that are being sold. Meaning that the buyer of such an account will have wasted 10$. Don't see why would anybody pay for a +1 account though. Especially since they will eventually open the gates to everyone.
So imagine you are a black hat for a moment. You've run your drive by malware campaign and harvested a couple hundred thousand Google login credentials, or maybe you just sit and wait and when the browser is open you send a +1 to the site your master told you to send it to.
So now Google has hundreds of +1 votes coming from otherwise legitimate users. How do they fight that?
Good point. Had not thought of that. Although it would probably become kind of obvious that there is something fishy going on. Why would a site that has no real value all of a sudden start getting a lot of +1s? They would have to be really subtle to go undetected.
I would first note that more 'voyages of discovery' were prompted by the desire to establish new or improved trade or resource exploration routes, and we've pretty-much established that there's no one to trade with and nothing to exploit within reach.
And I would like to see the cost comparisons, but I'd bet that just as pan-oceanic trips were an order of magnitude more expensive than explorations before, space journeys (especially manned), would require an exceptional economic incentive to be at all viable.
A system could create, manage and automate a 'cloud' of several hundred wallets, all shifting small amounts of money around at random intervals. When the owner decided to make a particular payment, he could set a target sum to be accumulated by a single wallet, and within a few hours (or days), make payment from there.
Once this system had a few users, the difficulty of tracing any particular wallet 'owner' would be significant.
If these nodes aren't shared between users then you're not really getting anything more than minor obfuscation. If they are shared then you in fact have a third party cloudbank that hopefully is trustworthy and the money cloud aspect is a distraction that doesn't provide any benefits.
all shifting small amounts of money around at random intervals
I suspect that "random" in this instance would have to be very carefully defined, as a lot of signals only become more apparent (to the human eye) when cloaked with the right type of noise.
I'm not certain what type of game you want. The obvious suggestions in terms of well-crafted atmosphere and high-quality narrative might be Portal and the follow-on to the above, Deus Ex: HR and Bioshock.