But the decision is a great deal more important than its immediate political aftermath. It’s about what the government can do, not just who runs it. If the Court acts in line with the sentiments expressed by the conservatives last week, it could curtail the policymaking options of Congress for a generation. An adverse decision on the Affordable Care Act could even jeopardize the prospects for conservative legislative priorities, like health-insurance vouchers or private retirement accounts in lieu of Social Security. It is simply not the Supreme Court’s business to be making these kinds of judgments.

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For many years, policymakers have appropriately singled out federal spending on health care — especially Medicare — as the most serious long-term threat to the nation's fiscal health. Over the past four decades, the average growth in Medicare spending per enrollee has exceeded the growth in per capita gross domestic product by 2.6 percentage points per year. This trend is unsustainable: if it continued, Medicare would consume all federal revenues by 2060.

They continue...

On the whole, we do not believe that the recent slowdown in Medicare spending growth is a fluke. There has been a long-term trend toward tighter Medicare payment policy, and policy changes that began in the middle of the 2000s have continued that tightening

Go read it all!

Yes, that's a landfill. The rest are equally cool.

Oh, there you are!

Nokia just confirmed that an LTE version of its flagship Lumia 900 will be crossing the border into Canada in April, running on Rogers' network, while a dual-carrier HSPA+ flavor will be hopping the Atlantic sometime in Q2, with a €480 (about $650) price tag in tow.

It's a good thing I'm saving up now! I'm sure when Apollo is released it'll smoke the Lumia 900, but either way, Nokia is leading the pack once again.+

A sentencing date has been set for July 16. The U.S. Attorney's Office said in a release that the artist faces a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a maximum term of supervised release of one year. He also faces a maximum fine of $5,000

Good. There's nothing wrong about standing on the shoulders of giants to make great work. Just give them the credit they deserve. Ripping off great designs makes everyone's lives better, and Fairey has some good work, but by ignoring the people who were his inspiration and source of material, he has done damage to good designers everywhere.

In this version of the memo, Romer calculated that it would take an eye-popping $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion to fill the entire hole in the economy—the “output gap,” in economist-speak.

Odd to think of what might have been.

The significance of this general conjecture, assuming its truth, is easy to see. It means that it is quite feasible to design ciphers that are effectively unbreakable

Hat tip: Bruce S.

Apple

Microsoft

I hope Apple gets back up and realizes that these skeuomorphs are idiotic.

Newtzilla is a different kind of kaiju (Japanese for "strange beast" or "giant monster") but not that different. Like Godzilla, Newtzilla has remarkable healing powers, allowing him to recover from charges that he wanted an open marriage and that he parasitically fed on Freddie Mac.

It's worth a read. The debate tonight showed that Newtzilla can actually dance with the punches, absorb plenty of tank-fire, and oddly enough, even withhold snapping back with his trademark atomic breath.

But for how long?

I just switched the default search engine in my browser from Google to Bing. And if you care about working efficiently, or getting the right results when you search, then maybe you should too. Don't laugh!

It all boils down to Google attempt to force "google+" on everyone. As someone who rarely (around every 8 months) pops up onto facebook, I'm not too concerned with Google+, but altering search results to push the service over twitter (which I use about once a week) does seem like a bad idea.

What's next? Mark Russinovich working on Intune? Bill Gates popping back up to do some coding for Microsoft HealthVault? Ballmer rehiring Ray Ozzie to pitch the next wave for Office?

So what about Cutler? He’s earned the right to do basically whatever he wants at Microsoft. And word is that “whatever” has something to do with the future of Xbox.

Since the Xbox is based on NT, the possibilities are cool to imagine.