Deutsche Telekom didn't want to put more money into T-Mobile because they're investing it all in their LTE buildout in Europe. T-Mobile is in bad shape because they need to build a 4g network to keep up with every one else, but they didn't buy any spectrum to do it. Whether the $3b goes to T-Mobile or not, DT has no reason to keep the spectrum. So T-Mobile will get the spectrum they need for a 4g network, they just need cash to build it.
DT could look at it in a number of ways; they find another buyer for T-Mobile as it sits (but they won't get the premium price AT&T was offering), they could look at the $3b as found money and use it to build T-Mobile's 4g network (making them more profitable and a better candidate for sale), or they could keep the $3b and tell T-Mobile to find their own money to utilize the new spectrum (possibly pissing away their investment as T-Mobile falls farther behind).
I've been happy with Sprint via Virgin Mobile but would prefer them to move to GSM and amp up their offerings, coverage, and user base.
Sprint already has GSM and they are in the process of phasing it out. Nextel is GSM and they want to retire it and reallocate the spectrum. That is the reason why the Sprint (CDMA)/Nextel(GSM) merger made no sense at all. Of course, before long no one will likely be doing GSM once Voice over LTE is worked out. Carriers are still wrapping their brains around 'voice is just another form of data' and flushing out the PSTN mentality. Phone companies in general (and all the national wireless companies had their start in wireline) still look for revenue paths by making customers think data type matters. Tethering, SMS, digital voice, etc., it's all data over the air. Verizon is advertising their 4G hotspot with a 5 client limit. Why? They're charging for bandwidth. And if they aren't careful, someone like Google or Apple is going to gobble up a 4G provider (Lightsquared and Clearwire come to mind) and show them what a real disruptive technology is.
Simple, set up Facebook accounts for each teacher through the school IT department. Teachers can engage with students outside school hours but the district would have the capability to monitor if necessary. But it also seems like the districts should be setting policies like this, not the state legislature.
Out of curiosity, I just looked at Craigslist. It's amazing how many TouchPads are posted with "I bought this for my wife, husband, grandfather, etc and they didn't want it. I already have one so I want to sell this one for $300". My favorite was (dated the 27th); "I bought this yesterday, then found out my wife bought me an iPad". There hasn't been any place in town that has had the Touchpad in stock since last Saturday (20th) morning. And the only places I've seen online that have stock are the ones that are still advertising it at the original price.
Although I would modify your statement a bit, the only reason it sold out so fast was because people thought they could resell them.... I think they would have sold fairly well at $200 retail for the 16g. Simply because it has the HP name and would be priced with the bargain brands. I'm considering a similarly spec'd Viewsonic gTablet at $250. Of course the Viewsonic also has a slot for an additional 16g card and there is a dock available with HDMI.
I should probably just save my money though, and re-purpose my retired Moto Droid. It makes a pretty expensive alarm clock. I had to chew an arm off to get out of Verizon's trap.
Radio Shack's demise is more about technology than anything. Back before all their stores were in malls they carried a lot of electronics components, but they also carried consumer electronics. I have a pair of 30 year old Realistic stereo speakers. My dad owned several Tandy computers. But with electronics going to SMD and programmable chips, most of the hobbyists moved on to cheaper hobbies. And then of course, a lot of them went into programming. While I think it would be nice to have a local source for things like Arduino's and PICs, in reality I doubt they could sell enough to keep a store open since most of us would order on the internet anyway. Radio Shack was never cheap and they didn't have particularly stellar quality control either.
First of all, for some people there is a non-zero chance of becoming parents with little warning.
Is immaculate conception common? About the only case I can think of where choice doesn't enter the equation is rape. I pay a great deal of money every year to provide an education for other people's children. Is it too much to ask parents to pick up the cost when schools are not available?
(note that I do not support 4 day school weeks precisely because parents tend to work 5 day weeks)
You only really need to go back to the 1890's or so, when Robber Barons ran everything, corruption in politics was rampant, and a few very large banking organizations (most notably J.P. Morgan's) were able to violate laws with impunity.
1890s? Look out the window, the Robber Barons have incorporated. Politicians can still be had for a price, they call it campaign financing. And rather than violate laws, big Banks just buy a politician and get the laws changed to suit them. Too big to fail.
The battles today are around entitlements to people vs entitlements to corporations. And things like Social Security and Medicare are pejoratively labeled an 'Entitlement' despite being 100% funded by payroll taxes.
This assumes the purpose of schools is to educate.
Most schools are public funded daycare. And that will be a big problem with 4 day weeks. Who will be supervising those kids on the 5th day while parents are working?
As far as untrained people who aren't capable of getting a job, this has significant impacts on society. Those people have to eat and have a place to live. If they can't earn enough themselves, society will end up paying the cost. Whether it's through a welfare system, crime, or the costs of transporting them to another geographical region. The balancing act for an elite class is to provide a system that works just well enough to keep the population fed and docile while not investing too much wealth.
Trade secrets do a much better job of protecting innovation, since they last forever.
Just to be pedantic, trade secrets last as long as they are kept secret. Post the recipe for your secret sauce on the company website, and your innovation is no longer protected. Unless of course you require every one that accesses the site to sign an NDA. And it provides no protection from reverse engineering.
That is what makes them a good investment. They have a business model that is working but could be more successful if they had more capacity. Not something that will work if you throw enough money at it. Once upon a time investors also used to care about book value vs market cap too.
FF5 didn't upgrade to FF6 automatically on any of my machines.
The only thing that stopped it on my Win7 laptop is the security message asking me if I wanted to allow the updater to change the system, every time I launched it. I kept telling it no, got tired of that and looked in Firefox and it told me it was a 5.x update. Let it install and suddenly I'm now running v6.x. As soon as I find a suitable replacement, I'm pulling it from all my systems. And I've been running it since Phoenix 0.3. I'm not amused. Some of us don't want to be bleeding edge.
Today, (most of) this money is paid for by special taxes but that will not be true moving forward.
Until the amount paid exceeds the amount borrowed, SS and Medicare are STILL being financed with special taxes. Money from the general fund going back into the SS Trust is debt maintenance and repayment. Just because the clowns in Washington borrowed the money doesn't mean we didn't pay it in the first place. And anyone with half a brain could figure out how to index the SS/Medicare payrolls taxes with system costs to keep it viable. Instead, Congressmen are lusting over the $$$ they can re-allocate to pet projects if they cut 'entitlements' that hard working American's have already paid for.
The difference is that now engineers know how to design a car to protect its passengers from a crash,
I blame engineers for today's crappy drivers. You can tailgate someone today, 20ft off their back bumper at 75mph, and survive the crash. Darwin has been cheated and the habit persists.
Depends on the engine. Ford/Navistar have made some horrors, and when diesels break so does your wallet.
If my gm 4.3l comes anywhere close to the 275k miles that my 7.3l IDI Ford/Navistar has I'll be greatly surprised. And at 120k it has already had a new distributor and the intake gaskets replaced.
Price a high pressure pump....
Last time I checked, a rebuilt IP for my 7.3l was around $300 and a couple hours to install. And conveniently located on top of the engine. The fuel pump for my 4.3l was $350 to replace and 4 hours labor. It required removing the fuel tank.
I thought I should point out an issue with your particle trap - RTFM - you must run it at high revs with a cleaning agent every so often to burn off the particles in your particle trap.
US diesels with particulate traps have an auto cleaning system. They inject urea into the exhaust as needed to burn off excess soot.
They are basically trying to buy a 4G network instead of building it themselves.
Boy, did they screw up then. T-Mobile doesn't have a 4g network. They don't have the spectrum, they don't have the money to build it out. That is why Deutsche Telekom wants to unload them. They don't want to spend the money (instead, using it to build out their 4g in Europe), and T-Mobile can't survive without it. They can struggle along with HSPA+ for a while, but just like AT&T they are facing a very expensive LTE buildout.
AT&T is less interested in acquiring T-Mobil business then in its spectrum.
AT&T doesn't need the spectrum, they have plenty of unused/under utilized spectrum. As do both of the other tier-1 providers. And it's doubtful that the additional spectrum will make much difference. If anything, they are after the already installed towers in urban areas. But even that doesn't make a lot of sense since $39B is about 10 times what it would take to fix their own network, and the T-Mobile spectrum may or may not be on a frequency that AT&T phones can utilize. Not only that, but they are paying a premium for T-Mobile. Possibly as much as twice it's value. This is about taking out a competitor and increasing subscriber count. Getting spectrum and putting Sprint on the ropes is just a bonus.
Your summary is rather disingenuous. When most people think about renewable energy they are thinking about solar and wind technologies. When you add hydro electric to the mix you skew the numbers. The US has hit it's limit on hydro, and has probably been there for decades. With the TVA projects from the great depression, Hoover Dam, and Grand Coulee Dam, etc, the US has had a significant portion of it's electricity from hydro for generations. It doesn't make sense to add it to the mix when comparing renewables to nuclear now. Also 77% sounds like a lot until you qualify it with 'domestic' production.
While I'm a supporter of renewable energy sources, I cringe when someone uses a report like this to say how good we're doing. Based on the 2010 total of 8.064 Biomass 4.310 Hydro 2.509 Wind.924 Geo.212 Solar/PV.109
Nuclear, by itself was 8.441 And fossil fuels, 58.527
So the only thing worthy noting is the biomass number. But the report doesn't give a source, so we don't even know where that is coming from.
Go to your City Council/Board of Alderman's next meeting and ask them in person what they intend to do to address the problem. Every meeting I have ever attended has a process for you to address them with your issues. And voter turnout is so low at local levels that representatives tend to pay attention to people who show up to meetings.
This has nothing to do with eliminating medical errors. This coding is strictly for Medicare and Medicaid billing purposes. It's a shit-ton of extra work so the government can get even bigger.
Or a simpler explanation would be that they're trying to eliminate fraud from multiple billing for the same process. If a claim for amputation of a specified finger has already been paid, then reject any new claims for that finger. In the less specific older system you couldn't catch that until digit #11.
It was called "Cash for Clunkers" and destroyed perfectly good and operational vehicles. Even the parts were destroyed, rather than recycled (very, very ungreen).
Cash for Clunkers had goals beside increasing new car sales. In addition to boosting manufacturing, it was aimed at taking older, less fuel efficient and polluting cars off the road.
It's also inaccurate to say the parts couldn't be recycled. The engine block could not be sold as a working engine. (still had value as scrap metal) Many of the other parts were sold. The recyclers were less than pleased with the program though because they had a limited amount of time to remove the parts and crush the vehicles. They wanted to pay bargain prices to the dealers and then sell parts at a leisurely pace to get the highest price. Instead they had an over supply of parts and they couldn't sell them all short term. Which gave them the dilemma of whether to invest the labor in pulling parts to sell later, or crush sell-able parts. You'll notice that a lot more have warehouses of pre-pulled parts now. Ironically, it forced them to computerize their inventories and provide better customer service.
It's an ANSI standard, a submember of ASC X12 so half the shit in there is unused crap needed for the other things X12 is used for, like wholesalers restocking their shelves or boats reporting their cargo, because apparently code reuse is so damn important to these people that the claim form has a section (completely unused for claims) for reporting credit card details.
The problem with X12 isn't that is supports so many different industries, you don't need to support any transaction set you don't use, it's that it's too vague about how the data is represented within a transaction set. Once upon a time in another life, I used to create X12 211s (electronic bills of lading). And there were tiny, annoying differences with each carrier we interfaced with. It was simply because there wasn't a reference set that could be used as a final arbiter when there is a disagreement in the implementation. X12 would be so much easier to work with if there was a validator service like W3C.Org.
The real problem with insurance claims processing is that there is financial incentive to refuse payment for any reason. It's kind of like product rebates. The more submissions you can reject, the higher your profits. So muddy up the filing process and if a doctor forgets to dot an i or cross a t, then you just increased the executive's bonus. At some point it becomes cost effective for the doctor to write off a claim as a learning experience rather than try to collect from the insurance company.
bought you an expensive computer you could use to write QBASIC programs on
Oh please. This is really dependent on when the events took place. I learned BASIC in highschool my senior year, on a TRS80. It was the first year my school offered a computer course. I quickly learned afterward that the PC computer lab at the local community college was open to anyone who walked through the door. IBM PCs, a TRS80, and some Apple IIs. It's been nearly 3 decades, but I seem to remember the Commodore 64s costing about $100, which was about a week's (40 hr) take home pay for me at the time. I couldn't afford one, but a friend's family had one. And just to start the 'get off my lawn' pissing match, I wrote my first Cobol program on punched cards.
In today's world, how many here have a stack of working computers in the closet, basement, or garage that work perfectly fine but have no market value. I personally have 2 dual proc P2 Compaq servers, 3 P2 laptops (Dell and Gateway), and a dual proc Athlon (duron?) that are complete with OSs installed that I would probably give to someone interested in learning programming (or linux) and willing to pick it up. I also have at least one dual PII motherboard, loaded with memory and CPUs and enough spare parts to make it a full PC.
When I was in highschool it was difficult to get access to a computer if you didn't have $$$, but not impossible. Today you could probably walk to your local library and put a posting on Craigslist and get something free that is capable of running a current linux release.
I'd be willing to bet they are channeled into college by their parents and advisers so they can have a 'better life'. The myth is still out there that IT is a high paying white collar job. In some cases that is true, you get professional pay and professional respect. In a lot of cases though, you are a salary exempt pager slave. Those patches aren't going to install themself, son.
Ironically, good plumbers can earn $70k, go into business for themselves with a few $k in tools and a pickup truck. All of which they can purchase with the money they'll save going to a VoTech school instead of college. They may have to spend as much time learning their craft, but most of it will be working under a master craftsman. Earn while you learn. And no fear of being outsourced.
Slashdot Mirror
Deutsche Telekom didn't want to put more money into T-Mobile because they're investing it all in their LTE buildout in Europe. T-Mobile is in bad shape because they need to build a 4g network to keep up with every one else, but they didn't buy any spectrum to do it. Whether the $3b goes to T-Mobile or not, DT has no reason to keep the spectrum. So T-Mobile will get the spectrum they need for a 4g network, they just need cash to build it.
DT could look at it in a number of ways;
they find another buyer for T-Mobile as it sits (but they won't get the premium price AT&T was offering),
they could look at the $3b as found money and use it to build T-Mobile's 4g network (making them more profitable and a better candidate for sale),
or they could keep the $3b and tell T-Mobile to find their own money to utilize the new spectrum (possibly pissing away their investment as T-Mobile falls farther behind).
I've been happy with Sprint via Virgin Mobile but would prefer them to move to GSM and amp up their offerings, coverage, and user base.
Sprint already has GSM and they are in the process of phasing it out. Nextel is GSM and they want to retire it and reallocate the spectrum. That is the reason why the Sprint (CDMA)/Nextel(GSM) merger made no sense at all. Of course, before long no one will likely be doing GSM once Voice over LTE is worked out. Carriers are still wrapping their brains around 'voice is just another form of data' and flushing out the PSTN mentality. Phone companies in general (and all the national wireless companies had their start in wireline) still look for revenue paths by making customers think data type matters. Tethering, SMS, digital voice, etc., it's all data over the air. Verizon is advertising their 4G hotspot with a 5 client limit. Why? They're charging for bandwidth. And if they aren't careful, someone like Google or Apple is going to gobble up a 4G provider (Lightsquared and Clearwire come to mind) and show them what a real disruptive technology is.
Nothing in the first amendment says adults have the right to speak to other people's children, good thing because that would be a little creepy.
What could possibly be wrong with teachers having private conversations with students
Simple, set up Facebook accounts for each teacher through the school IT department. Teachers can engage with students outside school hours but the district would have the capability to monitor if necessary. But it also seems like the districts should be setting policies like this, not the state legislature.
Out of curiosity, I just looked at Craigslist. It's amazing how many TouchPads are posted with "I bought this for my wife, husband, grandfather, etc and they didn't want it. I already have one so I want to sell this one for $300". My favorite was (dated the 27th); "I bought this yesterday, then found out my wife bought me an iPad". There hasn't been any place in town that has had the Touchpad in stock since last Saturday (20th) morning. And the only places I've seen online that have stock are the ones that are still advertising it at the original price.
Although I would modify your statement a bit, the only reason it sold out so fast was because people thought they could resell them.... I think they would have sold fairly well at $200 retail for the 16g. Simply because it has the HP name and would be priced with the bargain brands. I'm considering a similarly spec'd Viewsonic gTablet at $250. Of course the Viewsonic also has a slot for an additional 16g card and there is a dock available with HDMI.
I should probably just save my money though, and re-purpose my retired Moto Droid. It makes a pretty expensive alarm clock. I had to chew an arm off to get out of Verizon's trap.
Radio Shack's demise is more about technology than anything. Back before all their stores were in malls they carried a lot of electronics components, but they also carried consumer electronics. I have a pair of 30 year old Realistic stereo speakers. My dad owned several Tandy computers. But with electronics going to SMD and programmable chips, most of the hobbyists moved on to cheaper hobbies. And then of course, a lot of them went into programming. While I think it would be nice to have a local source for things like Arduino's and PICs, in reality I doubt they could sell enough to keep a store open since most of us would order on the internet anyway. Radio Shack was never cheap and they didn't have particularly stellar quality control either.
The only thing lost is the impulse buy.
First of all, for some people there is a non-zero chance of becoming parents with little warning.
Is immaculate conception common? About the only case I can think of where choice doesn't enter the equation is rape. I pay a great deal of money every year to provide an education for other people's children. Is it too much to ask parents to pick up the cost when schools are not available?
(note that I do not support 4 day school weeks precisely because parents tend to work 5 day weeks)
You only really need to go back to the 1890's or so, when Robber Barons ran everything, corruption in politics was rampant, and a few very large banking organizations (most notably J.P. Morgan's) were able to violate laws with impunity.
1890s? Look out the window, the Robber Barons have incorporated. Politicians can still be had for a price, they call it campaign financing. And rather than violate laws, big Banks just buy a politician and get the laws changed to suit them. Too big to fail.
The battles today are around entitlements to people vs entitlements to corporations. And things like Social Security and Medicare are pejoratively labeled an 'Entitlement' despite being 100% funded by payroll taxes.
This assumes the purpose of schools is to educate.
Most schools are public funded daycare. And that will be a big problem with 4 day weeks. Who will be supervising those kids on the 5th day while parents are working?
As far as untrained people who aren't capable of getting a job, this has significant impacts on society. Those people have to eat and have a place to live. If they can't earn enough themselves, society will end up paying the cost. Whether it's through a welfare system, crime, or the costs of transporting them to another geographical region. The balancing act for an elite class is to provide a system that works just well enough to keep the population fed and docile while not investing too much wealth.
Trade secrets do a much better job of protecting innovation, since they last forever.
Just to be pedantic, trade secrets last as long as they are kept secret. Post the recipe for your secret sauce on the company website, and your innovation is no longer protected. Unless of course you require every one that accesses the site to sign an NDA. And it provides no protection from reverse engineering.
That is what makes them a good investment. They have a business model that is working but could be more successful if they had more capacity. Not something that will work if you throw enough money at it. Once upon a time investors also used to care about book value vs market cap too.
FF5 didn't upgrade to FF6 automatically on any of my machines.
The only thing that stopped it on my Win7 laptop is the security message asking me if I wanted to allow the updater to change the system, every time I launched it. I kept telling it no, got tired of that and looked in Firefox and it told me it was a 5.x update. Let it install and suddenly I'm now running v6.x. As soon as I find a suitable replacement, I'm pulling it from all my systems. And I've been running it since Phoenix 0.3. I'm not amused. Some of us don't want to be bleeding edge.
Today, (most of) this money is paid for by special taxes but that will not be true moving forward.
Until the amount paid exceeds the amount borrowed, SS and Medicare are STILL being financed with special taxes. Money from the general fund going back into the SS Trust is debt maintenance and repayment. Just because the clowns in Washington borrowed the money doesn't mean we didn't pay it in the first place. And anyone with half a brain could figure out how to index the SS/Medicare payrolls taxes with system costs to keep it viable. Instead, Congressmen are lusting over the $$$ they can re-allocate to pet projects if they cut 'entitlements' that hard working American's have already paid for.
The difference is that now engineers know how to design a car to protect its passengers from a crash,
I blame engineers for today's crappy drivers. You can tailgate someone today, 20ft off their back bumper at 75mph, and survive the crash. Darwin has been cheated and the habit persists.
Depends on the engine. Ford/Navistar have made some horrors, and when diesels break so does your wallet.
If my gm 4.3l comes anywhere close to the 275k miles that my 7.3l IDI Ford/Navistar has I'll be greatly surprised. And at 120k it has already had a new distributor and the intake gaskets replaced.
Price a high pressure pump....
Last time I checked, a rebuilt IP for my 7.3l was around $300 and a couple hours to install. And conveniently located on top of the engine. The fuel pump for my 4.3l was $350 to replace and 4 hours labor. It required removing the fuel tank.
I thought I should point out an issue with your particle trap - RTFM - you must run it at high revs with a cleaning agent every so often to burn off the particles in your particle trap.
US diesels with particulate traps have an auto cleaning system. They inject urea into the exhaust as needed to burn off excess soot.
They are basically trying to buy a 4G network instead of building it themselves.
Boy, did they screw up then. T-Mobile doesn't have a 4g network. They don't have the spectrum, they don't have the money to build it out. That is why Deutsche Telekom wants to unload them. They don't want to spend the money (instead, using it to build out their 4g in Europe), and T-Mobile can't survive without it. They can struggle along with HSPA+ for a while, but just like AT&T they are facing a very expensive LTE buildout.
AT&T is less interested in acquiring T-Mobil business then in its spectrum.
AT&T doesn't need the spectrum, they have plenty of unused/under utilized spectrum. As do both of the other tier-1 providers. And it's doubtful that the additional spectrum will make much difference. If anything, they are after the already installed towers in urban areas. But even that doesn't make a lot of sense since $39B is about 10 times what it would take to fix their own network, and the T-Mobile spectrum may or may not be on a frequency that AT&T phones can utilize. Not only that, but they are paying a premium for T-Mobile. Possibly as much as twice it's value. This is about taking out a competitor and increasing subscriber count. Getting spectrum and putting Sprint on the ropes is just a bonus.
I have a Qosmio too. Another thing that sucks is you have to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger (from his Conan days) to carry the thing.
And some models were available with LED back-lit keyboards.
Your summary is rather disingenuous. When most people think about renewable energy they are thinking about solar and wind technologies. When you add hydro electric to the mix you skew the numbers. The US has hit it's limit on hydro, and has probably been there for decades. With the TVA projects from the great depression, Hoover Dam, and Grand Coulee Dam, etc, the US has had a significant portion of it's electricity from hydro for generations. It doesn't make sense to add it to the mix when comparing renewables to nuclear now. Also 77% sounds like a lot until you qualify it with 'domestic' production.
While I'm a supporter of renewable energy sources, I cringe when someone uses a report like this to say how good we're doing. .924 .212 .109
Based on the 2010 total of 8.064
Biomass 4.310
Hydro 2.509
Wind
Geo
Solar/PV
Nuclear, by itself was 8.441
And fossil fuels, 58.527
So the only thing worthy noting is the biomass number. But the report doesn't give a source, so we don't even know where that is coming from.
What else do you recommend that I do?
Go to your City Council/Board of Alderman's next meeting and ask them in person what they intend to do to address the problem. Every meeting I have ever attended has a process for you to address them with your issues. And voter turnout is so low at local levels that representatives tend to pay attention to people who show up to meetings.
This has nothing to do with eliminating medical errors. This coding is strictly for Medicare and Medicaid billing purposes. It's a shit-ton of extra work so the government can get even bigger.
Or a simpler explanation would be that they're trying to eliminate fraud from multiple billing for the same process. If a claim for amputation of a specified finger has already been paid, then reject any new claims for that finger. In the less specific older system you couldn't catch that until digit #11.
It was called "Cash for Clunkers" and destroyed perfectly good and operational vehicles. Even the parts were destroyed, rather than recycled (very, very ungreen).
Cash for Clunkers had goals beside increasing new car sales. In addition to boosting manufacturing, it was aimed at taking older, less fuel efficient and polluting cars off the road.
It's also inaccurate to say the parts couldn't be recycled. The engine block could not be sold as a working engine. (still had value as scrap metal) Many of the other parts were sold. The recyclers were less than pleased with the program though because they had a limited amount of time to remove the parts and crush the vehicles. They wanted to pay bargain prices to the dealers and then sell parts at a leisurely pace to get the highest price. Instead they had an over supply of parts and they couldn't sell them all short term. Which gave them the dilemma of whether to invest the labor in pulling parts to sell later, or crush sell-able parts. You'll notice that a lot more have warehouses of pre-pulled parts now. Ironically, it forced them to computerize their inventories and provide better customer service.
It's an ANSI standard, a submember of ASC X12 so half the shit in there is unused crap needed for the other things X12 is used for, like wholesalers restocking their shelves or boats reporting their cargo, because apparently code reuse is so damn important to these people that the claim form has a section (completely unused for claims) for reporting credit card details.
The problem with X12 isn't that is supports so many different industries, you don't need to support any transaction set you don't use, it's that it's too vague about how the data is represented within a transaction set. Once upon a time in another life, I used to create X12 211s (electronic bills of lading). And there were tiny, annoying differences with each carrier we interfaced with. It was simply because there wasn't a reference set that could be used as a final arbiter when there is a disagreement in the implementation. X12 would be so much easier to work with if there was a validator service like W3C.Org.
The real problem with insurance claims processing is that there is financial incentive to refuse payment for any reason. It's kind of like product rebates. The more submissions you can reject, the higher your profits. So muddy up the filing process and if a doctor forgets to dot an i or cross a t, then you just increased the executive's bonus. At some point it becomes cost effective for the doctor to write off a claim as a learning experience rather than try to collect from the insurance company.
bought you an expensive computer you could use to write QBASIC programs on
Oh please. This is really dependent on when the events took place. I learned BASIC in highschool my senior year, on a TRS80. It was the first year my school offered a computer course. I quickly learned afterward that the PC computer lab at the local community college was open to anyone who walked through the door. IBM PCs, a TRS80, and some Apple IIs. It's been nearly 3 decades, but I seem to remember the Commodore 64s costing about $100, which was about a week's (40 hr) take home pay for me at the time. I couldn't afford one, but a friend's family had one. And just to start the 'get off my lawn' pissing match, I wrote my first Cobol program on punched cards.
In today's world, how many here have a stack of working computers in the closet, basement, or garage that work perfectly fine but have no market value. I personally have 2 dual proc P2 Compaq servers, 3 P2 laptops (Dell and Gateway), and a dual proc Athlon (duron?) that are complete with OSs installed that I would probably give to someone interested in learning programming (or linux) and willing to pick it up. I also have at least one dual PII motherboard, loaded with memory and CPUs and enough spare parts to make it a full PC.
When I was in highschool it was difficult to get access to a computer if you didn't have $$$, but not impossible. Today you could probably walk to your local library and put a posting on Craigslist and get something free that is capable of running a current linux release.
I'd be willing to bet they are channeled into college by their parents and advisers so they can have a 'better life'. The myth is still out there that IT is a high paying white collar job. In some cases that is true, you get professional pay and professional respect. In a lot of cases though, you are a salary exempt pager slave. Those patches aren't going to install themself, son.
Ironically, good plumbers can earn $70k, go into business for themselves with a few $k in tools and a pickup truck. All of which they can purchase with the money they'll save going to a VoTech school instead of college. They may have to spend as much time learning their craft, but most of it will be working under a master craftsman. Earn while you learn. And no fear of being outsourced.