It could also be because what DirectTV has for HD is... well... dismal and their customer service / retention / cancelation department won't give you a dime if you want to upgrade to HD (and their offerings suck and are expensive, besides). This isn't to say dish is amazing, but it just goes to prove that some companies don't understand that.
They didn't release any tools or an SDK with this title - after they promised they would. Given that additional maps/mods can extend the lifetime of a game by 25% to 40% (think Half-Life/Counter-Strike...) they'd be crazy not to do that.
Actually, I think they would be crazy to release one. This is from the "asshole scumbag beancounter's guide to selling games" but, hey, who runs activision?;)
When a new game comes out, people will buy it, especially if you get people to shill for you on newsgroups and pay a lot in marketing. This happens for pretty much any game you throw enough money at. Besides, Activision is kinda big and make a lot of games, so they have a vested interest to see that one of their games doesn't become too successful. What it comes down do is this. Why would you let your customers make their own mods and play those instead of selling them a "completely" new game at full price every 6-8 months? Added to this, keeping a game on the shelves costs money (if you look at it in terms of Y' of shelf space will make you $X if you sell an old game, or $4(X) if you have a new title) and you're going to have to support a lot more people (this includes servers, customer service, etc) if your game has been successful for years - especially if it is a really addictive game like CS;) Even the most addicted player probably won't buy more than 1 copy of the game - unless they are a cheating nub and get their key banned or lost their cd.
Counterstrike, Starcraft and EQ etc are a bit of an oddity too. Most games don't survive all that long and require only minor upkeep, heck, some even shut down completely. EQ and a few other games have started to charge monthly, which is one way to "save the company money", but it is also (hopefully) a way to get the companies to produce a game that people will actually want to play.
Not releasing an anti-cheat is also disgusting, but I'm not surprised. Anti-cheat is a joke for pretty much any game anyways, so this is more par for the course than anything else.
While the single-player aspect of this game is for the most part a great game
Really? I just finished it and thought the AI was dismally bad. I know bots still are pretty stupid, but seriously, it doesn't look like they put in any effort past "follow the human". The gameplay wasn't all that great either, basically if you don't advance, the enemies keep magically replenishing. Also, the enemy can apparantly read minds, at least on the skill level I played. They will see (and attack) you before you can see them if you're covered by smoke, if you've flanked them, all of a sudden bots start running toward your position. Your own bots will let the enemy walk right past them too, which is lame as hell when you realize it.
I don't believe the enemy bots even attempted a flanking maneuver, just stood far off and shot back. Sure, they did the whole "human wave" thing, but if it wasn't for the "mind reading" and "my bots ignore the enemy and let a kraut take me out", the game was surprisingly easy. Bots didn't use cover effectively, etc.
Came with my geforce 7800, so I'm not exactly crying (and the graphics were really good, I haven't gone "damn, that looks nice" at a game for a while now, the shadows do look awesome.)
Anything that pushes their customers to other ISPs is a good thing in my book. Although most will no doubt be pushed to the major providers, some will actually go with local companies and I think one of the best ways to keep customer hostile policies like "tiered internet", etc is to keep as many people as possible getting access through small companies and independents instead of large isps who have sociopathic beancounters that are given drugs to find new ways of screwing us, pissing us off and making an additional 12 cents a month for it. After all, those policies work best when there are no alternatives.
Then again, AOL has pretty awesome retention, years ago I used their service for free for well over a year by calling in every month and threatening to cancel. I suppose that may of have changed though.
You forgot to mention that the main reason the policies don't get implemented is because of rampant corruption in the local / regional governments. Of course, China is hardly unique, but they do have a wee bit of a problem.
First off, the premium is $54.00, exactly. Not sure where you pulled over $75.00 from. A family of 3 or more costs $108.00. The premium is also waived or cut if you don't make a lot of money - 100% is covered if you make under $20,000 a year and it goes up to $28,000 in steps. A lot of employers cover it because it, quite frankly, isn't all that much. Public assistance is a joke in the USA (at least in Oregon).
I've also lived in BC and I've lived in the states. Maybe some things have changed since 1997, but I know people who currently pay $800 a month for health insurance in the USA for their families. Seeing a doctor in the USA right away is nearly impossible. The whole concept of a "walk in clinic" is foreign to them and 2 week waits to see a gp are common and even then, you pay a copay (on top of your insurance). Annual checkups aren't covered by many plans, so people don't do them, which leads to people finding that a minor problem has developed into a serious health condition that could of have easily been healed if detected earlier.
ER visits aren't free either, you will pay quite a bit in copays and whatever your hmo doesn't cover. And on top of this is the prices for common medical procedures are vulgarly expensive. There are reasons for this, but the biggest (imho) is that everyone tries to get as much as they can from medicare and that brings all the prices up slowly. A procedure billed to medicare can be over 200% more expensive than one billed to an hmo (And the price to an uninsured person can be all over the board). The cost for X-Rays and other procedures is also out of control. An X-Ray - given to an American in BC - without any insurance and in the ER of a hospital - is a whopping $42. The cost of an X-Ray in an American hospital is roughly 10 times that amount. And yes, you can walk into a hospital with a relatively minor injury like a broken arm and get treatment, unlike in some American hospitals where they will dump your ass onto the street. I'm not even going to start on the whole "if you get fired, you'll never get coverage again because you have a pre-existing condition" or the "don't even think of switching HMOs because you will be shitlisted because of your PEC, so suck up that rate increase and be our bitch" aspects of American health care either.
Yes, taxes are bullshit up in Canada (seriously, it is out of fucking control), but it isn't like you don't pay them in the USA either, but in the area of health care, I would much rather be in Canada than be in the USA.
so, the situation is this: you submit to enumeration by the state or you are not allowed to leave the country
Just like in the Soviet Union. In the 70s and 80s people in England and many other countries looked down (and perhaps even scoffed at how oppresive it was) on the Soviets doing the exact same thing. Funny how little time has changed and it has become completely acceptable.
I'm sorry, but what? What are you on about? What do you think a free market is? Unbridled competition without state intervention (which, for the avoidance of doubt, includes the FCC), is exactly what the free market is.
I think that when people think of a "free market", they don't envision it as one where a single company owns all the lines at the very begining and regulations prevent new ISPs from running new lines. In a true free market, the independent isps would be able to lay their own lines without interference from the city / state / county / country. Furthermore, the whole area of wireless and use of spectrum comes would need to be considered.
And besides, when your DSL companies and cable companies collude and keep the prices and level of service about the same, it might as well be a monopoly.
Most hospital patient tracking systems originated on DOS and then Windows computers
Or some custom app written in 1982 that runs on a dying mainframe.
If a patient moves from Seattle to Los Angeles, their new doctor is expecting the exact same types of files on that patient, readable by the same software. So is that patient's insurance company. So are paramedics who may need to quickly assess a patient's history for things like drug allergies, etc. So are pharmacists.
You do realize that they already have that interoperability - in paper files?;) The whole push for computerized records is fairly recent and complete conversion won't happen for a fair bit of time.
And you hit the nail on the head - instead of coding yet another window manager, or making yet another distro for home users, maybe a couple people should start coding something for the medical industry. Of course, this might not work so well when one of the developers realizes that billions can be made in this segment of the market.
He was using computers he did not own to defraud adware companies by generating false ad hits. This is a wellknown fraud dealing mostly with pay-per-click style ad schemes.
Please. The adware company itself makes money on every single ad display / clickthrough. They aren't victims here because they made a ton of money by being "victimized". It might not be conspiracy to commit fraud, but if you are in a shady market and get paid for fraudulent clicks, it makes it reeaally easy to overlook suspicious behavior.
And, if anything, these problems stemmed from a piss poor network design. Sure, the users computers got rooted, but mission critical systems (I'd say keycard servers and the such are) should be designed with the assumption that the user's computers are compromised 100% of the time.
However, many hospitals are notoriously underfunded. Haha, funny. The truth is that many hospitals want you to believe that they are underfunded, when in fact, they have more than enough money, the extra just goes into administration. Of course, IT budgets typically suck in hospitals (they have to keep up this image). It's sort of like running a non-profit, you have to toss the spare money around, but make it look like you really don't have any to spare.
In any case, they are a hospital that appears to be running Windows to control their sensitive security systems. Bad choice, and that alone warrants one finger pointed at the hospital, if it's true.
Look, I realize that it is fun to bash microsoft and all on/., but let's be serious here for a bit. It ultimately doesn't matter what OS you run, some systems should be isolated from the common network because of their importance. I'm pretty sure the keycard readers weren't running WinCE or XP (this isn't Alias, after all), and it sounds like they just didn't work because the network was getting DoS'ed. If the keycard server got infected, sure, string them up, but the fact remains that your physical access servers should be isolated so securely that you could throw an unpatched copy of windows xp on them and nothing would happen to them. After all, every O/S has exploits, and clearly a software only solution isn't the way to go (yes, I realize IOS, etc, has exploits, but that risk can be minimized by using multiple layers of security - physical, seperate networks, appropriate firewall rules, and finally patching the OS, etc.)
Furthermore, due to regulations, you don't have all that many options about what apps you can run in a hospital. And, to be quite honest, what the other guy said about "another useless window manager" is quite appropriate in this case. As a result, you won't see much open source, etc, stuff being used in hospitals. You will see a ton of legacy / custom code, and a lot of windows apps, that's just how it is right now.
One thing that seems to be missing from a lot of posts is that the adware companies seem to be engaging in fraud against their customers. I don't know the details of the case, but if I paid $100,000 in commission to someone (especially if that someone is 20 years old) who installed my software on 50,000 computers in a short period of time, it might, perhaps, raise a few flags. It is difficult for me to believe that they missed it, which forces me to conclude that they knew something suspicious was going on, but were perfectly content to stay quiet and charge their customers anyways. I have zero sympathy for their customers by the way, but if they sue the adware companies, I'll take that as win.
In any case, the students were the ones who created the botnet, which really took this a step above what the adware companies were doing. I would not shed a tear if they received the maximum sentence, although I would rather see them brought in chains to computer ethics classes for the next 10 years to serve as an example.
The adware companies certainly share some liability (in addition to being scum), but the fact remains that out of everyone they paid to install this software, only a small group chose to do so in such an agressive and clearly pre-meditated manner. It would be quite interesting if they were hammered with several dozen indictments, ranging from fraud to obstruction of justice, but I don't think it will happen.
Surely the actual ICU equipment isn't networked at all
Sure it is. If someone flatlines, the attending gets a page. Furthermore, like someone said, it is pretty simple to throw 20 ekg's on a 24" lcd and monitor all the patients in the ward from a single location. And, of course, they have alarms that go off when someone flatlines too.
Now, there is a way of doing this and isolating it from the Internet (aka, The Right Way). There is also a Really Wrong, No Seriously, How Goddamn Stupid Do You Have To Be To Do It That Way.
I really don't know why the door access was compromised. Maybe they ran it over the same network, maybe their access server got hit by the adware, it ultimately doesn't matter. It should be on a seperate set of wires, and really, should be an almost standalone system.
Precisely. It sounds like (ok, this is going to be geeky as hell, but I'm going to do it anyways) someone could learn by watching a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica.
And I suppose they might need the internet for paging their doctors - since it is probably a third party company that has a laughably bad ("Oh look, we ported our paging app to java and can run it over the web! Goodie Golly!") interface - but I'm pretty sure it can be done a bit more elegantly and can be made a bit more resilient.
What the fuck their keycard access system was doing on the same network as some of the infected computers is a complete mystery to me though.
The students, clearly. Colt manufactures guns. Man opens fire in public with a Colt pistol. Who's at fault? The shooter, of course.
The difference is that colt doesn't pay people to fire their pistols in public. Now, this doesn't absolve the dumbass of any responsibility, but it sure as hell makes the adware company an accessory. Seriously, they didn't think anything was going on when someone gained 50,000 PCs in a couple of weeks? They knew and didn't give a shit because they were paid even more money by the people whose "content" (read: shit) they were serving up.
Kneecap 'em both (yes, there are more than 2 people involved) - and I mean this quite literally, this sort of shit would get nipped in the bud quite quickly if we went IRA on them and used a makita drill (or would it have to be Black and decker, you know, for the whole "made in america" thing.) A couple hundred companies should also be knocking on the adware companies' doors, "politely" asking for a refund and leaving letters from their lawyers.
And, to be quite honest, a couple sysadmins also need a kick in the ass with a steel tipped pointy boot. Why would your keycard system be connected to your network, especially in a hospital situation? To say nothing of the fact that the pager system got owned (from what I understand, pagers are sort of important to doctors in hospitals) and it seems that pretty much everything was disrupted because ~15% of their computers were infected. Not blaming them for the attacks, of course, but lets be serious, this was a pretty big screwup on their part. Then again, given hospital politics, it probably wasn't the sysadmin's fault, but a department head who has no training in IT, but does everything Toilet and Douche tells him to do.
Finally, id by some small chance, Christopher Maxwell is reading this, I can only hope that in 15 years you will remember your job at WalMart and recall how it was the best job you ever had. Don't drop the soap, bud.
Sounds like a good idea, but you simply underestimate the power and immunity from prosecution that these people have. For a good example of this - and a somewhat entertaining tale about corruption, lies and deceit, google around a bit for "New Rome". You will clearly see that these people are essentially untouchable by the courts. It is sad to say, but in many cases the courts are not an answer - just shutting up and accepting it is the common solution. The only alternative is the strategic use of blackmail or bullets, and most people aren't prepared to use either.
The limit for shaw is now 50 gigs a month, down from 80 and 120. And yes, they packet shape and I'm pretty sure do something with QoS on Vonage packets.
Of course, the DSL provider here (Telus) matched them almost immediately - I believe they changed their policies within a week. 30 gigs a month for the cheaper package (they don't show the limit to you in this package though) and 60 gigs for their "Enhanced" package. There are no other high speed providers in our area and even the most expensive business package is $160 a month and only offers 100 gigs of bandwidth. Besides, Telus is the company who censors sites it disagrees with - they blocked access to several union sites during a strike and disconnected the internet access of striking employees, so I probably won't switch to them.
I fully expect shaw to drop the limit to 40 gigs or so within a few months. And, by the way - these limits are continously decreasing for people who are locked into 2 year contracts, of course, they aren't allowed to switch without paying a large cancellation fee. The bottom line is that the customers gets screwed in the end.
Your question is invalid since it assumes their behaviour is bait and switch.
But it is (at least for new users). I completely agree with you on the point that for the users who had the TOS switched on them, Netflix's actions aren't bait and switch (I believe they even dropped the price when they adopted the new TOS which would give them further protection) However, Netflix still continues to attract customers with the promise of unlimited DVD rentals. More on this below.
Your current opinion is that NF were deliberately deceptive
Maybe they were, maybe not. I do know that even a year after this article was written and well after the settlement was agreed upon, their advertising still has many, many instances of "unlimited". That use of "unlimited" is the "bait", which brings potential customers in. You don't get to see the tos until you begin to sign up - and even then it is one of the last things you see. It really doesn't matter though, as the FTC has something to say about this sort of activity (it should be noted that they filed an amicus brief against the settlement, although it was mainly because the settlement was essentially a 2.5 million dollar advertising campaign)
(a) No statement or illustration should be used in any advertisement which creates a false impression of the grade, quality, make, value, currency of model, size, color, usability, or origin of the product offered, or which may otherwise misrepresent the product in such a manner that later, on disclosure of the true facts, the purchaser may be switched from the advertised product to another.
(b) Even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception.
And I realize that bait and switch has traditionally been used in frauds against people purchasing products, not services - but the laws against it still apply.
So yes, a company changing its terms slightly outside of a contract isn't illegal, as it is completely reasonable to assume that the terms and conditions will eventually change. It may be shady and upset the people using the service - especially when the costs of switching to a competitor are high (and if the "competitors" collude to match an ever decreasing level of service), but it happens quite frequently.
The thing is, when I had them and did this, each and absolutely every single time, 2 showed received within minutes of each other and the other one was delayed 10 hours or so. I can understand it happening once or twice, but a dozen+ times in a row? When I finally got rid of netflix, I had over an inch thick pile of spare envelopes.
Maybe, but bb's process was literally checking a box and hitting submit, they never cut off my service or anything. I'd have to say at least 1/2 did show up eventually. I think it is less theft and more "the envelopes suck and fall apart and the loose bits get collected and picked up every x weeks". Netflix had really good envelopes in the begining, but they seemed to get cheaper over time. BB's were usually really weak.
And yet, netflix continues to use "unlimited" in their advertising. Link. I guess that spyware companies aren't the only ones who hide things in their ToS or EUIA.
My experience is with the Canadian internet access industry - and mirrors (and, I believe, will predict) the netflix situation quite well.
Shaw (who provides cable internet) once advertised "unlimited" service. Once people started signing up, they realized that they weren't willing to actually offer unlimited service. Then they put a statement about "excessive usage" in the AUP - it wasn't defined, of course, but people still got nasty letters and the mouthbreathers who man their "excessive use" line even threatened to charge people for "excessive usage". These "excessive usage" fines were, of course, pulled completely out of their ass. No documentation could be found regarding when the limit was reached, what the overage charges were, etc, etc, but people were still threatened with, and possibly even were charged those fines. An almost magical fee, but one that would appear on your bill and would have to be paid, or your service would be disconnected and your account sent to collections. After several nasty letters from lawyers and possibly some lawsuits, Shaw finally decided to write down the bandwidth limit in their advertising, at almost the exact same time their competitors did the same. Sounds like a couple people had a meeting.
What you can clearly see is that not only was Shaw involved in false advertising, but it continued to engage in such criminal activity far after their illegal activities were exposed. Moreover, their actions clearly were to the detriment of the person buying the services. Furthermore, collusion - whether intentional or just the other company matching policies - between Shaw and its competitors has led to an continuously decreasing level of service for the end user and shaw has suffered virtually no consequences.
In the end, netflix will face virtually no consequences (and before anyone says anything about the settlement, please, don't waste your breath. Bumping your users to the next tier for a month - and not bumping them back down at the end - is undeniably a win win situation for netflix). Furthermore, the shady - if not outright fraudulent - actions of netflix in stating the return date of dvds*, has gone, and will go unpunished. In the end, blockbuster (ok it has) and the completion will eventually adopt a similar tos - putting in writing what it is doing - and the situation will only get worse as time goes on. Furthermore, "advanced throttling" - such as sending the dvds on time, but from a service center across the country - will become commonplace, since once something is in writing, it will be used.
And finally - and perhaps most importantly - "unlimited" will still be used in their advertising until a regulatory agency or a number of lawsuits convince them to change it - both Blockbuster and Netflix currently do on their websites - even though their ToS states that they throttle. And have no doubt, once one company changes it, the other will change their advertising within a month.
*If you're being throttled, if you send back 3 dvds - even 3 dvds in the same envelope - netflix will receive 2 a couple minutes apart and then "receive" the last one several hours later. Try it out;)
So, mensa master, your stunningly brilliant conclusion is that a company engaging in bait and switch tactics (which, is what this is, if you offer unlimited, you simply cannot "throttle") on an grand scale is completely fine, as long as the customer can terminate their contract without repercussions. I know this post is a bit acerbic, but your argument is complete and utter apologist horseshit.
Are people making too big a deal out of this? Probably, but if a company advertises something - they should actually do it or change their advertising. And no, there shouldn't be secret limits or anything like that.
Blockbuster also does this - basically, if you send 3 dvds back - even in the same envelope, blockbuster will "receive" 2 at x time and then "receive" the other one later.
We aren't stupid, so we can see that this is clearly bulllshit on their part.
As a result, you'll only get 2 dvds shipped out that day, and a third will ship a day later. That said, blockbuster is really forgiving about missing dvds (damn post office lost 15 or so in a couple months)
BTW if you want a free month with blockbuster and have had their service for a while (3 months in my case), go to the cancellation page and they will give you a free month or two. Not sure what netflix does for customer retention, but I'm sure it is something. The legal settlement with netflix is a joke, btw (google for details)
Also, for those with "long delays" for certain movies under netflix - try killing your queue and re-adding the delayed movie. Theory is that they have to send you something and you should get bumped. Of course, this does kill your queue...
Slashdot Mirror
It could also be because what DirectTV has for HD is... well... dismal and their customer service / retention / cancelation department won't give you a dime if you want to upgrade to HD (and their offerings suck and are expensive, besides).
This isn't to say dish is amazing, but it just goes to prove that some companies don't understand that.
They didn't release any tools or an SDK with this title - after they promised they would. Given that additional maps/mods can extend the lifetime of a game by 25% to 40% (think Half-Life/Counter-Strike...) they'd be crazy not to do that.
;)
;) Even the most addicted player probably won't buy more than 1 copy of the game - unless they are a cheating nub and get their key banned or lost their cd.
Actually, I think they would be crazy to release one.
This is from the "asshole scumbag beancounter's guide to selling games" but, hey, who runs activision?
When a new game comes out, people will buy it, especially if you get people to shill for you on newsgroups and pay a lot in marketing. This happens for pretty much any game you throw enough money at. Besides, Activision is kinda big and make a lot of games, so they have a vested interest to see that one of their games doesn't become too successful.
What it comes down do is this. Why would you let your customers make their own mods and play those instead of selling them a "completely" new game at full price every 6-8 months?
Added to this, keeping a game on the shelves costs money (if you look at it in terms of Y' of shelf space will make you $X if you sell an old game, or $4(X) if you have a new title) and you're going to have to support a lot more people (this includes servers, customer service, etc) if your game has been successful for years - especially if it is a really addictive game like CS
Counterstrike, Starcraft and EQ etc are a bit of an oddity too. Most games don't survive all that long and require only minor upkeep, heck, some even shut down completely. EQ and a few other games have started to charge monthly, which is one way to "save the company money", but it is also (hopefully) a way to get the companies to produce a game that people will actually want to play.
Not releasing an anti-cheat is also disgusting, but I'm not surprised. Anti-cheat is a joke for pretty much any game anyways, so this is more par for the course than anything else.
While the single-player aspect of this game is for the most part a great game
Really? I just finished it and thought the AI was dismally bad. I know bots still are pretty stupid, but seriously, it doesn't look like they put in any effort past "follow the human".
The gameplay wasn't all that great either, basically if you don't advance, the enemies keep magically replenishing. Also, the enemy can apparantly read minds, at least on the skill level I played. They will see (and attack) you before you can see them if you're covered by smoke, if you've flanked them, all of a sudden bots start running toward your position.
Your own bots will let the enemy walk right past them too, which is lame as hell when you realize it.
I don't believe the enemy bots even attempted a flanking maneuver, just stood far off and shot back. Sure, they did the whole "human wave" thing, but if it wasn't for the "mind reading" and "my bots ignore the enemy and let a kraut take me out", the game was surprisingly easy. Bots didn't use cover effectively, etc.
Came with my geforce 7800, so I'm not exactly crying (and the graphics were really good, I haven't gone "damn, that looks nice" at a game for a while now, the shadows do look awesome.)
Anything that pushes their customers to other ISPs is a good thing in my book. Although most will no doubt be pushed to the major providers, some will actually go with local companies and I think one of the best ways to keep customer hostile policies like "tiered internet", etc is to keep as many people as possible getting access through small companies and independents instead of large isps who have sociopathic beancounters that are given drugs to find new ways of screwing us, pissing us off and making an additional 12 cents a month for it. After all, those policies work best when there are no alternatives.
Then again, AOL has pretty awesome retention, years ago I used their service for free for well over a year by calling in every month and threatening to cancel. I suppose that may of have changed though.
You forgot to mention that the main reason the policies don't get implemented is because of rampant corruption in the local / regional governments.
Of course, China is hardly unique, but they do have a wee bit of a problem.
First off, the premium is $54.00, exactly. Not sure where you pulled over $75.00 from. A family of 3 or more costs $108.00.
The premium is also waived or cut if you don't make a lot of money - 100% is covered if you make under $20,000 a year and it goes up to $28,000 in steps. A lot of employers cover it because it, quite frankly, isn't all that much. Public assistance is a joke in the USA (at least in Oregon).
I've also lived in BC and I've lived in the states. Maybe some things have changed since 1997, but I know people who currently pay $800 a month for health insurance in the USA for their families.
Seeing a doctor in the USA right away is nearly impossible. The whole concept of a "walk in clinic" is foreign to them and 2 week waits to see a gp are common and even then, you pay a copay (on top of your insurance). Annual checkups aren't covered by many plans, so people don't do them, which leads to people finding that a minor problem has developed into a serious health condition that could of have easily been healed if detected earlier.
ER visits aren't free either, you will pay quite a bit in copays and whatever your hmo doesn't cover.
And on top of this is the prices for common medical procedures are vulgarly expensive. There are reasons for this, but the biggest (imho) is that everyone tries to get as much as they can from medicare and that brings all the prices up slowly. A procedure billed to medicare can be over 200% more expensive than one billed to an hmo (And the price to an uninsured person can be all over the board).
The cost for X-Rays and other procedures is also out of control. An X-Ray - given to an American in BC - without any insurance and in the ER of a hospital - is a whopping $42. The cost of an X-Ray in an American hospital is roughly 10 times that amount. And yes, you can walk into a hospital with a relatively minor injury like a broken arm and get treatment, unlike in some American hospitals where they will dump your ass onto the street. I'm not even going to start on the whole "if you get fired, you'll never get coverage again because you have a pre-existing condition" or the "don't even think of switching HMOs because you will be shitlisted because of your PEC, so suck up that rate increase and be our bitch" aspects of American health care either.
Yes, taxes are bullshit up in Canada (seriously, it is out of fucking control), but it isn't like you don't pay them in the USA either, but in the area of health care, I would much rather be in Canada than be in the USA.
It's not terrorism when we do it.
so, the situation is this: you submit to enumeration by the state or you are not allowed to leave the country
Just like in the Soviet Union. In the 70s and 80s people in England and many other countries looked down (and perhaps even scoffed at how oppresive it was) on the Soviets doing the exact same thing. Funny how little time has changed and it has become completely acceptable.
I'm sorry, but what? What are you on about? What do you think a free market is? Unbridled competition without state intervention (which, for the avoidance of doubt, includes the FCC), is exactly what the free market is.
I think that when people think of a "free market", they don't envision it as one where a single company owns all the lines at the very begining and regulations prevent new ISPs from running new lines.
In a true free market, the independent isps would be able to lay their own lines without interference from the city / state / county / country. Furthermore, the whole area of wireless and use of spectrum comes would need to be considered.
And besides, when your DSL companies and cable companies collude and keep the prices and level of service about the same, it might as well be a monopoly.
Most hospital patient tracking systems originated on DOS and then Windows computers
;)
Or some custom app written in 1982 that runs on a dying mainframe.
If a patient moves from Seattle to Los Angeles, their new doctor is expecting the exact same types of files on that patient, readable by the same software. So is that patient's insurance company. So are paramedics who may need to quickly assess a patient's history for things like drug allergies, etc. So are pharmacists.
You do realize that they already have that interoperability - in paper files?
The whole push for computerized records is fairly recent and complete conversion won't happen for a fair bit of time.
And you hit the nail on the head - instead of coding yet another window manager, or making yet another distro for home users, maybe a couple people should start coding something for the medical industry. Of course, this might not work so well when one of the developers realizes that billions can be made in this segment of the market.
He was using computers he did not own to defraud adware companies by generating false ad hits. This is a wellknown fraud dealing mostly with pay-per-click style ad schemes.
Please. The adware company itself makes money on every single ad display / clickthrough. They aren't victims here because they made a ton of money by being "victimized".
It might not be conspiracy to commit fraud, but if you are in a shady market and get paid for fraudulent clicks, it makes it reeaally easy to overlook suspicious behavior.
And, if anything, these problems stemmed from a piss poor network design. Sure, the users computers got rooted, but mission critical systems (I'd say keycard servers and the such are) should be designed with the assumption that the user's computers are compromised 100% of the time.
However, many hospitals are notoriously underfunded.
/., but let's be serious here for a bit. It ultimately doesn't matter what OS you run, some systems should be isolated from the common network because of their importance.
Haha, funny. The truth is that many hospitals want you to believe that they are underfunded, when in fact, they have more than enough money, the extra just goes into administration. Of course, IT budgets typically suck in hospitals (they have to keep up this image). It's sort of like running a non-profit, you have to toss the spare money around, but make it look like you really don't have any to spare.
In any case, they are a hospital that appears to be running Windows to control their sensitive security systems. Bad choice, and that alone warrants one finger pointed at the hospital, if it's true.
Look, I realize that it is fun to bash microsoft and all on
I'm pretty sure the keycard readers weren't running WinCE or XP (this isn't Alias, after all), and it sounds like they just didn't work because the network was getting DoS'ed.
If the keycard server got infected, sure, string them up, but the fact remains that your physical access servers should be isolated so securely that you could throw an unpatched copy of windows xp on them and nothing would happen to them. After all, every O/S has exploits, and clearly a software only solution isn't the way to go (yes, I realize IOS, etc, has exploits, but that risk can be minimized by using multiple layers of security - physical, seperate networks, appropriate firewall rules, and finally patching the OS, etc.)
Furthermore, due to regulations, you don't have all that many options about what apps you can run in a hospital. And, to be quite honest, what the other guy said about "another useless window manager" is quite appropriate in this case. As a result, you won't see much open source, etc, stuff being used in hospitals. You will see a ton of legacy / custom code, and a lot of windows apps, that's just how it is right now.
One thing that seems to be missing from a lot of posts is that the adware companies seem to be engaging in fraud against their customers. I don't know the details of the case, but if I paid $100,000 in commission to someone (especially if that someone is 20 years old) who installed my software on 50,000 computers in a short period of time, it might, perhaps, raise a few flags. It is difficult for me to believe that they missed it, which forces me to conclude that they knew something suspicious was going on, but were perfectly content to stay quiet and charge their customers anyways. I have zero sympathy for their customers by the way, but if they sue the adware companies, I'll take that as win.
In any case, the students were the ones who created the botnet, which really took this a step above what the adware companies were doing. I would not shed a tear if they received the maximum sentence, although I would rather see them brought in chains to computer ethics classes for the next 10 years to serve as an example.
The adware companies certainly share some liability (in addition to being scum), but the fact remains that out of everyone they paid to install this software, only a small group chose to do so in such an agressive and clearly pre-meditated manner. It would be quite interesting if they were hammered with several dozen indictments, ranging from fraud to obstruction of justice, but I don't think it will happen.
Surely the actual ICU equipment isn't networked at all
Sure it is. If someone flatlines, the attending gets a page. Furthermore, like someone said, it is pretty simple to throw 20 ekg's on a 24" lcd and monitor all the patients in the ward from a single location. And, of course, they have alarms that go off when someone flatlines too.
Now, there is a way of doing this and isolating it from the Internet (aka, The Right Way). There is also a Really Wrong, No Seriously, How Goddamn Stupid Do You Have To Be To Do It That Way.
I really don't know why the door access was compromised. Maybe they ran it over the same network, maybe their access server got hit by the adware, it ultimately doesn't matter. It should be on a seperate set of wires, and really, should be an almost standalone system.
Precisely. It sounds like (ok, this is going to be geeky as hell, but I'm going to do it anyways) someone could learn by watching a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica.
And I suppose they might need the internet for paging their doctors - since it is probably a third party company that has a laughably bad ("Oh look, we ported our paging app to java and can run it over the web! Goodie Golly!") interface - but I'm pretty sure it can be done a bit more elegantly and can be made a bit more resilient.
What the fuck their keycard access system was doing on the same network as some of the infected computers is a complete mystery to me though.
The students, clearly.
Colt manufactures guns. Man opens fire in public with a Colt pistol. Who's at fault? The shooter, of course.
The difference is that colt doesn't pay people to fire their pistols in public. Now, this doesn't absolve the dumbass of any responsibility, but it sure as hell makes the adware company an accessory. Seriously, they didn't think anything was going on when someone gained 50,000 PCs in a couple of weeks? They knew and didn't give a shit because they were paid even more money by the people whose "content" (read: shit) they were serving up.
Kneecap 'em both (yes, there are more than 2 people involved) - and I mean this quite literally, this sort of shit would get nipped in the bud quite quickly if we went IRA on them and used a makita drill (or would it have to be Black and decker, you know, for the whole "made in america" thing.)
A couple hundred companies should also be knocking on the adware companies' doors, "politely" asking for a refund and leaving letters from their lawyers.
And, to be quite honest, a couple sysadmins also need a kick in the ass with a steel tipped pointy boot. Why would your keycard system be connected to your network, especially in a hospital situation? To say nothing of the fact that the pager system got owned (from what I understand, pagers are sort of important to doctors in hospitals) and it seems that pretty much everything was disrupted because ~15% of their computers were infected.
Not blaming them for the attacks, of course, but lets be serious, this was a pretty big screwup on their part. Then again, given hospital politics, it probably wasn't the sysadmin's fault, but a department head who has no training in IT, but does everything Toilet and Douche tells him to do.
Finally, id by some small chance, Christopher Maxwell is reading this, I can only hope that in 15 years you will remember your job at WalMart and recall how it was the best job you ever had.
Don't drop the soap, bud.
Sounds like a good idea, but you simply underestimate the power and immunity from prosecution that these people have.
For a good example of this - and a somewhat entertaining tale about corruption, lies and deceit, google around a bit for "New Rome". You will clearly see that these people are essentially untouchable by the courts.
It is sad to say, but in many cases the courts are not an answer - just shutting up and accepting it is the common solution. The only alternative is the strategic use of blackmail or bullets, and most people aren't prepared to use either.
The limit for shaw is now 50 gigs a month, down from 80 and 120. And yes, they packet shape and I'm pretty sure do something with QoS on Vonage packets.
Of course, the DSL provider here (Telus) matched them almost immediately - I believe they changed their policies within a week. 30 gigs a month for the cheaper package (they don't show the limit to you in this package though) and 60 gigs for their "Enhanced" package. There are no other high speed providers in our area and even the most expensive business package is $160 a month and only offers 100 gigs of bandwidth.
Besides, Telus is the company who censors sites it disagrees with - they blocked access to several union sites during a strike and disconnected the internet access of striking employees, so I probably won't switch to them.
I fully expect shaw to drop the limit to 40 gigs or so within a few months.
And, by the way - these limits are continously decreasing for people who are locked into 2 year contracts, of course, they aren't allowed to switch without paying a large cancellation fee.
The bottom line is that the customers gets screwed in the end.
But it is (at least for new users). I completely agree with you on the point that for the users who had the TOS switched on them, Netflix's actions aren't bait and switch (I believe they even dropped the price when they adopted the new TOS which would give them further protection)
However, Netflix still continues to attract customers with the promise of unlimited DVD rentals. More on this below.
Your current opinion is that NF were deliberately deceptive
Maybe they were, maybe not. I do know that even a year after this article was written and well after the settlement was agreed upon, their advertising still has many, many instances of "unlimited".
That use of "unlimited" is the "bait", which brings potential customers in. You don't get to see the tos until you begin to sign up - and even then it is one of the last things you see. It really doesn't matter though, as the FTC has something to say about this sort of activity (it should be noted that they filed an amicus brief against the settlement, although it was mainly because the settlement was essentially a 2.5 million dollar advertising campaign)
From here.
Sec. 238.2 Initial offer.
(a) No statement or illustration should be used in any advertisement which creates a false impression of the grade, quality, make, value, currency of model, size, color, usability, or origin of the product offered, or which may otherwise misrepresent the product in such a manner that later, on disclosure of the true facts, the purchaser may be switched from the advertised product to another.
And I realize that bait and switch has traditionally been used in frauds against people purchasing products, not services - but the laws against it still apply.
So yes, a company changing its terms slightly outside of a contract isn't illegal, as it is completely reasonable to assume that the terms and conditions will eventually change. It may be shady and upset the people using the service - especially when the costs of switching to a competitor are high (and if the "competitors" collude to match an ever decreasing level of service), but it happens quite frequently.
The thing is, when I had them and did this, each and absolutely every single time, 2 showed received within minutes of each other and the other one was delayed 10 hours or so. I can understand it happening once or twice, but a dozen+ times in a row? When I finally got rid of netflix, I had over an inch thick pile of spare envelopes.
Maybe, but bb's process was literally checking a box and hitting submit, they never cut off my service or anything. I'd have to say at least 1/2 did show up eventually. I think it is less theft and more "the envelopes suck and fall apart and the loose bits get collected and picked up every x weeks". Netflix had really good envelopes in the begining, but they seemed to get cheaper over time. BB's were usually really weak.
And yet, netflix continues to use "unlimited" in their advertising. Link.
I guess that spyware companies aren't the only ones who hide things in their ToS or EUIA.
A very good comparison.
;)
My experience is with the Canadian internet access industry - and mirrors (and, I believe, will predict) the netflix situation quite well.
Shaw (who provides cable internet) once advertised "unlimited" service.
Once people started signing up, they realized that they weren't willing to actually offer unlimited service.
Then they put a statement about "excessive usage" in the AUP - it wasn't defined, of course, but people still got nasty letters and the mouthbreathers who man their "excessive use" line even threatened to charge people for "excessive usage". These "excessive usage" fines were, of course, pulled completely out of their ass. No documentation could be found regarding when the limit was reached, what the overage charges were, etc, etc, but people were still threatened with, and possibly even were charged those fines. An almost magical fee, but one that would appear on your bill and would have to be paid, or your service would be disconnected and your account sent to collections.
After several nasty letters from lawyers and possibly some lawsuits, Shaw finally decided to write down the bandwidth limit in their advertising, at almost the exact same time their competitors did the same. Sounds like a couple people had a meeting.
What you can clearly see is that not only was Shaw involved in false advertising, but it continued to engage in such criminal activity far after their illegal activities were exposed. Moreover, their actions clearly were to the detriment of the person buying the services. Furthermore, collusion - whether intentional or just the other company matching policies - between Shaw and its competitors has led to an continuously decreasing level of service for the end user and shaw has suffered virtually no consequences.
In the end, netflix will face virtually no consequences (and before anyone says anything about the settlement, please, don't waste your breath. Bumping your users to the next tier for a month - and not bumping them back down at the end - is undeniably a win win situation for netflix).
Furthermore, the shady - if not outright fraudulent - actions of netflix in stating the return date of dvds*, has gone, and will go unpunished. In the end, blockbuster (ok it has) and the completion will eventually adopt a similar tos - putting in writing what it is doing - and the situation will only get worse as time goes on. Furthermore, "advanced throttling" - such as sending the dvds on time, but from a service center across the country - will become commonplace, since once something is in writing, it will be used.
And finally - and perhaps most importantly - "unlimited" will still be used in their advertising until a regulatory agency or a number of lawsuits convince them to change it - both Blockbuster and Netflix currently do on their websites - even though their ToS states that they throttle. And have no doubt, once one company changes it, the other will change their advertising within a month.
*If you're being throttled, if you send back 3 dvds - even 3 dvds in the same envelope - netflix will receive 2 a couple minutes apart and then "receive" the last one several hours later. Try it out
Give 'em a ring.
1-888-638-3549
1-800-290-4518
M-F 6AM-7PM, Sa-Su 6AM-2:30PM
So, mensa master, your stunningly brilliant conclusion is that a company engaging in bait and switch tactics (which, is what this is, if you offer unlimited, you simply cannot "throttle") on an grand scale is completely fine, as long as the customer can terminate their contract without repercussions.
I know this post is a bit acerbic, but your argument is complete and utter apologist horseshit.
Are people making too big a deal out of this? Probably, but if a company advertises something - they should actually do it or change their advertising. And no, there shouldn't be secret limits or anything like that.
Blockbuster also does this - basically, if you send 3 dvds back - even in the same envelope, blockbuster will "receive" 2 at x time and then "receive" the other one later.
We aren't stupid, so we can see that this is clearly bulllshit on their part.
As a result, you'll only get 2 dvds shipped out that day, and a third will ship a day later. That said, blockbuster is really forgiving about missing dvds (damn post office lost 15 or so in a couple months)
BTW if you want a free month with blockbuster and have had their service for a while (3 months in my case), go to the cancellation page and they will give you a free month or two.
Not sure what netflix does for customer retention, but I'm sure it is something. The legal settlement with netflix is a joke, btw (google for details)
Also, for those with "long delays" for certain movies under netflix - try killing your queue and re-adding the delayed movie. Theory is that they have to send you something and you should get bumped. Of course, this does kill your queue...