When patients routinely ask the doctor "Okay, what will that cost?", then we'll start to see some significant downward pressure that begins to at least contain the growth of health care spending, and perhaps even starts to reduce costs.
Go ask a doctor "Okay, what will that cost?" and then get back to us.
Been doing it a lot for the last two years, through my daughter's two hospitalizations, and my wife's diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. It works well.
This makes absolutely no sense. People with insurance, high deductible or not, generally do not question the costs of remaining in good health.
I sure as hell do, ever since I switched to a high-deductible plan. And the doctors really go out of their way to find the most cost-effective approaches when the patient is worried about the bill.
Moreover, even when there are multiple insurance companies, it's generally very costly for them to send people around checking out all of the different options for all of the different hospitals to determine what they'll pay for what.
The competition needs to be pushed out a level: to the patient. Patients need to have a stake in the cost of their own treatment, and they need to have the ability to easily compare prices between competing providers (hospitals/physicians). It's the decentralization of choice that makes markets work well. Centralized choice is better than no choice, but not nearly as efficient as decentralized choice.
This, in fact, is the core problem with our healthcare system, and every other, including the centralized ones. Everyone is experiencing massive cost inflation, and it's precisely because the end-customers are insulated from the cost of their own health care decisions. All patients want the most effective test/treatment available, regardless of whether it's only 10% better than another option that costs a third as much. Providers, for their part, are both morally and financially motivated to go for the better and more expensive approach. Morally because it's the best treatment for the patient and financially for obvious reasons. The only one who has any incentive to keep costs down is the insurance company. And if they're actually competing for customers, then they have a counter-incentive to keep the patient happy, which means ever-increasing costs.
A national, single-payer system as envisioned by the left just exacerbates this problem because it even further separates the patients from any concern about the costs of their care. It must, therefore, replace patient-driven cost-control with centrally-managed cost control, a.k.a. rationing. But that runs into the same problem the insurance companies have with their cost-control efforts: It makes the customer mad. In the case of a private insurer, that anger may lead to lost business. In the case of a nationalized system it's even worse, because it leads to votes to "expand and improve" healthcare... and we'll figure out how to pay for it later.
What we need is to get patients back in the loop. High-deductible health insurance so that routine expenses are paid out of pocket should be the norm, not the exception. For more expensive treatment, the patient should still have to pay a portion, though obviously it has to decline fairly quickly as costs rise.
When patients routinely ask the doctor "Okay, what will that cost?", then we'll start to see some significant downward pressure that begins to at least contain the growth of health care spending, and perhaps even starts to reduce costs.
How to reconcile that with the desire to make health care more widely accessible is a challenge, but not an insuperable one. But that's for another post.
Every time I see a picture of it, I think how they could have designed it a bit more ergonomically. It looks like a committees designed each part without talking to each other.
Wait... you want an unmanned robot that's on a planet no human has visited to be a more comfortable workstation?
I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.
They want it, let them write it and specify the terms. You just need to read it to make sure that it doesn't limit your ability to continue giving the code away.
I'd let them pick the dollar amount for the licensing fee, too. Tell them to make a proposal, on both fee and terms, and you'll decide if it's acceptable. Odds are they'll offer you terms and money in roughly the same ballpark as what commercial software of the same type would cost.
Be certain that you own 100% of the code though. You don't want to get yourself in trouble for selling someone else's property.
Seriously, once you get to 1 mbit, web browsing is about as good as it gets. Like blinking twice as fast, you simply don't notice.
Unless you're into YouTube HD, in which case 4 mbit will be noticeable.
Unless you like, you know, download files.
Actually, I have 6 Mbps down and it's fine. What I need improved is my upstream bandwidth. I only get about 400 Kbps, and that's barely usable for my over-the-Internet backups. The backup of my photos has been running for over a month now, and has another month to go. I'd really like to back up my DV, but it's just impractical.
GNU tar defaults to stdin/stdout if the TAPE environment variable is unset. It's not good to rely on that in scripts that need to be portable but it's handy on the command line.
The only thing I pay for is my domain name registration (I think it was $4 per year last time I renewed). I use a free DNS service, and use Google Apps to host my e-mail.
Having your own domain name costs next to nothing.
Seriously - how many people are so eager to watch the released movies that they can't wait a month but weren't going to buy the movie? Yeah so they are going to piss off a lot of people just so they can pick up a tiny portion of the market?
Agreed.
The way I see it, there are movies that are worth seeing in the theater and buying for re-watching, there are movies worth seeing in the theater, once, and there are movies worth renting. The three sets are almost disjoint, and there is certainly no overlap between the "worth buying" and "worth renting" sets.
They should use the method from Vernor Vinge's novel "Rainbow's End", where the books are fed into what is essentially a giant chipper/shredder. The shredded pages are then blown through a tunnel studded with cameras, swirled around so that every side of every piece of paper is photographed at some point, and then all of the images are reassembled to form complete images of every page. At the end of the tunnel is an incinerator which burns the shredded paper.
In short, there is an RSA break, as we have always known, but it is only practical for small keys. The definition of "small keys" has just been updated.
Agreed, with one small caveat regarding terminology.
In cryptographic circles, brute force (which factorization is, for RSA) is not considered a "break" of the algorithm. So it would be correct to say that RSA-768 has been shown to be weak, but if you say it's broken people will tend to think you mean some weakness other than practicality of brute force.
That nit aside, your characterization that we've just had the definition of "small keys" updated is spot on.
That is like saying RSA-16 (if such a thing existed) is not broken because the fasted way of cracking it is factorization. Brute force is a legitimate form of cryptoanalysis, particularly when it is computationally feasible. Calling an encryption scheme "broken" when an attack such as this is demonstrated is quite reasonable, no matter how inelegant you may find the attack.
Suggesting that DES is not broken is very silly because "not being broken" implies on some level that it is still acceptable to use.
Not at all.
You're assuming there is only a single definition of "broken", which is absolutely not the case in cryptography. The definition you're using is what cryptographers would call a "practical break" and it is almost orthogonal to the definitions that cryptographers normally use. Many cryptographic breaks are not practical, for example, but they're still considered perfectly valid breaks. On the other hand many unbroken ciphers exist which are worthless in practical terms, such as RSA-16.
DES falls somewhere in between. It's not worthless in practical terms, since the effort required to break it is high enough for some purposes, but it has relatively little security value in general. However, the fact that DES is not cryptographically broken does have significant meaning -- because it enables us to have confidence that 3DES is secure. I mention this to make the point that cryptographers' definitions of "broken" (there are many) do have practical implications.
Testing large numbers for primality is time consuming, but quick tests can eliminate nearly all composite numbers.
More precisely probabilistic primality testing can be used to ensure that a number is not composite to any required degree of certainty. For example, with the Miller-Rabin test, each time you run the test you have a 3/4 chance of discovering that the number is not prime (assuming it's not). So, you run the test enough time to achieve the degree of certainty you desire. If you run it 100 times and each time the result is "prime", then there is only a 1 in 10^-13 chance that it is composite. Given that level of assurance, it's very reasonable to simply say "it's prime".
If it's not prime then the key will be significantly easier to break, but we just ensure that the odds of that are negligible and go about our business.
2. Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector
Cite?
I'm something of a firearms enthusiast and I've never heard of any firearm design which has eliminated the need for a substantial amount of steel in the chamber and barrel.
So one pirate can eliminate the revenue for a work completely.
Got any examples where that has happened?
I can point out many examples where the copyright holder made the material available for free and still made money by selling the same thing. In fact, I can point to a few examples where they found that giving it away for free increased sales.
I haven't seen any examples of where a freely available work that had non-trivial market value before being offered gratis became worthless when it could be obtained gratis. It seems to defy economics, but really it just shows that price is not the only consideration buyers consider.
So when my grandmother wants to add a network printer to her home network, instead of just plugging the thing in and printing, you want her to:
- Hope that her ISP is giving her a large enough block of addresses so she doesn't have to mess around with multiple subnets
- Find out what the ip for the device is
- Build firewall table rules to prevent outside access/add all the IP's of the other home devices to a whitelist
- Build routing tables so the traffic doesn't try to leave the network and traverse to the ISP
Don't be ridiculous.
Your grandma would just plug the thing in and it would work.
As far as the large-enough block of IPs, the smallest IPv6 block used for a subnet (even a "subnet" containing a single host) is a/64, meaning it contains 2^64 addresses. No worries about not having enough.
As for the rest, it would work exactly as NAT does now. Your NATed devices are not prevented from leaving the local network and reaching out to the Internet at large. What's not allowed is for something out in the world to initiate a connection to your device. Stateful inbound-blocking firewalls work exactly the same way. Connections from outside-in are rejected. Connections from inside-out are allowed. The only difference is that the router doesn't have to edit the source address and port.
But I guess if you really want your asshole ISP to control how users access each one of your internal devices, then so be it.
What would the ISP have to do with it?
We will see v6 (or 7, etc.) deployment eventually, but we will also see NAT stick around as well.
No, we won't. NAT offers absolutely no value for IPv6. It will die, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Well, if the router config still has the default password, he logs into the router and modifies the firewall to allow access to what he wants.
No, you can't log into a consumer-grade NAT/firewall via the public interface, you have to be on a local interface.
That's not actually true. I have a Linksys router which does allow HTTPS connections from the outside to the configuration interface. Hopefully not by default; I don't recall.
In any case, how is this any different from a device of the same class that provides a stateless firewall without NAT?
It's the firewall that provides the security, not the NAT.
Slashdot Mirror
When patients routinely ask the doctor "Okay, what will that cost?", then we'll start to see some significant downward pressure that begins to at least contain the growth of health care spending, and perhaps even starts to reduce costs.
Go ask a doctor "Okay, what will that cost?" and then get back to us.
Been doing it a lot for the last two years, through my daughter's two hospitalizations, and my wife's diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. It works well.
This makes absolutely no sense. People with insurance, high deductible or not, generally do not question the costs of remaining in good health.
I sure as hell do, ever since I switched to a high-deductible plan. And the doctors really go out of their way to find the most cost-effective approaches when the patient is worried about the bill.
Moreover, even when there are multiple insurance companies, it's generally very costly for them to send people around checking out all of the different options for all of the different hospitals to determine what they'll pay for what.
The competition needs to be pushed out a level: to the patient. Patients need to have a stake in the cost of their own treatment, and they need to have the ability to easily compare prices between competing providers (hospitals/physicians). It's the decentralization of choice that makes markets work well. Centralized choice is better than no choice, but not nearly as efficient as decentralized choice.
This, in fact, is the core problem with our healthcare system, and every other, including the centralized ones. Everyone is experiencing massive cost inflation, and it's precisely because the end-customers are insulated from the cost of their own health care decisions. All patients want the most effective test/treatment available, regardless of whether it's only 10% better than another option that costs a third as much. Providers, for their part, are both morally and financially motivated to go for the better and more expensive approach. Morally because it's the best treatment for the patient and financially for obvious reasons. The only one who has any incentive to keep costs down is the insurance company. And if they're actually competing for customers, then they have a counter-incentive to keep the patient happy, which means ever-increasing costs.
A national, single-payer system as envisioned by the left just exacerbates this problem because it even further separates the patients from any concern about the costs of their care. It must, therefore, replace patient-driven cost-control with centrally-managed cost control, a.k.a. rationing. But that runs into the same problem the insurance companies have with their cost-control efforts: It makes the customer mad. In the case of a private insurer, that anger may lead to lost business. In the case of a nationalized system it's even worse, because it leads to votes to "expand and improve" healthcare... and we'll figure out how to pay for it later.
What we need is to get patients back in the loop. High-deductible health insurance so that routine expenses are paid out of pocket should be the norm, not the exception. For more expensive treatment, the patient should still have to pay a portion, though obviously it has to decline fairly quickly as costs rise.
When patients routinely ask the doctor "Okay, what will that cost?", then we'll start to see some significant downward pressure that begins to at least contain the growth of health care spending, and perhaps even starts to reduce costs.
How to reconcile that with the desire to make health care more widely accessible is a challenge, but not an insuperable one. But that's for another post.
Every time I see a picture of it, I think how they could have designed it a bit more ergonomically. It looks like a committees designed each part without talking to each other.
Wait... you want an unmanned robot that's on a planet no human has visited to be a more comfortable workstation?
I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.
They want it, let them write it and specify the terms. You just need to read it to make sure that it doesn't limit your ability to continue giving the code away.
I'd let them pick the dollar amount for the licensing fee, too. Tell them to make a proposal, on both fee and terms, and you'll decide if it's acceptable. Odds are they'll offer you terms and money in roughly the same ballpark as what commercial software of the same type would cost.
Be certain that you own 100% of the code though. You don't want to get yourself in trouble for selling someone else's property.
I posted about this on another forum, where someone mentioned that Qwest offers FIOS service in Sandy. He didn't know the speed, though.
What about UTOPIA?
Seriously, once you get to 1 mbit, web browsing is about as good as it gets. Like blinking twice as fast, you simply don't notice. Unless you're into YouTube HD, in which case 4 mbit will be noticeable.
Unless you like, you know, download files.
Actually, I have 6 Mbps down and it's fine. What I need improved is my upstream bandwidth. I only get about 400 Kbps, and that's barely usable for my over-the-Internet backups. The backup of my photos has been running for over a month now, and has another month to go. I'd really like to back up my DV, but it's just impractical.
An F22 is just a little bit harder to buy, though.
GNU tar defaults to stdin/stdout if the TAPE environment variable is unset. It's not good to rely on that in scripts that need to be portable but it's handy on the command line.
Screens will always be the weak point until we get that transparent aluminum out there
You mean like this transparent aluminum (oxide)?
Really? Pretty much everyone with any tech savvy abandoned aol years ago.
Pretty much anyone with any tech savvy avoided AOL from the beginning.
The only thing I pay for is my domain name registration (I think it was $4 per year last time I renewed). I use a free DNS service, and use Google Apps to host my e-mail.
Having your own domain name costs next to nothing.
TFA says that OpenGL not only does everything Direct3D does today, but things that Direct3D doesn't yet do. Is the author lying?
You may be right about the shredda. I don't remember for sure, and don't have the book handy.
Seriously - how many people are so eager to watch the released movies that they can't wait a month but weren't going to buy the movie? Yeah so they are going to piss off a lot of people just so they can pick up a tiny portion of the market?
Agreed.
The way I see it, there are movies that are worth seeing in the theater and buying for re-watching, there are movies worth seeing in the theater, once, and there are movies worth renting. The three sets are almost disjoint, and there is certainly no overlap between the "worth buying" and "worth renting" sets.
That's insufficiently destructive.
They should use the method from Vernor Vinge's novel "Rainbow's End", where the books are fed into what is essentially a giant chipper/shredder. The shredded pages are then blown through a tunnel studded with cameras, swirled around so that every side of every piece of paper is photographed at some point, and then all of the images are reassembled to form complete images of every page. At the end of the tunnel is an incinerator which burns the shredded paper.
The books are gone.
In short, there is an RSA break, as we have always known, but it is only practical for small keys. The definition of "small keys" has just been updated.
Agreed, with one small caveat regarding terminology.
In cryptographic circles, brute force (which factorization is, for RSA) is not considered a "break" of the algorithm. So it would be correct to say that RSA-768 has been shown to be weak, but if you say it's broken people will tend to think you mean some weakness other than practicality of brute force.
That nit aside, your characterization that we've just had the definition of "small keys" updated is spot on.
That is like saying RSA-16 (if such a thing existed) is not broken because the fasted way of cracking it is factorization. Brute force is a legitimate form of cryptoanalysis, particularly when it is computationally feasible. Calling an encryption scheme "broken" when an attack such as this is demonstrated is quite reasonable, no matter how inelegant you may find the attack.
Suggesting that DES is not broken is very silly because "not being broken" implies on some level that it is still acceptable to use.
Not at all.
You're assuming there is only a single definition of "broken", which is absolutely not the case in cryptography. The definition you're using is what cryptographers would call a "practical break" and it is almost orthogonal to the definitions that cryptographers normally use. Many cryptographic breaks are not practical, for example, but they're still considered perfectly valid breaks. On the other hand many unbroken ciphers exist which are worthless in practical terms, such as RSA-16.
DES falls somewhere in between. It's not worthless in practical terms, since the effort required to break it is high enough for some purposes, but it has relatively little security value in general. However, the fact that DES is not cryptographically broken does have significant meaning -- because it enables us to have confidence that 3DES is secure. I mention this to make the point that cryptographers' definitions of "broken" (there are many) do have practical implications.
Testing large numbers for primality is time consuming, but quick tests can eliminate nearly all composite numbers.
More precisely probabilistic primality testing can be used to ensure that a number is not composite to any required degree of certainty. For example, with the Miller-Rabin test, each time you run the test you have a 3/4 chance of discovering that the number is not prime (assuming it's not). So, you run the test enough time to achieve the degree of certainty you desire. If you run it 100 times and each time the result is "prime", then there is only a 1 in 10^-13 chance that it is composite. Given that level of assurance, it's very reasonable to simply say "it's prime".
If it's not prime then the key will be significantly easier to break, but we just ensure that the odds of that are negligible and go about our business.
2. Firearms can be achieved with plastics now which would not come up in a metal detector
Cite?
I'm something of a firearms enthusiast and I've never heard of any firearm design which has eliminated the need for a substantial amount of steel in the chamber and barrel.
mDNS.
So one pirate can eliminate the revenue for a work completely.
Got any examples where that has happened?
I can point out many examples where the copyright holder made the material available for free and still made money by selling the same thing. In fact, I can point to a few examples where they found that giving it away for free increased sales.
I haven't seen any examples of where a freely available work that had non-trivial market value before being offered gratis became worthless when it could be obtained gratis. It seems to defy economics, but really it just shows that price is not the only consideration buyers consider.
So when my grandmother wants to add a network printer to her home network, instead of just plugging the thing in and printing, you want her to:
- Hope that her ISP is giving her a large enough block of addresses so she doesn't have to mess around with multiple subnets
- Find out what the ip for the device is
- Build firewall table rules to prevent outside access/add all the IP's of the other home devices to a whitelist
- Build routing tables so the traffic doesn't try to leave the network and traverse to the ISP
Don't be ridiculous.
Your grandma would just plug the thing in and it would work.
As far as the large-enough block of IPs, the smallest IPv6 block used for a subnet (even a "subnet" containing a single host) is a /64, meaning it contains 2^64 addresses. No worries about not having enough.
As for the rest, it would work exactly as NAT does now. Your NATed devices are not prevented from leaving the local network and reaching out to the Internet at large. What's not allowed is for something out in the world to initiate a connection to your device. Stateful inbound-blocking firewalls work exactly the same way. Connections from outside-in are rejected. Connections from inside-out are allowed. The only difference is that the router doesn't have to edit the source address and port.
But I guess if you really want your asshole ISP to control how users access each one of your internal devices, then so be it.
What would the ISP have to do with it?
We will see v6 (or 7, etc.) deployment eventually, but we will also see NAT stick around as well.
No, we won't. NAT offers absolutely no value for IPv6. It will die, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Well, if the router config still has the default password, he logs into the router and modifies the firewall to allow access to what he wants.
No, you can't log into a consumer-grade NAT/firewall via the public interface, you have to be on a local interface.
That's not actually true. I have a Linksys router which does allow HTTPS connections from the outside to the configuration interface. Hopefully not by default; I don't recall.
In any case, how is this any different from a device of the same class that provides a stateless firewall without NAT?
It's the firewall that provides the security, not the NAT.