Even if only one of 100,000 who experienced this problem (a reasonable figure, I think - the optometrist in my case said it happened occasionally on glasses), it would still be a fairly large headache for Apple to keep ahead of.
Apple's stated goal is to capture 1% of the market by the end of 2008. That's roughly ten million phones. If your 1 in 100,000 figure is correct, that means there'd be one hundred iPhones having that problem. One hundred out of a run of ten million is probably not "a fairly large headache".
The number of malpractice filings 1992-2001 was pretty much constant (around 1% net decrease over that period), and over that period 54% of malpractice judgments came from 5% of doctors.
I'm willing to bet we would be paying half the current amount for our health care too had it not be for all the frivolous litigation.
Amusing statistic: the size of the average malpractice award in the United States has grown pretty steadily at between one and four percent each year for the past fifteen years or so. In the same period, the average premium for malpractice insurance has often grown by double-digit percentages (in some cases as high as 25 percent in a single year). Even more amusing: malpractice premiums vary on a state-by-state basis, but tort-reform laws and malpractice damage caps in several states have had little to no effect on the rate at which premiums rise in those states.
Somebody's making a lot of money, and for once it isn't the lawyers; over the same periods that premiums have risen, the property and casualty firms which insure doctors have been reporting massive profit increases.
I wondered who'd be the first to launch an ad hominem attack - and look, right in the first comment.
How about we try it this way:
Maynor claims to be a professional security researcher. One of the cornerstones of professionalism in that field is responsible disclosure of discovered vulnerabilities. Another is full disclosure of vulnerability details after a vendor has had a reasonable amount of time to correct the vulnerability. Yet another is working to advance the overall state of computer security. But Maynor has a track record of irresponsible, partial-at-best disclosure: he claims discovery of vulnerabilities while proclaiming that he will not report them to the vendor, and strives to hide the details of his discoveries from open review by his peers in the security community (for example, witness the endless controversy over the alleged MacBook wifi hack, all of which could have been settled quickly and objectively by simple peer review of the exploit he claimed to have used). And none of this can, so far as I can see, be construed as advancing the state of computer security in any fashion.
In other words, there is no sense of the word "professionalism" for his field which seems to be reasonably applicable to Maynor. Before you go screaming "ad hominem" or "Apple Fanboi", take note of two things:
All I've criticized here are the man's methods, not the man himself. I don't even speculate to his motives for operating the way he does.
I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro, and I do like both it and the operating system it runs, but neither are particularly essential to me -- at this point I can move between (Unix-y) operating systems with relative ease, and occasionally do as needed (prior to this MacBook, I used various forms of Linux exclusively for about six years, and still use them on a regular basis. The only OS I have a prejudice against is Windows, and I've even got that available, virtualized, when I need to test things in it).
The iPhone keyboard is supposed to be correctional and make adjustments as you type, accounting for slightly missed keys
Indeed. Apple were among the first to get this sort of "correctional" interface behavior right in other spheres (e.g., even early versions of the Mac OS allowed you to "stray" a little when moving from a menu item into its sub-menu; rather than requiring the cursor to remain precisely within the bounds of the selected menu item, the mouse could venture outside a small distance -- so long as it continued generally moving toward the submenu -- without causing the submenu to disappear).
Of course you will. The speculated advantages you can pass judgement on now; the speculated disadvantages you should wait to pass judgement on. That's what it means to be open-minded regarding Apple, right?
No, it simply means I haven't come to a conclusion and likely won't until/unless there's solid evidence of actual use of the iPhone to back it up. In the meantime, I'm willing to grant some charity based on the lack of available evidence and the arguments I'm able to come up with on each side.
As for your actual points:
Why do you assume that lack of a stylus has any relevance to the question? I've used touchscreen interfaces which had no stylus and offered no tactile feedback, and had no problems with them; so have many others. Given this historical data, I'm willing to entertain the notion that the iPhone's interface won't suffer unduly from the lack of tactile feedback.
There are not that many functions advertised for the iPhone which would be useful without looking at the phone; dialing is perhaps the biggest and perhaps the only one where "eyes-free" use is desirable, and then the desirability is subjective; again, in my own use I often look at the phone when dialing or even speed dialing, to ensure I've dialed correctly. No amount of tactile feedback will change that for me. So we're locked on subjectivity, which means no useful argument can be made one way or another.
As others have pointed out, areas of the iPhone which are used for the screen are replaced with physical controls on many other phones; the tradeoff of "my fingers aren't covering up the screen" is "my screen is smaller". A larger screen size may well have usability dividends which offset the need to occasionally use part of it for text input, and until we actually see the iPhone in general use it's not possible to tell.
So. Do you want to have a constructive debate based on what we already know about the iPhone and about similar touch-screen technologies, or do you want to take back-handed swipes at someone? I can do either, but I'd like to know up-front where we're going with this.
You also assume that everyone agrees with RMS's explanations and redefinitions; some of us (who release code under the BSD license) don't; adding a restriction takes away "freedom" not adds to it
You might want to read the BSD license very carefully; it's more viral than people commonly believe.
Lack of tactile feedback in the UI. I.e. you have to look at it and concentrate on the UI to use it.
I've been thinking about this, and I really can't see anything to be concerned about. Several things come to mind:
Does the mouse on your computer provide tactile feedback when you move the cursor over a button? Trackpads or pointers on laptops? Do any other touchscreens (e.g., in grocery store checkout lines) do so? Do any PDAs with touchscreens provide tactile feedback? I can't think of many, if any, that do, and that doesn't seem to have hindered them.
How often do you actually use a phone without looking at it? Even when I'm just hitting speed dial buttons I'm usually looking at the phone to double-check that it's calling the right person. Especially relevant: how often do you use advanced features like web surfing or text messaging/email without looking at the phone? Unless you've got a screen reader in there, don't you kind of have to look at it to use those features? Ditto for watching video on a handheld device.
I'll wait until I actually see one in action to pass judgment, but I'm a lot more skeptical of the "no tactile feedback" argument than I used to be...
Random other person X takes a picture of you. Maybe you were standing in a public place and didn't know your picture was being taken. Person X uploads the photo and tags it with your name. Other than spending your entire life outside of publicly-viewable physical locations and simultaneously ensuring that no-one knows your name (so that if they do manage to get a picture they don't know how to tag it), what sort of control do you have over that?
I've read through the first five or so chapters from the Erlang book (it's almost impossible to find in the States, but Amazon.co.uk will print it for you on-demand) but haven't done much work with it other than a few toy programs.
Yeah, I've been doing tutorials and bought the beta PDF edition of Joe Armstrong's book, but at one point I stopped to go back and do The Little Schemer to refresh my ability to frame everything in terms of recursion on lists. Haven't gotten back to Erlang yet, but I've been keeping an eye out for something useful to do with it as a first non-trivial application. You'd think it'd be easy for a web-dev geek to come up with problems that are well-suited to the pseudo-functional concurrent style, but it's harder than it looks:)
I've also been playing off and on with Scala, which is a pretty neat little language; it runs on the JVM (and has seamless importing of Java classes, which is quite nice), but has first-class and higher-order functions, anonymous functions, pattern matching (including pattern matching on classes, which is wicked cool), list comprehensions and the ability to use either Java's Thread API or its own Actor-based concurrency model. It's definitely worth looking at if you've been enjoying Erlang.
By the way, do you happen to know of shops running Erlang? I've heard that Amazon is using it, but I don't know of anyone in the Chicago area using Erlang other than Orbitz.
Not off the top of my head, but I'm also somewhat sidetracked by an ongoing effort to pull the news industry off Java and onto Python:)
Many things can't be done simultanously, many side effects can occur if you don't take care and generally, programmers don't really enjoy multithreaded applications, for exactly those reasons.
This is why the languages which have the highest level of "enjoyment" for concurrent tasks tend to move further along the spectrum toward pure functional programming, and partially or completely ban side effects and mutable state (e.g., Erlang forbids shared state in its concurrency model, and also forbids reassignment).
You may want to look into Erlang, which does two things that will interest you:
Concurrency is handled by lightweight thread-like pseudo-processes passing messages to one another, and supported directly in the language.
Shared state between these processes is absolutely forbidden.
There are still concurrent problems which are hard, but generally it boils down to the problem being hard instead of the language making the problem harder to express.
All they have to do now is change the icon from the AIM-ish one to something like a carrier pigeon (guessing that's where they got the name from).
Nope. In linguistics, a "pidgin" is the sort of simplified hybrid language that evolves when two groups with different languages end up in close contact with each other and need to communicate.
There is a startup called potsful which is doing something like this for real -- you can tie an email address to a postal address, and they'll print and mail to the postal address anything you send to the email address.
I have a feeling that the target market for the Apple TV is largely made up of people who already have some sort of DVR in their lives, so it doesn't make much sense to try to sell them something they already have. It does make sense to try to sell them a box which can do things the DVR can't.
And just for the sake of it, since most people don't know about COBRA:
Usually when you quit or lose your job, your health insurance terminates at the same time, and if you start a new job with insurance it won't kick in until you've been working there a little while (90 days seemed to be fairly common when I was doing this, but some companies start your coverage earlier than that), so there's a period when you're uninsured. COBRA gives you the option of keeping the insurance you had with the previous employer -- even after you're no longer employed by them -- for up to 18 months; the catch is that you pay the full premium (typically your employer subsidizes the insurance by paying part of the premium and taking the rest out of your paycheck). When you leave your job you'll receive some paperwork from the insurer with information about how to do this.
Also, keep in mind that most employer-provided group health plans don't begin offering coverage until you've been working there for 90 days, so unless you pick up COBRA from a previous employer you'll almost inevitably have a break in coverage that's too long for the portability bits to kick in.
What if you switch jobs twice within a month? Assuming you've had continuous coverage between the three insurers, would the current insurer only reduce the "claim denial" period by the time you've had coverage through the most recent insurer, or would it be by the total time you've had continuous coverage?
No matter how many times you switch, the insurance you end up on has to reduce the time in which it denies pre-existing conditions by the amount of time you had continuous coverage prior to starting with them; "continuous coverage" means no break in coverage longer than 63 days. So if you bounced between three, four, five or a dozen different insurers, so long as you had at least 12 or 18 months of continuous coverage before starting with the one you finally land on, they wouldn't be able to deny pre-existing conditions.
This is the "P" (for "portability") in "HIPAA", and you wouldn't believe how many people don't know about it...
Applying to a new insurance is a very long process, and that slowness is deliberate to prevent some scams.
Depends on the insurer. I worked with group plans offered by employers, which don't have a choice about whether to accept you or not and generally start your coverage 90 days after you begin working for the employer. Private plans may vary. My comment about "scamming" was that it's just plain idiotic to avoid treating a serious medical condition so you can trick an insurance plan.
that there are no hard and fast rules about conditions with complications. Instead, you make your decisions on a whim, based on the superior knowledge instilled into you by a two months crash course.
No, you didn't read a word I wrote. An insurer who can deny a pre-existing condition can deny the entire condition, including any complications. Spotting what's related to what is a combination of the claims examiner recognizing patterns of conditions (which, believe me, isn't hard in about 90% of cases -- again, examiners see a hundred more more claims a day, they learn how to spot this stuff), and the insurer having licensed medial professionals on staff who can answer questions when it's not obvious whether two things are related.
But keep right on living in your little fantasy world if you want to.
If you have a medical condition, and that condition wasn't treated during the six months prior to the beginning of your coverage, then your insurer can't consider it "pre-existing". Setting aside the fact that it's just stupid to tell a doctor not to treat something so you can try to scam the insurance company, and that no doctor in his or her right mind would do that, most of the expensive ailments will either kill you or come close to killing you if you leave them that long, so don't even think about it.
Complications which stem from a primary condition can be tracked, and usually it's fairly obvious what's related and what's not; ICD codes differentiate acute and chronic conditions, and for cases where it's not as obvious that two things are related, most insurers have MDs and RNs on staff who can review the records and figure it out.
Keep in mind that the person who processes the claim is trained to spot a lot of stuff -- when I worked in the industry, I had a two-month crash course in claims processing which included a pretty hardcode intro to medicine and medical terminology before I was ever allowed near a live claim, and after that came an extended period of pairing up with an experienced examiner to get a feel for the real stuff before I was allowed to authorize even a dollar's worth of payment on an actual claim. You learn pretty quickly how to spot a patterns of symptoms and conditions; I was technically customer service and did claims processing when call volume was low, but it wasn't uncommon to work through a hundred claims in a day, with each day's work usually involving a fairly small group of patients, and at that rate the patterns literally jump out at you.
Random trivia: AIDS really isn't as expensive -- from the insurer's POV -- as you'd expect it to be. Of course, it's not cheap, and claims examiners are trained to spot it, and a few other conditions, as quickly as possible and get a case-management file open, but most patients are just HIV+ and taking maintenance meds; it's not until the later stages of full-blown AIDS that it really gets nasty, and then it's from the accumulation of various conditions, not from AIDS itself. Compare that to a more common situation -- patient with chronic pain getting a $3000 intramuscular shot twice a month -- and the relatively low number of AIDS patients turns into more of a blip on the radar for the insurer.
Cancer, on the other hand... I saw people rack up $500K or more in medical bills, in very short periods (i.e., a few months), from some of the nastier forms of cancer.
Take care of your pancreas, because if it ever starts to go out on you you'll need the rest of your body to be made of solid gold to pay for the treatments. And your firstborn child will need to be made of gold, too. And your second, and your third. And you'll probably die anyway. So be good to your pancreas.
Nah. I did my time in the bowels of the insurance industry, got out, and I don't plan on going back if I can avoid it. Once I had six months' expenses saved up, I quit and started up doing freelance web-dev, which is what I'd actually wanted to do (and which eventually got me the nice job I have now).
The job itself wasn't so bad, and the money was decent for the area I was living in, but it's just not something that interests me; these days the only use I get out of it is helping friends and relations decipher medical bills and insurance documentation.
Would one be obliged to inform insurance companies of this "pre-existing" condition. If so, it seems one would probably be better off not knowing.
I used to work at a health-insurance company (customer service and claims processing, it was my first job out of college), so I feel like I should point out that "pre-existing condition" is (in the US, at least) a phrase with a very precise legal definition, and doesn't include a lot of things people commonly think it does.
If you seek out insurance as a private individual, then the prospective insurer can choose not to provide you with any coverage for pretty much any reason they like, and many will if you have an expensive ongoing condition, but group health plans offered through an employer are not permitted to deny coverage -- if insurance is offered to one employee in a given class (usually full-time employees), it must be offered to all employees in that class.
Once you have coverage, there are strict laws regarding what claims may be denied due to pre-existing conditions, and when:
Once your coverage starts with an insurer, they can investigate claims to determine whether they are related to a pre-existing condition. In order to deny payment of a claim for a pre-existing condition, that specific condition must have been actively treated at some point during the six months immediately prior to the beginning of your coverage. "Active treatment" doesn't mean "diagnosed" or "mentioned", it means that a licensed medical practictioner was carrying out medical procedures and/or prescribing medication specifically for the treatment of that condition[1]. Treatment which took place more than six months prior to the beginning of coverage cannot be used as evidence of a pre-existing condition.
After twelve months with an insurer (or eighteen months if you're on a group plan and were a "late enrolee"), the insurer is no longer permitted to deny any claims due to pre-existing conditions.
If, prior to the beginning of your coverage with your current insurer, you had coverage with another insurer, and there was no period between the two in which you were uninsured or that period was less than 63 days long, then the time in which your new insurer can deny claims for pre-existing conditions is reduced by the length of time you had continuous coverage through your previous insurer. If your prior coverage was longer than 12 or 18 months (depending on your time of enrollment), then your new insurer is not permitted to deny claims for pre-existing conditions. To facilitate this, your previous insurer is required by law to provide you with a "certificate of creditable coverage" indicating the duration of your coverage with them.
Claims related to pregnancy can never be denied due to a pre-existing condition, regardless of circumstances.
Additionally, many insurers won't bother investigating on claims where common sense says it wasn't a pre-existing condition; so, for example, if you accidentally slice your thumb while chopping onions for dinner, the insurer will probably go ahead and pay the claim. Any sort of sudden/acute onset condition or accidental illness/injury will usually get this treatment, because investigating pre-existing conditions is expensive and time-consuming, and it doesn't make any sense to waste time and money when you know how it'll turn out anyway.
One of the biggest causes of misunderstanding is the insurer's investigation of a condition -- the claim will be put on hold, and the doctor or facility listed on the claim will be asked for records of treatment of that condition during the six-month "lookback" period, as well as information about any other doctors or facilities who may have treated the condition. If the insurer receives no response to those requests, then the insurer is permitted to initially deny the claim (any time there's insufficient information to determine benefits, an insurer can deny the claim un
There is something about a Linux distributor telling me that I am limited as to how many clients I can install based on how much money I pay that just rubs be the wrong way. How can they do this and not go afoul of the GPL?
They can do this because the GPL does not mandate that you cannot charge money, and does not mandate that you make the software available to everyone. The GPL requires that if you provide a binary copy of a GPL'd program to someone, you must provide or offer to provide equivalent source to that someone, and that you pass on the freedoms of the GPL as you distribute.
Additionally, the price tag is for support and updates for X installations, not for X copies of the software -- this is actually very much in line with RMS' vision of a service-oriented, rather than product-oriented, software world.
Tbe problem is not with his editing Wikipedia, but with:
His use of a fabricated set of credentials to create greater perceived credibility on certain topics than he might otherwise have been accorded.
His ascent to a variety of trusted positions within Wikipedia and other projects while continuing to actively deceive the community which placed trust in him.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's stated goal is to capture 1% of the market by the end of 2008. That's roughly ten million phones. If your 1 in 100,000 figure is correct, that means there'd be one hundred iPhones having that problem. One hundred out of a run of ten million is probably not "a fairly large headache".
OK, how about this:
The number of malpractice filings 1992-2001 was pretty much constant (around 1% net decrease over that period), and over that period 54% of malpractice judgments came from 5% of doctors.
Amusing statistic: the size of the average malpractice award in the United States has grown pretty steadily at between one and four percent each year for the past fifteen years or so. In the same period, the average premium for malpractice insurance has often grown by double-digit percentages (in some cases as high as 25 percent in a single year). Even more amusing: malpractice premiums vary on a state-by-state basis, but tort-reform laws and malpractice damage caps in several states have had little to no effect on the rate at which premiums rise in those states.
Somebody's making a lot of money, and for once it isn't the lawyers; over the same periods that premiums have risen, the property and casualty firms which insure doctors have been reporting massive profit increases.
How about we try it this way:
Maynor claims to be a professional security researcher. One of the cornerstones of professionalism in that field is responsible disclosure of discovered vulnerabilities. Another is full disclosure of vulnerability details after a vendor has had a reasonable amount of time to correct the vulnerability. Yet another is working to advance the overall state of computer security. But Maynor has a track record of irresponsible, partial-at-best disclosure: he claims discovery of vulnerabilities while proclaiming that he will not report them to the vendor, and strives to hide the details of his discoveries from open review by his peers in the security community (for example, witness the endless controversy over the alleged MacBook wifi hack, all of which could have been settled quickly and objectively by simple peer review of the exploit he claimed to have used). And none of this can, so far as I can see, be construed as advancing the state of computer security in any fashion.
In other words, there is no sense of the word "professionalism" for his field which seems to be reasonably applicable to Maynor. Before you go screaming "ad hominem" or "Apple Fanboi", take note of two things:
I await your reply.
You keep using this word, "privacy". I do not think you know what this word means.
Indeed. Apple were among the first to get this sort of "correctional" interface behavior right in other spheres (e.g., even early versions of the Mac OS allowed you to "stray" a little when moving from a menu item into its sub-menu; rather than requiring the cursor to remain precisely within the bounds of the selected menu item, the mouse could venture outside a small distance -- so long as it continued generally moving toward the submenu -- without causing the submenu to disappear).
No, it simply means I haven't come to a conclusion and likely won't until/unless there's solid evidence of actual use of the iPhone to back it up. In the meantime, I'm willing to grant some charity based on the lack of available evidence and the arguments I'm able to come up with on each side.
As for your actual points:
So. Do you want to have a constructive debate based on what we already know about the iPhone and about similar touch-screen technologies, or do you want to take back-handed swipes at someone? I can do either, but I'd like to know up-front where we're going with this.
You might want to read the BSD license very carefully; it's more viral than people commonly believe.
I've been thinking about this, and I really can't see anything to be concerned about. Several things come to mind:
I'll wait until I actually see one in action to pass judgment, but I'm a lot more skeptical of the "no tactile feedback" argument than I used to be...
Random other person X takes a picture of you. Maybe you were standing in a public place and didn't know your picture was being taken. Person X uploads the photo and tags it with your name. Other than spending your entire life outside of publicly-viewable physical locations and simultaneously ensuring that no-one knows your name (so that if they do manage to get a picture they don't know how to tag it), what sort of control do you have over that?
Yeah, I've been doing tutorials and bought the beta PDF edition of Joe Armstrong's book, but at one point I stopped to go back and do The Little Schemer to refresh my ability to frame everything in terms of recursion on lists. Haven't gotten back to Erlang yet, but I've been keeping an eye out for something useful to do with it as a first non-trivial application. You'd think it'd be easy for a web-dev geek to come up with problems that are well-suited to the pseudo-functional concurrent style, but it's harder than it looks :)
I've also been playing off and on with Scala, which is a pretty neat little language; it runs on the JVM (and has seamless importing of Java classes, which is quite nice), but has first-class and higher-order functions, anonymous functions, pattern matching (including pattern matching on classes, which is wicked cool), list comprehensions and the ability to use either Java's Thread API or its own Actor-based concurrency model. It's definitely worth looking at if you've been enjoying Erlang.
Not off the top of my head, but I'm also somewhat sidetracked by an ongoing effort to pull the news industry off Java and onto Python :)
This is why the languages which have the highest level of "enjoyment" for concurrent tasks tend to move further along the spectrum toward pure functional programming, and partially or completely ban side effects and mutable state (e.g., Erlang forbids shared state in its concurrency model, and also forbids reassignment).
You may want to look into Erlang, which does two things that will interest you:
There are still concurrent problems which are hard, but generally it boils down to the problem being hard instead of the language making the problem harder to express.
Nope. In linguistics, a "pidgin" is the sort of simplified hybrid language that evolves when two groups with different languages end up in close contact with each other and need to communicate.
There is a startup called potsful which is doing something like this for real -- you can tie an email address to a postal address, and they'll print and mail to the postal address anything you send to the email address.
I have a feeling that the target market for the Apple TV is largely made up of people who already have some sort of DVR in their lives, so it doesn't make much sense to try to sell them something they already have. It does make sense to try to sell them a box which can do things the DVR can't.
And just for the sake of it, since most people don't know about COBRA:
Usually when you quit or lose your job, your health insurance terminates at the same time, and if you start a new job with insurance it won't kick in until you've been working there a little while (90 days seemed to be fairly common when I was doing this, but some companies start your coverage earlier than that), so there's a period when you're uninsured. COBRA gives you the option of keeping the insurance you had with the previous employer -- even after you're no longer employed by them -- for up to 18 months; the catch is that you pay the full premium (typically your employer subsidizes the insurance by paying part of the premium and taking the rest out of your paycheck). When you leave your job you'll receive some paperwork from the insurer with information about how to do this.
Also, keep in mind that most employer-provided group health plans don't begin offering coverage until you've been working there for 90 days, so unless you pick up COBRA from a previous employer you'll almost inevitably have a break in coverage that's too long for the portability bits to kick in.
No matter how many times you switch, the insurance you end up on has to reduce the time in which it denies pre-existing conditions by the amount of time you had continuous coverage prior to starting with them; "continuous coverage" means no break in coverage longer than 63 days. So if you bounced between three, four, five or a dozen different insurers, so long as you had at least 12 or 18 months of continuous coverage before starting with the one you finally land on, they wouldn't be able to deny pre-existing conditions.
This is the "P" (for "portability") in "HIPAA", and you wouldn't believe how many people don't know about it...
Depends on the insurer. I worked with group plans offered by employers, which don't have a choice about whether to accept you or not and generally start your coverage 90 days after you begin working for the employer. Private plans may vary. My comment about "scamming" was that it's just plain idiotic to avoid treating a serious medical condition so you can trick an insurance plan.
No, you didn't read a word I wrote. An insurer who can deny a pre-existing condition can deny the entire condition, including any complications. Spotting what's related to what is a combination of the claims examiner recognizing patterns of conditions (which, believe me, isn't hard in about 90% of cases -- again, examiners see a hundred more more claims a day, they learn how to spot this stuff), and the insurer having licensed medial professionals on staff who can answer questions when it's not obvious whether two things are related.
But keep right on living in your little fantasy world if you want to.
If you have a medical condition, and that condition wasn't treated during the six months prior to the beginning of your coverage, then your insurer can't consider it "pre-existing". Setting aside the fact that it's just stupid to tell a doctor not to treat something so you can try to scam the insurance company, and that no doctor in his or her right mind would do that, most of the expensive ailments will either kill you or come close to killing you if you leave them that long, so don't even think about it.
Complications which stem from a primary condition can be tracked, and usually it's fairly obvious what's related and what's not; ICD codes differentiate acute and chronic conditions, and for cases where it's not as obvious that two things are related, most insurers have MDs and RNs on staff who can review the records and figure it out.
Keep in mind that the person who processes the claim is trained to spot a lot of stuff -- when I worked in the industry, I had a two-month crash course in claims processing which included a pretty hardcode intro to medicine and medical terminology before I was ever allowed near a live claim, and after that came an extended period of pairing up with an experienced examiner to get a feel for the real stuff before I was allowed to authorize even a dollar's worth of payment on an actual claim. You learn pretty quickly how to spot a patterns of symptoms and conditions; I was technically customer service and did claims processing when call volume was low, but it wasn't uncommon to work through a hundred claims in a day, with each day's work usually involving a fairly small group of patients, and at that rate the patterns literally jump out at you.
Random trivia: AIDS really isn't as expensive -- from the insurer's POV -- as you'd expect it to be. Of course, it's not cheap, and claims examiners are trained to spot it, and a few other conditions, as quickly as possible and get a case-management file open, but most patients are just HIV+ and taking maintenance meds; it's not until the later stages of full-blown AIDS that it really gets nasty, and then it's from the accumulation of various conditions, not from AIDS itself. Compare that to a more common situation -- patient with chronic pain getting a $3000 intramuscular shot twice a month -- and the relatively low number of AIDS patients turns into more of a blip on the radar for the insurer.
Cancer, on the other hand... I saw people rack up $500K or more in medical bills, in very short periods (i.e., a few months), from some of the nastier forms of cancer.
Take care of your pancreas, because if it ever starts to go out on you you'll need the rest of your body to be made of solid gold to pay for the treatments. And your firstborn child will need to be made of gold, too. And your second, and your third. And you'll probably die anyway. So be good to your pancreas.
Nah. I did my time in the bowels of the insurance industry, got out, and I don't plan on going back if I can avoid it. Once I had six months' expenses saved up, I quit and started up doing freelance web-dev, which is what I'd actually wanted to do (and which eventually got me the nice job I have now).
The job itself wasn't so bad, and the money was decent for the area I was living in, but it's just not something that interests me; these days the only use I get out of it is helping friends and relations decipher medical bills and insurance documentation.
I used to work at a health-insurance company (customer service and claims processing, it was my first job out of college), so I feel like I should point out that "pre-existing condition" is (in the US, at least) a phrase with a very precise legal definition, and doesn't include a lot of things people commonly think it does.
If you seek out insurance as a private individual, then the prospective insurer can choose not to provide you with any coverage for pretty much any reason they like, and many will if you have an expensive ongoing condition, but group health plans offered through an employer are not permitted to deny coverage -- if insurance is offered to one employee in a given class (usually full-time employees), it must be offered to all employees in that class.
Once you have coverage, there are strict laws regarding what claims may be denied due to pre-existing conditions, and when:
Additionally, many insurers won't bother investigating on claims where common sense says it wasn't a pre-existing condition; so, for example, if you accidentally slice your thumb while chopping onions for dinner, the insurer will probably go ahead and pay the claim. Any sort of sudden/acute onset condition or accidental illness/injury will usually get this treatment, because investigating pre-existing conditions is expensive and time-consuming, and it doesn't make any sense to waste time and money when you know how it'll turn out anyway.
One of the biggest causes of misunderstanding is the insurer's investigation of a condition -- the claim will be put on hold, and the doctor or facility listed on the claim will be asked for records of treatment of that condition during the six-month "lookback" period, as well as information about any other doctors or facilities who may have treated the condition. If the insurer receives no response to those requests, then the insurer is permitted to initially deny the claim (any time there's insufficient information to determine benefits, an insurer can deny the claim un
They can do this because the GPL does not mandate that you cannot charge money, and does not mandate that you make the software available to everyone. The GPL requires that if you provide a binary copy of a GPL'd program to someone, you must provide or offer to provide equivalent source to that someone, and that you pass on the freedoms of the GPL as you distribute.
Additionally, the price tag is for support and updates for X installations, not for X copies of the software -- this is actually very much in line with RMS' vision of a service-oriented, rather than product-oriented, software world.
Tbe problem is not with his editing Wikipedia, but with: