Verizon (thank god) is not a police force. The most that they can do is turn off your cable, and they are always free to do so for almost any reason.
but.. want to sell unlimited? don't sell a service you don't want to sell, put in some 10 TB limit then. for all they knew he could have been just running a raw video feed from his pot farm, shouldn't be the isp's business.
But he did not say that is what he was doing, he said that he was doing something directly in contention with the terms of service.
Why offer that much throughput then complain when people actually make good use of it.
If you want people to buy business lines, make it competitive with your home accounts.
They want for people to buy home lines for home use, and business lines for business use.
Not to even mention the pedestrian uses; people will be more likely to heat their pool, turn down/up their thermostats, drive larger vehicles, get a second vehicle, build houses with less insulation, and the list just goes on. Economics says (again, get a good text and read it) that this will happen when the price of energy goes down, as a matter of fact.
Well, if I had a finite number of devices, that I paid a reasonable amount for, that could reliably produce more than enough power to run my home and my transportation needs and could last decades, I would have to come up with some really ingenious new needs to make energy a scarce resource again.
No, you obviously couldn't and wouldn't think of anything ingenious, or not, to do with the new electricity. Surprisingly, not everybody shares your lack of foresight, and new applications would (will) arise. Maybe pick up a science fiction book or two, maybe even a good movie or TV series, it would be the perfect break from that economics book.
Look at computers. In 1989, very few people were thinking of what we do with computers today. There were most certainly stalwarts like yourself thinking, "What could anyone need a chip orders of magnitude more powerful than an i486 for? If only they would invent a Pentium I, we would never need another computer chip again."
If you can make a large amount of cheap devices which all produce energy from relatively cheap inputs, you end up with something which is markedly less scarce
Markedly less scarce, is still scarce. The energy that you speak of will still be produced by a machine which is its self built from scarce resources! The machine that the article supposes about would convert nickel to copper, so nickle would be the ostensible fuel. Nickel is a scarce resource, so scarce in fact that it has a commodity market defining its price. People are so interested in its price, that they even make charts about it (http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/nickel_historical_large.html). As energy becomes more freely available, new uses will be invented, and people will want more energy than is supplied. You are right that a new type of power generator would totally change the energy market (probably in a consumer friendly way), but to say that scarcity would not be involved makes you sound ignorant.
and potentially something you can produce yourself and eliminate the energy companies.
Sure, you own or lease the generator, but do you really think you could do it all by yourself? Get real. Whoever makes/maintains this hypothetical new type of power source, and its fuel, will be your new energy companies. Hopefully they will be better than the old ones, but that is yet to be seen.
Well, in the good scenario, an energy based economy which suddenly became free means we get unlimited cheap power and can do a great deal because it's no longer a scarce resource we're competing for.
In a bad scenario, the technology gets hidden away, or we still end up paying the same for everything, but the people selling the devices print money like mad fools by enforcing artificial scarcity with patents.
There will still be a limited amount of energy production, from a finite number of devices, so it will still be a scarce resource. Read an economics book!
My impression is that the appeal of weak typed languages is mostly in the ability to readily convert between primitive types. The gratuitous code created by maintaining multiple variables, for example a string and a long, and having to convert between them, while handling the exception they might throw, is truly one of my most hated programming activities. I wonder though, if one is truly forced to use a scripting language to have this feature? Would it not also be possible to provide a "dynamic type", or "super primitive", that could implicitly be used anywhere that another primitive is used? If it threw an unchecked exception, it would just die suddenly and catastrophically like a scripting language... so nothing really different.
Don't ask why, but I have extensive experience programming with a language which is now called, "ASP Classic". It had an option to at least force you to declare the names of variables ("Option Explicit"), which turned out to be absurdly handy. Figuring out what was happening when you had a variable, someVariable, and the same thing, someVairable, could take hours... because there was no exception, just poorly functioning code. I hate languages where variables can appear out of nowhere, that feature should not exist anywhere.
What I am trying to say here is, why not provide strong types when it matters, and weak types for when it does not? This whole debate feels like it is between people on different planets, like it is some ideological thing with no compromised solution.
Honestly I would be fine with a simple we pay nothing until $X, then we pay everything. Somehow that does not seem to be available at all.
That seems completely backwards - you are pushing all of the routine care onto the insurer, and have no coverage at all for the catastrophic events. I would much rather have a typical HDHP - pays basically nothing until $X out of pocket, with that cost blunted by an HSA, and then it pays for everything.
I think he is indicating the insurance company with the pronoun we, in which case he means they pay for no routine care.
I never said there was anything wrong with trial and error. In a manner of thinking, it is how everything gets done one way or another.
My brain just has a hard time not giving a fuck about types, because at the end of the day type does matter. It matters whether your language helps you to remember or not, regardless of if you discover type errors at run time or compile time. Personally, I just like a little help.
Also when you really need care, you cannot shop around. When due to an electrolyte imbalance I was unable to clearly communicate I was taken by emergency personal to a hospital and since I was unable to give consent and clearly in distress they performed tests to find the cause.
Even if all the prices and options were listed in front of me at that time I could never have competently considered them nor communicated that fact clearly. If I had not had insurance I would have been unable to pay. At the time I was a poor college student and this single event would have cost more than my income for several years at that time in my life.
Excellent points describing why, at least emergency medical care, is not a commodity market. Lacking the ability to simply go to another hospital, coupled with absolute need for care, creates a situation where the hospital has total and absolute leverage over the individual consumer. Left to a totally free market, the individual is essentially helpless. This is part of the reason why it is so terrifying to have no insurance, I think.
What you are indicating more states that the HSA is the least bad deal.
Shopping for merely the least bad deal perfectly describes every experience I have had while shopping for heath insurance, for at least 15 years. It is hard to buy it in the first place, which further complicates shopping around.
The real crime with health care though, is how the price changes depending on who you are. Hospitals have a master charge list with egregious prices, which literally have nothing to do with the actual cost of the procedure. When questioned about it, hospital administrators will claim that these prices are a starting place for negotiations. If you are a national insurance company, you do indeed negotiate, prices that are on average around 15% of the chargemaster prices. As an unfortunate single payer, they will gladly invoice you for the full chargemaster prices, yet offer literally no opportunity to negotiate before destroying your credit. There is a great article in Time, entitled, "Bitter Pill", that everybody should read.
When I was shopping for PPO vs HSA insurance from HealthNet, the PPO had a $1000 copay for MRI scans, and no I could not even make that up. Comparing the benefits of PPO/HMO/HSA, there was literally no comparison... the HSA insurance was the best deal for the consumer.
Coverage limits are a reality of most types of insurance (car, boat, airplane, oil rig, homeowners, etc...). They are not immoral unless they are vastly insufficient to provide sufficient protection, which sadly is the case in the case of health insurance. I looked at policies with as little as $400,000 of yearly coverage, that should be illegal.
A single illness can change that, or a single broken limb. Granted it depends on how high the deductible is and what your total out of pocket is. Never forget that many of these plans only pay 80% even after the deductible is reached until you have spent a good bit of change.
This is absolutely untrue, when you buy an HSA policy the deductible, co-insurance %, and out of pocket maximum (deductible + co-insurance) are clearly defined. My out of pocket maximum, for example, is $7,500, which is fairly standard for HSA insurance. Sure, I do not want to have to pay this, but the reality is that this will not ruin anyone financially. The only real difference is that I have to pay to go to the doctor instead of having a copay, but the reality is that a doctor visit only costs me about $75 dollars (instead of $45 copay before HSA insurance). Also note that with insurance having a copay, you continue paying it after you reach the deductible. (Ouch if you get cancer and need 10, $1000 copay MRIs.)
If you really want to find *shitty* insurance, forget looking at the modest up front costs, and instead look at the yearly and lifetime coverage limits. This is where normal people meet financial ruin, because once the coverage runs out, you are stuck with the remaining hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills. These plans are sold and marketed to people that want the good feeling of insurance, but that are too stupid to see that they are not protected from a catastrophic event.
That's why you subpoena e-mails relating to the issue. Laziness will get you every time on things you should have said directly with no trail.
Do you really think that the defendant will provide you with *all* of the emails? It would be just as hard to prove one was missing as it would be to demonstrate mal-intent in the first place.
I don't know if I'd put money on that assertion...
You, are a clever person. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that nobody has been electrocuted to death by a USB cable that is plugged in to a standards compliant, and normally functioning USB port.
I was going to mention the high fire starting potential of using a high current, low voltage source. Power dissipated in a resistor (ie. heat in a bad connection, or damaged wire) depends only on current and resistance.
Except its the current thats more dangerous in this situation than the voltage.
You are right, and wrong. Current does ultimately determine the severity of electrocution, in that sense you are right. The problem is that the body acts like a resistor, so according to ohms law current draw is determined by voltage. Higher voltage means more current, lower voltage means less. For example, the 500ma provided by a USB cable is more than enough to kill you, but at 5v it can not. Nobody has been killed by a USB cable.
At 25v, a worst case body resistance would be around 1750 ohms... so by using math:
Slashdot Mirror
maybe he should have just said "get a warrant"...
Verizon (thank god) is not a police force. The most that they can do is turn off your cable, and they are always free to do so for almost any reason.
but.. want to sell unlimited? don't sell a service you don't want to sell, put in some 10 TB limit then. for all they knew he could have been just running a raw video feed from his pot farm, shouldn't be the isp's business.
But he did not say that is what he was doing, he said that he was doing something directly in contention with the terms of service.
Why offer that much throughput then complain when people actually make good use of it. If you want people to buy business lines, make it competitive with your home accounts.
They want for people to buy home lines for home use, and business lines for business use.
Not to even mention the pedestrian uses; people will be more likely to heat their pool, turn down/up their thermostats, drive larger vehicles, get a second vehicle, build houses with less insulation, and the list just goes on. Economics says (again, get a good text and read it) that this will happen when the price of energy goes down, as a matter of fact.
Well, if I had a finite number of devices, that I paid a reasonable amount for, that could reliably produce more than enough power to run my home and my transportation needs and could last decades, I would have to come up with some really ingenious new needs to make energy a scarce resource again.
No, you obviously couldn't and wouldn't think of anything ingenious, or not, to do with the new electricity. Surprisingly, not everybody shares your lack of foresight, and new applications would (will) arise. Maybe pick up a science fiction book or two, maybe even a good movie or TV series, it would be the perfect break from that economics book.
Look at computers. In 1989, very few people were thinking of what we do with computers today. There were most certainly stalwarts like yourself thinking, "What could anyone need a chip orders of magnitude more powerful than an i486 for? If only they would invent a Pentium I, we would never need another computer chip again."
That bunch of shit generates a very efficient containment field. We have trouble doing that on a smaller scale.
Nope, it is just a pile of shit held together by gravity.
solar panels. wind turbines.
That have a higher total cost of ownership than buying commercial energy created from fossil fuels. Stick it to the man!
If you can make a large amount of cheap devices which all produce energy from relatively cheap inputs, you end up with something which is markedly less scarce
Markedly less scarce, is still scarce. The energy that you speak of will still be produced by a machine which is its self built from scarce resources! The machine that the article supposes about would convert nickel to copper, so nickle would be the ostensible fuel. Nickel is a scarce resource, so scarce in fact that it has a commodity market defining its price. People are so interested in its price, that they even make charts about it (http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/nickel_historical_large.html). As energy becomes more freely available, new uses will be invented, and people will want more energy than is supplied. You are right that a new type of power generator would totally change the energy market (probably in a consumer friendly way), but to say that scarcity would not be involved makes you sound ignorant.
and potentially something you can produce yourself and eliminate the energy companies.
Sure, you own or lease the generator, but do you really think you could do it all by yourself? Get real. Whoever makes/maintains this hypothetical new type of power source, and its fuel, will be your new energy companies. Hopefully they will be better than the old ones, but that is yet to be seen.
[...] difficulties in containing a stable reaction using equipment a bit more compact than a star.
A star is just a bunch of shit clumped together by gravity.
Well, in the good scenario, an energy based economy which suddenly became free means we get unlimited cheap power and can do a great deal because it's no longer a scarce resource we're competing for.
In a bad scenario, the technology gets hidden away, or we still end up paying the same for everything, but the people selling the devices print money like mad fools by enforcing artificial scarcity with patents.
There will still be a limited amount of energy production, from a finite number of devices, so it will still be a scarce resource. Read an economics book!
My impression is that the appeal of weak typed languages is mostly in the ability to readily convert between primitive types. The gratuitous code created by maintaining multiple variables, for example a string and a long, and having to convert between them, while handling the exception they might throw, is truly one of my most hated programming activities. I wonder though, if one is truly forced to use a scripting language to have this feature? Would it not also be possible to provide a "dynamic type", or "super primitive", that could implicitly be used anywhere that another primitive is used? If it threw an unchecked exception, it would just die suddenly and catastrophically like a scripting language... so nothing really different.
Don't ask why, but I have extensive experience programming with a language which is now called, "ASP Classic". It had an option to at least force you to declare the names of variables ("Option Explicit"), which turned out to be absurdly handy. Figuring out what was happening when you had a variable, someVariable, and the same thing, someVairable, could take hours... because there was no exception, just poorly functioning code. I hate languages where variables can appear out of nowhere, that feature should not exist anywhere.
What I am trying to say here is, why not provide strong types when it matters, and weak types for when it does not? This whole debate feels like it is between people on different planets, like it is some ideological thing with no compromised solution.
Honestly I would be fine with a simple we pay nothing until $X, then we pay everything. Somehow that does not seem to be available at all.
That seems completely backwards - you are pushing all of the routine care onto the insurer, and have no coverage at all for the catastrophic events. I would much rather have a typical HDHP - pays basically nothing until $X out of pocket, with that cost blunted by an HSA, and then it pays for everything.
I think he is indicating the insurance company with the pronoun we, in which case he means they pay for no routine care.
I never said there was anything wrong with trial and error. In a manner of thinking, it is how everything gets done one way or another.
My brain just has a hard time not giving a fuck about types, because at the end of the day type does matter. It matters whether your language helps you to remember or not, regardless of if you discover type errors at run time or compile time. Personally, I just like a little help.
In order to be like a "Real Job", then it needs to be done with no planning and result in wasted effort with no results.
So real jobs are exactly like a CS programming class?
It helps bad programmers to indent their code :)
Instant reload is important when you are programming by trial and error!
Also when you really need care, you cannot shop around. When due to an electrolyte imbalance I was unable to clearly communicate I was taken by emergency personal to a hospital and since I was unable to give consent and clearly in distress they performed tests to find the cause.
Even if all the prices and options were listed in front of me at that time I could never have competently considered them nor communicated that fact clearly. If I had not had insurance I would have been unable to pay. At the time I was a poor college student and this single event would have cost more than my income for several years at that time in my life.
Excellent points describing why, at least emergency medical care, is not a commodity market. Lacking the ability to simply go to another hospital, coupled with absolute need for care, creates a situation where the hospital has total and absolute leverage over the individual consumer. Left to a totally free market, the individual is essentially helpless. This is part of the reason why it is so terrifying to have no insurance, I think.
What you are indicating more states that the HSA is the least bad deal.
Shopping for merely the least bad deal perfectly describes every experience I have had while shopping for heath insurance, for at least 15 years. It is hard to buy it in the first place, which further complicates shopping around.
The real crime with health care though, is how the price changes depending on who you are. Hospitals have a master charge list with egregious prices, which literally have nothing to do with the actual cost of the procedure. When questioned about it, hospital administrators will claim that these prices are a starting place for negotiations. If you are a national insurance company, you do indeed negotiate, prices that are on average around 15% of the chargemaster prices. As an unfortunate single payer, they will gladly invoice you for the full chargemaster prices, yet offer literally no opportunity to negotiate before destroying your credit. There is a great article in Time, entitled, "Bitter Pill", that everybody should read.
When I was shopping for PPO vs HSA insurance from HealthNet, the PPO had a $1000 copay for MRI scans, and no I could not even make that up. Comparing the benefits of PPO/HMO/HSA, there was literally no comparison... the HSA insurance was the best deal for the consumer.
Coverage limits are a reality of most types of insurance (car, boat, airplane, oil rig, homeowners, etc...). They are not immoral unless they are vastly insufficient to provide sufficient protection, which sadly is the case in the case of health insurance. I looked at policies with as little as $400,000 of yearly coverage, that should be illegal.
You *could*, but that would just be pedantic, I mean nobody's ever been killed by a USB cable ;)
Because a USB cable is an inanimate object... how dumb can I be!
295%
A single illness can change that, or a single broken limb. Granted it depends on how high the deductible is and what your total out of pocket is. Never forget that many of these plans only pay 80% even after the deductible is reached until you have spent a good bit of change.
This is absolutely untrue, when you buy an HSA policy the deductible, co-insurance %, and out of pocket maximum (deductible + co-insurance) are clearly defined. My out of pocket maximum, for example, is $7,500, which is fairly standard for HSA insurance. Sure, I do not want to have to pay this, but the reality is that this will not ruin anyone financially. The only real difference is that I have to pay to go to the doctor instead of having a copay, but the reality is that a doctor visit only costs me about $75 dollars (instead of $45 copay before HSA insurance). Also note that with insurance having a copay, you continue paying it after you reach the deductible. (Ouch if you get cancer and need 10, $1000 copay MRIs.)
If you really want to find *shitty* insurance, forget looking at the modest up front costs, and instead look at the yearly and lifetime coverage limits. This is where normal people meet financial ruin, because once the coverage runs out, you are stuck with the remaining hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills. These plans are sold and marketed to people that want the good feeling of insurance, but that are too stupid to see that they are not protected from a catastrophic event.
That's why you subpoena e-mails relating to the issue. Laziness will get you every time on things you should have said directly with no trail.
Do you really think that the defendant will provide you with *all* of the emails? It would be just as hard to prove one was missing as it would be to demonstrate mal-intent in the first place.
Nobody has been killed by a USB cable.
I don't know if I'd put money on that assertion...
You, are a clever person. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that nobody has been electrocuted to death by a USB cable that is plugged in to a standards compliant, and normally functioning USB port.
I was going to mention the high fire starting potential of using a high current, low voltage source. Power dissipated in a resistor (ie. heat in a bad connection, or damaged wire) depends only on current and resistance.
Except its the current thats more dangerous in this situation than the voltage.
You are right, and wrong. Current does ultimately determine the severity of electrocution, in that sense you are right. The problem is that the body acts like a resistor, so according to ohms law current draw is determined by voltage. Higher voltage means more current, lower voltage means less. For example, the 500ma provided by a USB cable is more than enough to kill you, but at 5v it can not. Nobody has been killed by a USB cable.
At 25v, a worst case body resistance would be around 1750 ohms... so by using math:
i=e/r, 5v/1750ohm = 2 ma