The Zune service / software is still better than iTunes but dedicated mp3 players were a hard sell once smartphones started taking off.
Like the iPod Touch, which has over half the sales of iPhones? The MP3 player market is still huge. It's just that there's the iTouch on one end, and the cheap Sansa-type stuff on the other. Microsoft went for an iTouch price point but with Sansa functionality. Anyone's surprised that didn't go over?
...which almost no one, anywhere, actually wants to run on a tablet. That actually made me LOL as an advertising point - "run your favorite office apps!" - as though there were a non-zero-after-rounding desire for people to run Excel on an iPad (or -alike).
I laud this public school's initiative to make sure that they are tracking attendance.
My school used a sophisticated algorithm by where the number of kids approximately equaled the number of desks. Teachers had a skeuomorphic interface that visually resembled the classroom's desk arrangement. At the beginning of a class period, they'd initiate a breadth-first scan of the studentspace, correlate empty desks with the matching students' names, and use a stylus to apply a red "checkmark" icon next to those names. The process was highly automated and generally took less than 5 seconds.
My sister and her husband haven't had a kid and probably never will. You're an asshole for implying that they're not legitimately married.
If marriage has a specific societal purpose, it's to create small autonomous mutually-supportive social units. My wife and I are a family. My sister and her husband are a family. Joe and Tom can be just as much a family as anyone else.
Maybe the gays need to just grow a pair and live their own lives in peace.
And maybe you just need to grow a pair and accept that you're not the final arbiter of who gets to fall in love with whom.
Judging from the reviews I found on Amazon, I don't think TomTom knows what to do with it. Even my non-techie in-laws think of TomTom as "that brand they'll sell cheaply at Wal-Mart on Black Friday".
Candidate 1: "I am 90% in favor of [something I detest]."
Candidate 2: "How un-American! I'm 95% in favor of [something I detest]."
So there are distinctions, but few that I find substantial or redeeming. And although I tried to be explicit about this, I'll say it again: I am not a Romney supporter. I couldn't vote for either major candidate with good conscience.
The Obama administration objected Thursday to immediately ending the military's ban on openly gay service members, saying that an injunction to stop the "don't ask, don't tell" policy might harm military readiness in a time of war.
In a filing with a federal court in California, the Justice Department said that a judge who struck down the policy as unconstitutional should not enforce that ruling with a military-wide injunction banning the discharge of gay service members.
Kudos to him for coming around to the side of decency and eventually signing the DADT Repeal Act of 2010, albeit after ordering his Justice Department to fight it tooth and nail.
Maybe I'm just young, but most of my adult life has been under Bush, and now Obama. Bush seemed to mostly screw things up. Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Like Gitmo still being open. Like ordering the assassination of American citizens. Like fighting against the end of indefinite detention of unconvicted, untried suspects. Like the drones circling over the Middle East. This is the "better direction" you see America moving toward?
Note: I'm explicitly not supporting Romney, either. As Douglas Adams might say, they're both the wrong lizards. And given that Romney pretty much invented Obamacare, frankly, I can't really tell them apart.
If a procedure can legitimately be coded in multiple ways, then as the payer I would certainly pay you for the least expensive code regardless of the code you billed me for.
Now you're just being obstinate. The contracts are written like:
Code #123 Requirements:
* Does something * Does something else
Code #123.2 Requirements:
* Does the same something from #123 * Does the same something else from #123 * Does one extra thing
Suppose the doctor legitimately performs all three requirements to bill for code #123.2. Playing by the rules that were given to them, they are legally entitled to be reimbursed for the more advanced (and expensive) code #123.2. Since the contract says that if you do the work then you can get paid for it, they'd be dumb to walk away from the extra money.
pay the doctor the same whether he runs no tests or 100 tests and you will get the actual number of tests needed to diagnose a patient
And then you said:
are you telling me some doctors will be like "i know i need to run test {ABC} to rule out condition {XYZ} but i'm not going to do it". because... because why? what is your logic whereby a doctor will not run this test?
Because tests aren't free. If a doctor only gets paid for 1 test, they're not going to order the other 14 that might narrow down the result, especially if it only takes one unpaid test to push the equation into a net loss. That's just basic economics. If it costs $40 to perform a test that a doctor bills $50 for, they're not likely to do a second one for free.
Meanwhile, the supplies themselves are horribly overpriced in too many cases. I do wonder why doctors don't form the medical equivalent of Sam's club to force vendors to charge reasonably.
They do. My wife ordered from a supply company that was nearly a co-op and its prices were very reasonable compared to some of the direct suppliers.
Doctors seem to bring at least some of it on themselves. Most don't even know how much the various tests they might order cost nor how much the prescriptions will be. Clearly they do nothing like a cost/benefit analysis for their patients. Any professional in any non-medical field is expected to do that.
I totally agree with that. I was between insurances last month and needed to see a doctor for something minor. I explained up front that I was paying out of pocket. She started to prescribe something that sounded expensive and I stopped her to ask if there was something with a generic that would be more affordable. She paused for a moment, then "oh! Sure. How about ____?" That turned a likely $200 prescription into a $4 generic and was effective enough to fix the problem I went for.
On at least one occasion, she was paid in chickens. The patient had little money but was able to spare some poultry from their farm, so they showed up with an ice chest of plucked, gutted chickens. We got a nice ham once, too. I don't know what her cash discount rate was for people with enough money to pay out of pocket.
They deserve slack for replacing a well known, well tested, highly reliable and popular service with their in-house verison which is apparently poorly tested and unpopular-- all in the name of a popularity contest?
I wonder about that. Apple must have had a pretty strong reason to drop such an important and widely-used app from their most popular product, so what could that have been? Petty spite is possible, but it doesn't seem plausible. Maybe Apple decided it's not good to be dependent on their only competitor in the mobile space? Or maybe Google refused to put any significant work into updating Maps; I don't recall any major new features appearing for it in recent years)? Perhaps Google hinted that it's an awfully nice mapping app they've got there - it'd be a pity if something were to happen to it. Or maybe it was just a combination of those and other factors that made Apple say, "you know, this isn't going to be any less painful if we put it off. Let's bite the bullet and get started with a self-hosted app sooner rather than later."
I can imagine quite a few reasons why a company might not have wanted to be in the position that Apple was with Google's Maps app. A popularity wasn't one of them.
pay the doctor the same whether he runs no tests or 100 tests and you will get the actual number of tests needed to diagnose a patient
My wife's a doctor. She had almost no in-house testing equipment except for an x-ray machine, so she referred out any other tests. I don't expect you to believe this, but she didn't make a penny of those tests. There was zero profit motive for her; she just genuinely wanted to know the results of the tests. I know that's not the case for large practices with in-house laboratories or which own advanced imaging systems like MRIs or CT scanners, but your average family practice guy probably isn't seeing any money from prescribing tests from outside facilities.
are you a doctor? you honestly think this is valid advice to give lay people about their healthcare?
No, and yes. My specific advice is to talk it over with your doctor and come to a mutual conclusion. If you go in for bronchitis and he wants to order a chest x-ray, ask him if that's really important or if he's just trying to rule out some highly unlikely condition. If your mutual decision is that it's probably not that important, don't get it. I stand by that advice for a lay person.
If a care provider is doing additional services with the only objective being getting paid more and not treating the patient, it is fraud - even if it just five percent extra.
So you're opposed to using objective rules like "provider performed and documented X, so they're entitled to bill for X" in favor of "provider performed and documented X, but that doesn't feel right". Down that path lies insanity.
Doctor applies band-aid to cut. Bills as emergency band-adi application. Is authorized $921.
Even if they met all the requirement to bill as emergency band-aid application, you still feel it's fraudulent? You're not a fan of rule-of-law, are you.
a free market in real life translates to "give as many expensive tests as we can get away with"
Would a non-free-market solution provide protection to doctors who don't order the most expensive tests they can get away with? As it stands today, doctors who don't order every test imaginable are screwed if they miss something.
On a personal level, you can turn down tests if you don't want to have them. I routinely ask my doctor whether he thinks a test is truly necessary or whether he ordered them to rule out a one-in-a-million syndrome. A good doctor will tell you when they're ordering something just to cover all the bases.
Somebody at Medicare should be looking at the billing records and saying, "It can't be right for every procedure to be billed at the highest possible code when they're a regular full-service hospital. These people are cheating us and I have a red phone on my desk to the Department of Justice Prosecutor's office."
If there are two legal, legitimate ways to code for a given procedure, why would a clinic not bill for the more expensive of the two? Medicare - not the hospitals - sets the reimbursement rates and defines the codes. If they didn't intend for the higher code to be billable, they should have written the definition so that it wasn't.
There are also lots of coding seminars that teach doctors things like "if you ask question X during the history and physical part of their exam, you can bill code #123-2 instead of your normal #123-1. You're already doing 95% of the work to qualify for #123-2, which pays double of #123-1, so why not do the extra 5% and double your income?". Again, Medicare and the insurance companies are settings those standards. Sucks to be them if health care providers decide to play by the rules that have been dictated to them.
Let's put it in tax terms. Suppose that if you give $10,000 to charity, you get a $5,000 tax break. Your accountant notices that you've already given $9,500 to charity and advises you to donate $500 more before the end of the year. You do so, and that $500 turns into a $5,000 benefit for you. Are you cheating? You didn't make the rules. You're playing entirely within the codes that Congress has set. It would ring a little hollow for Congress to complain that you're defrauding the IRS of $5,000 by going along with the procedures that they put in place.
Then depending on what they did during the exam, they bill for everything they did (according to the standard set of codes) at some totally fictitious rate that maybe one sucker in a million pays.
Furthermore, insurers typically calculate their reimbursement for procedure #123 based on a percentage of the average "retail" price of procedure #123 across all physicians in the local area. For instance, say the average price for a strep throat exam in your suburb is $100. An insurance company might say that they'll reimburse at 40% of the local rate for a billing code, so any given doctor will get paid $40.00 for that exam whether their invoice price is $20 or $200. Is your doctor a med school near-dropout or the guy who invented the exam procedure used worldwide? Doesn't matter. $40.
Because of that, doctors almost universally raise their rates regularly, not to increase the amount they'll get paid for each invoice but to bring the local average rate up. In case you're wondering, that 40% in the example is particularly generous. Most insurance companies reimburse at significantly lower multiples. Medicaid has notoriously horrible reimbursement rates, to the point that my wife (a podiatrist) would literally get paid less for many common procedures than she spent for consumable supplies. Every patient she treated like that took money out of her pocket - it's hard to make money when you get paid $15 to do a procedure that costs you $20 to perform (assuming your time is free) - but she saw them anyway because she feels morally compelled to help sick people regardless of their circumstances.
Tell me again why it is terrible advice to use phrases?
Because you still have to remember which phrase goes with which site. If you're going to go through that trouble, why not just use a strong random password generator and store the result in a password safe?
At least from my observation, self-taught developers tend to stick with higher languages such as Ruby or Python rather than C or assembly
Funny, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I've hear newer programmers say things like "I'll just use C to whip up a function that takes the argument and compares it to a linked list of structs to decide which function to call base on the the MD5 digest of the string you passed in, and it'll be really cool!" A more experienced programmer might say something like "I'll make a dict that makes strings to functions, then go to an early lunch." Most of the "old salts" I've worked around tend to use high level languages that let them concentrate on the problem's data flow rather than managing all the nitty gritty details.
Which isn't to say that they can't manage those details exceedingly well. It's just that they'd rather spend their time on the big picture stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The Zune service / software is still better than iTunes but dedicated mp3 players were a hard sell once smartphones started taking off.
Like the iPod Touch, which has over half the sales of iPhones? The MP3 player market is still huge. It's just that there's the iTouch on one end, and the cheap Sansa-type stuff on the other. Microsoft went for an iTouch price point but with Sansa functionality. Anyone's surprised that didn't go over?
Or $689 if you want to add in an office suite
...which almost no one, anywhere, actually wants to run on a tablet. That actually made me LOL as an advertising point - "run your favorite office apps!" - as though there were a non-zero-after-rounding desire for people to run Excel on an iPad (or -alike).
I laud this public school's initiative to make sure that they are tracking attendance.
My school used a sophisticated algorithm by where the number of kids approximately equaled the number of desks. Teachers had a skeuomorphic interface that visually resembled the classroom's desk arrangement. At the beginning of a class period, they'd initiate a breadth-first scan of the studentspace, correlate empty desks with the matching students' names, and use a stylus to apply a red "checkmark" icon next to those names. The process was highly automated and generally took less than 5 seconds.
[slow, appreciative clap]
Somewhere, a kid has been begging and pleading to get an iPad for Christmas.
Somewhere, a parent is thrilled to find that Microsoft's iPads are on sale for $100 off.
One day, both of them will relate the story to their therapists.
Marriage has a specific societal purpose
My sister and her husband haven't had a kid and probably never will. You're an asshole for implying that they're not legitimately married.
If marriage has a specific societal purpose, it's to create small autonomous mutually-supportive social units. My wife and I are a family. My sister and her husband are a family. Joe and Tom can be just as much a family as anyone else.
Maybe the gays need to just grow a pair and live their own lives in peace.
And maybe you just need to grow a pair and accept that you're not the final arbiter of who gets to fall in love with whom.
To find out how to use the data?
Judging from the reviews I found on Amazon, I don't think TomTom knows what to do with it. Even my non-techie in-laws think of TomTom as "that brand they'll sell cheaply at Wal-Mart on Black Friday".
Has no teen hacker rooted the WP7 Lumias so that Android or Linux can be installed?
That would imply the existence of a teen hacker willing to touch a WP7 Lumia, and I see no evidence that such a thing exists.
it's not the "Lumina," but Lumia.
His spellchecker probably autocorrected it to the more popular and respected of the two words.
Besides, if I was Apple, I would buy TomTom for the maps
They already bought TomTom's data. Would would they want with the rest of the company?
Then, obviously you are not too discriminating.
Candidate 1: "I am 90% in favor of [something I detest]."
Candidate 2: "How un-American! I'm 95% in favor of [something I detest]."
So there are distinctions, but few that I find substantial or redeeming. And although I tried to be explicit about this, I'll say it again: I am not a Romney supporter. I couldn't vote for either major candidate with good conscience.
Ended Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Yeah. About that:
Kudos to him for coming around to the side of decency and eventually signing the DADT Repeal Act of 2010, albeit after ordering his Justice Department to fight it tooth and nail.
Maybe I'm just young, but most of my adult life has been under Bush, and now Obama. Bush seemed to mostly screw things up. Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Like Gitmo still being open. Like ordering the assassination of American citizens. Like fighting against the end of indefinite detention of unconvicted, untried suspects. Like the drones circling over the Middle East. This is the "better direction" you see America moving toward?
Note: I'm explicitly not supporting Romney, either. As Douglas Adams might say, they're both the wrong lizards. And given that Romney pretty much invented Obamacare, frankly, I can't really tell them apart.
If a procedure can legitimately be coded in multiple ways, then as the payer I would certainly pay you for the least expensive code regardless of the code you billed me for.
Now you're just being obstinate. The contracts are written like:
Code #123
Requirements:
* Does something
* Does something else
Code #123.2
Requirements:
* Does the same something from #123
* Does the same something else from #123
* Does one extra thing
Suppose the doctor legitimately performs all three requirements to bill for code #123.2. Playing by the rules that were given to them, they are legally entitled to be reimbursed for the more advanced (and expensive) code #123.2. Since the contract says that if you do the work then you can get paid for it, they'd be dumb to walk away from the extra money.
Earlier, you said:
pay the doctor the same whether he runs no tests or 100 tests and you will get the actual number of tests needed to diagnose a patient
And then you said:
are you telling me some doctors will be like "i know i need to run test {ABC} to rule out condition {XYZ} but i'm not going to do it". because... because why? what is your logic whereby a doctor will not run this test?
Because tests aren't free. If a doctor only gets paid for 1 test, they're not going to order the other 14 that might narrow down the result, especially if it only takes one unpaid test to push the equation into a net loss. That's just basic economics. If it costs $40 to perform a test that a doctor bills $50 for, they're not likely to do a second one for free.
Meanwhile, the supplies themselves are horribly overpriced in too many cases. I do wonder why doctors don't form the medical equivalent of Sam's club to force vendors to charge reasonably.
They do. My wife ordered from a supply company that was nearly a co-op and its prices were very reasonable compared to some of the direct suppliers.
Doctors seem to bring at least some of it on themselves. Most don't even know how much the various tests they might order cost nor how much the prescriptions will be. Clearly they do nothing like a cost/benefit analysis for their patients. Any professional in any non-medical field is expected to do that.
I totally agree with that. I was between insurances last month and needed to see a doctor for something minor. I explained up front that I was paying out of pocket. She started to prescribe something that sounded expensive and I stopped her to ask if there was something with a generic that would be more affordable. She paused for a moment, then "oh! Sure. How about ____?" That turned a likely $200 prescription into a $4 generic and was effective enough to fix the problem I went for.
On at least one occasion, she was paid in chickens. The patient had little money but was able to spare some poultry from their farm, so they showed up with an ice chest of plucked, gutted chickens. We got a nice ham once, too. I don't know what her cash discount rate was for people with enough money to pay out of pocket.
Not really. It's just that the dragons are real in this game, and the dungeons aren't nearly as fun.
They deserve slack for replacing a well known, well tested, highly reliable and popular service with their in-house verison which is apparently poorly tested and unpopular-- all in the name of a popularity contest?
I wonder about that. Apple must have had a pretty strong reason to drop such an important and widely-used app from their most popular product, so what could that have been? Petty spite is possible, but it doesn't seem plausible. Maybe Apple decided it's not good to be dependent on their only competitor in the mobile space? Or maybe Google refused to put any significant work into updating Maps; I don't recall any major new features appearing for it in recent years)? Perhaps Google hinted that it's an awfully nice mapping app they've got there - it'd be a pity if something were to happen to it. Or maybe it was just a combination of those and other factors that made Apple say, "you know, this isn't going to be any less painful if we put it off. Let's bite the bullet and get started with a self-hosted app sooner rather than later."
I can imagine quite a few reasons why a company might not have wanted to be in the position that Apple was with Google's Maps app. A popularity wasn't one of them.
pay the doctor the same whether he runs no tests or 100 tests and you will get the actual number of tests needed to diagnose a patient
My wife's a doctor. She had almost no in-house testing equipment except for an x-ray machine, so she referred out any other tests. I don't expect you to believe this, but she didn't make a penny of those tests. There was zero profit motive for her; she just genuinely wanted to know the results of the tests. I know that's not the case for large practices with in-house laboratories or which own advanced imaging systems like MRIs or CT scanners, but your average family practice guy probably isn't seeing any money from prescribing tests from outside facilities.
are you a doctor? you honestly think this is valid advice to give lay people about their healthcare?
No, and yes. My specific advice is to talk it over with your doctor and come to a mutual conclusion. If you go in for bronchitis and he wants to order a chest x-ray, ask him if that's really important or if he's just trying to rule out some highly unlikely condition. If your mutual decision is that it's probably not that important, don't get it. I stand by that advice for a lay person.
If a care provider is doing additional services with the only objective being getting paid more and not treating the patient, it is fraud - even if it just five percent extra.
So you're opposed to using objective rules like "provider performed and documented X, so they're entitled to bill for X" in favor of "provider performed and documented X, but that doesn't feel right". Down that path lies insanity.
Doctor applies band-aid to cut. Bills as emergency band-adi application. Is authorized $921.
Even if they met all the requirement to bill as emergency band-aid application, you still feel it's fraudulent? You're not a fan of rule-of-law, are you.
a free market in real life translates to "give as many expensive tests as we can get away with"
Would a non-free-market solution provide protection to doctors who don't order the most expensive tests they can get away with? As it stands today, doctors who don't order every test imaginable are screwed if they miss something.
On a personal level, you can turn down tests if you don't want to have them. I routinely ask my doctor whether he thinks a test is truly necessary or whether he ordered them to rule out a one-in-a-million syndrome. A good doctor will tell you when they're ordering something just to cover all the bases.
Somebody at Medicare should be looking at the billing records and saying, "It can't be right for every procedure to be billed at the highest possible code when they're a regular full-service hospital. These people are cheating us and I have a red phone on my desk to the Department of Justice Prosecutor's office."
If there are two legal, legitimate ways to code for a given procedure, why would a clinic not bill for the more expensive of the two? Medicare - not the hospitals - sets the reimbursement rates and defines the codes. If they didn't intend for the higher code to be billable, they should have written the definition so that it wasn't.
There are also lots of coding seminars that teach doctors things like "if you ask question X during the history and physical part of their exam, you can bill code #123-2 instead of your normal #123-1. You're already doing 95% of the work to qualify for #123-2, which pays double of #123-1, so why not do the extra 5% and double your income?". Again, Medicare and the insurance companies are settings those standards. Sucks to be them if health care providers decide to play by the rules that have been dictated to them.
Let's put it in tax terms. Suppose that if you give $10,000 to charity, you get a $5,000 tax break. Your accountant notices that you've already given $9,500 to charity and advises you to donate $500 more before the end of the year. You do so, and that $500 turns into a $5,000 benefit for you. Are you cheating? You didn't make the rules. You're playing entirely within the codes that Congress has set. It would ring a little hollow for Congress to complain that you're defrauding the IRS of $5,000 by going along with the procedures that they put in place.
Then depending on what they did during the exam, they bill for everything they did (according to the standard set of codes) at some totally fictitious rate that maybe one sucker in a million pays.
Furthermore, insurers typically calculate their reimbursement for procedure #123 based on a percentage of the average "retail" price of procedure #123 across all physicians in the local area. For instance, say the average price for a strep throat exam in your suburb is $100. An insurance company might say that they'll reimburse at 40% of the local rate for a billing code, so any given doctor will get paid $40.00 for that exam whether their invoice price is $20 or $200. Is your doctor a med school near-dropout or the guy who invented the exam procedure used worldwide? Doesn't matter. $40.
Because of that, doctors almost universally raise their rates regularly, not to increase the amount they'll get paid for each invoice but to bring the local average rate up. In case you're wondering, that 40% in the example is particularly generous. Most insurance companies reimburse at significantly lower multiples. Medicaid has notoriously horrible reimbursement rates, to the point that my wife (a podiatrist) would literally get paid less for many common procedures than she spent for consumable supplies. Every patient she treated like that took money out of her pocket - it's hard to make money when you get paid $15 to do a procedure that costs you $20 to perform (assuming your time is free) - but she saw them anyway because she feels morally compelled to help sick people regardless of their circumstances.
Tell me again why it is terrible advice to use phrases?
Because you still have to remember which phrase goes with which site. If you're going to go through that trouble, why not just use a strong random password generator and store the result in a password safe?
At least from my observation, self-taught developers tend to stick with higher languages such as Ruby or Python rather than C or assembly
Funny, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I've hear newer programmers say things like "I'll just use C to whip up a function that takes the argument and compares it to a linked list of structs to decide which function to call base on the the MD5 digest of the string you passed in, and it'll be really cool!" A more experienced programmer might say something like "I'll make a dict that makes strings to functions, then go to an early lunch." Most of the "old salts" I've worked around tend to use high level languages that let them concentrate on the problem's data flow rather than managing all the nitty gritty details.
Which isn't to say that they can't manage those details exceedingly well. It's just that they'd rather spend their time on the big picture stuff.