Valerie has insurance which covers the three of us, but it's her insurance. If she lost her job or if other things happened that I decline to contemplate, we would not have been able to obtain that sort of insurance or indeed anything that wasn't a fraud or a rip-off.
Given that some of the other 50 states implemented exchanges and that the Federal one exists, a total of 7 Million sounds reasonable with 1.2 Million coming from California.
Are you able to show us the terms of your plan? The reason I ask is that I was offered what turned out to be a "trash plan", and the sort of things that aren't being grandfathered are rejected because they don't meet a minimum standard of care. In my case, a catastrophic injury such as in an auto wreck would not have been covered significantly.
The lady who famously confronted Obama on this issue had a plan that limited its payout to a few hundred dollars.
There were two sorts of plans available: There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury. Basically, it was a "feel good about being insured until you try to use it" plan which had the main purpose of producing income for a fraudster. I am very glad that such things are being prohibited now because I know there are lots of people who are not as careful readers of terms as I am.
The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.
California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.
I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.
Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.
Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.
Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.
Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.
Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.
I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.
So, it is tempting to resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot stinks worse than the last two times I shut down technocrat.net.
If you remember, we didn't get very many readers. We didn't get them because not enough people submitted usable articles.
As it happens, we don't just need a better Slashdot. We need a replacement for Groklaw. And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.
I know that I can do it technically, and I have the server, and Cloudflare should be able to help me handle the load. But if it is like last time, and my wife observes that I'm talking to the same dozen guys all of the time, it's not going to work.
You could do this using FRS walkie talkies, as long as they have microphone and earphone connections. Or analog telephones. It's been tested multiple times on ham FM walkie talkies. Anything that carries voice should work. The bandwidth is only 1.25 kHz and I think the low end starts at about 700 Hz.
There is a video of the codec vs. SSB on the same radio link here. You can also take any radio links you have at hand and run the FreeDV program. This is an evening project to set up without a business case, and at least some companies appreciate people who take the initiative to do this sort of thing.
Since I did this talk, a lot of information about AMBE has been revealed and there is a receive-only implementation in Open Source. The patents in general run out by 2015. But AMBE is still a relatively low-performance codec compared to ours.
Sorry. When I say "1200 Baud", I am in general thinking of the TAPR TNC 2, which was never built for voice but can do it, to a degree, with this codec. It's sort of a Bell 212 modem on half-duplex radio. There were many commercial products based on the TNC 2 design and many hams have them on hand. It's a good demo to put speech through a pair of them, not really practical because the latency is high.
MOS is only for people who want to pay a lot of money. Of the automated processes, the one available to us isn't validated for less than 4K bps codecs.
It would be a great improvement to MOS if there was an open version of POQLA. But the actual customer base for the codec have never even heard of MOS and thus we aren't volunteering to write that. The folks who want to put it in expensive government support systems yet aren't willing to help with testing don't get our sympathy.
Correct. It's made for radio, and indeed you need to go connection-based rather than datagram-based to keep the header overhead smaller than the payload.
We avoid some techniques that would make the noise performance worse. The HF version of the codec doesn't vector quantitize, and doesn't do any delta coding between frames. The current FEC is Golay and we are investigating low-density parity codes.
There is a lot yet unheard about the Ratheon codec, regarding its actual noise performance and how well the listener can distinguish different speakers.
Slashdot Mirror
Valerie has insurance which covers the three of us, but it's her insurance. If she lost her job or if other things happened that I decline to contemplate, we would not have been able to obtain that sort of insurance or indeed anything that wasn't a fraud or a rip-off.
Given that some of the other 50 states implemented exchanges and that the Federal one exists, a total of 7 Million sounds reasonable with 1.2 Million coming from California.
Are you able to show us the terms of your plan? The reason I ask is that I was offered what turned out to be a "trash plan", and the sort of things that aren't being grandfathered are rejected because they don't meet a minimum standard of care. In my case, a catastrophic injury such as in an auto wreck would not have been covered significantly.
The lady who famously confronted Obama on this issue had a plan that limited its payout to a few hundred dollars.
There were two sorts of plans available: There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury. Basically, it was a "feel good about being insured until you try to use it" plan which had the main purpose of producing income for a fraudster. I am very glad that such things are being prohibited now because I know there are lots of people who are not as careful readers of terms as I am.
The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.
California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.
I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.
Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.
Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.
It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.
Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.
If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.
Yes... What's your point?
The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.
Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.
Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.
Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.
I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.
That makes more sense. Thanks.
I did that with Slashdot. I don't like the way it worked out.
Hi,
So, it is tempting to resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot stinks worse than the last two times I shut down technocrat.net .
If you remember, we didn't get very many readers. We didn't get them because not enough people submitted usable articles.
As it happens, we don't just need a better Slashdot. We need a replacement for Groklaw. And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.
I know that I can do it technically, and I have the server, and Cloudflare should be able to help me handle the load. But if it is like last time, and my wife observes that I'm talking to the same dozen guys all of the time, it's not going to work.
What do you think?
You dial 1-510-4PERENS. Email is probably better, though. bruce@perens.com .
How about a smartphone app that encodes steganographic audio in your photographs? If you upload your photos, the spies get your audio too!
You could do this using FRS walkie talkies, as long as they have microphone and earphone connections. Or analog telephones. It's been tested multiple times on ham FM walkie talkies. Anything that carries voice should work. The bandwidth is only 1.25 kHz and I think the low end starts at about 700 Hz.
There is a video of the codec vs. SSB on the same radio link here. You can also take any radio links you have at hand and run the FreeDV program. This is an evening project to set up without a business case, and at least some companies appreciate people who take the initiative to do this sort of thing.
I can get the soundrack of your entire lifetime on a 32G micro-SD card.
Since I did this talk, a lot of information about AMBE has been revealed and there is a receive-only implementation in Open Source. The patents in general run out by 2015. But AMBE is still a relatively low-performance codec compared to ours.
Sorry. When I say "1200 Baud", I am in general thinking of the TAPR TNC 2, which was never built for voice but can do it, to a degree, with this codec. It's sort of a Bell 212 modem on half-duplex radio. There were many commercial products based on the TNC 2 design and many hams have them on hand. It's a good demo to put speech through a pair of them, not really practical because the latency is high.
MOS is only for people who want to pay a lot of money. Of the automated processes, the one available to us isn't validated for less than 4K bps codecs.
It would be a great improvement to MOS if there was an open version of POQLA. But the actual customer base for the codec have never even heard of MOS and thus we aren't volunteering to write that. The folks who want to put it in expensive government support systems yet aren't willing to help with testing don't get our sympathy.
Correct. It's made for radio, and indeed you need to go connection-based rather than datagram-based to keep the header overhead smaller than the payload.
We avoid some techniques that would make the noise performance worse. The HF version of the codec doesn't vector quantitize, and doesn't do any delta coding between frames. The current FEC is Golay and we are investigating low-density parity codes.
There is a lot yet unheard about the Ratheon codec, regarding its actual noise performance and how well the listener can distinguish different speakers.