If your boss makes work a living hell in hops of you quitting, some people will quit. Others will endure the living hell in order to pay for their family's living. Of course, the stress will probably increase the likelihood of their actually getting sick, and will exacerbate any illness they have.
Perhaps a more valuable solution would be to mandate the grandfathering of employer health insurance -- If an employee leaves, then {s,}he gets to take the insurance with {him,her}. Only a small increase in premiums would be allowed -- to cover the increased paperwork caused by a single participant. Similarly, insurance companies shouldn't be able to jack up the premiums of a company much beyond the average increase in industry costs. In either case, the company would still be stuck with the sick customer.
The idea would be to force insurance companies to actually amortize the cost of acutely and chronically sick customers into their larger base, rather than forcing them out through massive fee increases. --
Many of the externally observable effects of a black hole (eg: gravitational lensing) are really just the effects of deep gravity wells including non-black neutron stars. As such: even if they turn out not to exist, whatever the erstwhile blackholes actually become, many of the effects attributed to black holes will still be there. --
The key to loosing weight (for most people) is to increase your exercise on a constant food intake. Try parking the car a mile from work and walking the rest of the way each day. As you get used to it, increase the distance, until you're jogging 5 miles a day. Do not change your diet (neither increase or decrease). --
There's a difference between not being able to get a job at United Airlines as a pilot, because losing your glasses in the middle of a rough landing could cause a crash -- and not being able to get a job at all at United because you inherited a bone-cancer gene.
The problem is with profit-based health insurance schemes, where you're only insurable as long as your insurer is getting more money out of you than they're paying for your health care. There is effectively no way to give the average person coverage against chronic-style illness under the US model of health insurance. --
What he described was essentially a version of the 'two camps' problem (I first heard this story in the early '80s with respect to TCP handshaking).
You have two allied camps in a war zone separated by enemy territory. The commander of one camp sends a runner to the other camp with a message. "we attack at 6am -- but only if we know you got this message safely". The question is: How do BOTH camps know that the other got the message and it wasn't intercepted?
At some point, the answer is "trust". Building a secure trust without a secure channel is next to impossible without some sort of out-of-band communication.
Send a number of volleys equal to your mistress' birth month 200 Metres north of our camp to acknowledge this message.
Even with Thawte or Verisign, how do you know that the installation software for your browser wasn't compromised? How paranoid do you want to get?
With any cryptographically based authentication scheme, there comes a point where you have to trust SOME communication to be accurate and the underlying data secure.
The question then becomes: How much work do you want to put into the key exchange and verification process (as a user), and how much work should we put into making the process user-friendly (as developers).
The answers to these questions will differ for different people and different applications. General users doing random web browsing probably don't care quite enough. An IT spook at CSIS (Canadian Security and Intelligence Services), on the other hand, was quoted as saying "We don't have a firewall -- We have an air gap." between their 'secure' systems and their net-accessible systems).
An old "murphy's laws" listing (circa 1979) included the phrase:
Investment in security will continue until the cost of the security exceeds the cost of the breach -- or until somebody insists on getting some serious work done
I just put a self-signed key on my site mostly for the hell of it. It allows people to view the highly political contents of the site with complete paranoia. Is it worthwhile for me to find someone to pay for a 'secure' version of the certificate? no. Are people going to accept the self-signed certificate? I don't care. --
In Netscape, you can view the list of signers by left-clicking on the lock icon in the bottom left corner of the window. Then choose Certificates/ Signers. --
It's a predictable side-effect of having people generally dependant on their employer for medical insurance. Especially if you work for a relatively small company ( Once you loose your coverage from your employer, you're essentially uninsurable privatly. It's another example of private 'health insurance' being only for the healthy. The problem lies in the financial reality of a 'statistically sick' person in a profit-driven industry. There is almost no reason whatsoever why it would be to a company's advantage to insure you for less than it would statistically cost to take care of you.
In other words, if it's going to cost $20K/year to keep you alive, it's not going to be worth it for ANY insurance company that isn't charging you at least $22K/year (need some profit in there after bookkeeping costs).
I don't see much of a real answer to this stastical delima than making Health Insurance coverage mandatory (i.e. nationalizing it). --
(please ignore this line -- it's entire purpose is to satisfy the lameness filter)
g/<fuzzy logic>/s/propert/proprietary/
This is the hypothesis of "Anarchism Triumphant" and part of what I'm writing about in "The Invisible Barbecue." We're going to have a
competition in certain sectors of the economy between property and non-property production and non-property production is going to
win. But the same can't be said when the goods are not functional and there is not an objective evaluation of betterness or worseness, and
where the level of collaboration in production is less. We will see art forms in the next generation that are just as collaborative in production
. . . . .
Fear of "wasting" money on a sick child is not a dilema that a Canadian mother would have to face.
Oh, and it's such a HUGE problem here in the US! Right! Have you been watching too much ER or something?
In this case, the child was seriously ill (congenital problem). The mother (adoptive, I think) was even a nurse, but her health plan apparently didn't cover the child very well.
The thing about health insurance is that it only becomes a big issue if/when something nasty happens. I've been lucky enough to not have needed much medical attention. Then again, I'd have said the same thing of my mother -- until she hit her 70s. The chronic kidney problems she's had for the last couple of years would have probably made her uninsurable under the US system. Luckily she's Canadian, so she doesn't have to worry about declaring bankruptcy in 5 years if her situation worsens again.
It's a little bit hard to guage the value of a health-insurance system from the point of view of a young, healthy professional. Consider what whould happen, though, if you came down with cancer at the same time as you had to change companies -- or if your child got sick just after leaving home. That kind of situation is where the rubber of any insurance system meets the road. --
Back in the '80s there were some hams working on wireless net access -- of course, they were talking about a blazing 1200~2400 baud, at the time. Although the hardware technology is obviously obsolete, some of the software techniques may be applicable to current wireless open nets. --
The electoral collage was put in place so a canidate can't campaign in 5 major cities
and promise welfare for life to everyone and win, neglecting the other 99% of the country.
ugh: You win NYC, you carry New York. You win SF and LA, you carry California. You win Palm Beach, you carry Florida.
Maybee you have to campaign in 10-20 major sities, but it can be pretty much the way you said it isn't.
Some historians seem to think that the original reason for the Electoral College was that you can't trust the 'stupid' electorate with something as important as choosing the president. The college originally was chosen by the governors or the senates/houses of the various states --- people you could trust(!). Now they're chosen by wierd laws in each state that give an entire state's seats to the winner in that state.
Big improvement, I guess. It's too bad that voters can't actually vote for president, though.
(It's not much better here in Canada, where the equivalent of the House leader becomes the effective head of state, and can be re-picked if the politics dictates it (in a couple of cases,
we've even had Prime Ministers who weren't even elected to Parliament, just because they became the leader of the dominant party). --
Hmm. I got it working, but the multi-user stuff didn't work too well. Couldn't find another site to play with.
Any thoughts on that??? (no -- no firewall problems here!) --
Microsoft and MPAA (as pointed out elsewhere) have the strength they do partly because of government regulations that give them power over their consumers (DMCA, UCTIA, etc.). cf: DECSS.
Standard Oil is before my time.
AT&T? That may be before your time, but the history of unix is actually bound up in AT&T being a regulated monopoly.
Back in the mid '70s, Ritchie and Thompson had written a paper on the UNIX operating system, including the chess work that they were using background CPU time on. Many academics were interested in working with their program and asked them for a copy.
As luck would have it, running the program really required that you also have UNIX available. In the process of sending out copies, their activities got the attention of the lawyers who said that they should NOT release UNIX outside of Bell Labs or they'd be sued. This was because they were a regulated monopoly and someone might see them distributing UNIX as going into a non-telephone market (Operating Systems).
They reluctantly told their colleagues that they could not release their system -- and were propmptly sued. The basis of the suit was apparently that (as a regulated monopoly) they could not restrict the flow of technology.
AT&T lost the suit and released UNIX to interested parties -- and were promptly sued for releasing it.The basis of the second suit was (as AT&T lawyers had predicted) that they were entering a new market (OSes). AT&T also lost the second suit.
Faced with the apparent catch-22 logic that they could neither restrict nor market the UNIX technology, they came up with a somewhat convoluted solution:
For an appropriate fee ($100 for universities, much more for a company), and signing a non-disclosure license agreement, you got a tape with a dump of a working UNIX box -- including source code. Once you got the tape, your were on your own. AT&T could neither market, nor support their 'rogue' operating system.
Since everybody who used UNIX in it's early years needed the source code (and could share it with anyone else with a source license), Unix was effectively Open Source in the early years. This resulted in a phenomenal growth in both the use and the power of the system (including branches such as BSD).
Part of the reason why AT&T decided to go for the breakup that resulted in the de-monopolization of phone service in the US was that they wanted to take advantage of this burgeoning UNIX market. (they failed, but that's another issue)
As UNIX became more commercial (and therefore closed-source), I think that this closed-source squeeze was part of the impetus for Stallman (and others) to start what is now the Free Source movement) --
There's an interesting side effect to socialized health care:
If I breake my arm in Canada, I go to the hospital and head home with a cast.
If I do that in the States, I go home with a cast and a bill for $1,200. At that point it's worthwhile to hire a lawyer to figure out who's fault the broken arm is. By the time the dust settles, the cost of the broken arm can be up in the $15K range.
A notable example of the difference between Canadian and US health care came up with the baby abandoned in Calgary this summer. The note said that the child had never been to a doctor because the mother didn't expect him to live very long.
Fear of "wasting" money on a sick child is not a dilema that a Canadian mother would have to face. It would be unthinkable to do anything other than go to the doctor and at least find out what it took to make sure that you child had as comfortable life as possible.
Being sick, and not being able to visit a doctor is not a seirous worry for Canadians (as long as we manage to maintain our health system). --
One of the principles of Adam Smith's free market was that the market consisted of multiple small, local companies in competition. Monopolies, near monopolies and multi-regional (not to mention multi-national) companies tend to distort a true free market economy. Smith might be rolling over in his grave over what's going on in his name.
As far as I'm concerned (and I don't think I'm too far off of what Smith intended), large companies aren't that much different than government intervention. In either case, you have bureaucrats deciding what's going to happen in some remote location depending on semi-random criteria (often including what makes the most money for someone far remote from the actual work being done).
BTW: monopolies don't require that there be absolutely no other competition. Perfect monopolies rarely exist. The closer you get to them the more likely that they're the result of some sort of government regulation. An effective monopoly (a la M$) simply requires an overwhelming control of the bulk of the market such that you can act as if you wer pretty much the only player in the market.
For a monopoly's actions to be declared illegal like MS was, it requires both an overwhelming control of the market, and actions to maintain that overwhelming control over the market at cost to both customers and current or impending competition.
In other words: for a monopoly to take illegal actions pretty much requires some sort of competition to take action against (either actual or latent competition is fine).
--
.... (not as good
as first sex (with Natalie Portman - ah the innocent virgin)
If you think Natalie Portman is an innocent virgin, you're probably more innocent than you think she is!
The difference between OS and FS isn't really large, but the distinction is important.
It's kinda like if someone asked me about programming an old Intel processor. They may all seem almost the same on the surface, but if you do some deep programming of a '286, thinking it was a '386, (or vice versa), you could end up with come serious problems once you broke out of compatability mode.
Similarly with OS vs FS. It doesn't make much difference on the surface, but when M$ tries to
'embrace and extend' your code, it can be really important to know which paradigm you were distributing your code inside of.
From what I can tell, all of the counter-examples are prior to the 1997 document sited at the top.
They are also all prior to the explosion of the 'net, when everybody and their dog wanted to get their own domain.
Honest, Billy: There really was a time when people would say "So why should I want an e-mail address? I've got FAX!"
My grandfather used to own a Model T. It sat in his Garage until 1980. He was a pretty good businessman, so after having it for so long, he was so proud of himself when he managed to sell it for a whole $50. (yeah, you read that right -- no missing digits, and it was TT dollars (about $0.35US each)!)
A almost throttled him over the phone when I found out about that.
That's why oil's so useful. If it wasn't cheaper than bottled water (ever figured out the price/gallon of evian=!=naive or perrier?), we'd be using something else to get ourselves around, make plastic with etc. etc. That's also why people are screaming so much about the recent rise in the price of gas.
A stone imagined by some to be of impenetrable hardness; a name given to the diamond and other substances of extreme hardness;
but in modern mineralogy it has no technical signification. It is now a rhetorical or poetical name for the embodiment of impenetrable hardness.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a more valuable solution would be to mandate the grandfathering of employer health insurance -- If an employee leaves, then {s,}he gets to take the insurance with {him,her}. Only a small increase in premiums would be allowed -- to cover the increased paperwork caused by a single participant. Similarly, insurance companies shouldn't be able to jack up the premiums of a company much beyond the average increase in industry costs. In either case, the company would still be stuck with the sick customer.
The idea would be to force insurance companies to actually amortize the cost of acutely and chronically sick customers into their larger base, rather than forcing them out through massive fee increases.
--
Rather like my truism:
Treat someone like an enemy for long enough and -- sooner or later -- they'll get the hint.
--
Many of the externally observable effects of a black hole (eg: gravitational lensing) are really just the effects of deep gravity wells including non-black neutron stars. As such: even if they turn out not to exist, whatever the erstwhile blackholes actually become, many of the effects attributed to black holes will still be there.
--
The key to loosing weight (for most people) is to increase your exercise on a constant food intake. Try parking the car a mile from work and walking the rest of the way each day. As you get used to it, increase the distance, until you're jogging 5 miles a day. Do not change your diet (neither increase or decrease).
--
The problem is with profit-based health insurance schemes, where you're only insurable as long as your insurer is getting more money out of you than they're paying for your health care. There is effectively no way to give the average person coverage against chronic-style illness under the US model of health insurance.
--
Send a number of volleys equal to your mistress' birth month 200 Metres north of our camp to acknowledge this message.
Even with Thawte or Verisign, how do you know that the installation software for your browser wasn't compromised? How paranoid do you want to get? With any cryptographically based authentication scheme, there comes a point where you have to trust SOME communication to be accurate and the underlying data secure.
The question then becomes: How much work do you want to put into the key exchange and verification process (as a user), and how much work should we put into making the process user-friendly (as developers).
The answers to these questions will differ for different people and different applications. General users doing random web browsing probably don't care quite enough. An IT spook at CSIS (Canadian Security and Intelligence Services), on the other hand, was quoted as saying "We don't have a firewall -- We have an air gap." between their 'secure' systems and their net-accessible systems).
Chocolate / Vanilla -- Choose.
--
--
In Netscape, you can view the list of signers by left-clicking on the lock icon in the bottom left corner of the window. Then choose Certificates/ Signers.
--
In other words, if it's going to cost $20K/year to keep you alive, it's not going to be worth it for ANY insurance company that isn't charging you at least $22K/year (need some profit in there after bookkeeping costs).
I don't see much of a real answer to this stastical delima than making Health Insurance coverage mandatory (i.e. nationalizing it).
--
I've had it on my site since about 1993. I remember finding a rebuttal, but I didn't post it back then, so it's long lost.
--
g/<fuzzy logic>/s/propert/proprietary/
--
The thing about health insurance is that it only becomes a big issue if/when something nasty happens. I've been lucky enough to not have needed much medical attention. Then again, I'd have said the same thing of my mother -- until she hit her 70s. The chronic kidney problems she's had for the last couple of years would have probably made her uninsurable under the US system. Luckily she's Canadian, so she doesn't have to worry about declaring bankruptcy in 5 years if her situation worsens again.
It's a little bit hard to guage the value of a health-insurance system from the point of view of a young, healthy professional. Consider what whould happen, though, if you came down with cancer at the same time as you had to change companies -- or if your child got sick just after leaving home. That kind of situation is where the rubber of any insurance system meets the road.
--
Back in the '80s there were some hams working on wireless net access -- of course, they were talking about a blazing 1200~2400 baud, at the time. Although the hardware technology is obviously obsolete, some of the software techniques may be applicable to current wireless open nets.
--
Maybee you have to campaign in 10-20 major sities, but it can be pretty much the way you said it isn't.
Some historians seem to think that the original reason for the Electoral College was that you can't trust the 'stupid' electorate with something as important as choosing the president. The college originally was chosen by the governors or the senates/houses of the various states --- people you could trust(!). Now they're chosen by wierd laws in each state that give an entire state's seats to the winner in that state.
Big improvement, I guess. It's too bad that voters can't actually vote for president, though. (It's not much better here in Canada, where the equivalent of the House leader becomes the effective head of state, and can be re-picked if the politics dictates it (in a couple of cases, we've even had Prime Ministers who weren't even elected to Parliament, just because they became the leader of the dominant party).
--
Hmm. I got it working, but the multi-user stuff didn't work too well. Couldn't find another site to play with. Any thoughts on that??? (no -- no firewall problems here!)
--
Standard Oil is before my time.
AT&T? That may be before your time, but the history of unix is actually bound up in AT&T being a regulated monopoly.
Back in the mid '70s, Ritchie and Thompson had written a paper on the UNIX operating system, including the chess work that they were using background CPU time on. Many academics were interested in working with their program and asked them for a copy.
As luck would have it, running the program really required that you also have UNIX available. In the process of sending out copies, their activities got the attention of the lawyers who said that they should NOT release UNIX outside of Bell Labs or they'd be sued. This was because they were a regulated monopoly and someone might see them distributing UNIX as going into a non-telephone market (Operating Systems).
They reluctantly told their colleagues that they could not release their system -- and were propmptly sued. The basis of the suit was apparently that (as a regulated monopoly) they could not restrict the flow of technology.
AT&T lost the suit and released UNIX to interested parties -- and were promptly sued for releasing it.The basis of the second suit was (as AT&T lawyers had predicted) that they were entering a new market (OSes). AT&T also lost the second suit.
Faced with the apparent catch-22 logic that they could neither restrict nor market the UNIX technology, they came up with a somewhat convoluted solution:
For an appropriate fee ($100 for universities, much more for a company), and signing a non-disclosure license agreement, you got a tape with a dump of a working UNIX box -- including source code. Once you got the tape, your were on your own. AT&T could neither market, nor support their 'rogue' operating system.
Since everybody who used UNIX in it's early years needed the source code (and could share it with anyone else with a source license), Unix was effectively Open Source in the early years. This resulted in a phenomenal growth in both the use and the power of the system (including branches such as BSD).
Part of the reason why AT&T decided to go for the breakup that resulted in the de-monopolization of phone service in the US was that they wanted to take advantage of this burgeoning UNIX market. (they failed, but that's another issue)
As UNIX became more commercial (and therefore closed-source), I think that this closed-source squeeze was part of the impetus for Stallman (and others) to start what is now the Free Source movement)
--
If I breake my arm in Canada, I go to the hospital and head home with a cast.
If I do that in the States, I go home with a cast and a bill for $1,200. At that point it's worthwhile to hire a lawyer to figure out who's fault the broken arm is. By the time the dust settles, the cost of the broken arm can be up in the $15K range.
A notable example of the difference between Canadian and US health care came up with the baby abandoned in Calgary this summer. The note said that the child had never been to a doctor because the mother didn't expect him to live very long.
Fear of "wasting" money on a sick child is not a dilema that a Canadian mother would have to face. It would be unthinkable to do anything other than go to the doctor and at least find out what it took to make sure that you child had as comfortable life as possible.
Being sick, and not being able to visit a doctor is not a seirous worry for Canadians (as long as we manage to maintain our health system).
--
As far as I'm concerned (and I don't think I'm too far off of what Smith intended), large companies aren't that much different than government intervention. In either case, you have bureaucrats deciding what's going to happen in some remote location depending on semi-random criteria (often including what makes the most money for someone far remote from the actual work being done).
BTW: monopolies don't require that there be absolutely no other competition. Perfect monopolies rarely exist. The closer you get to them the more likely that they're the result of some sort of government regulation. An effective monopoly (a la M$) simply requires an overwhelming control of the bulk of the market such that you can act as if you wer pretty much the only player in the market.
For a monopoly's actions to be declared illegal like MS was, it requires both an overwhelming control of the market, and actions to maintain that overwhelming control over the market at cost to both customers and current or impending competition.
In other words: for a monopoly to take illegal actions pretty much requires some sort of competition to take action against (either actual or latent competition is fine).
--
Well, if Shakespeare was a group of people, you'd have to dig up their bones to throw in jail.
.... (not as good as first sex (with Natalie Portman - ah the innocent virgin) If you think Natalie Portman is an innocent virgin, you're probably more innocent than you think she is!
It's kinda like if someone asked me about programming an old Intel processor. They may all seem almost the same on the surface, but if you do some deep programming of a '286, thinking it was a '386, (or vice versa), you could end up with come serious problems once you broke out of compatability mode.
Similarly with OS vs FS. It doesn't make much difference on the surface, but when M$ tries to 'embrace and extend' your code, it can be really important to know which paradigm you were distributing your code inside of.
Honest, Billy: There really was a time when people would say "So why should I want an e-mail address? I've got FAX!"
A almost throttled him over the phone when I found out about that.
That's why oil's so useful. If it wasn't cheaper than bottled water (ever figured out the price/gallon of evian=!=naive or perrier?), we'd be using something else to get ourselves around, make plastic with etc. etc. That's also why people are screaming so much about the recent rise in the price of gas.