Perhaps I am merely off-base here being as I am a civilian with exactly zero hours remote piloting a combat drone aircraft, but is it possible that what we have here is merely a case of information overload? It seems likely that better software, perhaps with configurable plug-ins and a bit of AI would go a long way towards alleviating some of the stress. For example, MMORPG computer games such as World of Warcraft offer plug-ins for extra HUD options to alert the player to important events and conditions and quickly take scripted responses. Could not something similar be done here? Naturally the AI would not "control" the drone in an active way, but streamline the flow of information while at the same time allowing the pilot to make important decisions without feeling overly rushed or pressured by less relevant incoming data. It might even be possible for the software to allow targeting and firing at the command of the pilot (i.e. engaging target x, cancel or allow?) without forcing the pilot to view the immediate results (i.e. it is recorded for later review by either the pilot or others in the chain of command) with the AI "co-pilot" simply reporting success or failure of the objective without displaying visuals of the results (unless it is asked too of course). Surely a couple of billion dollars can be spared (what is that, a month or less of operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan) to build such a system and put it into place. In fact, I hear that the new F22 fighter plane (which probably gets more funding than the drones) already has similar intelligent information filtering, prioritizing, and display systems.
According to TFA that won't work. You don't know if a particular retailer is using the "verified by visa" program before you are already in the process of making your purchase. You get redirected (or ambushed) into a separate off-site page where you are asked to enter a password which locks your card for fraud if you get it wrong (or possibly even if you just refuse to enter the password, but the details on what causes a lock are a bit sketchy which makes the whole situation even worse). If your card gets locked in this way then you cannot use it any other merchant online or offline until you go to the bank website and unlock it. It has been pointed out by others that, due to the offsite redirect and request for a separate password, this makes a perfect target for phisers who can trick an unsuspecting user into entering their password which the phisers then use to reset the password to something else (effectively locking the legitimate customer out of their account). The fact that phising was and is an ongoing problem, even with regular HTTPs sites that do not do extra re-directs, suggests that these additional steps will only confuse most of the customers and provide even more chances for the phisers out there to ply their trade.
They can put whatever they want in their employment contract and their lawyers can try to scare you into believing that they can sue you and enforce it in court but it is really nothing more than a bluff on the part of the employer to prevent spineless and ignorant former employees from "violating the agreement". They are hoping that they can scare people into giving up their rights.
That's a complex problem that most programs, even modern ones, probably are not designed to consider.
They may not be implemented to consider it "as is", but the best modern object oriented (OO) software systems would be designed to allow this type of functionality to be injected into the existing implementation at runtime on a future date. This is a great advantage of modern OO and modular systems, you don't have to know about all possible requirements or uses up front if you are able to develop and inject new dependencies as the circumstances change. Unfortunately, this type of advanced understanding is not yet widely grokked among those who identify themselves with the software development profession, but that will change as more people recognize the advantages of the powerful design patterns enabled by OO design and analysis.
This is true, however they do frequently receive an allowance, typically an odd amount with exact change, from which approved or periodically mandated purchases can or must be made and recorded in a special notebook carried upon the person of the cultist especially for that purpose. For example, the Heavens Gate cultists were each found with exactly $5.75 (a $5 dollar bill and three quarters) in their pockets following their mass suicide in the Rancho Santa Fe community of San Diego California on March 26, 1997.
It was a dig on the notion that civilization is a game which can be won and the irreverent style of the series and especially the more recent installments, Civilization IV for example, which poke at themselves in a self deprecating sort of way. Some people, upon whom the humorous factor is lost, have even complained that the games present a decidedly western and essentially Americanized manifest destiny view of world history where capitalist democracy combined with a powerful military is the supreme level of achievement for any civilization without realizing that part of the game is ridiculous situations which are funny precisely because they are absurd. So there you are, some background on the inside, or should I say outside now, joke.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, I do not eschew insurance entirely but rather advocate its judicious use for situations for which it is warranted. A high deductible health insurance plan (HDHP) combined with a health savings account (HSA) very nicely fits the bill. Once the savings ball is rolling you can periodically adjust the deductible as the balance in the account increases or your individual tolerance for risk increases or decreases. Now I will grant you that this is not the best option for everyone. For example, people with regularly recurring medical expenses that are moderately high but not high enough to satisfy the deductible OR people who, through either misfortune or their own doing or both, incur medical expenses in excess of $5 million dollars or so (but really you are screwed anyway at that point because almost nobody could afford to pay out of pocket for those kind of expenses and a state run health program is likely to deny your treatment and let you die anyway because they will not pay a huge amount to save the life a single individual and thereby endanger the solvency of the system for everyone else). However, for most of the rest of us the HDHP + HSA plan is quite viable because many expected medical expenses over one's lifetime are relatively small compared to what can be saved over time in the HSA and involve planned expenses and NOT catastrophic emergency care (which is why the HSA is combined with the HDHP).
You could very easily could end up requiring to pay $3~5k per month for health insurance.
So don't have insurance and pay out of pocket instead if that works out to be cheaper. Insurance should not be used for everyday transactions anyway and I have yet to meet a doctor who would not take cash on the barrelhead (and if you know anything about insurance billing and what a headache it can be for doctors then you know how much they appreciate cash basis patients and are willing to negotiate with and accommodate them to avoid third party billing hassles). This one of many reasons why it is imperative to build up a strong financial position before reaching middle and old age, so that one is not limited in negotiations and options by bargaining from a position of weakness rather than a position of strength.
The workers of the United States are some of the most productive in the world and we collectively create vast riches--for a tiny minority of people at the top who "own" the factories and businesses from which this wealth is extracted.
The workers were paid for their work. Perhaps you think that they weren't paid enough or that the terms were unfair, but really that is between the worker and their employer. Nobody forced the employer to hire the worker and the worker is free to leave at any time for whatever reason.
This is nothing more than organized theft.
Organization and management are skills that can be applied to create more wealth and even you admit that they are organized. Should not those who organize and coordinate collective efforts to achieve greater results be rewarded for doing that in the same way that workers are rewarded for doing the labor?
Under a sane, rational system all workers would share in the wealth we create.
Everyone shares in the wealth right now, just not equally because not all individual contributions to the collective store of wealth in society are of equal value.
When we discover new techniques that make our jobs more efficient, we would all work less--instead of under capitalism, which results in layoffs and fewer people working more
You should give France a try if you are living in the EU, I hear that they have a mandatory 35 hour maximum work week.
We wouldn't waste trillions on killing people--we'd spend trillions to create good jobs that serve important needs: like educating people, healing them, building efficient mass-transit and clean, renewable energy sources
Would you like some fries with that tall order of Utopia? People have been killing each other since the first ape stood up on two legs (and probably before that too) and there is every reason to expect that the humans will continue to find ever more efficient and inventive ways to kill their fellow man.
Instead we live in a world where a handful of parasites lets their own short-term, profit-oriented interests dictate policy for the rest of us. They get to force their pro-capitalist dogma onto us in schools, textbooks and via the media they own, so that people believe that the current system is the way things should be and always will be (just as the Church and nobility once taught serfs and merchants to remain in their places).
Is this the part where we all say, "Death to the Bourgeoisie"?
There's no reason we can't provide a job, food, clothing, shelter and health care for every single person on the planet
How about scarce resources? There simply isn't enough of everything on the planet for every last one of us to live like the average American or European.
except that it wouldn't be profitable for the people at the top, and they are not going to give up their power and privilege without a fight.
They control the trillion dollar military, remember? Right...
Banks (who own the ATMs where the withdrawals occurred), merchants (if the thieves were able to use the cards before they were reported stolen), and all of us in the form of slightly higher bank fees and retail prices in the future as the banks and merchants attempt to make up for their fraud losses.
eating healthy and exercising are not rocket science. You seem to have a special situation, but for many people, especially young people, they don't need a health care professional to tell them that fast food is unhealthy, smoking causes cancer, and that exercise is good for you no matter what your age. If you feel that you need an expert opinion concerning your health care then you are free to seek it just like you would a professional legal or financial opinion, but be prepared to pay the professional for his time. As for leaving people for dead, I think that is a bit of hyperbole or perhaps you disagree? IMHO, adults should be free to make their own decisions, even bad ones, and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. That is what it means to live in a free society and encroaching upon that, even with the best of intentions, invariably leads to disaster. You seem to have had some tough times and I don't mean to make light of your situation, but it does not generalize well to the population at large in that what might have been good for you in your situation would have been best for everyone regardless of their situation. Anyway, good luck and best wishes.
You asked if you as in all of us readers (English is so imprecise in this regard, other languages have a form of "you" which means "all of you" or you plural but in English it depends upon context) could lower our health care costs not you as an individual or at least that is how it sounded given the context.
It is true that the goal of any private for profit enterprise is to maximize profits. However, that should not include resort to fraud (canceling coverage when a major expense occurs, delayed approval or payment of claims, etc) which is why we have the courts and our state insurance commissioners (although their track records are somewhat more mixed). IMHO, the problem with the present situation is three fold:
First: third party payment of small and nuisance claims.
Do people insure their automobiles against having to change the oil (i.e. does their insurance split the cost of an oil change with them?) or how about home owners insurance, do they split the cost of the gas for their lawnmower with the insurance company? No, so why should health insurance be any different? Insurance should be purchased against the possibility of a catastrophic loss, not regular or predictable expenses. People save money so that they will be prepared when life throws other regular expenses or minor emergencies at them, so why should it be any different for the vast majority of non-emergency health care?
Second: short term nature of insurance contracts combined with unfavorable terms.
The way that insurance contracts are written today makes them too easy to cancel in the event that someone who is healthy today becomes a "bad risk" at some point in the future. There is also a segment of the market, namely younger people without dependents, who seek to game the system by gambling that they won't need insurance during their early twenties and then showing up at the emergency room when something does happen. It would be better for everyone involved if health insurance contracts were written to address longer term risks by offering better coverage for staying in the plan for longer terms (i.e. making those monthly payments). There probably are contracts like this available for health insurance, but most people never shop for their own insurance, or have very limited choices, because they get it through their employers instead (which is another major problem because it disincentivizes people to shop around for a good insurance value for their health care)
Third: excessive bureaucracy between patients and doctors.
Finally, the involvement of third parties and complex billing arrangements, combined with hospital disincentives to invest in any sort of information technology to mitigate these costs (why should they when they can simply charge more and their is little or no competition?), does nothing to lower costs. It would be better, especially for routine and preventative care, if the patient worked out an arrangement with the doctor of their choice and negotiated a fee or contract which they then paid out of their own pocket. The new Health Savings Account option is an attempt to address some of these issues and it is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done to eliminate excessive involvement of bureaucracy and third party payment in health care.
If the government would act to facilitate these changes and do more to punish fraud, particularly in Medicare, we would see a drastic reduction in the cost of health care to levels which are more commensurate with what it actually costs to provide the care. I think that option "C" combined with regular long term insurance against those catastrophic events (like we have for our homes and other big ticket items) would go a long way towards addressing the problems.
Stop slamming cheeseburgers three times per week, quit smoking and drinking, and stop sitting around on your butt all of the time. For most Americans the answer to that question is a resounding YES, but everyone is always looking for the miracle diet pill or the easy way out instead of taking responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle choices that are at the heart (pun intended) of their health problems.
The problem is that the government only sees the option to pay dozens of old programmers to manipulate the COBOL code instead of paying one hacker for a day to write a Perl script to hard wire all the salary data in the database to minimum wage.
It's probably not that simple. In fact, it is likely that the COBOL payroll system is using flat files on the mainframe or else some old proprietary mainframe database that doesn't even support ODBC (because it predates everything in use today) and is only accessible via terminal or terminal emulation. No offense, but your glib attitude concerning Perl scripting tends to suggest that you haven't had to work with very many legacy systems or at least not mainframe legacy systems (they are finally getting rare now, but they are still concentrated in government and large insurance companies who were the among the first users of computer technologies when they became available and widespread in the decades following WWII). If this type of capability was not built into the system as an option in the first place (i.e. temporarily alter payroll) then it will probably be a royal PITA to accomplish. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that because payroll is (generally) such a well defined problem space that this system is even more rigid than most in its design assumptions. Incidentally, this is why the modern field of software engineering exists. If it were possible to develop flexible and powerful systems via hacking and ad hoc scripting then we never would have delved into databases, OO design, and functional analysis in the first place (and if people could manage themselves then we wouldn't need any managers). So it is either manage the payroll manually (which the system was built to handle because managing it by hand hasn't been feasible for decades now) or come up with some other system which doesn't involve the automatic payroll processing system (i.e. some other political alternative).
But they'd be much smarter to build on solid foundations
You are presuming that their foundation, namely Windows, is solid when in fact it is widely suspected to be NOT solid (nobody except Microsoft insiders knows for sure because Windows is closed source). So, it could make sense to pay the redo price given that it might cost even more to continue moving forward based upon what they already have.
The M$ board and executive team is basically treating it's shareholders the same way it treats it's customers. It is feeding them a line of non-committal B$ in order to keep their jobs and maintain a threatened share price.
Suppose that you were the CEO of Microsoft instead of Ballmer, what would you have told the shareholders? Would you stand in front of thousands of people at the annual meeting and say, "You know what, even though we have already made billions of dollars of profit on the Windows and Office products we are now going to open source those products and sell them for less so that we can hope to make up the difference on support contracts..." There are certain things that the CEO just cannot do and that is one of them. Really, what did you expect them to say? If you disagree with the direction that Microsoft is taking the company (which you obviously do) then why not simply sell your shares and wash your hands of them?
Disney was a strong backer because Mickey was about to become public domain - and that mouse is worth millions to its corporate masters.
Does anyone else remember when Jack Valenti said that "limited time", as the Constitution puts it with regard to securing for authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries, should be interpreted as "infinity less one day"?
Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.
Which perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The TCP/IP protocols take a very minimalist approach to features, often supporting the minimum possible set of features that could possibly work (or very close to minimum, there are a few features that aren't used anymore but not too many bits in the packet headers were wasted). The designers were wise to implement their network protocols in a stack of layers as a chain of responsibility which allowed for each layer to handle a clearly defined task with potentially unlimited options for additional layers to be added on top. In fact, many ideas that went into the design of the Internet over the years (it didn't happen all at once after all) really were ahead of their time and only now are some of these ideas seeing more general appreciation in software engineering and other related engineering fields. The chain of responsibility really is the right design pattern for network stacks, why redo that part?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I am merely off-base here being as I am a civilian with exactly zero hours remote piloting a combat drone aircraft, but is it possible that what we have here is merely a case of information overload? It seems likely that better software, perhaps with configurable plug-ins and a bit of AI would go a long way towards alleviating some of the stress. For example, MMORPG computer games such as World of Warcraft offer plug-ins for extra HUD options to alert the player to important events and conditions and quickly take scripted responses. Could not something similar be done here? Naturally the AI would not "control" the drone in an active way, but streamline the flow of information while at the same time allowing the pilot to make important decisions without feeling overly rushed or pressured by less relevant incoming data. It might even be possible for the software to allow targeting and firing at the command of the pilot (i.e. engaging target x, cancel or allow?) without forcing the pilot to view the immediate results (i.e. it is recorded for later review by either the pilot or others in the chain of command) with the AI "co-pilot" simply reporting success or failure of the objective without displaying visuals of the results (unless it is asked too of course). Surely a couple of billion dollars can be spared (what is that, a month or less of operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan) to build such a system and put it into place. In fact, I hear that the new F22 fighter plane (which probably gets more funding than the drones) already has similar intelligent information filtering, prioritizing, and display systems.
According to TFA that won't work. You don't know if a particular retailer is using the "verified by visa" program before you are already in the process of making your purchase. You get redirected (or ambushed) into a separate off-site page where you are asked to enter a password which locks your card for fraud if you get it wrong (or possibly even if you just refuse to enter the password, but the details on what causes a lock are a bit sketchy which makes the whole situation even worse). If your card gets locked in this way then you cannot use it any other merchant online or offline until you go to the bank website and unlock it. It has been pointed out by others that, due to the offsite redirect and request for a separate password, this makes a perfect target for phisers who can trick an unsuspecting user into entering their password which the phisers then use to reset the password to something else (effectively locking the legitimate customer out of their account). The fact that phising was and is an ongoing problem, even with regular HTTPs sites that do not do extra re-directs, suggests that these additional steps will only confuse most of the customers and provide even more chances for the phisers out there to ply their trade.
How can it be "opt-in" if you basically cannot use your card if you don't?
They can put whatever they want in their employment contract and their lawyers can try to scare you into believing that they can sue you and enforce it in court but it is really nothing more than a bluff on the part of the employer to prevent spineless and ignorant former employees from "violating the agreement". They are hoping that they can scare people into giving up their rights.
what is the Chinese word for hypocrite?
That's a complex problem that most programs, even modern ones, probably are not designed to consider.
They may not be implemented to consider it "as is", but the best modern object oriented (OO) software systems would be designed to allow this type of functionality to be injected into the existing implementation at runtime on a future date. This is a great advantage of modern OO and modular systems, you don't have to know about all possible requirements or uses up front if you are able to develop and inject new dependencies as the circumstances change. Unfortunately, this type of advanced understanding is not yet widely grokked among those who identify themselves with the software development profession, but that will change as more people recognize the advantages of the powerful design patterns enabled by OO design and analysis.
This is true, however they do frequently receive an allowance, typically an odd amount with exact change, from which approved or periodically mandated purchases can or must be made and recorded in a special notebook carried upon the person of the cultist especially for that purpose. For example, the Heavens Gate cultists were each found with exactly $5.75 (a $5 dollar bill and three quarters) in their pockets following their mass suicide in the Rancho Santa Fe community of San Diego California on March 26, 1997.
It was a dig on the notion that civilization is a game which can be won and the irreverent style of the series and especially the more recent installments, Civilization IV for example, which poke at themselves in a self deprecating sort of way. Some people, upon whom the humorous factor is lost, have even complained that the games present a decidedly western and essentially Americanized manifest destiny view of world history where capitalist democracy combined with a powerful military is the supreme level of achievement for any civilization without realizing that part of the game is ridiculous situations which are funny precisely because they are absurd. So there you are, some background on the inside, or should I say outside now, joke.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, I do not eschew insurance entirely but rather advocate its judicious use for situations for which it is warranted. A high deductible health insurance plan (HDHP) combined with a health savings account (HSA) very nicely fits the bill. Once the savings ball is rolling you can periodically adjust the deductible as the balance in the account increases or your individual tolerance for risk increases or decreases. Now I will grant you that this is not the best option for everyone. For example, people with regularly recurring medical expenses that are moderately high but not high enough to satisfy the deductible OR people who, through either misfortune or their own doing or both, incur medical expenses in excess of $5 million dollars or so (but really you are screwed anyway at that point because almost nobody could afford to pay out of pocket for those kind of expenses and a state run health program is likely to deny your treatment and let you die anyway because they will not pay a huge amount to save the life a single individual and thereby endanger the solvency of the system for everyone else). However, for most of the rest of us the HDHP + HSA plan is quite viable because many expected medical expenses over one's lifetime are relatively small compared to what can be saved over time in the HSA and involve planned expenses and NOT catastrophic emergency care (which is why the HSA is combined with the HDHP).
Yes, but when it reaches Alpha Centauri who will get credit for "wining" this round of Civilization?
Hmmmm...Rhythmic Gymnastics, there has got to be a joke in there somewhere.
You could very easily could end up requiring to pay $3~5k per month for health insurance.
So don't have insurance and pay out of pocket instead if that works out to be cheaper. Insurance should not be used for everyday transactions anyway and I have yet to meet a doctor who would not take cash on the barrelhead (and if you know anything about insurance billing and what a headache it can be for doctors then you know how much they appreciate cash basis patients and are willing to negotiate with and accommodate them to avoid third party billing hassles). This one of many reasons why it is imperative to build up a strong financial position before reaching middle and old age, so that one is not limited in negotiations and options by bargaining from a position of weakness rather than a position of strength.
wow, somebody has a chip on his shoulder...
The workers of the United States are some of the most productive in the world and we collectively create vast riches--for a tiny minority of people at the top who "own" the factories and businesses from which this wealth is extracted.
The workers were paid for their work. Perhaps you think that they weren't paid enough or that the terms were unfair, but really that is between the worker and their employer. Nobody forced the employer to hire the worker and the worker is free to leave at any time for whatever reason.
This is nothing more than organized theft.
Organization and management are skills that can be applied to create more wealth and even you admit that they are organized. Should not those who organize and coordinate collective efforts to achieve greater results be rewarded for doing that in the same way that workers are rewarded for doing the labor?
Under a sane, rational system all workers would share in the wealth we create.
Everyone shares in the wealth right now, just not equally because not all individual contributions to the collective store of wealth in society are of equal value.
When we discover new techniques that make our jobs more efficient, we would all work less--instead of under capitalism, which results in layoffs and fewer people working more
You should give France a try if you are living in the EU, I hear that they have a mandatory 35 hour maximum work week.
We wouldn't waste trillions on killing people--we'd spend trillions to create good jobs that serve important needs: like educating people, healing them, building efficient mass-transit and clean, renewable energy sources
Would you like some fries with that tall order of Utopia? People have been killing each other since the first ape stood up on two legs (and probably before that too) and there is every reason to expect that the humans will continue to find ever more efficient and inventive ways to kill their fellow man.
Instead we live in a world where a handful of parasites lets their own short-term, profit-oriented interests dictate policy for the rest of us. They get to force their pro-capitalist dogma onto us in schools, textbooks and via the media they own, so that people believe that the current system is the way things should be and always will be (just as the Church and nobility once taught serfs and merchants to remain in their places).
Is this the part where we all say, "Death to the Bourgeoisie"?
There's no reason we can't provide a job, food, clothing, shelter and health care for every single person on the planet
How about scarce resources? There simply isn't enough of everything on the planet for every last one of us to live like the average American or European.
except that it wouldn't be profitable for the people at the top, and they are not going to give up their power and privilege without a fight.
They control the trillion dollar military, remember? Right...
So who pays for all this?
Banks (who own the ATMs where the withdrawals occurred), merchants (if the thieves were able to use the cards before they were reported stolen), and all of us in the form of slightly higher bank fees and retail prices in the future as the banks and merchants attempt to make up for their fraud losses.
eating healthy and exercising are not rocket science. You seem to have a special situation, but for many people, especially young people, they don't need a health care professional to tell them that fast food is unhealthy, smoking causes cancer, and that exercise is good for you no matter what your age. If you feel that you need an expert opinion concerning your health care then you are free to seek it just like you would a professional legal or financial opinion, but be prepared to pay the professional for his time. As for leaving people for dead, I think that is a bit of hyperbole or perhaps you disagree? IMHO, adults should be free to make their own decisions, even bad ones, and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. That is what it means to live in a free society and encroaching upon that, even with the best of intentions, invariably leads to disaster. You seem to have had some tough times and I don't mean to make light of your situation, but it does not generalize well to the population at large in that what might have been good for you in your situation would have been best for everyone regardless of their situation. Anyway, good luck and best wishes.
You asked if you as in all of us readers (English is so imprecise in this regard, other languages have a form of "you" which means "all of you" or you plural but in English it depends upon context) could lower our health care costs not you as an individual or at least that is how it sounded given the context.
It is true that the goal of any private for profit enterprise is to maximize profits. However, that should not include resort to fraud (canceling coverage when a major expense occurs, delayed approval or payment of claims, etc) which is why we have the courts and our state insurance commissioners (although their track records are somewhat more mixed). IMHO, the problem with the present situation is three fold:
First: third party payment of small and nuisance claims.
Do people insure their automobiles against having to change the oil (i.e. does their insurance split the cost of an oil change with them?) or how about home owners insurance, do they split the cost of the gas for their lawnmower with the insurance company? No, so why should health insurance be any different? Insurance should be purchased against the possibility of a catastrophic loss, not regular or predictable expenses. People save money so that they will be prepared when life throws other regular expenses or minor emergencies at them, so why should it be any different for the vast majority of non-emergency health care?
Second: short term nature of insurance contracts combined with unfavorable terms.
The way that insurance contracts are written today makes them too easy to cancel in the event that someone who is healthy today becomes a "bad risk" at some point in the future. There is also a segment of the market, namely younger people without dependents, who seek to game the system by gambling that they won't need insurance during their early twenties and then showing up at the emergency room when something does happen. It would be better for everyone involved if health insurance contracts were written to address longer term risks by offering better coverage for staying in the plan for longer terms (i.e. making those monthly payments). There probably are contracts like this available for health insurance, but most people never shop for their own insurance, or have very limited choices, because they get it through their employers instead (which is another major problem because it disincentivizes people to shop around for a good insurance value for their health care)
Third: excessive bureaucracy between patients and doctors.
Finally, the involvement of third parties and complex billing arrangements, combined with hospital disincentives to invest in any sort of information technology to mitigate these costs (why should they when they can simply charge more and their is little or no competition?), does nothing to lower costs. It would be better, especially for routine and preventative care, if the patient worked out an arrangement with the doctor of their choice and negotiated a fee or contract which they then paid out of their own pocket. The new Health Savings Account option is an attempt to address some of these issues and it is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done to eliminate excessive involvement of bureaucracy and third party payment in health care.
If the government would act to facilitate these changes and do more to punish fraud, particularly in Medicare, we would see a drastic reduction in the cost of health care to levels which are more commensurate with what it actually costs to provide the care. I think that option "C" combined with regular long term insurance against those catastrophic events (like we have for our homes and other big ticket items) would go a long way towards addressing the problems.
Can you lower your demand for health care?
Stop slamming cheeseburgers three times per week, quit smoking and drinking, and stop sitting around on your butt all of the time. For most Americans the answer to that question is a resounding YES, but everyone is always looking for the miracle diet pill or the easy way out instead of taking responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle choices that are at the heart (pun intended) of their health problems.
There has to be a better way.
How to Cure Health Care by Milton Friedman
The problem is that the government only sees the option to pay dozens of old programmers to manipulate the COBOL code instead of paying one hacker for a day to write a Perl script to hard wire all the salary data in the database to minimum wage.
It's probably not that simple. In fact, it is likely that the COBOL payroll system is using flat files on the mainframe or else some old proprietary mainframe database that doesn't even support ODBC (because it predates everything in use today) and is only accessible via terminal or terminal emulation. No offense, but your glib attitude concerning Perl scripting tends to suggest that you haven't had to work with very many legacy systems or at least not mainframe legacy systems (they are finally getting rare now, but they are still concentrated in government and large insurance companies who were the among the first users of computer technologies when they became available and widespread in the decades following WWII). If this type of capability was not built into the system as an option in the first place (i.e. temporarily alter payroll) then it will probably be a royal PITA to accomplish. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that because payroll is (generally) such a well defined problem space that this system is even more rigid than most in its design assumptions. Incidentally, this is why the modern field of software engineering exists. If it were possible to develop flexible and powerful systems via hacking and ad hoc scripting then we never would have delved into databases, OO design, and functional analysis in the first place (and if people could manage themselves then we wouldn't need any managers). So it is either manage the payroll manually (which the system was built to handle because managing it by hand hasn't been feasible for decades now) or come up with some other system which doesn't involve the automatic payroll processing system (i.e. some other political alternative).
Perhaps you can name or reference the bill(s) in question?
But they'd be much smarter to build on solid foundations
You are presuming that their foundation, namely Windows, is solid when in fact it is widely suspected to be NOT solid (nobody except Microsoft insiders knows for sure because Windows is closed source). So, it could make sense to pay the redo price given that it might cost even more to continue moving forward based upon what they already have.
The M$ board and executive team is basically treating it's shareholders the same way it treats it's customers. It is feeding them a line of non-committal B$ in order to keep their jobs and maintain a threatened share price.
Suppose that you were the CEO of Microsoft instead of Ballmer, what would you have told the shareholders? Would you stand in front of thousands of people at the annual meeting and say, "You know what, even though we have already made billions of dollars of profit on the Windows and Office products we are now going to open source those products and sell them for less so that we can hope to make up the difference on support contracts..." There are certain things that the CEO just cannot do and that is one of them. Really, what did you expect them to say? If you disagree with the direction that Microsoft is taking the company (which you obviously do) then why not simply sell your shares and wash your hands of them?
Disney was a strong backer because Mickey was about to become public domain - and that mouse is worth millions to its corporate masters.
Does anyone else remember when Jack Valenti said that "limited time", as the Constitution puts it with regard to securing for authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries, should be interpreted as "infinity less one day"?
Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.
Which perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The TCP/IP protocols take a very minimalist approach to features, often supporting the minimum possible set of features that could possibly work (or very close to minimum, there are a few features that aren't used anymore but not too many bits in the packet headers were wasted). The designers were wise to implement their network protocols in a stack of layers as a chain of responsibility which allowed for each layer to handle a clearly defined task with potentially unlimited options for additional layers to be added on top. In fact, many ideas that went into the design of the Internet over the years (it didn't happen all at once after all) really were ahead of their time and only now are some of these ideas seeing more general appreciation in software engineering and other related engineering fields. The chain of responsibility really is the right design pattern for network stacks, why redo that part?