Is he not Commander-in-Chief? Order the soldiers to leave the base, problem solved. No amount of excuses make up for the fact that we are holding people without trial. As President he can ORDER the abandonment of the base, Congress can pick up the pieces.
Or simply have the military place all those prisoners placed on a plane and shipped to a US prison. Suddenly the whole "constitution doesn't apply overseas" argument vanishes. I don't think the President needs Congressional approval to move prisoners around.
Then he can charge those people with crimes, or deport them. He could always drop them off at an airport in France and let them decide if they should be allowed to travel freely beyond that.
Sure, you can't prove a negative. However, there is at least a plausible argument that you could recover data from a zeroed drive.
For all I know the NSA even has a history of successfully doing it. They're not going to publish that if they do, but they'll certainly not rely on zeroing their own drives.
Bottom line is that anybody with classified information has a documented procedure that they'll follow when disposing of hard drives. Simple zeroing is plenty good for those who don't expect state agents to be snooping. Anybody who is actively and successfully evading the CIA/NSA probably has a lot more insight into just what is required to do so then either of us.
However the NHS has a secondary (vicarious) liability and should also be punished for inadequate supervision of its contractors.
Just how do you "punish" an organization? The only reason the org has money is to accomplish some public service. Taking that money away just makes it less effective at whatever purpose it was created for. If it doesn't need the money, then the money should be taken away regardless of behavior.
Punish the people who made the decisions, not the organization.
So if you fine a government agency the money leaves their budget and goes away from their department and to an other area. Leaving that department with less money budgeted towards what they need to do. As well it would effect their influence of getting additional funding for the next year.
Great, so the NHS has less money to spend on making patients healthier, and so patient health suffers.
Trust me - the money won't come out of office furnishings or donuts for the doctors.
If money is being misspent the solution is to correctly spend it - not just to cut off the supply. When people make bad decisions you need to punish the people, not the organization.
Even for that it should be fine. There is no proof that there is any way to read drives that are overwritten.
Risk/reward. If failure to destroy a $15 hard drive (its value after years of use) could cause a $5B fighter plane to be useless, it is probably worth the $15 just to be sure (especially since wiping isn't exactly free in terms of labor either).
When risk tolerance is low the burden of proof is really on those who want to promote the risky behavior. There is no proof that it is impossible to read a zeroed drive (and it is unlikely there every will be until we reach the point where the uncertainty principle kicks in).
The CR-48 is starting to feel a bit slow for me. I have a Nexus 10 so that tends to be my go-to browsing/etc device. However, if I want to do something crazy like type a comment on Slashdot or an email while traveling I always reach for the CR48. Even if I'm already looking at what I want to reply to on my tablet it takes less time to boot a CR-48 cold and navigate to it than it takes for me to try to type on a touchscreen. I'm sure the newer Chromebooks are much faster.
Having your data in the cloud is about convenience - I can edit a document from my phone, tablet, PC, whatever.
Frankly I think the bigger issue isn't that everybody wants their data in the cloud, but rather that there aren't really that many good FOSS solutions in this space. I've yet to see an FOSS MUA that compete with GMail if you include the requirement that you be able to operate it solely from a browser (the closest options are roundcube and squirrelmail, and if you've ever tried to sort 100 messages with nothing but a trackpad and a keyboard using those you'll understand their deficiencies). There really are no word processor/spreadsheet solutions out there that can run in a browser. Everything is X11 based, and none of the affordable phones/tablets/etc support X11.
There is no reason that you can't have the data "in the cloud" and control your data at the same time - you just have to run your own servers. I do that whenever I have the practical option to do so. That seems to be less and less often, unfortunately...
Slip the airline employee there a $20 and he'd tag it as if it were a regular bag.
I sincerely hope that the bags were weighed all the same before being loaded.
If you think the effects of incorrectly loading a container ship are bad, they're nothing compared to what happens when you do the same to an aircraft.
I'm surprised that on smaller planes they don't make passengers step onto a scale. They must really underload aircraft if they're getting away with using an average weight of 200lbs per adult male in the USA. Of course, the passengers of 5481 might have a different perspective on that.
Sounds like my company's smartphone policies. They whitelist specific models, and generally turn all of them down (well, unless their names start with an "i"). So, the 90% of company employees who aren't covered end up forwarding mail/calendars/etc to completely insecure outside services, where they're synced to their phones.
I guess the company gets plausible deniability out of the deal, but that's about it. The employees get a sub-standard experience compared to just being allowed to directly sync, and the companies data gets mirrored who-knows-where.
These are Vine reviewers. They all DID use the product, in the sense that they were mailed a free copy of the book to review. The problem is that they're just random people - it isn't like Amazon has a Vine review program for PhDs in electrical engineering.
This is like asking a chemist to review a dynamometer or asking an auto mechanic to review a mass spectrometer. No useful information is likely to come out. If you're interested in reviews of such products you'd prefer them to come from experts in the field who can either spec to the details of their performance or at least how well they work in daily use.
They really need to fix the GUI for submitting reviews so that you're prompted for both at the same time, and it is made clear which pertains to the product vs the seller with more specific questions to answer.
Reviews of niche items are still useful. If anything what makes them less useful is when Amazon pays non-experts to add noisy reviews to the mix, which seems rather stupid. Amazon is spending money to make their reviews less useful...
I'll often search reviews for keywords to find ones by experts when there is a product that is dual-use.
Elevator operators were trained professionals, just like airline pilots (though not quite so highly trained owing to the much simpler equipment). Elevators requiring them were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now as well. If they did still exist, I'm sure that the accident rate would be higher than with automated elevators. Unfortunately I can't find any records of accident rates online to cite, but if you have any demonstrating that fatality rates per passenger-floor haven't gone down with automation I'd be interested in them.
Seriously? Do you think Russia and America are going to antagonize each other militarily at this point in their relationship?
No, hence the reason I said, "The US wouldn't shoot down a Venezuelan diplomatic aircraft, and they certainly aren't going to fire on a Russian Alfa during peacetime in international waters."
Bingo!!! Marriage is a religious rite. Government has no business regulating or even recognizing a religious rite. However, there is a purpose to the government recognition of marriage, specifically taxes, shared property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance rights and so on, and I completely support gay couples gaining the same rights as straight couples.
Frankly, I think we'd be better off getting rid of special treatment of married (or whatever) couples for taxes, property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance, and so on.
Any of those things can be better accomplished in some other way. If you wan to give somebody power of attorney, just sign an agreement to that effect (certainly no more effort to do that then to go to a wedding). Ditto for every other thing on your list except taxes. I don't get why married couples should be treated differently for taxes - just file head-of-household or whatever when you have dissimilar incomes, or just file separately.
Since so many people live together unmarried the government already has laws to deal with every contingency that comes up (out-of-wedlock kids, disputes over property when couples split up, etc). It seems like an official state of marriage complicates things more than it helps.
I think marriage made more sense back in the day when fathers wanted to get proper value when they sold their daughters, and husband-to-be's wanted to make sure that their bride couldn't run off on them right after they were paid for. In a society where we actually treat women as the equals of men it makes more sense to let couples have the freedom to define their own relationships and the government can just deal with enforcing contracts. No doubt churches will come up with form contracts that represent their vision of what marriage is supposed to be, and twist the arms of their congregants to sign them. As long as slavery and indentured servitude aren't in the terms and there is reasonable consideration people can sign whatever they want to.
Why do you want to store bits on paper and not on some other medium? Chances are that paper is not the medium with the best data security.
Ultimately the only difference between storing a bit on a magnetic domain on some disk and in the color of some paper fibers is the far inferior data density of the paper, and the relative durability.
Unless you're just talking about a fairly small amount of information the economy of scale will almost always favor digital media. With barcodes you could probably store about 265k/page (with some of that taken up by ECC no doubt, and you'll probably have to roll your own software to manage it all). That is about 260MB per 20lb ream of paper if you double-side it. That is 80lbs/GB, at a cost of probably $12/GB if you get half-decent paper in bulk (what would be the point of using super-cheap paper?). Oh, and that isn't factoring in the costs to print it all, or later scan it all back. It would take hours to print 1GB of barcode and you'd spend probably $20 on toner doing it with an economical printer.
I'm sure you could buy the nicest archival DVDs for WAY less than that, and you can burn several GB in a few minutes and read it back in even less time, and the discs won't weigh 80lbs each.
Go ahead and add extra ECC, or use tape/whatever. I imagine that no matter how you slice it the paper will be the least effective storage solution against any failure mode.
they can give you an experience that looks like Walmart, but in reality is more like Jimmy's Used Cars.
How do you haggle with Amazon?
Same way you haggle with a used car salesman - walk out the door and come back another day. I'm sure it will take them a while to figure out how, but it is in Amazon's interest to give you a price you're willing to take.
Try haggling with your screen when on amazon.com. Maybe email their support monkeys with an offer. Good luck with that.
Well, you could just buy elsewhere, or try again another day. It is in Amazon's interest to give you a profitable offer that you're willing to take, though they might make you work for it.
Being admitted to a hospital pretty much implies desperation -- it's impossible to have a free and fair market when you either (a) need the service or (b) will die. The US healthcare system ruthlessly takes advantage of this fact.
Free AND fair market? Agree it basically is impossible in this market. You can certainly have a fair market though with good regulation (something lacking in the US). To start out with I'd require providers to charge the same fees to everybody (and not accept partial payment from anyone, discounts, rebates, etc).
Even with insurance, you'll end up with an out-of-network anesthesiologist or with a service that isn't covered, and be stuck paying the inflated prices. You can't shop when you're unconscious.
I think most insurance companies will reimburse at the network rate for acute care, or any care at a participating hospital, for the reasons you say. If some don't, then they should be required to do so. (Side note - some people get caught up in whether particular insurers are "good" or "bad" - while there are some that are better, most offer both "good" and "bad" plans - the choice is made by the employer in most cases. The same insurer might apply different policies to different plans depending on the premium.)
I don't know who you talk to that like to say how much money they save not having insurance - but I'll say that the reason the list prices are inflated is a result of the insurance companies paying a "discount". People without insurance are being screwed. We're all being screwed...
It is just a negotiating tactic. I doubt that list prices would be any cheaper if there weren't insurance. Doctors have a captive audience - are you going to choose to not go to a doctor because you're frustrated with the buying experience? Most services that are expensive tend to require haggling, and medical bills are QUITE expensive.
The list prices don't really affect insurance companies much - I doubt they even bother to look at them. They look at some city they're in and ask themselves "do we need to accept more doctors here, or do we have plenty?" If the former, they raise their rates a little and call around looking to sign some up. If the latter they lower their rates a little and see how many doctors quit in frustration. They pay every doctor in town the same for any particular service. When a doctor sends a bill to the insurer they don't even look at the price - they just look at what was done and their own price and send the appropriate reimbursement.
Doctors then turn around and do the same thing - they join with hospitals/etc to form service networks where everybody agrees to charge the same and those networks then negotiate with the insurers. The doctors are looking at it from the opposite angle - are they getting enough business? If they have plenty they'll put the screws on the insurers (raise your rates or your customers won't be able to go to half the doctors in Chicago).
The price that is reached is then bound up in contract. The list price never really enters into things. The only people who really need to be concerned with it are individuals who have almost no negotiating power.
If you want to fix this particular aspect of the system the solution isn't to ban insurance, but rather to require all doctors to publish their rates and charge the same rate to everybody (with no discounts/rebates/whatever). Suddenly list prices will become quite accurate and those with and without insurance will pay the same rate. Part of the problem with the US Healthcare system is that insurance isn't really so much about insurance as about being part of a wholesale buying club. Split up the insurance vs price management sides of the industry and consumers will win. (Don't get me wrong, I'm all for fixing the insurance side of the problem as well, but that is orthogonal to the price issue except where insurance policies (sometimes mandated) create incentives for poor buying habits.)
I wonder if the DEA transferred the money to own of its own accounts, or if they merely seized a drive that contained the wallet.
If the latter is the case, I wonder what will happen if there's a copy of that wallet, that now starts sending money. That'd be one hell of a way to accuse the DEA of fraud with seized goods...
Well, to transfer the money they'd have to have access to the wallet in any case. Maybe the Bitcoins weren't actually in his possession (for example, they might be deposited in some external party's account that they can demand them from).
If they actually got access to the wallet by seizing his hard drive, then that is something that could be defended against. Just have a backup with enough coordination so that if the computer is seized the money gets immediately transferred someplace safe. The wallet that was seized is worthless if the money gets transferred before it is decrypted.
Re:Does this mean anything?
on
The Price of Amazon
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What TFS means is that books will be priced differently for each individual. If the online shop thinks you will pay more then me for a given book they will try to charge you extra, something that physical shops can't do.
This is something physical shops have been doing for AGES, though not as much recently with commodity items.
What's the price of that new car? Sure, ANYBODY can get it for the sticker price, if they're insane. Everybody can also get it for less, and just how much less depends on their negotiating skills and those of the salesman. If you look desperate, expect to pay more.
The same is true in the US medical industry. Look desperate, and you can expect to pay more (don't worry, I'll give you a "discount" since you're paying cash...). I love it when people talk about how much they save by not having insurance, as if the insurance companies pay list price (healthcare list prices are almost as inflated as RIAA math).
The only real difference with something like Amazon is the level of automation - they can give you an experience that looks like Walmart, but in reality is more like Jimmy's Used Cars.
They quite literally murder thousands of innocent people every year with drone strikes and military action. I believe it is willfully ignorant to think that the US government has ANY qualms whatsoever about killing as many people as they see fit to suit their purposes, including Americans.
Again, you're mixing up unintended casualties with deliberate targeting. I've yet to see a case where the US has deliberately targeted somebody like a whistleblower for execution.
Sure, the US kills lots of people accidentally, and that is a bad thing. If you're concerned about that then I hope you don't fly, because if that is your concern ANY plane flying over international waters is in mortal peril, not just one that happens to have Snowden on-board. Ditto for anybody walking around in the Middle East / Afghanistan / Pakistan - any of them could be an accidental casualty in a drone strike.
Could the US deliberately target Snowden and then claim it is an accident? Sure. Has the US ever done anything like this in the past (specifically deliberately shooting down a plane carrying hundreds of innocent people to kill one target on-board)? Certainly not that I'm aware of. All indications are that when the US assassinates people they're usually suspected of terrorism and the US attempts to engage them with the least loss of other lives (they blow them up on a random road, and not in the middle of a shopping mall).
Clearly this is a major problem with the current system - we'll only ever see automated cars/planes/etc if it is regulated and compliant companies are shielded from liability.
The car design flaw of having a steering wheel is a result of the legal design flaw of making a company that manufacturers cars that kill 10k people per year less liable than one that kills 10 people per year if the latter's cars lacked steering wheels. The simple legal solution is to create a regulatory framework where we set a maximum acceptable fatality/accident rate and require manufacturers to stay below it. Start it out at the status quo (not a very high bar), and reduce the limit annually until we get into the noise. Companies that violate the regs would be heavily fined, and companies that do not would have blanket immunity from suits from accident victims. The result of such a policy would be a lot fewer dead people.
Not sure what the resolution on that data is, but seems like he was a bit high, then dove for the runway and ended up being too low. If you're above the glide path that close to the runway you're really supposed to just go around.
The smoothness of the successful glide path is likely the result of using ILS. The runway had neither ILS nor PAPI during this approach, so the pilot was just going by eye looking at the shape of the runway. That shouldn't be a problem for somebody flying a 777, but certainly it will be less accurate. The bigger issue was probably continuing an approach that should have been aborted.
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Is he not Commander-in-Chief? Order the soldiers to leave the base, problem solved. No amount of excuses make up for the fact that we are holding people without trial. As President he can ORDER the abandonment of the base, Congress can pick up the pieces.
Or simply have the military place all those prisoners placed on a plane and shipped to a US prison. Suddenly the whole "constitution doesn't apply overseas" argument vanishes. I don't think the President needs Congressional approval to move prisoners around.
Then he can charge those people with crimes, or deport them. He could always drop them off at an airport in France and let them decide if they should be allowed to travel freely beyond that.
Sure, you can't prove a negative. However, there is at least a plausible argument that you could recover data from a zeroed drive.
For all I know the NSA even has a history of successfully doing it. They're not going to publish that if they do, but they'll certainly not rely on zeroing their own drives.
Bottom line is that anybody with classified information has a documented procedure that they'll follow when disposing of hard drives. Simple zeroing is plenty good for those who don't expect state agents to be snooping. Anybody who is actively and successfully evading the CIA/NSA probably has a lot more insight into just what is required to do so then either of us.
However the NHS has a secondary (vicarious) liability and should also be punished for inadequate supervision of its contractors.
Just how do you "punish" an organization? The only reason the org has money is to accomplish some public service. Taking that money away just makes it less effective at whatever purpose it was created for. If it doesn't need the money, then the money should be taken away regardless of behavior.
Punish the people who made the decisions, not the organization.
So if you fine a government agency the money leaves their budget and goes away from their department and to an other area. Leaving that department with less money budgeted towards what they need to do. As well it would effect their influence of getting additional funding for the next year.
Great, so the NHS has less money to spend on making patients healthier, and so patient health suffers.
Trust me - the money won't come out of office furnishings or donuts for the doctors.
If money is being misspent the solution is to correctly spend it - not just to cut off the supply. When people make bad decisions you need to punish the people, not the organization.
Even for that it should be fine. There is no proof that there is any way to read drives that are overwritten.
Risk/reward. If failure to destroy a $15 hard drive (its value after years of use) could cause a $5B fighter plane to be useless, it is probably worth the $15 just to be sure (especially since wiping isn't exactly free in terms of labor either).
When risk tolerance is low the burden of proof is really on those who want to promote the risky behavior. There is no proof that it is impossible to read a zeroed drive (and it is unlikely there every will be until we reach the point where the uncertainty principle kicks in).
The CR-48 is starting to feel a bit slow for me. I have a Nexus 10 so that tends to be my go-to browsing/etc device. However, if I want to do something crazy like type a comment on Slashdot or an email while traveling I always reach for the CR48. Even if I'm already looking at what I want to reply to on my tablet it takes less time to boot a CR-48 cold and navigate to it than it takes for me to try to type on a touchscreen. I'm sure the newer Chromebooks are much faster.
Having your data in the cloud is about convenience - I can edit a document from my phone, tablet, PC, whatever.
Frankly I think the bigger issue isn't that everybody wants their data in the cloud, but rather that there aren't really that many good FOSS solutions in this space. I've yet to see an FOSS MUA that compete with GMail if you include the requirement that you be able to operate it solely from a browser (the closest options are roundcube and squirrelmail, and if you've ever tried to sort 100 messages with nothing but a trackpad and a keyboard using those you'll understand their deficiencies). There really are no word processor/spreadsheet solutions out there that can run in a browser. Everything is X11 based, and none of the affordable phones/tablets/etc support X11.
There is no reason that you can't have the data "in the cloud" and control your data at the same time - you just have to run your own servers. I do that whenever I have the practical option to do so. That seems to be less and less often, unfortunately...
Slip the airline employee there a $20 and he'd tag it as if it were a regular bag.
I sincerely hope that the bags were weighed all the same before being loaded.
If you think the effects of incorrectly loading a container ship are bad, they're nothing compared to what happens when you do the same to an aircraft.
I'm surprised that on smaller planes they don't make passengers step onto a scale. They must really underload aircraft if they're getting away with using an average weight of 200lbs per adult male in the USA. Of course, the passengers of 5481 might have a different perspective on that.
Sounds like my company's smartphone policies. They whitelist specific models, and generally turn all of them down (well, unless their names start with an "i"). So, the 90% of company employees who aren't covered end up forwarding mail/calendars/etc to completely insecure outside services, where they're synced to their phones.
I guess the company gets plausible deniability out of the deal, but that's about it. The employees get a sub-standard experience compared to just being allowed to directly sync, and the companies data gets mirrored who-knows-where.
These are Vine reviewers. They all DID use the product, in the sense that they were mailed a free copy of the book to review. The problem is that they're just random people - it isn't like Amazon has a Vine review program for PhDs in electrical engineering.
This is like asking a chemist to review a dynamometer or asking an auto mechanic to review a mass spectrometer. No useful information is likely to come out. If you're interested in reviews of such products you'd prefer them to come from experts in the field who can either spec to the details of their performance or at least how well they work in daily use.
They really need to fix the GUI for submitting reviews so that you're prompted for both at the same time, and it is made clear which pertains to the product vs the seller with more specific questions to answer.
Reviews of niche items are still useful. If anything what makes them less useful is when Amazon pays non-experts to add noisy reviews to the mix, which seems rather stupid. Amazon is spending money to make their reviews less useful...
I'll often search reviews for keywords to find ones by experts when there is a product that is dual-use.
Elevator operators were trained professionals, just like airline pilots (though not quite so highly trained owing to the much simpler equipment). Elevators requiring them were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now as well. If they did still exist, I'm sure that the accident rate would be higher than with automated elevators. Unfortunately I can't find any records of accident rates online to cite, but if you have any demonstrating that fatality rates per passenger-floor haven't gone down with automation I'd be interested in them.
Seriously? Do you think Russia and America are going to antagonize each other militarily at this point in their relationship?
No, hence the reason I said, "The US wouldn't shoot down a Venezuelan diplomatic aircraft, and they certainly aren't going to fire on a Russian Alfa during peacetime in international waters."
Bingo!!! Marriage is a religious rite. Government has no business regulating or even recognizing a religious rite. However, there is a purpose to the government recognition of marriage, specifically taxes, shared property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance rights and so on, and I completely support gay couples gaining the same rights as straight couples.
Frankly, I think we'd be better off getting rid of special treatment of married (or whatever) couples for taxes, property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance, and so on.
Any of those things can be better accomplished in some other way. If you wan to give somebody power of attorney, just sign an agreement to that effect (certainly no more effort to do that then to go to a wedding). Ditto for every other thing on your list except taxes. I don't get why married couples should be treated differently for taxes - just file head-of-household or whatever when you have dissimilar incomes, or just file separately.
Since so many people live together unmarried the government already has laws to deal with every contingency that comes up (out-of-wedlock kids, disputes over property when couples split up, etc). It seems like an official state of marriage complicates things more than it helps.
I think marriage made more sense back in the day when fathers wanted to get proper value when they sold their daughters, and husband-to-be's wanted to make sure that their bride couldn't run off on them right after they were paid for. In a society where we actually treat women as the equals of men it makes more sense to let couples have the freedom to define their own relationships and the government can just deal with enforcing contracts. No doubt churches will come up with form contracts that represent their vision of what marriage is supposed to be, and twist the arms of their congregants to sign them. As long as slavery and indentured servitude aren't in the terms and there is reasonable consideration people can sign whatever they want to.
Why do you want to store bits on paper and not on some other medium? Chances are that paper is not the medium with the best data security.
Ultimately the only difference between storing a bit on a magnetic domain on some disk and in the color of some paper fibers is the far inferior data density of the paper, and the relative durability.
Unless you're just talking about a fairly small amount of information the economy of scale will almost always favor digital media. With barcodes you could probably store about 265k/page (with some of that taken up by ECC no doubt, and you'll probably have to roll your own software to manage it all). That is about 260MB per 20lb ream of paper if you double-side it. That is 80lbs/GB, at a cost of probably $12/GB if you get half-decent paper in bulk (what would be the point of using super-cheap paper?). Oh, and that isn't factoring in the costs to print it all, or later scan it all back. It would take hours to print 1GB of barcode and you'd spend probably $20 on toner doing it with an economical printer.
I'm sure you could buy the nicest archival DVDs for WAY less than that, and you can burn several GB in a few minutes and read it back in even less time, and the discs won't weigh 80lbs each.
Go ahead and add extra ECC, or use tape/whatever. I imagine that no matter how you slice it the paper will be the least effective storage solution against any failure mode.
they can give you an experience that looks like Walmart, but in reality is more like Jimmy's Used Cars.
How do you haggle with Amazon?
Same way you haggle with a used car salesman - walk out the door and come back another day. I'm sure it will take them a while to figure out how, but it is in Amazon's interest to give you a price you're willing to take.
Try haggling with your screen when on amazon.com. Maybe email their support monkeys with an offer. Good luck with that.
Well, you could just buy elsewhere, or try again another day. It is in Amazon's interest to give you a profitable offer that you're willing to take, though they might make you work for it.
Being admitted to a hospital pretty much implies desperation -- it's impossible to have a free and fair market when you either (a) need the service or (b) will die. The US healthcare system ruthlessly takes advantage of this fact.
Free AND fair market? Agree it basically is impossible in this market. You can certainly have a fair market though with good regulation (something lacking in the US). To start out with I'd require providers to charge the same fees to everybody (and not accept partial payment from anyone, discounts, rebates, etc).
Even with insurance, you'll end up with an out-of-network anesthesiologist or with a service that isn't covered, and be stuck paying the inflated prices. You can't shop when you're unconscious.
I think most insurance companies will reimburse at the network rate for acute care, or any care at a participating hospital, for the reasons you say. If some don't, then they should be required to do so. (Side note - some people get caught up in whether particular insurers are "good" or "bad" - while there are some that are better, most offer both "good" and "bad" plans - the choice is made by the employer in most cases. The same insurer might apply different policies to different plans depending on the premium.)
I don't know who you talk to that like to say how much money they save not having insurance - but I'll say that the reason the list prices are inflated is a result of the insurance companies paying a "discount". People without insurance are being screwed. We're all being screwed...
It is just a negotiating tactic. I doubt that list prices would be any cheaper if there weren't insurance. Doctors have a captive audience - are you going to choose to not go to a doctor because you're frustrated with the buying experience? Most services that are expensive tend to require haggling, and medical bills are QUITE expensive.
The list prices don't really affect insurance companies much - I doubt they even bother to look at them. They look at some city they're in and ask themselves "do we need to accept more doctors here, or do we have plenty?" If the former, they raise their rates a little and call around looking to sign some up. If the latter they lower their rates a little and see how many doctors quit in frustration. They pay every doctor in town the same for any particular service. When a doctor sends a bill to the insurer they don't even look at the price - they just look at what was done and their own price and send the appropriate reimbursement.
Doctors then turn around and do the same thing - they join with hospitals/etc to form service networks where everybody agrees to charge the same and those networks then negotiate with the insurers. The doctors are looking at it from the opposite angle - are they getting enough business? If they have plenty they'll put the screws on the insurers (raise your rates or your customers won't be able to go to half the doctors in Chicago).
The price that is reached is then bound up in contract. The list price never really enters into things. The only people who really need to be concerned with it are individuals who have almost no negotiating power.
If you want to fix this particular aspect of the system the solution isn't to ban insurance, but rather to require all doctors to publish their rates and charge the same rate to everybody (with no discounts/rebates/whatever). Suddenly list prices will become quite accurate and those with and without insurance will pay the same rate. Part of the problem with the US Healthcare system is that insurance isn't really so much about insurance as about being part of a wholesale buying club. Split up the insurance vs price management sides of the industry and consumers will win. (Don't get me wrong, I'm all for fixing the insurance side of the problem as well, but that is orthogonal to the price issue except where insurance policies (sometimes mandated) create incentives for poor buying habits.)
I wonder if the DEA transferred the money to own of its own accounts, or if they merely seized a drive that contained the wallet.
If the latter is the case, I wonder what will happen if there's a copy of that wallet, that now starts sending money. That'd be one hell of a way to accuse the DEA of fraud with seized goods...
Well, to transfer the money they'd have to have access to the wallet in any case. Maybe the Bitcoins weren't actually in his possession (for example, they might be deposited in some external party's account that they can demand them from).
If they actually got access to the wallet by seizing his hard drive, then that is something that could be defended against. Just have a backup with enough coordination so that if the computer is seized the money gets immediately transferred someplace safe. The wallet that was seized is worthless if the money gets transferred before it is decrypted.
What TFS means is that books will be priced differently for each individual. If the online shop thinks you will pay more then me for a given book they will try to charge you extra, something that physical shops can't do.
This is something physical shops have been doing for AGES, though not as much recently with commodity items.
What's the price of that new car? Sure, ANYBODY can get it for the sticker price, if they're insane. Everybody can also get it for less, and just how much less depends on their negotiating skills and those of the salesman. If you look desperate, expect to pay more.
The same is true in the US medical industry. Look desperate, and you can expect to pay more (don't worry, I'll give you a "discount" since you're paying cash...). I love it when people talk about how much they save by not having insurance, as if the insurance companies pay list price (healthcare list prices are almost as inflated as RIAA math).
The only real difference with something like Amazon is the level of automation - they can give you an experience that looks like Walmart, but in reality is more like Jimmy's Used Cars.
They quite literally murder thousands of innocent people every year with drone strikes and military action. I believe it is willfully ignorant to think that the US government has ANY qualms whatsoever about killing as many people as they see fit to suit their purposes, including Americans.
Again, you're mixing up unintended casualties with deliberate targeting. I've yet to see a case where the US has deliberately targeted somebody like a whistleblower for execution.
Sure, the US kills lots of people accidentally, and that is a bad thing. If you're concerned about that then I hope you don't fly, because if that is your concern ANY plane flying over international waters is in mortal peril, not just one that happens to have Snowden on-board. Ditto for anybody walking around in the Middle East / Afghanistan / Pakistan - any of them could be an accidental casualty in a drone strike.
Could the US deliberately target Snowden and then claim it is an accident? Sure. Has the US ever done anything like this in the past (specifically deliberately shooting down a plane carrying hundreds of innocent people to kill one target on-board)? Certainly not that I'm aware of. All indications are that when the US assassinates people they're usually suspected of terrorism and the US attempts to engage them with the least loss of other lives (they blow them up on a random road, and not in the middle of a shopping mall).
Clearly this is a major problem with the current system - we'll only ever see automated cars/planes/etc if it is regulated and compliant companies are shielded from liability.
The car design flaw of having a steering wheel is a result of the legal design flaw of making a company that manufacturers cars that kill 10k people per year less liable than one that kills 10 people per year if the latter's cars lacked steering wheels. The simple legal solution is to create a regulatory framework where we set a maximum acceptable fatality/accident rate and require manufacturers to stay below it. Start it out at the status quo (not a very high bar), and reduce the limit annually until we get into the noise. Companies that violate the regs would be heavily fined, and companies that do not would have blanket immunity from suits from accident victims. The result of such a policy would be a lot fewer dead people.
Not sure what the resolution on that data is, but seems like he was a bit high, then dove for the runway and ended up being too low. If you're above the glide path that close to the runway you're really supposed to just go around.
The smoothness of the successful glide path is likely the result of using ILS. The runway had neither ILS nor PAPI during this approach, so the pilot was just going by eye looking at the shape of the runway. That shouldn't be a problem for somebody flying a 777, but certainly it will be less accurate. The bigger issue was probably continuing an approach that should have been aborted.