In the US for civil suits alleging libel the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. In the UK it is actually on the defendant. In general the US is pretty liberal regarding freedom of speech - winning a case of libel is not a trivial matter unless it is pretty blatant.
I'd be hard-pressed to think of examples of civil actions brought by private parties in which the burden of proof lies with the defendant.
There certainly are cases where regulations require a company to maintain certain records for inspection at any time, and violation could result in either a civil or a criminal action. In such a situation the only real burden of proof on the government is for them to say that they asked for the defendant to produce the record and they failed to do so. That gets close to a situation where the burden of proof is on the defendant, but that is really only the case because the laws/regulations are fairly strict to begin with (simply failing to maintain a record is a crime - the government does not need to prove something bad happened as a result).
No idea. If you just want local storage I'd use keepass, and some use that combined with dropbox. That at least is an FOSS solution. The main advantage of lastpass is its cloud/browser-based solution, so it works everywhere. If your browser doesn't have a plugin available they even support bookmarklets, which are fairly universal (ironically with the exception of Chrome on Android, but not the simpler AOSP browser).
I still have some old passwords I haven't updated, but most of my passwords are now randomly generated. You can also download all your passwords in plain-text format for backup (obviously encrypt this file).
First option, we operate our generating facilities under the supervision of the US government, with police and/or military troops responsible for the requisite security. Not likely in the USA or other 'free market' economy. Even if the plant operations were handled by private business and the public were to provide the police force, the operator would not tolerate the required restrictions on their operations (not being able to hire the boss' idiot security risk nephew, for example). Or something akin to the TSA (the idiot nephew rises again).
I was merely pointing out that the current policy was dumb, not that self-interested politicians were likely to enact something better...
However, those government-supplied security guards are more likely to be accepted by private industry than the restrictions that would be necessary to prevent the accumulation of waste that we now have no permanent solution for.
For single-site projects, like the superconducting supercolider in the '80's, everyone was for it until a specific site was identified, at which point everyone but the representatives from that state (Texas, I think), and that concerted opposition was enough to kill it.
Of course, the facts that the project was massively behind schedule, massively over budget, and that the costs and schedule for the new tech required kept ballooning had nothing to do with it... It was all politics.
You pretty-much described just about every large project the US government undertakes. Nobody canceled the Space Shuttle for being massively over budget, because everybody had a stake in it. One man's waste is another man's fat profit margin (another man who likely contributes well to campaign funds).
Nobody is going to stand up and vote against a project and say that it was because it doesn't meet their selfish interests. People always point to some lofty ideal, one that they're all to happy to ignore when it suits them.
The waste at those sites is not merely nuclear waste.
I knew somebody who had some connection to one of those sites, and he gave an interesting presentation on the mess that is left. Poor records were kept, so nobody really knows what is in those underground tanks. All kinds of stuff was dumped into tanks with little regard for compatibility. The mixtures in the tanks are not homogenous, which means that over time you get stuff happening as things mix and diffuse, and you can get buildups of stuff like hydrogen which of course can threaten to blow the whole tank up (talk about a mess with all that radioactive waste mixed in).
I have no doubt that a concerted effort could clean up the mess, but nobody wants to deal with it - let it blow up on somebody else's watch (I'm sure there is significant risk of an environmental disaster if the site is disturbed to try to remediate it, and what administration wants that on their watch?).
Just as with Yucca Mountain - the status quo is good enough for a few more years, and if something bad happens you could just say you were doing what everybody else did and "who could have seen that coming?" Worked for New Orleans, worked for the housing crash, will work for the next time a President keeps his head in the sand like all those before him.
Yeah, I don't get the big deal. Just station a garrison in every nuclear plant if you're paranoid, and a UN watch team if you must. The cost of doing that is likely trivial compared to the cost from stuff like lung cancer from coal soot, let alone nuclear proliferation.
Just build efficient breeder reactors and do whatever makes the most sense economically, and do it under high security.
People argue that it isn't possible to secure nuclear reactors, and that is just nonsense. We secure actual nuclear weapons production facilities, so why can't we secure facilities intended to not produce weapons.
Well, that is the problem with the ASIC-based solutions. They are dedicated-purpose chips - they don't do anything but generate bitcoins. At least with GPUs and FPGAs they were generic computing devices with other uses.
Pretty soon the only way to generate any significant money from bitcoins will be to own hardware whose only purpose is mining bitcoins.
It isn't unlike mining for gold - back in the day you could grab a sieve or a pickaxe and actually find something (though in reality not much if you weren't lucky). Today those kinds of tools are useless - you need mining equipment and a chemical plant to obtain gold in any significant quantity - things that for the most part have little other use. (Some of the equipment can be applied to other ores, others can't.)
Uh, what is bitcoin going to do for somebody with bad credit? It is a currency system. When you have bad credit people will be more than willing to accept cash from you. What people won't do is give you something now in exchange for a promise to be paid for it later, since you've demonstrated that you do not keep those promises. They're not suddenly going to start giving you stuff on loan because you offer to pay them in bitcoins down the road.
I could see how it might fix some economic problems at a nation-state level, but it would likely create other problems (little control over currency - a sword that cuts two ways). However, it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem that if you try to spend more than you make then bad things happen.
Progress in technology will not result in devaluing of the currency. Every so many blocks the difficulty factor is adjusted based on the block generation rate. So, if the rate of block generation goes up 1000X, then after a bunch of blocks (which won't take long to generate at all) the rate will drop back down to the previous rate, as it will become 1000X more difficult to generate a block.
About the only thing that would change is that instead of thousands of people with FPGAs and GPUs in their basement generating all the blocks, they'll all be generated with one guy with a few boards with chips on them. Expect transaction fees to rise.:)
Actually, while this is true, most productivity gain goes to the investors -- which can be anyone who thought to take a risk on that company.
Anyone who thought to take a risk on that company, and who had the means to actually do so.
There are lots of things I'd love to invest in, but I don't have surplus income 30x the poverty line so that I can dabble in tech stocks while not sitting in my yacht.
No issues with paying back investors, but there is WAY too much disparity between working and owning.
They do cache the passwords locally, encrypted. However, the whole point of a cloud-based service is that they're also stored on the cloud. The unencrypted passwords never leave RAM (well, aside from swap issues - I doubt a browser plugin can lock RAM).
I wonder what kind of car Stallman drives. Seriously. Does he update the firmware controlling the engine timing and fuel injectors?
Say what you will of Stallman, but the guy eats his dog food. He uses non-free software/hardware/etc when free alternatives are not available, but he is VERY tolerant of inconvenience when it will allow him to substitute something free. He is largely free of proprietary software, and I'm sure he's gotten quite far on the hardware front. I'm sure when he buys a new car that the sorts of things you mention are considerations for him, and if riding in the rain on a moped would get him closer to an all-FOSS world he'd probably do it.
He also writes software, though I suspect not as much as he used to. So, he isn't just demanding that others write his software for him.
Does he represent an extreme? Sure. However, he is actually reasonably practical about his beliefs. He doesn't insist on swimming across the Atlantic because all the planes and ships have proprietary ECUs.
That episode is the main reason why I've stuck with them - I was a customer at that time.
When that breach occurred nobody knew about it but them, but they immediately broke the news and generally treated the situation in the most conservative manner possible. Their treat assessments as communicated out seemed accurate to me.
So, sure, you're more secure if you never put your passwords out in the cloud to begin with - nobody can question that (assuming you still use strong unique passwords for each site and just carry them around with you on a PDA or USB drive or something). However, if you are going to use a cloud service then would you rather use one that has an episode like this and does full disclosure, or one that puts the marketers in charge and covers the whole thing up? The only reason you can cite that example is because Lastpass did the right thing.
If the alternative is to just pick a few memorable passwords and use them on many websites each, I'm not convinced you're better off.
See my reply - this was somebody I know personally, so it isn't propaganda from your favorite right-wing candidate. However, I wasn't there, and I can't vouch for how well he was utilizing the options available to him within the NHS. Perhaps experiences vary considerably within that system.
His condition wasn't very serious when it first presented, though it became very serious having been left untreated for weeks. The initial presentation as a non-serious problem may have contributed to it not getting rapid attention, and perhaps the system just failed to properly escalate when things got worse.
In his case the problem was pneumonia (mild at first).
He saw his GP within a few days, and basically was sent home with some with some aspirin and instructions to return if things didn't improve. When things didn't improve he was given an appointment for a chest x-ray days later. Then the doctor had to wait a week for the x-ray to be read. Then after some delay he was diagnosed with pneumonia and received antibiotics.
I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in-between, but the various steps each introduced latency of days and the bottom line is that he was untreated for several weeks. He became VERY sick and was barely able to talk for a month.
That's just an anecdote, and perhaps he didn't avail himself of all options or push hard enough to keep things moving along. However, when my wife in the US had a touch of pneumonia we took her to the ER late at night. Within a few hours she had been discharged fully able to breath with an inhaler, having been given O2 almost immediately upon arrival X-rays, and interpretation of those X-rays, and treatment with a nebulizer/steroids.
I can believe that, though the reality is that your employer basically is the one that decides what your life is worth. People rail about this insurance company or that one, but I've found that the company involved makes little difference (except for a few companies that only do high-end plans). What matters is which plan your company paid for, and they're REALLY hard to compare.
If your employer paid Aetna for the expensive PPO option, then you'll have access to just about any care that is reasonably established in the profession (certainly anything that Medicare or the VA or a European health system would pay for). If your employer paid Aetna for the cheap PPO option, then you're going to get routine denials, and a style of administration that is analogous to running out the clock in most sports. Either way the job ad will just say "Aetna PPO available." Then you'll find some internet forum where inexplicably people are going back and forth about how horrible Aetna is or how wonderful they've been.
Regardless of whether we ever have a public option I'd love to see a requirement for published stats on percentage of premiums that get spend on actual care, and a ban on employer-provided healthcare. The customer is always right, and when the employer is the customer you can imagine that there are perverse incentives. Why should your employer care if you live or die? The faster you die the sooner they can stop paying your short-term disability.
Yup, ERs in the US work entirely on Triage, and tend to have more/less busy times. I've been to them both for very serious and not very serious issues, and for the simplest issues some have expedited processes that you can volunteer for (nurse practitioners/etc). (It was a holiday weekend and while I'd normally just make an appointment I was concerned that if would be unwise to just let the issue go on for days without antibiotics, and I don't really mind the wait.) Show up to an ER with difficulty breathing and you should get immediate care.
However, you hit on a serious problem with the US health system - ERs in low-income areas like Brooklyn. That ER is require to treat all acute conditions regardless of ability to pay, and since the US does not have universal coverage that means treating a LOT of people without being paid for it. These ERs tend to be overcapacity since nobody is going to build a new hospital in that economic climate so people have even been known to die in ER waiting rooms (a recent scandal involved somebody calling 911 from a hospital waiting room and being turned away by the operator since they were already at a hospital, then dying). That sort of thing can happen in cities and poor areas, due to the way healthcare is (or isn't) financed. In suburbs it isn't a problem, since hospitals are profitable and if one gets too busy they just expand or somebody builds another one.
The average middle-class US voter just avoids going into areas like Brooklyn - see no evil, hear no evil...
The inner city problem exists because everybody just wants to stick their heads in the sand. Legislatures pass laws that require acute care so that they can say they're doing the right thing, but then they don't do anything to pay for it, so it becomes "somebody else's problem." The people in Brooklyn would get better care under almost any other system - if they just let poor people die on the street then at least there would be well-functioning hospitals for those with some kind of income, and if they actually paid for care then there would be well-functioning hospitals for everybody. What we have now is a sort of no-man's land where everybody gets pretty lousy care in those areas.
Well, presumably Google wouldn't be making the device unless they felt otherwise, but my point was that their failure to handle the one-offs stands in the way of adoption.
Google has to overcome opinions like yours to make a sale no matter what. However, because they have no solution for running the odd win32 application on ChromeOS they have set the bar considerably higher - a potential customer can't have ANY win32 apps to be a good candidate for ChromeOS.
Agreed, but what we're likely to first see is every Bank and significant e-commerce site making you pay $5 for a dedicated keyfob, so that you now have to carry around a huge collection of them. It will turn out that half of them have other security problems, but that's OK since you're the one who had to pay for them.
What we really need is something like a strong two-factor openid system, or something like that. OpenID can already support this, but the problem is that few sites actually support OpenID. If more did, then you just need to get everybody to start using stronger authentication services.
I'd echo the other suggestion to use lastpass. I was struggling with the same issues. In theory the passwords are encrypted/decrypted locally and they do not have access to them. Of course, I'm sure they could be bruteforced as with any of the other sites. That said, I am a bit more inclined to trust one site whose sole purpose is storing passwords than every web forum on the internet. These days most of my passwords are randomly generated thanks to lastpass.
The real pain has been with smartphone apps, which don't integrate well with lastpass. I can access my passwords on the phone, but I have to do copy/paste to get the password into the app, and some apps are brain-dead and reset when context-switching which means I need to at least manually enter the username (which is a pita if it is a long email address).
People also point out keepass, but it doesn't support every OS I use. Lastpass always has the browser as a fallback if nothing else.
Simpler and more accurate to just call the whole OS "Linux", like Linus Torvalds does.
Q: Have you ever tried running Linux on your desktop? A: I tried, but when I stuck the Tivo on my desktop it was really hard to compose emails on it.
Q: What utility do you find most useful when managing your linux system? A: I find the button that displays the remaining time until the next oil change is pretty handy.
Q: Do you think Linux will ever overtake Microsoft? A: Uh, are they up to 100 apps and 1% market share yet, or is RIM still outperforming them?
Q: What do you think of Linux flexibility? A: It is pretty annoying - my Linux laptop only runs a browser, and I can't even change it.
The fact is that Linux is actually about as defining of user experience as udev or mesa is on a typical "Linux distro." If you showed somebody an older version of Ubuntu and asked them whether it had more in common with a FreeBSD system running Gnome or a Linux system running Tivo, they'd probably pick the FreeBSD system, despite the fact that it doesn't contain Linux at all.
That might not actually change their decision much. The decision is supposed to be based on quality-adjusted years of life. If they're not spending $100k on your new lung it is probably because they don't expect it to buy you more than a year or two, or maybe longer than that but living in utter agony or something.
If so, then they're paying off your widow no matter what, so it is just a matter of whether they want to dump $100k on a heroic procedure first.
Of course, such a thing would help keep them honest.
Oh, and if you have trouble paying your premiums on that insurance and you sell the policy to a 3rd party (who pays you cash in advance, becomes the beneficiary, and takes over the premiums) then you most certainly DON'T want those guys on your death panel. The faster you die, the more money they make.
I think a factor to consider is that care can vary considerably within both the US and Canada, which makes many average comparisons misleading.
My understanding is that in a well-served area in Canada you can get pretty quick service. In remote areas, not so much.
In the NE US my experience has been that while you do need to schedule non-emergency tests, you're talking about scheduling them within a few days, unless you have rigid scheduling preferences ("I'd like a Tues between 3-5"), and then you might wait a week or two. Oh, if you want to see the #1 rated cardiologist in the NYC area then expect to wait a few months. However, if you just want to see any cardiologist you can probably find one with an opening in a few weeks at most, and again all of that is assuming non-emergency care. If you show up in an ER complaining of chest pains or something you'll be seen by doctors and have a barrage of tests started almost immediately, with results back within hours (varies by test, largely due to the nature of the tests themselves). I would hope most first world ER/AEs would have similar results, but I know a guy in the UK who suffered with pneumonia for a month or two before getting antibiotics with all the delays (perhaps he just failed to go to AE when he should have, but you'd think the first doctor to talk to him would tell him to go - if I called a doctor in the US to schedule an appointment and mentioned difficulty breathing they'd tell me to call 911 right away).
From everybody I've talked to (mostly coworkers at a multinational all with good incomes and insurance/etc) the sense has been that the US tends to have the fastest care - you just really get ripped off price-wise all around. Again, if you're picky and don't want to talk to anybody but the "best" specialist in the region then you're going to wait, but I'm not sure how many countries even let you pick a doctor.
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In the US for civil suits alleging libel the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. In the UK it is actually on the defendant. In general the US is pretty liberal regarding freedom of speech - winning a case of libel is not a trivial matter unless it is pretty blatant.
I'd be hard-pressed to think of examples of civil actions brought by private parties in which the burden of proof lies with the defendant.
There certainly are cases where regulations require a company to maintain certain records for inspection at any time, and violation could result in either a civil or a criminal action. In such a situation the only real burden of proof on the government is for them to say that they asked for the defendant to produce the record and they failed to do so. That gets close to a situation where the burden of proof is on the defendant, but that is really only the case because the laws/regulations are fairly strict to begin with (simply failing to maintain a record is a crime - the government does not need to prove something bad happened as a result).
No idea. If you just want local storage I'd use keepass, and some use that combined with dropbox. That at least is an FOSS solution. The main advantage of lastpass is its cloud/browser-based solution, so it works everywhere. If your browser doesn't have a plugin available they even support bookmarklets, which are fairly universal (ironically with the exception of Chrome on Android, but not the simpler AOSP browser).
I still have some old passwords I haven't updated, but most of my passwords are now randomly generated. You can also download all your passwords in plain-text format for backup (obviously encrypt this file).
First option, we operate our generating facilities under the supervision of the US government, with police and/or military troops responsible for the requisite security. Not likely in the USA or other 'free market' economy. Even if the plant operations were handled by private business and the public were to provide the police force, the operator would not tolerate the required restrictions on their operations (not being able to hire the boss' idiot security risk nephew, for example). Or something akin to the TSA (the idiot nephew rises again).
I was merely pointing out that the current policy was dumb, not that self-interested politicians were likely to enact something better...
However, those government-supplied security guards are more likely to be accepted by private industry than the restrictions that would be necessary to prevent the accumulation of waste that we now have no permanent solution for.
Of course, the facts that the project was massively behind schedule, massively over budget, and that the costs and schedule for the new tech required kept ballooning had nothing to do with it... It was all politics.
You pretty-much described just about every large project the US government undertakes. Nobody canceled the Space Shuttle for being massively over budget, because everybody had a stake in it. One man's waste is another man's fat profit margin (another man who likely contributes well to campaign funds).
Nobody is going to stand up and vote against a project and say that it was because it doesn't meet their selfish interests. People always point to some lofty ideal, one that they're all to happy to ignore when it suits them.
Probably an acid of some sort.
The waste at those sites is not merely nuclear waste.
I knew somebody who had some connection to one of those sites, and he gave an interesting presentation on the mess that is left. Poor records were kept, so nobody really knows what is in those underground tanks. All kinds of stuff was dumped into tanks with little regard for compatibility. The mixtures in the tanks are not homogenous, which means that over time you get stuff happening as things mix and diffuse, and you can get buildups of stuff like hydrogen which of course can threaten to blow the whole tank up (talk about a mess with all that radioactive waste mixed in).
I have no doubt that a concerted effort could clean up the mess, but nobody wants to deal with it - let it blow up on somebody else's watch (I'm sure there is significant risk of an environmental disaster if the site is disturbed to try to remediate it, and what administration wants that on their watch?).
Just as with Yucca Mountain - the status quo is good enough for a few more years, and if something bad happens you could just say you were doing what everybody else did and "who could have seen that coming?" Worked for New Orleans, worked for the housing crash, will work for the next time a President keeps his head in the sand like all those before him.
Doh!
s/let alone nuclear proliferation/let alone rising sea levels/
Yeah, I don't get the big deal. Just station a garrison in every nuclear plant if you're paranoid, and a UN watch team if you must. The cost of doing that is likely trivial compared to the cost from stuff like lung cancer from coal soot, let alone nuclear proliferation.
Just build efficient breeder reactors and do whatever makes the most sense economically, and do it under high security.
People argue that it isn't possible to secure nuclear reactors, and that is just nonsense. We secure actual nuclear weapons production facilities, so why can't we secure facilities intended to not produce weapons.
Well, that is the problem with the ASIC-based solutions. They are dedicated-purpose chips - they don't do anything but generate bitcoins. At least with GPUs and FPGAs they were generic computing devices with other uses.
Pretty soon the only way to generate any significant money from bitcoins will be to own hardware whose only purpose is mining bitcoins.
It isn't unlike mining for gold - back in the day you could grab a sieve or a pickaxe and actually find something (though in reality not much if you weren't lucky). Today those kinds of tools are useless - you need mining equipment and a chemical plant to obtain gold in any significant quantity - things that for the most part have little other use. (Some of the equipment can be applied to other ores, others can't.)
..Also if you have bad credit
Uh, what is bitcoin going to do for somebody with bad credit? It is a currency system. When you have bad credit people will be more than willing to accept cash from you. What people won't do is give you something now in exchange for a promise to be paid for it later, since you've demonstrated that you do not keep those promises. They're not suddenly going to start giving you stuff on loan because you offer to pay them in bitcoins down the road.
I could see how it might fix some economic problems at a nation-state level, but it would likely create other problems (little control over currency - a sword that cuts two ways). However, it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem that if you try to spend more than you make then bad things happen.
Progress in technology will not result in devaluing of the currency. Every so many blocks the difficulty factor is adjusted based on the block generation rate. So, if the rate of block generation goes up 1000X, then after a bunch of blocks (which won't take long to generate at all) the rate will drop back down to the previous rate, as it will become 1000X more difficult to generate a block.
About the only thing that would change is that instead of thousands of people with FPGAs and GPUs in their basement generating all the blocks, they'll all be generated with one guy with a few boards with chips on them. Expect transaction fees to rise. :)
Actually, while this is true, most productivity gain goes to the investors -- which can be anyone who thought to take a risk on that company.
Anyone who thought to take a risk on that company, and who had the means to actually do so.
There are lots of things I'd love to invest in, but I don't have surplus income 30x the poverty line so that I can dabble in tech stocks while not sitting in my yacht.
No issues with paying back investors, but there is WAY too much disparity between working and owning.
They do cache the passwords locally, encrypted. However, the whole point of a cloud-based service is that they're also stored on the cloud. The unencrypted passwords never leave RAM (well, aside from swap issues - I doubt a browser plugin can lock RAM).
I wonder what kind of car Stallman drives. Seriously. Does he update the firmware controlling the engine timing and fuel injectors?
Say what you will of Stallman, but the guy eats his dog food. He uses non-free software/hardware/etc when free alternatives are not available, but he is VERY tolerant of inconvenience when it will allow him to substitute something free. He is largely free of proprietary software, and I'm sure he's gotten quite far on the hardware front. I'm sure when he buys a new car that the sorts of things you mention are considerations for him, and if riding in the rain on a moped would get him closer to an all-FOSS world he'd probably do it.
He also writes software, though I suspect not as much as he used to. So, he isn't just demanding that others write his software for him.
Does he represent an extreme? Sure. However, he is actually reasonably practical about his beliefs. He doesn't insist on swimming across the Atlantic because all the planes and ships have proprietary ECUs.
That episode is the main reason why I've stuck with them - I was a customer at that time.
When that breach occurred nobody knew about it but them, but they immediately broke the news and generally treated the situation in the most conservative manner possible. Their treat assessments as communicated out seemed accurate to me.
So, sure, you're more secure if you never put your passwords out in the cloud to begin with - nobody can question that (assuming you still use strong unique passwords for each site and just carry them around with you on a PDA or USB drive or something). However, if you are going to use a cloud service then would you rather use one that has an episode like this and does full disclosure, or one that puts the marketers in charge and covers the whole thing up? The only reason you can cite that example is because Lastpass did the right thing.
If the alternative is to just pick a few memorable passwords and use them on many websites each, I'm not convinced you're better off.
See my reply - this was somebody I know personally, so it isn't propaganda from your favorite right-wing candidate. However, I wasn't there, and I can't vouch for how well he was utilizing the options available to him within the NHS. Perhaps experiences vary considerably within that system.
His condition wasn't very serious when it first presented, though it became very serious having been left untreated for weeks. The initial presentation as a non-serious problem may have contributed to it not getting rapid attention, and perhaps the system just failed to properly escalate when things got worse.
In his case the problem was pneumonia (mild at first).
He saw his GP within a few days, and basically was sent home with some with some aspirin and instructions to return if things didn't improve. When things didn't improve he was given an appointment for a chest x-ray days later. Then the doctor had to wait a week for the x-ray to be read. Then after some delay he was diagnosed with pneumonia and received antibiotics.
I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in-between, but the various steps each introduced latency of days and the bottom line is that he was untreated for several weeks. He became VERY sick and was barely able to talk for a month.
That's just an anecdote, and perhaps he didn't avail himself of all options or push hard enough to keep things moving along. However, when my wife in the US had a touch of pneumonia we took her to the ER late at night. Within a few hours she had been discharged fully able to breath with an inhaler, having been given O2 almost immediately upon arrival X-rays, and interpretation of those X-rays, and treatment with a nebulizer/steroids.
What you say is absolutely true, though it probably should be noted that insurers won't pay for most of that stuff.
I can believe that, though the reality is that your employer basically is the one that decides what your life is worth. People rail about this insurance company or that one, but I've found that the company involved makes little difference (except for a few companies that only do high-end plans). What matters is which plan your company paid for, and they're REALLY hard to compare.
If your employer paid Aetna for the expensive PPO option, then you'll have access to just about any care that is reasonably established in the profession (certainly anything that Medicare or the VA or a European health system would pay for). If your employer paid Aetna for the cheap PPO option, then you're going to get routine denials, and a style of administration that is analogous to running out the clock in most sports. Either way the job ad will just say "Aetna PPO available." Then you'll find some internet forum where inexplicably people are going back and forth about how horrible Aetna is or how wonderful they've been.
Regardless of whether we ever have a public option I'd love to see a requirement for published stats on percentage of premiums that get spend on actual care, and a ban on employer-provided healthcare. The customer is always right, and when the employer is the customer you can imagine that there are perverse incentives. Why should your employer care if you live or die? The faster you die the sooner they can stop paying your short-term disability.
Yup, ERs in the US work entirely on Triage, and tend to have more/less busy times. I've been to them both for very serious and not very serious issues, and for the simplest issues some have expedited processes that you can volunteer for (nurse practitioners/etc). (It was a holiday weekend and while I'd normally just make an appointment I was concerned that if would be unwise to just let the issue go on for days without antibiotics, and I don't really mind the wait.) Show up to an ER with difficulty breathing and you should get immediate care.
However, you hit on a serious problem with the US health system - ERs in low-income areas like Brooklyn. That ER is require to treat all acute conditions regardless of ability to pay, and since the US does not have universal coverage that means treating a LOT of people without being paid for it. These ERs tend to be overcapacity since nobody is going to build a new hospital in that economic climate so people have even been known to die in ER waiting rooms (a recent scandal involved somebody calling 911 from a hospital waiting room and being turned away by the operator since they were already at a hospital, then dying). That sort of thing can happen in cities and poor areas, due to the way healthcare is (or isn't) financed. In suburbs it isn't a problem, since hospitals are profitable and if one gets too busy they just expand or somebody builds another one.
The average middle-class US voter just avoids going into areas like Brooklyn - see no evil, hear no evil...
The inner city problem exists because everybody just wants to stick their heads in the sand. Legislatures pass laws that require acute care so that they can say they're doing the right thing, but then they don't do anything to pay for it, so it becomes "somebody else's problem." The people in Brooklyn would get better care under almost any other system - if they just let poor people die on the street then at least there would be well-functioning hospitals for those with some kind of income, and if they actually paid for care then there would be well-functioning hospitals for everybody. What we have now is a sort of no-man's land where everybody gets pretty lousy care in those areas.
Well, presumably Google wouldn't be making the device unless they felt otherwise, but my point was that their failure to handle the one-offs stands in the way of adoption.
Google has to overcome opinions like yours to make a sale no matter what. However, because they have no solution for running the odd win32 application on ChromeOS they have set the bar considerably higher - a potential customer can't have ANY win32 apps to be a good candidate for ChromeOS.
Agreed, but what we're likely to first see is every Bank and significant e-commerce site making you pay $5 for a dedicated keyfob, so that you now have to carry around a huge collection of them. It will turn out that half of them have other security problems, but that's OK since you're the one who had to pay for them.
What we really need is something like a strong two-factor openid system, or something like that. OpenID can already support this, but the problem is that few sites actually support OpenID. If more did, then you just need to get everybody to start using stronger authentication services.
I'd echo the other suggestion to use lastpass. I was struggling with the same issues. In theory the passwords are encrypted/decrypted locally and they do not have access to them. Of course, I'm sure they could be bruteforced as with any of the other sites. That said, I am a bit more inclined to trust one site whose sole purpose is storing passwords than every web forum on the internet. These days most of my passwords are randomly generated thanks to lastpass.
The real pain has been with smartphone apps, which don't integrate well with lastpass. I can access my passwords on the phone, but I have to do copy/paste to get the password into the app, and some apps are brain-dead and reset when context-switching which means I need to at least manually enter the username (which is a pita if it is a long email address).
People also point out keepass, but it doesn't support every OS I use. Lastpass always has the browser as a fallback if nothing else.
Simpler and more accurate to just call the whole OS "Linux", like Linus Torvalds does.
Q: Have you ever tried running Linux on your desktop?
A: I tried, but when I stuck the Tivo on my desktop it was really hard to compose emails on it.
Q: What utility do you find most useful when managing your linux system?
A: I find the button that displays the remaining time until the next oil change is pretty handy.
Q: Do you think Linux will ever overtake Microsoft?
A: Uh, are they up to 100 apps and 1% market share yet, or is RIM still outperforming them?
Q: What do you think of Linux flexibility?
A: It is pretty annoying - my Linux laptop only runs a browser, and I can't even change it.
The fact is that Linux is actually about as defining of user experience as udev or mesa is on a typical "Linux distro." If you showed somebody an older version of Ubuntu and asked them whether it had more in common with a FreeBSD system running Gnome or a Linux system running Tivo, they'd probably pick the FreeBSD system, despite the fact that it doesn't contain Linux at all.
That might not actually change their decision much. The decision is supposed to be based on quality-adjusted years of life. If they're not spending $100k on your new lung it is probably because they don't expect it to buy you more than a year or two, or maybe longer than that but living in utter agony or something.
If so, then they're paying off your widow no matter what, so it is just a matter of whether they want to dump $100k on a heroic procedure first.
Of course, such a thing would help keep them honest.
Oh, and if you have trouble paying your premiums on that insurance and you sell the policy to a 3rd party (who pays you cash in advance, becomes the beneficiary, and takes over the premiums) then you most certainly DON'T want those guys on your death panel. The faster you die, the more money they make.
I think a factor to consider is that care can vary considerably within both the US and Canada, which makes many average comparisons misleading.
My understanding is that in a well-served area in Canada you can get pretty quick service. In remote areas, not so much.
In the NE US my experience has been that while you do need to schedule non-emergency tests, you're talking about scheduling them within a few days, unless you have rigid scheduling preferences ("I'd like a Tues between 3-5"), and then you might wait a week or two. Oh, if you want to see the #1 rated cardiologist in the NYC area then expect to wait a few months. However, if you just want to see any cardiologist you can probably find one with an opening in a few weeks at most, and again all of that is assuming non-emergency care. If you show up in an ER complaining of chest pains or something you'll be seen by doctors and have a barrage of tests started almost immediately, with results back within hours (varies by test, largely due to the nature of the tests themselves). I would hope most first world ER/AEs would have similar results, but I know a guy in the UK who suffered with pneumonia for a month or two before getting antibiotics with all the delays (perhaps he just failed to go to AE when he should have, but you'd think the first doctor to talk to him would tell him to go - if I called a doctor in the US to schedule an appointment and mentioned difficulty breathing they'd tell me to call 911 right away).
From everybody I've talked to (mostly coworkers at a multinational all with good incomes and insurance/etc) the sense has been that the US tends to have the fastest care - you just really get ripped off price-wise all around. Again, if you're picky and don't want to talk to anybody but the "best" specialist in the region then you're going to wait, but I'm not sure how many countries even let you pick a doctor.