We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed.
No, Carly and the bean counters reaped the benefit years ago, and they're all living just fine in their mansions. The shareholders at the time likely got some benefit as well. The intent of that greed was never to make things better for people like yourself, America, future generations, or even future shareholders. That's why it is called greed. They did exactly what the shareholders at the time paid them to do - they made those with ownership and control of the company wealthier.
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
Keep in mind volume matters. Servers just don't have it compared to desktops/laptops.
I remember a guy working for a defense contractor mentioned a story. Some guy in the army wanted to look into buying some kind of hardened mobile device - like an iPhone for soldiers. He went to a mobile vendor and told them that if they could build it, the army could buy a million units from him, expecting the vendor to salivate over the opportunity to move so many units. The vendor replied that this was smaller than their minimum order size for existing products, let alone a new one.
The consumer market is huge. I'm not convinced the PC market is dying though - it just isn't growing like mad anymore. I don't think that even the iPad killed it - the problem is that nobody has come up with a use for all that CPU to make people throw away perfectly working hardware like they used to. Everybody is excited about Apple because they're in a growth market - but in the end they might still not reach the volume of the HPs and Dells of the world, and if the market matures they won't be getting a 25% margin either.
Agreed, but the problem is that the MBAs are basically right. If your only goal is to make as much money as you can as fast as you can, then the strategies they advocate are exactly the ones you should be following. Get as much rent from your customers as you can, let somebody else do the R&D but be ready to milk the commons as much as you can, and so on.
Most of the truly great inventions of the last century were created by people who were into the achievement more than the cash. And, most people like that lose money - sure some become filthy rich, but you could say the same thing about people who buy lottery tickets. You'll never see an MBA in line at the lottery ticket counter.
The only reason that Bell Labs had its heyday was that Bell could pass the cost on plus some to every phone customer in the country. Once they were no longer allowed to do that, then there was no financial incentive to keep them around. Bell was already a mature company by that point.
I've long said that companies go through three cycles. There is the original founder, who usually is out for more than just money but of course if successful still ends up with quite a bit of it (Google today). Then there is the founder's hand-picked successor who generally maintains the direction of the company, but often with less innovation, but not with the complete sellout to the bottom line (that is Apple or MS today). Then the next successor is picked by the executive search subcommittee of the board of directors, and they are MBAs who do what they do best (think HP today, or likely even Agilent though with a different customer base). The last are the ones that basically outsource all the jobs, stick their logo on anything like Schwinn, and so on.
The company you love today WILL eventually go this route if it survives long enough. That's why you can't count on altruism, even for companies like Google.
They'd get a lot further if they bothered to package the thing for any linux distro. I mean, when you can't even find a.deb for it, you know nobody is going to use the thing.
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
And rightly so. The fact is that scalability is just not that important for a startup. Most likely the startup will fail with few customers at all. If they do have customers chances are they won't be on the scale of today's Facebook. If they do have a huge mass of customers and run into scaling issues, then they'll also have gobs of money coming at them from all direction with which they can solve those problems.
The alternative is to burn through all your capital making a really nice infrastructure that could be used to run Facebook, but which nobody will ever use anyway.
In business procrastination often pays off. It is hard to anticipate what your needs will be in 10 years, so don't sacrifice your needs in the next 2 years to get there.
How well does it work with stuff that uses ssh but doesn't actually use openssh in a terminal to do it? For example, some nice GUI application that lets you access your home directory via ssh, or nx/x2go, etc. That would be my main concern with it. I'd also prefer not to have to use it if I was using RSA - that essentially is a two factor process already.
TPM allows for remote attestation. That isn't just identity - it can also certify that the software is in some particular configuration. How do you think all that fancy passwordless full-hard-disk encryption software used in the enterprise works?
You stick a bootloader on the hard drive that can decrypt the hard drive, then you encrypt the rest of the hard drive, and store the key in the TPM chip, telling the TPM chip to only release the key if the system was booted from a bootloader with some particular signature. So, if you boot off of anything but the trusted bootloader the key is stuck in a hardware vault, and you can't read the rest of the drive.
You can set all of this up on linux if you want - Trusted GRUB is a bootloader that preserves the chain of trust, and the linux kernel has supported this for ages. So, you implement passwordless full-disk encryption using linux and if your bootloader or kernel changes it won't be able to read the rest of your drive.
That attestation can be extended to remote hosts as well - besides asking the TPM to authenticate your identity it can also authenticate the stored boot configuration chain, assuming your OS created it in the first place. Nobody uses it to do this now, but the hardware necessary to do this is present in almost every working PC on the planet.
Well, that is more of a bug in the GPLv2, depending on your viewpoint. I mean, if all you cared about was open source, but not free software, then you'd license it BSD in the first place...
Yeah, but look at what you're proposing. Old computers - presumably the reason I buy a new computer is that I'd rather not be using my old one. FPGA - sure, I guess I could use one to implement an i386, or maybe even an i486. However, there is no way an FPGA is going to be half as fast as even a fairly ancient computer, since the technology is just not nearly as cost-effective.
And if you need remote attestation to get on the internet you have to add hacking into some chip on a brand new computer to the list as well.
Ah, try running either of those distros on a version of glibc other than what they were supplied with. That is a recipe for a LOT of pain and likely less stability as well. If you do it with Gentoo the pain level goes way down, but arguably the stability is not as high.
Freedom is only freedom if you can exercise it to do stuff not intended by whoever made the distro.
And this is the problem. The outcome of a court case should be that which is just. The outcome shouldn't be based on who had the best legal representation.
Maybe all five at once will work since only a few cops are on duty.
Assange appearing on the balcony was stupid. Once he went into the embassy, he should have worked very hard on 'hiding' his location. A lot can be achieved with deniability.
Yup, Assange's narcissism has worked against him in almost every element of this whole saga. If he read the very cables he disclosed he'd see how much all those intelligence agencies employ deniability to their advantage, such as the bit about the PM of Sweden asking for intelligence requests to be kept informal to avoid parliamentary oversight.
Maybe some guys in the UK government are sympathetic to Assange, and they might be inclined to look the other way. That doesn't work when the guy gets himself on the front page saying "just try and get me." If the guy just sneaked into the embassy they could have arranged a private plane at the airport, driven him in a diplomatic car with him only being out in sight for a few minutes here and there, and nobody would know where he went. Maybe he could stand out on the balcony at his new home in Equador, or maybe he just quietly runs his operation from hiding and nobody knows where to even look for him. Then everybody speculates on whether the UK knew what was going on, or whatever, but they can just claim that they did their job and some dastardly nation spirited him away. With Assange making an issue of things, they have to make an issue of things to save face and show to their diplomatic partners (like the US) that they are on-board.
Or maybe the UK is just out for blood. In any case, I doubt they routinely watch the loading and unloading of every diplomatic limo in the country, so some secrecy would have gone a long way to getting him out. Heck, the embassy could have just handed him a fake passport and chances are he could just fly out on an airliner.
You can face 5 years in prison and not be able to ask for a jury trial, but sue somebody for $500 in federal court and gosh darn it your right to a jury is preserved.
Most jurisdictions only allow a jury trial if any single count you are charged with carries more than a six month prison term. If you're charged with 60 counts of a crime punishable by a month in prison, no jury for you as upheld recently by the Supreme Court, even if the terms run consecutively.
Well, it is more like you grab 200 off the street, let anybody with half a brain and something better to do with a year of their time exclude themselves, and then go ahead and exclude anybody else from the group who seems to still half a brain left.
I see, so the purpose of the patent is to encourage companies to come up with unimportant innovations? After all, come up with a GSM standard and you make millions, but come up with a UI element and you can milk the market for billions.
This is my problem with how patents are being enforced in general. If you come up with the cure for cancer it is considered a crime against humanity to charge money for it. If you come up with an erectile dysfunction treatment you can charge whatever you want and make billions a year.
And this is why we're a nation built on entertainment and marketing and not science. Maybe we need a better model for how these breakthroughs are paid for, but we shouldn't be trying to fix that problem by mixing up the worth of inventions.
That may be so, but computing the prime factorization of 15 is not in that class.
Actually, it is. There is a reason that kids are taught multiplication long before factoring. It just happens that for numbers this small you can do both in your home.
If I handed you a pencil and paper and asked you to factor 1474 to primes it would take you a LOT longer than if I gave you the factors and asked you to multiply them.
Verifying the factorization of even a 2048 bit number by hand on paper is probably doable, though likely pretty tedious. Calculating those factors if they are just two primes would be astronomically difficult without Shor's algorithm or some other breakthrough even with every supercomputer likely to be made in the next 100 years. So, if I told you that some particular answer was 48% likely to be right, and any of 1 million other answers were each about 0.00001% likely to be right, then it seems like verification would be pretty easy to do.
Honestly, I think this is inevitable anyway - but not for a while. I think what will really disrupt the industry is improvements in genetic testing/analysis.
If I can fully understand my risk profile at an early age then I have an information advantage over the insurance company and can play games like the one you just outlined. That means they go bankrupt. If they can use the same information against me, then you have huge classes of disadvantaged people, which won't be socially acceptable. The only solution for either is mandatory universal coverage, either via public or private funds.
If you believe that, then I've got a car to sell you. You'll find the negotiating process isn't all that different, and if you think you can walk into a car dealer and get the same deal as some guy paid $100k/yr to negotiate fleet deals you're quite mistaken.
The insurance prices are set by professional negotiators. The insurance company knows what every doctor in the country is paying them for that service. They can take away a fair chunk of the doctor's revenue by deciding to drop them. They don't put any value on the fact that the doctor delivered you and your parents and that their son is good friends with your cousin/etc. They don't care if the doctor hates them and will never speak to them again. They can put a contract clause in that they get the lowest rate anybody pays, and if they suspect cheating the cost of a lawsuit is peanuts vs what they'd recover across all their patients. Bottom line is they're just out to get the lowest reimbursement rate they can, and they're quite able to do it.
You aren't a professional negotiator. You don't want to have to twist the doctor's arm on price and then go into the office and have a frank discussion about your health. You don't want to switch doctors. Your friend really recommended this doctor, so you really want to make it work out. You have no idea what every other doctor in the city charges, let alone what the ones two states over charge. You don't even know what this doctor charges to other insurers, and if they promised to not charge you more than somebody else you'd have little chance of discovering if they ripped you off and the doctor would only be out a small amount of money if they did.
So, the doctor will tell you the normal price for the service is $1000, but since they care about you and like dealing in cash they'll do it for the low low price of $600. Meanwhile Blue Cross pays them $300 for the same service, and afterwards if they feel the job wasn't done right they'll just tell the doctor they won't get even that.
I've been the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and I'd be surprised if my insurance paid more than 15 cents on the dollar on average.
I also found, that often, when I told the caregiver I was paying myself, I got up to about 15% discount right of the top....I had an MRI where they did this.
You apparently think you got a good deal. The last time I looked at an EOB from my insurer they're getting about an 80% discount, and I pay only 10% of that (ie 2% of the original bill).
I've had to deal with quite a bit of catastrophic care. For something like heart surgery expect the bills to come in at $100k, the insurance company to pay $10-20k, and you pay about $1-2k or your out-of-pocket limit if you hit that first on a 10% coinsurnace plan (you pay twice as much on a 20% plan obviously). I'm sure the doctors would offer you a discount if you didn't have insurance, but do you really think you'll talk them down to 10-20% of the original offer?
I'd love to see healthcare reform in the US, including more insurance reform, but insurance is not the only reason that care is so expensive. The uninsured just don't get to see what everybody else is paying so they think that the doctor letting them pay 50% of the bill is kind and generous, when the reality is that they are ripping them off.
I'm sure that is sarcasm - something lost on most of your replies, and on most of those arguing over the forced-insurance issue.
You can have it one way or the other, but not both: 1. You can allow providers to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. 2. You can force everybody to have insurance (private or public or whatever).
The problem with #1 is that it leads to massive abuse, like post-claim underwriting. I see #2 as the lesser of two evils, and it lets you have more of a market for insurance. The only problem with the US implementation of #2 is that the fines for not having insurance aren't high enough - they need to be comparable to the cost of having insurance, or the government will end up having to bail out insurance companies (that is also a legitimate option - view no insurance as a form of partially-taxpayer-funded catastrophic insurance).
If you try to do both you get the scenario described in your post. To some extent that is what the too-low penalties accomplish.
Tend to agree. The plug-in hack probably takes no more time to execute than just using the key the lock was designed for, and wouldn't involve any fiddling that would look conspicuous from more than 20 feet away. Plus, this approach leaves the lock undamaged.
Once you're talking screwdrivers the fiddling looks much more conspicuous, though dressing like a repair guy probably would help as long as hotel staff doesn't catch you in the act.
Some of these comments are kind of crazy - dremels and such. I'm sure a nice sledge would bypass the door with a single hit, or a powered rotary saw would chop the whole lock out of the door in less time than it takes to elegantly disassemble the lock with tools that make just as much noise.
However, all of this fiddling will leave more signs of tampering, which may not be desirable.
I'm sure there is every situation imaginable. Usually these kinds of devices have layers of "controllers."
The UI that a human being works with is often a PC running a desktop OS. Some devices are more appliance-oriented, but something that just installs an application on your PC like any consumer-oriented device seems to be pretty common.
Then there is the controller that actually operates the device. That rarely has any kind of direct human input beyond a few buttons on the device itself - it just talks to the software on the PC. That was the bit I was referring to with an embedded OS.
For a consumer-oriented example, take a Harmony Remote Control. The control itself is obviously running some kind of embedded OS, which has simple IO via the buttons on the device and a small screen, but no real ability to configure anything. Then to configure it you use much more sophisticated software on a PC.
And this is why your X server shouldn't be run as root - there is no reason that a userspace program should be able to lock your ability to switch virtual terminals. For whatever reason X11 has been allowed to be the big exception to the whole kernel-manages-the-hardware thing.
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We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed.
No, Carly and the bean counters reaped the benefit years ago, and they're all living just fine in their mansions. The shareholders at the time likely got some benefit as well. The intent of that greed was never to make things better for people like yourself, America, future generations, or even future shareholders. That's why it is called greed. They did exactly what the shareholders at the time paid them to do - they made those with ownership and control of the company wealthier.
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
Keep in mind volume matters. Servers just don't have it compared to desktops/laptops.
I remember a guy working for a defense contractor mentioned a story. Some guy in the army wanted to look into buying some kind of hardened mobile device - like an iPhone for soldiers. He went to a mobile vendor and told them that if they could build it, the army could buy a million units from him, expecting the vendor to salivate over the opportunity to move so many units. The vendor replied that this was smaller than their minimum order size for existing products, let alone a new one.
The consumer market is huge. I'm not convinced the PC market is dying though - it just isn't growing like mad anymore. I don't think that even the iPad killed it - the problem is that nobody has come up with a use for all that CPU to make people throw away perfectly working hardware like they used to. Everybody is excited about Apple because they're in a growth market - but in the end they might still not reach the volume of the HPs and Dells of the world, and if the market matures they won't be getting a 25% margin either.
Why should I have to pay somebody to install my own software on my own computer?
Agreed, but the problem is that the MBAs are basically right. If your only goal is to make as much money as you can as fast as you can, then the strategies they advocate are exactly the ones you should be following. Get as much rent from your customers as you can, let somebody else do the R&D but be ready to milk the commons as much as you can, and so on.
Most of the truly great inventions of the last century were created by people who were into the achievement more than the cash. And, most people like that lose money - sure some become filthy rich, but you could say the same thing about people who buy lottery tickets. You'll never see an MBA in line at the lottery ticket counter.
The only reason that Bell Labs had its heyday was that Bell could pass the cost on plus some to every phone customer in the country. Once they were no longer allowed to do that, then there was no financial incentive to keep them around. Bell was already a mature company by that point.
I've long said that companies go through three cycles. There is the original founder, who usually is out for more than just money but of course if successful still ends up with quite a bit of it (Google today). Then there is the founder's hand-picked successor who generally maintains the direction of the company, but often with less innovation, but not with the complete sellout to the bottom line (that is Apple or MS today). Then the next successor is picked by the executive search subcommittee of the board of directors, and they are MBAs who do what they do best (think HP today, or likely even Agilent though with a different customer base). The last are the ones that basically outsource all the jobs, stick their logo on anything like Schwinn, and so on.
The company you love today WILL eventually go this route if it survives long enough. That's why you can't count on altruism, even for companies like Google.
They'd get a lot further if they bothered to package the thing for any linux distro. I mean, when you can't even find a .deb for it, you know nobody is going to use the thing.
Sure, Windows and OSX would be icing on the cake.
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
And rightly so. The fact is that scalability is just not that important for a startup. Most likely the startup will fail with few customers at all. If they do have customers chances are they won't be on the scale of today's Facebook. If they do have a huge mass of customers and run into scaling issues, then they'll also have gobs of money coming at them from all direction with which they can solve those problems.
The alternative is to burn through all your capital making a really nice infrastructure that could be used to run Facebook, but which nobody will ever use anyway.
In business procrastination often pays off. It is hard to anticipate what your needs will be in 10 years, so don't sacrifice your needs in the next 2 years to get there.
How well does it work with stuff that uses ssh but doesn't actually use openssh in a terminal to do it? For example, some nice GUI application that lets you access your home directory via ssh, or nx/x2go, etc. That would be my main concern with it. I'd also prefer not to have to use it if I was using RSA - that essentially is a two factor process already.
TPM allows for remote attestation. That isn't just identity - it can also certify that the software is in some particular configuration. How do you think all that fancy passwordless full-hard-disk encryption software used in the enterprise works?
You stick a bootloader on the hard drive that can decrypt the hard drive, then you encrypt the rest of the hard drive, and store the key in the TPM chip, telling the TPM chip to only release the key if the system was booted from a bootloader with some particular signature. So, if you boot off of anything but the trusted bootloader the key is stuck in a hardware vault, and you can't read the rest of the drive.
You can set all of this up on linux if you want - Trusted GRUB is a bootloader that preserves the chain of trust, and the linux kernel has supported this for ages. So, you implement passwordless full-disk encryption using linux and if your bootloader or kernel changes it won't be able to read the rest of your drive.
That attestation can be extended to remote hosts as well - besides asking the TPM to authenticate your identity it can also authenticate the stored boot configuration chain, assuming your OS created it in the first place. Nobody uses it to do this now, but the hardware necessary to do this is present in almost every working PC on the planet.
Well, that is more of a bug in the GPLv2, depending on your viewpoint. I mean, if all you cared about was open source, but not free software, then you'd license it BSD in the first place...
Yeah, but look at what you're proposing. Old computers - presumably the reason I buy a new computer is that I'd rather not be using my old one. FPGA - sure, I guess I could use one to implement an i386, or maybe even an i486. However, there is no way an FPGA is going to be half as fast as even a fairly ancient computer, since the technology is just not nearly as cost-effective.
And if you need remote attestation to get on the internet you have to add hacking into some chip on a brand new computer to the list as well.
Ah, try running either of those distros on a version of glibc other than what they were supplied with. That is a recipe for a LOT of pain and likely less stability as well. If you do it with Gentoo the pain level goes way down, but arguably the stability is not as high.
Freedom is only freedom if you can exercise it to do stuff not intended by whoever made the distro.
Perhaps Samsung losing was their own fault. That doesn't make it right.
And this is the problem. The outcome of a court case should be that which is just. The outcome shouldn't be based on who had the best legal representation.
Maybe all five at once will work since only a few cops are on duty.
Assange appearing on the balcony was stupid. Once he went into the embassy, he should have worked very hard on 'hiding' his location. A lot can be achieved with deniability.
Yup, Assange's narcissism has worked against him in almost every element of this whole saga. If he read the very cables he disclosed he'd see how much all those intelligence agencies employ deniability to their advantage, such as the bit about the PM of Sweden asking for intelligence requests to be kept informal to avoid parliamentary oversight.
Maybe some guys in the UK government are sympathetic to Assange, and they might be inclined to look the other way. That doesn't work when the guy gets himself on the front page saying "just try and get me." If the guy just sneaked into the embassy they could have arranged a private plane at the airport, driven him in a diplomatic car with him only being out in sight for a few minutes here and there, and nobody would know where he went. Maybe he could stand out on the balcony at his new home in Equador, or maybe he just quietly runs his operation from hiding and nobody knows where to even look for him. Then everybody speculates on whether the UK knew what was going on, or whatever, but they can just claim that they did their job and some dastardly nation spirited him away. With Assange making an issue of things, they have to make an issue of things to save face and show to their diplomatic partners (like the US) that they are on-board.
Or maybe the UK is just out for blood. In any case, I doubt they routinely watch the loading and unloading of every diplomatic limo in the country, so some secrecy would have gone a long way to getting him out. Heck, the embassy could have just handed him a fake passport and chances are he could just fly out on an airliner.
It is worse than that.
You can face 5 years in prison and not be able to ask for a jury trial, but sue somebody for $500 in federal court and gosh darn it your right to a jury is preserved.
Most jurisdictions only allow a jury trial if any single count you are charged with carries more than a six month prison term. If you're charged with 60 counts of a crime punishable by a month in prison, no jury for you as upheld recently by the Supreme Court, even if the terms run consecutively.
Well, it is more like you grab 200 off the street, let anybody with half a brain and something better to do with a year of their time exclude themselves, and then go ahead and exclude anybody else from the group who seems to still half a brain left.
But, you're on the right track...
I see, so the purpose of the patent is to encourage companies to come up with unimportant innovations? After all, come up with a GSM standard and you make millions, but come up with a UI element and you can milk the market for billions.
This is my problem with how patents are being enforced in general. If you come up with the cure for cancer it is considered a crime against humanity to charge money for it. If you come up with an erectile dysfunction treatment you can charge whatever you want and make billions a year.
And this is why we're a nation built on entertainment and marketing and not science. Maybe we need a better model for how these breakthroughs are paid for, but we shouldn't be trying to fix that problem by mixing up the worth of inventions.
That may be so, but computing the prime factorization of 15 is not in that class.
Actually, it is. There is a reason that kids are taught multiplication long before factoring. It just happens that for numbers this small you can do both in your home.
If I handed you a pencil and paper and asked you to factor 1474 to primes it would take you a LOT longer than if I gave you the factors and asked you to multiply them.
Verifying the factorization of even a 2048 bit number by hand on paper is probably doable, though likely pretty tedious. Calculating those factors if they are just two primes would be astronomically difficult without Shor's algorithm or some other breakthrough even with every supercomputer likely to be made in the next 100 years. So, if I told you that some particular answer was 48% likely to be right, and any of 1 million other answers were each about 0.00001% likely to be right, then it seems like verification would be pretty easy to do.
That might be the case.
Honestly, I think this is inevitable anyway - but not for a while. I think what will really disrupt the industry is improvements in genetic testing/analysis.
If I can fully understand my risk profile at an early age then I have an information advantage over the insurance company and can play games like the one you just outlined. That means they go bankrupt. If they can use the same information against me, then you have huge classes of disadvantaged people, which won't be socially acceptable. The only solution for either is mandatory universal coverage, either via public or private funds.
If you believe that, then I've got a car to sell you. You'll find the negotiating process isn't all that different, and if you think you can walk into a car dealer and get the same deal as some guy paid $100k/yr to negotiate fleet deals you're quite mistaken.
The insurance prices are set by professional negotiators. The insurance company knows what every doctor in the country is paying them for that service. They can take away a fair chunk of the doctor's revenue by deciding to drop them. They don't put any value on the fact that the doctor delivered you and your parents and that their son is good friends with your cousin/etc. They don't care if the doctor hates them and will never speak to them again. They can put a contract clause in that they get the lowest rate anybody pays, and if they suspect cheating the cost of a lawsuit is peanuts vs what they'd recover across all their patients. Bottom line is they're just out to get the lowest reimbursement rate they can, and they're quite able to do it.
You aren't a professional negotiator. You don't want to have to twist the doctor's arm on price and then go into the office and have a frank discussion about your health. You don't want to switch doctors. Your friend really recommended this doctor, so you really want to make it work out. You have no idea what every other doctor in the city charges, let alone what the ones two states over charge. You don't even know what this doctor charges to other insurers, and if they promised to not charge you more than somebody else you'd have little chance of discovering if they ripped you off and the doctor would only be out a small amount of money if they did.
So, the doctor will tell you the normal price for the service is $1000, but since they care about you and like dealing in cash they'll do it for the low low price of $600. Meanwhile Blue Cross pays them $300 for the same service, and afterwards if they feel the job wasn't done right they'll just tell the doctor they won't get even that.
I've been the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and I'd be surprised if my insurance paid more than 15 cents on the dollar on average.
I also found, that often, when I told the caregiver I was paying myself, I got up to about 15% discount right of the top....I had an MRI where they did this.
You apparently think you got a good deal. The last time I looked at an EOB from my insurer they're getting about an 80% discount, and I pay only 10% of that (ie 2% of the original bill).
I've had to deal with quite a bit of catastrophic care. For something like heart surgery expect the bills to come in at $100k, the insurance company to pay $10-20k, and you pay about $1-2k or your out-of-pocket limit if you hit that first on a 10% coinsurnace plan (you pay twice as much on a 20% plan obviously). I'm sure the doctors would offer you a discount if you didn't have insurance, but do you really think you'll talk them down to 10-20% of the original offer?
I'd love to see healthcare reform in the US, including more insurance reform, but insurance is not the only reason that care is so expensive. The uninsured just don't get to see what everybody else is paying so they think that the doctor letting them pay 50% of the bill is kind and generous, when the reality is that they are ripping them off.
I'm sure that is sarcasm - something lost on most of your replies, and on most of those arguing over the forced-insurance issue.
You can have it one way or the other, but not both:
1. You can allow providers to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.
2. You can force everybody to have insurance (private or public or whatever).
The problem with #1 is that it leads to massive abuse, like post-claim underwriting. I see #2 as the lesser of two evils, and it lets you have more of a market for insurance. The only problem with the US implementation of #2 is that the fines for not having insurance aren't high enough - they need to be comparable to the cost of having insurance, or the government will end up having to bail out insurance companies (that is also a legitimate option - view no insurance as a form of partially-taxpayer-funded catastrophic insurance).
If you try to do both you get the scenario described in your post. To some extent that is what the too-low penalties accomplish.
Tend to agree. The plug-in hack probably takes no more time to execute than just using the key the lock was designed for, and wouldn't involve any fiddling that would look conspicuous from more than 20 feet away. Plus, this approach leaves the lock undamaged.
Once you're talking screwdrivers the fiddling looks much more conspicuous, though dressing like a repair guy probably would help as long as hotel staff doesn't catch you in the act.
Some of these comments are kind of crazy - dremels and such. I'm sure a nice sledge would bypass the door with a single hit, or a powered rotary saw would chop the whole lock out of the door in less time than it takes to elegantly disassemble the lock with tools that make just as much noise.
However, all of this fiddling will leave more signs of tampering, which may not be desirable.
I'm sure there is every situation imaginable. Usually these kinds of devices have layers of "controllers."
The UI that a human being works with is often a PC running a desktop OS. Some devices are more appliance-oriented, but something that just installs an application on your PC like any consumer-oriented device seems to be pretty common.
Then there is the controller that actually operates the device. That rarely has any kind of direct human input beyond a few buttons on the device itself - it just talks to the software on the PC. That was the bit I was referring to with an embedded OS.
For a consumer-oriented example, take a Harmony Remote Control. The control itself is obviously running some kind of embedded OS, which has simple IO via the buttons on the device and a small screen, but no real ability to configure anything. Then to configure it you use much more sophisticated software on a PC.
And this is why your X server shouldn't be run as root - there is no reason that a userspace program should be able to lock your ability to switch virtual terminals. For whatever reason X11 has been allowed to be the big exception to the whole kernel-manages-the-hardware thing.