Well, simple solution for that. When the insurer gets a bill from a doctor they first send a form to the patient (electronically if possible).
Question 1: Did you obtain the results of all tests that you were given and a complete copy of your medical records?
Question 2: Did your doctor review these with you and explain their content?
Question 3: Do you feel satisfied that you understand your condition and the necessary treatment?
If any come back No then the insurer denies the claim and tells the doctor to resubmit once they've sorted it out. By law the doctors would also not be able to collect on the bill.
While you're at it, bills will not be paid unless a patient is given copies of all necessary prescriptions, whether for pills, eyeglasses, contact lenses, or durable medical equipment. Too many health-related professions use what should be safety-oriented laws like requiring prescriptions as a way to avoid competition.
I have no idea how to treat either. However, if they are influenced at all by genetics then using family history for artificial selection would reduce the rate at which they occur.
Evolution is like the market - you don't need to know who will win or lose in advance - you just have to set up the conditions for everything to sort itself out on its own. And, just like the market perverse incentives cause big problems. Right now the perverse incentive is that your success at reproduction has almost nothing to do with your long-term health outlook. If you institute eugenics there is of course the risk of creating other perverse incentives, but it isn't like the status quo is a bed of roses. The real ethical question is whether reproduction is a fundamental human right. If it is not, or it is outweighed by the right of future generations to be healthier, then eugenics is a means to an end.
However, there really isn't much room for debating whether artificial selection works - clearly that has been well established and I don't know anybody reputable that would debate this. The only question is how it is applied.
Looks like you found a solution to the health care crisis - we just have to eat lots of food, live in secure locations, and avoid being outside. I wonder why people are so worried about obesity since apparently it promotes longevity (in some minds).
I guess the obvious thing I didn't state was that I was talking about people who lived to 80 without major health issues. Types 2 diabetes would obviously disqualify.
There isn't nearly as much money in copper, and it is in itself a legitimate industry so it isn't like the black market is the sole supplier and can dictate the price. Any black market that is established will never be able to charge more than legitimate industry does, and that puts a cap on their profits. Since the black market is likely to be inefficient at every step chances are it won't work.
If Walmart sold what are currently illegal narcotics you'd see the drug cartels die off within a few years at most. Their skillset isn't actually making drugs so much as evading the law, and if you remove the value of the latter then they will find it much harder to compete.
I dunno. You get a whole distribution network for drugs because they're REALLY cheap to make and expensive on the street. The value of copper probably isn't high enough to sustain a while industry. I can see opportunists grabbing some wire and selling it for $200 at a scrap shop. I can't see people setting up smelting operations and turning out pipes and wires and such. Right now they're only sourcing scrap copper which has enough margin to make the theft profitable. If they have to replicate the whole manufacturing process then you're competing against legitimate industry and your initial margins will get wiped out fast as all the downstream steps are more costly.
That and require traceability (identifying where it went, who it was sold to, etc), and perhaps a holding period before you can do anything with it.
Audit scrap dealers, and so on. If you catch a thief treat them like a druggie and get them to snitch and then nail the dealer to the wall. The key is to remove the profit incentive, and that means controlling the legitimate copper trade.
The latter is a method of accomplishing the former. If you don't let anybody whose grandparents didn't live to the age of 80 reproduce, then over time the longevity of the population is likely to increase. In this case the apriori definition of "fit" is "lives to the age of 80,"
Eugenics is nothing more than artificial selection, applied to humans.
Of course, lots of people use it to select for stuff that is racist in nature or whatever (which is evil), or nutjobs try to use it to select for stuff that isn't genetic in origin (which won't work, and often is done in ways that are evil). I'm not convinced the concept in itself is evil, although it depends on whether you consider reproduction a fundamental human right. My thinking is that kids would be a whole lot better off if it wasn't - why not let kids be born to parents who will actually raise them properly (which is tangential to eugenics).
This is to prevent theft, not protect the environment (though cutting down on the wire -> scrap -> wire cycling will certainly help the latter).
There is no need to have a watch list or whatever. Just require that any scrap dealer obtain ID when collecting scrap, and mail payment to the address on the ID after 30 days or whatever. Scrap dealers would then have to maintain traceability of their inventory, and perhaps hold onto stuff for a few days in case the police drop by.
And this need not be applied to everything - just stuff that tends to get stolen because of high value. Pawn shops already operate under rules like these.
Do these plastic anti-scanning bags which are used to protect electronic components and hard drives from powerful x-raying machines not work against these x-raying machines in the U.S.?
I would imagine that it depends on the power of the x-ray. From what I understand the machines designed to inspect baggage are quite powerful - it will fog film even in a protective bag (though these bags are effective against scanners designed to be used around people).
Also, I imagine that a bunch of opaque objects in a scan that appear suspicious would trigger a manual search.
This story is crazy. I don't have any objection to using x-rays on unoccupied vehicles, but doing a CT-scan with people inside is just nuts. They already use CT-like technology to screen baggage and it is no big deal since the equipment is operated without people in the vicinity.
The odd thing is that the more I think about it the more it almost seems inevitable.
All medical research does is removes selective pressure on health. Once you do that you just get drift until you reach a new equilibrium (lots of people dying despite spending lots of money on healthcare). If you improve healthcare further then life expectancy goes up a little until you reach a new equilibrium. You end up having to spend more and more money to basically stay in the same place.
If you applied eugenics to the problem then society could probably afford to care for those who are alive much better, because an effort would be made to avoid bringing into the world those who are less healthy. A simple way of implementing it would be to say that you're not allowed to have children unless 3 of your grandparents lived until the age of 80, or something like that. Since most disease strikes after reproductive years, the health of the parents themselves is almost irrelevant (sure, if they already have cancer then don't let them reproduce, but being healthy at 30 does nothing for the bills associated with caring for 90 year olds).
Obviously the counterargument is the slippery slope. That would obviously be something that society has to deal with...
Unless you count that in all current implementations I'm aware of it doesn't work over TCP - only UDP. So, any network that doesn't transmit UDP will work fine for torrent files (with TCP trackers) but not magnet links.
Not entirely true - Bittorrent does not require a network that can transmit UDP, but DHT does (in its commonly-used implementations - I can't think of any reason that it couldn't use TCP, but it doesn't).
So, if you're on a TCP-only network (they do exist), then you can use Bittorrent with a torrent file and a TCP tracker, but not a magnet link.
For whatever reason I can't get my deluge installation to support magnet URLs (the option is grayed out in the web interface). I assume DHT works fine over TCP? My biggest annoyance is the huge number of torrent files out there which don't list TCP trackers - I end up having to edit the tracker list extensively - usually just to substitute most if not all the list with trackers that are actually reachable. For various reasons I can't route UDP on the network I use for deluge...
This sort of thing happens with all kinds of workplace regulations - usually with safety regs (give everybody access to safety equipment that makes them less productive, but fire the slowest people every week and watch as nobody uses it).
The solution is to place the onus of compliance on the employer. If an inspector walks in and sees people without safety gear the employer gets fined $1M even if the gear was made available to the employees. The local management should ensure that employees use safety gear, and fire people who refuse to do so.
The same thing works for overtime pay. Do an audit of the server logs, pick 10 people who logged in after hours, and then check their payroll for the same period of time and see if overtime was paid. If the employee didn't claim overtime, then fine the employer $1M. Pretty soon you'll see employers bending over backwards to make sure people get paid.
However, all of this depends on enforcement. You can write all the laws you want and they're worthless if you don't enforce them...
This is why smart-cards should not accept PIN input from any external device. The PIN input should be a keypad directly on the card itself. The card should display the authenticated hostname connecting to it on an internal display as well.
People have already defeated security on terminals in numerous ways - they should be generally treated as untrusted. Now, if you're logging onto a fileshare you can't prevent malware from copying data off that fileshare once you've connected, but you can at least prevent it from accessing other resources that the user hasn't explicitly authorized by reusing a token.
Perhaps, if you want to spend a week trying to create a manufacturing process for ladles that can be sold at a profit for $1 by those who have already figured it out. How much is it going to cost you in materials alone per unit when you're done? You'll end up spending more, polluting more, and wasting a ton of time.
3d printers are great for modeling new things before manufacturing them, but it is going to be a rare case indeed where they're actually a useful manufacturing technology.
Yup. Don't forget that when you're done you'll end up spending $2 on plastic to make a ladle of poorer quality than one you can buy for $1 at a discount store.
Saying that current 3D printers will replace mass manufacturing is like saying that the laser printer will make the New York Times obsolete. The web might very well make the NYT obsolete, but not because people can print the whole newspaper out. Doing so would probably end up using a $5 ream of paper and $3 worth of ink (without pictures) on an average consumer printer, to replace what would otherwise be a $1 newspaper.
Relevance depends on industry. If you're a consumer wanting to buy a camera then you're going to care far more about CES than NAB. If you're a broadcaster looking for an HD studio camera that outputs in some studio-specific format with attachments for teleprompters, monitors, and 47 remote control features, then you're going to care far more about NAB. The former sells $500-5000 gadgets to yuppies, and the latter sells $20k-$20M solutions to industry. Maybe at the intermediate price ranges there might be a bit of crossover, but otherwise the only thing they have in common is that some suppliers make products for both and they're in the same city.
Every industry has exhibits like these - if you're shopping for a robot that builds cars chances are you will find both CES and NAB completely irrelevant.
The various companies involved really need to get their act together.
Oh, they know exactly what they're doing (or so they think). Your app not working on their no-longer-sold phones is a feature to them, not a bug. It gives their previous customers incentive to buy a newer phone. What they aren't thinking about is that if they aren't careful that phone will be an iPhone.
Good point, and up until Android came along an OS per device was the norm. I've had feature phones that supported apps since the early 2000s, but the reality is that there were no apps worth installing except maybe some payware navigation app from the carrier. The fact that the apps practially had to be written per-phone let alone per-carrier was a huge obstacle.
Right now for smartphones your targets are basically iPhone and everybody else (Android). Sure, there is that RIM/MS blip in there, but your app selection in those cases is about what I could have gotten for a Nokia in 2001.
What I did with my N1 is probably harder to do with an iPhone; but the OP shouldn't have been too surprised. Next time they should buy an Android phone that way instead.
The OP didn't buy their iPhone from ATT, however. Near-monopoly communications providers shouldn't be allowed to enter into exclusive agreements in the first place, but they certainly shouldn't be allowed to extend that agreement to equipment they never sold/etc.
Neither iPhones nor Android phones require a data plan to operate as far as I'm aware. Mobile providers will certainly tell you that they do, but it simply isn't true. I gave my old G1 to my stepson and disabled its ability to send data thoroughly (disable APNs, disable mobile data, etc). It worked just fine - it would sync on WiFi and otherwise work like a feature phone on the cell network.
Things like visual voicemail will probably work just fine without a data plan - you just need to be connected to WiFi.
Considering that the iPhone and the iPod are fairly similar in features and OS I'd be surprised if the iPhone also would work just fine without a data plan.
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Well, simple solution for that. When the insurer gets a bill from a doctor they first send a form to the patient (electronically if possible).
Question 1: Did you obtain the results of all tests that you were given and a complete copy of your medical records?
Question 2: Did your doctor review these with you and explain their content?
Question 3: Do you feel satisfied that you understand your condition and the necessary treatment?
If any come back No then the insurer denies the claim and tells the doctor to resubmit once they've sorted it out. By law the doctors would also not be able to collect on the bill.
While you're at it, bills will not be paid unless a patient is given copies of all necessary prescriptions, whether for pills, eyeglasses, contact lenses, or durable medical equipment. Too many health-related professions use what should be safety-oriented laws like requiring prescriptions as a way to avoid competition.
I have no idea how to treat either. However, if they are influenced at all by genetics then using family history for artificial selection would reduce the rate at which they occur.
Evolution is like the market - you don't need to know who will win or lose in advance - you just have to set up the conditions for everything to sort itself out on its own. And, just like the market perverse incentives cause big problems. Right now the perverse incentive is that your success at reproduction has almost nothing to do with your long-term health outlook. If you institute eugenics there is of course the risk of creating other perverse incentives, but it isn't like the status quo is a bed of roses. The real ethical question is whether reproduction is a fundamental human right. If it is not, or it is outweighed by the right of future generations to be healthier, then eugenics is a means to an end.
However, there really isn't much room for debating whether artificial selection works - clearly that has been well established and I don't know anybody reputable that would debate this. The only question is how it is applied.
Looks like you found a solution to the health care crisis - we just have to eat lots of food, live in secure locations, and avoid being outside. I wonder why people are so worried about obesity since apparently it promotes longevity (in some minds).
I guess the obvious thing I didn't state was that I was talking about people who lived to 80 without major health issues. Types 2 diabetes would obviously disqualify.
There isn't nearly as much money in copper, and it is in itself a legitimate industry so it isn't like the black market is the sole supplier and can dictate the price. Any black market that is established will never be able to charge more than legitimate industry does, and that puts a cap on their profits. Since the black market is likely to be inefficient at every step chances are it won't work.
If Walmart sold what are currently illegal narcotics you'd see the drug cartels die off within a few years at most. Their skillset isn't actually making drugs so much as evading the law, and if you remove the value of the latter then they will find it much harder to compete.
I dunno. You get a whole distribution network for drugs because they're REALLY cheap to make and expensive on the street. The value of copper probably isn't high enough to sustain a while industry. I can see opportunists grabbing some wire and selling it for $200 at a scrap shop. I can't see people setting up smelting operations and turning out pipes and wires and such. Right now they're only sourcing scrap copper which has enough margin to make the theft profitable. If they have to replicate the whole manufacturing process then you're competing against legitimate industry and your initial margins will get wiped out fast as all the downstream steps are more costly.
That and require traceability (identifying where it went, who it was sold to, etc), and perhaps a holding period before you can do anything with it.
Audit scrap dealers, and so on. If you catch a thief treat them like a druggie and get them to snitch and then nail the dealer to the wall. The key is to remove the profit incentive, and that means controlling the legitimate copper trade.
The latter is a method of accomplishing the former. If you don't let anybody whose grandparents didn't live to the age of 80 reproduce, then over time the longevity of the population is likely to increase. In this case the apriori definition of "fit" is "lives to the age of 80,"
Eugenics is nothing more than artificial selection, applied to humans.
Of course, lots of people use it to select for stuff that is racist in nature or whatever (which is evil), or nutjobs try to use it to select for stuff that isn't genetic in origin (which won't work, and often is done in ways that are evil). I'm not convinced the concept in itself is evil, although it depends on whether you consider reproduction a fundamental human right. My thinking is that kids would be a whole lot better off if it wasn't - why not let kids be born to parents who will actually raise them properly (which is tangential to eugenics).
This is to prevent theft, not protect the environment (though cutting down on the wire -> scrap -> wire cycling will certainly help the latter).
There is no need to have a watch list or whatever. Just require that any scrap dealer obtain ID when collecting scrap, and mail payment to the address on the ID after 30 days or whatever. Scrap dealers would then have to maintain traceability of their inventory, and perhaps hold onto stuff for a few days in case the police drop by.
And this need not be applied to everything - just stuff that tends to get stolen because of high value. Pawn shops already operate under rules like these.
Do these plastic anti-scanning bags which are used to protect electronic components and hard drives from powerful x-raying machines not work against these x-raying machines in the U.S.?
I would imagine that it depends on the power of the x-ray. From what I understand the machines designed to inspect baggage are quite powerful - it will fog film even in a protective bag (though these bags are effective against scanners designed to be used around people).
Also, I imagine that a bunch of opaque objects in a scan that appear suspicious would trigger a manual search.
This story is crazy. I don't have any objection to using x-rays on unoccupied vehicles, but doing a CT-scan with people inside is just nuts. They already use CT-like technology to screen baggage and it is no big deal since the equipment is operated without people in the vicinity.
The odd thing is that the more I think about it the more it almost seems inevitable.
All medical research does is removes selective pressure on health. Once you do that you just get drift until you reach a new equilibrium (lots of people dying despite spending lots of money on healthcare). If you improve healthcare further then life expectancy goes up a little until you reach a new equilibrium. You end up having to spend more and more money to basically stay in the same place.
If you applied eugenics to the problem then society could probably afford to care for those who are alive much better, because an effort would be made to avoid bringing into the world those who are less healthy. A simple way of implementing it would be to say that you're not allowed to have children unless 3 of your grandparents lived until the age of 80, or something like that. Since most disease strikes after reproductive years, the health of the parents themselves is almost irrelevant (sure, if they already have cancer then don't let them reproduce, but being healthy at 30 does nothing for the bills associated with caring for 90 year olds).
Obviously the counterargument is the slippery slope. That would obviously be something that society has to deal with...
When you join the DHT network (by running a bittorrent client)...
Well, perhaps this should be written as:
IF you join the DHT network (by running certain bittorrent clients on a network that can route UDP bidirectionally from the internet)...
Anybody that can't route UDP bidirectionally to the internet is going to be stuck using torrent files, and apparently other sites.
basically they cant be blocked,
Unless you count that in all current implementations I'm aware of it doesn't work over TCP - only UDP. So, any network that doesn't transmit UDP will work fine for torrent files (with TCP trackers) but not magnet links.
So if you can use Bittorrent, you can use DHT.
Not entirely true - Bittorrent does not require a network that can transmit UDP, but DHT does (in its commonly-used implementations - I can't think of any reason that it couldn't use TCP, but it doesn't).
So, if you're on a TCP-only network (they do exist), then you can use Bittorrent with a torrent file and a TCP tracker, but not a magnet link.
For whatever reason I can't get my deluge installation to support magnet URLs (the option is grayed out in the web interface). I assume DHT works fine over TCP? My biggest annoyance is the huge number of torrent files out there which don't list TCP trackers - I end up having to edit the tracker list extensively - usually just to substitute most if not all the list with trackers that are actually reachable. For various reasons I can't route UDP on the network I use for deluge...
This sort of thing happens with all kinds of workplace regulations - usually with safety regs (give everybody access to safety equipment that makes them less productive, but fire the slowest people every week and watch as nobody uses it).
The solution is to place the onus of compliance on the employer. If an inspector walks in and sees people without safety gear the employer gets fined $1M even if the gear was made available to the employees. The local management should ensure that employees use safety gear, and fire people who refuse to do so.
The same thing works for overtime pay. Do an audit of the server logs, pick 10 people who logged in after hours, and then check their payroll for the same period of time and see if overtime was paid. If the employee didn't claim overtime, then fine the employer $1M. Pretty soon you'll see employers bending over backwards to make sure people get paid.
However, all of this depends on enforcement. You can write all the laws you want and they're worthless if you don't enforce them...
This is why smart-cards should not accept PIN input from any external device. The PIN input should be a keypad directly on the card itself. The card should display the authenticated hostname connecting to it on an internal display as well.
People have already defeated security on terminals in numerous ways - they should be generally treated as untrusted. Now, if you're logging onto a fileshare you can't prevent malware from copying data off that fileshare once you've connected, but you can at least prevent it from accessing other resources that the user hasn't explicitly authorized by reusing a token.
How do you get card credentials using a trojan? The card's credentials should never leave the card if the design isn't brain-dead.
Probably one of those almost-smart card systems...
Perhaps, if you want to spend a week trying to create a manufacturing process for ladles that can be sold at a profit for $1 by those who have already figured it out. How much is it going to cost you in materials alone per unit when you're done? You'll end up spending more, polluting more, and wasting a ton of time.
3d printers are great for modeling new things before manufacturing them, but it is going to be a rare case indeed where they're actually a useful manufacturing technology.
Yup. Don't forget that when you're done you'll end up spending $2 on plastic to make a ladle of poorer quality than one you can buy for $1 at a discount store.
Saying that current 3D printers will replace mass manufacturing is like saying that the laser printer will make the New York Times obsolete. The web might very well make the NYT obsolete, but not because people can print the whole newspaper out. Doing so would probably end up using a $5 ream of paper and $3 worth of ink (without pictures) on an average consumer printer, to replace what would otherwise be a $1 newspaper.
Step 1 - get everybody else in the world to embrace what you just posted.
Step 2 - try to find somebody willing to haul away your garbage.
Nuff said.
Relevance depends on industry. If you're a consumer wanting to buy a camera then you're going to care far more about CES than NAB. If you're a broadcaster looking for an HD studio camera that outputs in some studio-specific format with attachments for teleprompters, monitors, and 47 remote control features, then you're going to care far more about NAB. The former sells $500-5000 gadgets to yuppies, and the latter sells $20k-$20M solutions to industry. Maybe at the intermediate price ranges there might be a bit of crossover, but otherwise the only thing they have in common is that some suppliers make products for both and they're in the same city.
Every industry has exhibits like these - if you're shopping for a robot that builds cars chances are you will find both CES and NAB completely irrelevant.
The various companies involved really need to get their act together.
Oh, they know exactly what they're doing (or so they think). Your app not working on their no-longer-sold phones is a feature to them, not a bug. It gives their previous customers incentive to buy a newer phone. What they aren't thinking about is that if they aren't careful that phone will be an iPhone.
Good point, and up until Android came along an OS per device was the norm. I've had feature phones that supported apps since the early 2000s, but the reality is that there were no apps worth installing except maybe some payware navigation app from the carrier. The fact that the apps practially had to be written per-phone let alone per-carrier was a huge obstacle.
Right now for smartphones your targets are basically iPhone and everybody else (Android). Sure, there is that RIM/MS blip in there, but your app selection in those cases is about what I could have gotten for a Nokia in 2001.
What I did with my N1 is probably harder to do with an iPhone; but the OP shouldn't have been too surprised. Next time they should buy an Android phone that way instead.
The OP didn't buy their iPhone from ATT, however. Near-monopoly communications providers shouldn't be allowed to enter into exclusive agreements in the first place, but they certainly shouldn't be allowed to extend that agreement to equipment they never sold/etc.
Neither iPhones nor Android phones require a data plan to operate as far as I'm aware. Mobile providers will certainly tell you that they do, but it simply isn't true. I gave my old G1 to my stepson and disabled its ability to send data thoroughly (disable APNs, disable mobile data, etc). It worked just fine - it would sync on WiFi and otherwise work like a feature phone on the cell network.
Things like visual voicemail will probably work just fine without a data plan - you just need to be connected to WiFi.
Considering that the iPhone and the iPod are fairly similar in features and OS I'd be surprised if the iPhone also would work just fine without a data plan.