I go a step further - I have email delivered to my domain, and a copy forwarded to my gmail account. Essentially I'm using gmail as an MUA of sorts, although on a duplicate repository.
Sure, all my email is going to just be sitting in my inbox, but I don't need it all sorted/etc - I'll just upload 30 days worth to a new gmail account and use search...
In the 1950s computer scientists speculated on the creation of computers that wouldn't cost millions of dollars and fill entire rooms. Imagine what such power in the hands of the individual consumer could bring!
However, this was completely silly thinking. As anybody who actually had access to a computer knew, being able to program one was far beyond the reach of individual consumers. No, computers are strictly the domain of research, and have little practical use for individuals.
Or, perhaps what is the domain of research today, will be practically employed tomorrow. We only first sequenced the human genome, what, barely more than ten years ago, and now we're talking about doing it for every person on the planet!
I'm not against others companies selling ACCEPTABLE batteries.
And yet, that is precisely what this sort of thing prevents.
That's OK, I'm sure you'll have an excuse for Apple when some virus comes along and airplanes all over the country start looking like that youtube video...
So you can harm your computer by running malicious code outside of a sandbox. Is this really news to anyone?
Well, there is a disturbing trend towards an increasing number of hardware components that can be irreversibly damaged by software. 15 years ago there wasn't anything software could do to your computer that couldn't be undone by booting off of a clean floppy and re-installing the OS.
Fast-forward to today. Now a virus can blast through write cycles on flash chips, permanently destroying them. It can wipe the BIOS, which on many motherboards cannot be recovered without changing chips. It can cycle your DVD player's region codes, permanently locking it (well, unless you have dvdcss, but mainstream software won't work). And, now we find out that a virus can brick your batteries - which are fairly expensive to replace. It wouldn't surprise me if a virus could get them to explode too, and maybe burn down your house.
I'm not sure that we really should be giving software on average PCs that kind of power over the physical world. If you're designing software to run a large industrial robot then you're going to have a ton of safety testing and controls on your development. If you're designing flight control systems for aircraft the controls are even more stringent. It isn't like we don't give software power over the physical world already, but usually this comes with a higher level of QA than what you find on the typical EULA. It simply should not be possible to mess around with the battery in a dangerous way using software of any kind - the protection should be at the hardware level, or implemented in ROM on a controller that does not contain more than a few necessary bytes of RAM.
Well, they'd still have to license via the GPL any patents applicable to the non-mobile version of Java. Since these are vague patents there is a good chance the desktop version infringes.
I would say that just about all major US companies have serious corruption at the executive levels. They're out to make a buck and US law/politics makes it very hard to prosecute them.
Disrupting the entire US economy is not a good solution to this problem. Going after the people that are the problem is.
As far as company policy being consistent with the law goes - who gets to decide? It was suggested that simply working for a company makes you as guilty as the guy operating the gas chambers. That we should be questioning authority and all that. My point was only that this breaks down when you apply it to everything. Sure, some people here clearly knew what was going on and should be punished. I'd be fine with punishing the shareholders as well. But, putting Bob in the mail room out of a job is just misdirected anger.
You need to solve the problem at its root cause - lousy executives and boards. When a company needs a bailout, do it via eminent domain. The government goes in and takes it over, making any management changes needed. Then after cleaning things up and settling debts (possibly via bankruptcy), they IPO the place to get it off their hands. If by some miracle the government spends less money fixing the company than it recovers in the IPO then it gives the rest (up to market cap at time of bailout) to the previous shareholders, thus meeting the eminent domain requirement to pay market value. In most cases the government will spend more than it makes, so the old shareholders get squat. Oh, while operating the company the government also can run through the company bolstering criminal and civil cases against the former executives (yup. sue the executives for the clean-up costs). Boom - econonomy is still saved, and taxpayers still foot some of the bill, but taxpayers don't just write checks to companies and companies are going to think twice before asking for a bailout.
Yup, my problem with G+ is that too many people make EVERYTHING public. If I know somebody from some FOSS project, chances are I'm really interested in their latest hack to get apache running on their postfix printer, and less interested in what they're listening to on the radio right now. I'm fine with the occasional human-interest post and make them myself, but there are some people I'm fairly likely to de-follow at the rate things are going.
Share pictures of the kids with family, and share pictures of the printer guts with geeks. Once a month include the others to confirm that you're still a single human being.
"I was just following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg and it shouldn't be acceptable now.
Yes, but not every person wearing a German uniform was tried at Nuremberg. They actually figured out who was directly involved with the crime and punished them.
Go ahead and punish anybody who knew what was going on, or should have known. On the other hand, does the guy fixing Cisco routers in some closet in Kansas need to be dragged into this?
If you punish the senior executives and those directly involved, the rest will follow.
I was on a jury where the Nuremburg issue came up - cops not quite following correct procedure/etc. The general sense among the jury was that if we were talking about some supervisor telling an officer to shoot a prisoner then claiming to be simply following orders would be ridiculous. On the other hand, a dispute of some detail of how a lineup was conducted should probably just be charged to the person making the decisions.
Imagine what your life at work would be like if everybody in the company had to agree with every aspect of how anything the company does happened, or they could just refuse to cooperate? Get an invoice against a PO in the accounting department? Time to start a hearing on whether the bid was properly solicited, and while we're at it this is an invoice for software development so let's bring in an independent auditor to determine if the requirements are accurate, and let's repeat it in two weeks when the next invoice arrives on the same project.
Chances are they'll handle it the same way as Canada: "Gee, this is a horrible situation, but we checked and the people we're responsible for were just doing their jobs - must be somebody else's fault..."
The Attorney General of Canada could have put a stop to the fiasco at any point by not opposing the request to deny extradition.
This isn't an ordinary judge - this is the Supreme Court of British Columbia. I'm not an expert on the Candian Justice System, but I would think that this carries at least a fair bit of clout.
On the other hand, I am concerned that this really isn't going to have any real impact just the same. In fact, I'm a bit concerned that basically a Canadian court has ruled that a bunch of people it has no jurisdiction over did a lot of bad stuff and shouldn't do it again, but everybody it does have jurisdiction over is blameless. Should the Canadian government really just rubber-stamp anything it gets from the US? There is plenty of blame to go around here and no doubt the following will happen:
1. The Canadian government will rule that nobody in the Canadian government did anything wrong, after all they just were acting on info from the US. 2. The US government will either ignore the issue entirely, or rule that nobody in particular did anything wrong - everybody was just doing their jobs, being tough on crime and all that. Plus Cisco did say that the guy broke into their systems, and he's innocent until proven guilty and we don't count disrupting somebody's life for a year as "punishment." 3. If Cisco does any internal investigation it will probably just be to determine who to give the promotions to. After all, they disrupted a competitor for a year, even if they ended up having to go along with his demands they still haven't paid a dime to anybody (that is cash flow in the bank as any MBA will attest - and they're all MBAs), and I'm sure fighting out the extradition order has slowed down this guy's effort to woo away maintenance business from Cisco.
Welcome to the modern justice system - where simply being accused of a crime is almost as bad as being found guilty.
releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths is completely justified and not at all irresponsible
How will releasing these documents prevent millions of deaths?
If they find some document that proves that there is some great conspiracy to engineer wars to increase defense contractor profits or something, I'd say that would be something to release. On the other hand, how is publishing the operational budget for the construction of some base somewhere going to prevent millions of deaths. Do you think the leaders of NATO nations are going to say "whoa - our line-item for $20k in toilet fixtures has been leaked to the world - let's change our foreign policy!"
Wars happen because elected leaders issue orders to pursue them. All NATO does is drop the bombs. I doubt there is some document that shows that innocent people were deliberately targeted/etc. Most likely the best you'll find is some map that labels a building as weapons factory and it turned out it was an orphanage or whatever. Besides - anything actually dealing with targeting decisions is probably classified way beyond the stuff that Anonymous got a hold of.
And for the record, I'm all for having less intervention overseas, and fewer long-term engagements. Leaking military operational information isn't likely to change that, and may just end up getting people killed. The wars are started by politicians, so that should be the focus of reform.
You could have a couple dozen Backblaze units, pay for a tech to monitor them 24/7/365 and replace all the drives twice over for what Amazon charges for the same thing.
Ok, you'll also have to write software to keep them in sync.
Oh, and you'll need a tech at each of those locations. You'll also need physical security. The security guards will need a supervisor, as will the techs. You'll need a bathroom at those locations, which means you'll need janitors, and so on.
Don't underestimate the cost of overhead if you're running a business. It can be rather substantial.
All that said, if you're willing to run at medium scale I have no doubts that anybody can set up the equivalent of AWS for less - after all Amazon does it and makes a profit on top. The question is whether a business really wants to. I'm sure my employer goes through enough plastic trash bags in a week to fund the creation of a bag manufacturing line. However, at some point a business needs to decide what business it is in...
Yup, and that's why business don't buy Macs for the most part. Suppose you had a fancy $50k lathe that interfaced with its controller via an RS232 port? Sure, today USB->RS232 dongles cost $1.99 and the drivers are ubiquitous, but if the controller ran DOS v4 chances are that wouldn't have been a viable option. At work we still have odd machines running NT4 for this sort of reason, and I'm sure somebody has something running software written in COBOL on CSIS. Legacy support gives you a more gradual upgrade path - it isn't about failure to modernize - it is about being able to modernize at your own convenience.
If you have a modern PC motherboard with a floppy controller (like most still have), you can boot a DOS v2 floppy from it just fine. And I bet that if you could find calc.exe from windows 3.0 it would probably run fine on Windows 7 64-bit edition.
I'm typing this email on a USB keyboard that goes into a PS2 dongle for my ancient KVM. Sure, a USB KVM would work fine, but why spend $40 that I don't have to? That's the essence of the PC.
You know, with issues as complex as Universal Health Care I think there is plenty of room for intelligent and principled people to disagree. Let's let them debate the REAL issues and maybe come up with a good solution. I never mind discussing issues with intelligent people I disagree with, even if in the end we still disagree, because I feel like I've gained something from the exchange (hopefully a mutual feeling). On the other hand, arguing with somebody touting the party line is just tiring - I gain nothing but slogans, and know that my words are falling on deaf ears.
The problem is that it isn't people of intelligence and principle who end up leading the debates - it is people touting sound-bytes to get re-elected or otherwise benefit personally.
I've worked more in the physical sciences so I can't vouch for CompSci, but I've seen this kind of thing fairly often even in fairly prestigious institutions. I've heard similar reports from grad students pursing CompSci degrees as well. One guy worked in a group that wanted to solve every problem with neural networks, but basically that just consisted of grabbing random datasets in various fields and running them through some canned Matlab function and writing up a paper describing the output. He got grief for wanting to take the time to understand the field they were getting into and do the work in a way that was both more relevant to the actual field and more novel (novel work in a University - go figure).
Yup, only movies I've seen in 3D which I thought were done well were Avatar and Tron Legacy. I rarely bother to see movies in 3D - usually they're just visually distracting and headache-inducing. It isn't even a matter of money for me so much as paying more for what I'd consider an inferior product to the 2D most of the time.
To make a movie in 3D you need to actually plan it that way - just like you have to plan for movies in 2D. They don't "just happen."
Supply chain integrity matters a lot more than most people realize. The average company has to trust their suppliers - even in critical industries like health care. You can audit, but audits rarely catch intentional deception unless they are very invasive. And, if you're going to go to the trouble to keep that much of a watch on your supplier, why not just make the stuff yourself?
Didn't actually say that. I'm certainly for trying to make pricing more transparent and equitable. Charge $5000 for a procedure if you must, but don't charge a guy without insurance $10k and an insurance company $2k. And so on... More transparency can help reduce costs, but it isn't a complete solution.
Long term I don't believe that voluntary medical insurance is viable. Sooner or later genetics will get to the point where we can predict somebody's medical costs from birth (for the most part). At that point if insurance is voluntary than either insurers will try to deny care to those who will be expensive, or people who are cheap will avoid buying insurance. The second bit is impossible to solve without making coverage universal, and will destroy the insurance industry (as a private industry) very quickly. People only talk about the first bit, which is more easily regulated but in the end unimportant.
So, I think that eventually everybody will have universal coverage only because no other system works in a system where everybody actually has strong knowledge of risk. Either that or we just write off "the weak."
Those are the real stores. And if you only have four stores in an entire country they're going to tend to have high revenue. If I want to go to an Apple store there are probably 4 within an hour's drive here. If there were only one it would get a lot more business, but probably not as much as all four combined. So, more at one store isn't always better.
Slashdot Mirror
I go a step further - I have email delivered to my domain, and a copy forwarded to my gmail account. Essentially I'm using gmail as an MUA of sorts, although on a duplicate repository.
Sure, all my email is going to just be sitting in my inbox, but I don't need it all sorted/etc - I'll just upload 30 days worth to a new gmail account and use search...
Those that don't understand Plan 9 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly... :)
In the 1950s computer scientists speculated on the creation of computers that wouldn't cost millions of dollars and fill entire rooms. Imagine what such power in the hands of the individual consumer could bring!
However, this was completely silly thinking. As anybody who actually had access to a computer knew, being able to program one was far beyond the reach of individual consumers. No, computers are strictly the domain of research, and have little practical use for individuals.
Or, perhaps what is the domain of research today, will be practically employed tomorrow. We only first sequenced the human genome, what, barely more than ten years ago, and now we're talking about doing it for every person on the planet!
I'm not against others companies selling ACCEPTABLE batteries.
And yet, that is precisely what this sort of thing prevents.
That's OK, I'm sure you'll have an excuse for Apple when some virus comes along and airplanes all over the country start looking like that youtube video...
Doh, replying to undo botched mod. Apologies.
So you can harm your computer by running malicious code outside of a sandbox. Is this really news to anyone?
Well, there is a disturbing trend towards an increasing number of hardware components that can be irreversibly damaged by software. 15 years ago there wasn't anything software could do to your computer that couldn't be undone by booting off of a clean floppy and re-installing the OS.
Fast-forward to today. Now a virus can blast through write cycles on flash chips, permanently destroying them. It can wipe the BIOS, which on many motherboards cannot be recovered without changing chips. It can cycle your DVD player's region codes, permanently locking it (well, unless you have dvdcss, but mainstream software won't work). And, now we find out that a virus can brick your batteries - which are fairly expensive to replace. It wouldn't surprise me if a virus could get them to explode too, and maybe burn down your house.
I'm not sure that we really should be giving software on average PCs that kind of power over the physical world. If you're designing software to run a large industrial robot then you're going to have a ton of safety testing and controls on your development. If you're designing flight control systems for aircraft the controls are even more stringent. It isn't like we don't give software power over the physical world already, but usually this comes with a higher level of QA than what you find on the typical EULA. It simply should not be possible to mess around with the battery in a dangerous way using software of any kind - the protection should be at the hardware level, or implemented in ROM on a controller that does not contain more than a few necessary bytes of RAM.
Or, maybe it works just fine but it undercuts the vendor's market.
I'm not a big fan of protecting consumers from themselves, or vendors from competition.
And, why can't we just have standard-size batteries anyway? That and standard size oil filters while we're at it...
Well, they'd still have to license via the GPL any patents applicable to the non-mobile version of Java. Since these are vague patents there is a good chance the desktop version infringes.
And yet, there were no actual consequences. I'm sure they feel appropriately scolded...
I would say that just about all major US companies have serious corruption at the executive levels. They're out to make a buck and US law/politics makes it very hard to prosecute them.
Disrupting the entire US economy is not a good solution to this problem. Going after the people that are the problem is.
As far as company policy being consistent with the law goes - who gets to decide? It was suggested that simply working for a company makes you as guilty as the guy operating the gas chambers. That we should be questioning authority and all that. My point was only that this breaks down when you apply it to everything. Sure, some people here clearly knew what was going on and should be punished. I'd be fine with punishing the shareholders as well. But, putting Bob in the mail room out of a job is just misdirected anger.
You need to solve the problem at its root cause - lousy executives and boards. When a company needs a bailout, do it via eminent domain. The government goes in and takes it over, making any management changes needed. Then after cleaning things up and settling debts (possibly via bankruptcy), they IPO the place to get it off their hands. If by some miracle the government spends less money fixing the company than it recovers in the IPO then it gives the rest (up to market cap at time of bailout) to the previous shareholders, thus meeting the eminent domain requirement to pay market value. In most cases the government will spend more than it makes, so the old shareholders get squat. Oh, while operating the company the government also can run through the company bolstering criminal and civil cases against the former executives (yup. sue the executives for the clean-up costs). Boom - econonomy is still saved, and taxpayers still foot some of the bill, but taxpayers don't just write checks to companies and companies are going to think twice before asking for a bailout.
Wow - I really loved the one award Orange Mike got: "For almost being as fast at deleting as I am at taggin!"
Pretty-much sums up what is wrong with WP:LETSBEPEDANTIC.
Yup, my problem with G+ is that too many people make EVERYTHING public. If I know somebody from some FOSS project, chances are I'm really interested in their latest hack to get apache running on their postfix printer, and less interested in what they're listening to on the radio right now. I'm fine with the occasional human-interest post and make them myself, but there are some people I'm fairly likely to de-follow at the rate things are going.
Share pictures of the kids with family, and share pictures of the printer guts with geeks. Once a month include the others to confirm that you're still a single human being.
"I was just following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg and it shouldn't be acceptable now.
Yes, but not every person wearing a German uniform was tried at Nuremberg. They actually figured out who was directly involved with the crime and punished them.
Go ahead and punish anybody who knew what was going on, or should have known. On the other hand, does the guy fixing Cisco routers in some closet in Kansas need to be dragged into this?
If you punish the senior executives and those directly involved, the rest will follow.
I was on a jury where the Nuremburg issue came up - cops not quite following correct procedure/etc. The general sense among the jury was that if we were talking about some supervisor telling an officer to shoot a prisoner then claiming to be simply following orders would be ridiculous. On the other hand, a dispute of some detail of how a lineup was conducted should probably just be charged to the person making the decisions.
Imagine what your life at work would be like if everybody in the company had to agree with every aspect of how anything the company does happened, or they could just refuse to cooperate? Get an invoice against a PO in the accounting department? Time to start a hearing on whether the bid was properly solicited, and while we're at it this is an invoice for software development so let's bring in an independent auditor to determine if the requirements are accurate, and let's repeat it in two weeks when the next invoice arrives on the same project.
Chances are they'll handle it the same way as Canada: "Gee, this is a horrible situation, but we checked and the people we're responsible for were just doing their jobs - must be somebody else's fault..."
The Attorney General of Canada could have put a stop to the fiasco at any point by not opposing the request to deny extradition.
This isn't an ordinary judge - this is the Supreme Court of British Columbia. I'm not an expert on the Candian Justice System, but I would think that this carries at least a fair bit of clout.
On the other hand, I am concerned that this really isn't going to have any real impact just the same. In fact, I'm a bit concerned that basically a Canadian court has ruled that a bunch of people it has no jurisdiction over did a lot of bad stuff and shouldn't do it again, but everybody it does have jurisdiction over is blameless. Should the Canadian government really just rubber-stamp anything it gets from the US? There is plenty of blame to go around here and no doubt the following will happen:
1. The Canadian government will rule that nobody in the Canadian government did anything wrong, after all they just were acting on info from the US.
2. The US government will either ignore the issue entirely, or rule that nobody in particular did anything wrong - everybody was just doing their jobs, being tough on crime and all that. Plus Cisco did say that the guy broke into their systems, and he's innocent until proven guilty and we don't count disrupting somebody's life for a year as "punishment."
3. If Cisco does any internal investigation it will probably just be to determine who to give the promotions to. After all, they disrupted a competitor for a year, even if they ended up having to go along with his demands they still haven't paid a dime to anybody (that is cash flow in the bank as any MBA will attest - and they're all MBAs), and I'm sure fighting out the extradition order has slowed down this guy's effort to woo away maintenance business from Cisco.
Welcome to the modern justice system - where simply being accused of a crime is almost as bad as being found guilty.
releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths is completely justified and not at all irresponsible
How will releasing these documents prevent millions of deaths?
If they find some document that proves that there is some great conspiracy to engineer wars to increase defense contractor profits or something, I'd say that would be something to release. On the other hand, how is publishing the operational budget for the construction of some base somewhere going to prevent millions of deaths. Do you think the leaders of NATO nations are going to say "whoa - our line-item for $20k in toilet fixtures has been leaked to the world - let's change our foreign policy!"
Wars happen because elected leaders issue orders to pursue them. All NATO does is drop the bombs. I doubt there is some document that shows that innocent people were deliberately targeted/etc. Most likely the best you'll find is some map that labels a building as weapons factory and it turned out it was an orphanage or whatever. Besides - anything actually dealing with targeting decisions is probably classified way beyond the stuff that Anonymous got a hold of.
And for the record, I'm all for having less intervention overseas, and fewer long-term engagements. Leaking military operational information isn't likely to change that, and may just end up getting people killed. The wars are started by politicians, so that should be the focus of reform.
Yeah, but just think of the parallel seek times!
You could have a couple dozen Backblaze units, pay for a tech to monitor them 24/7/365 and replace all the drives twice over for what Amazon charges for the same thing.
Ok, you'll also have to write software to keep them in sync.
Oh, and you'll need a tech at each of those locations. You'll also need physical security. The security guards will need a supervisor, as will the techs. You'll need a bathroom at those locations, which means you'll need janitors, and so on.
Don't underestimate the cost of overhead if you're running a business. It can be rather substantial.
All that said, if you're willing to run at medium scale I have no doubts that anybody can set up the equivalent of AWS for less - after all Amazon does it and makes a profit on top. The question is whether a business really wants to. I'm sure my employer goes through enough plastic trash bags in a week to fund the creation of a bag manufacturing line. However, at some point a business needs to decide what business it is in...
Yup, and that's why business don't buy Macs for the most part. Suppose you had a fancy $50k lathe that interfaced with its controller via an RS232 port? Sure, today USB->RS232 dongles cost $1.99 and the drivers are ubiquitous, but if the controller ran DOS v4 chances are that wouldn't have been a viable option. At work we still have odd machines running NT4 for this sort of reason, and I'm sure somebody has something running software written in COBOL on CSIS. Legacy support gives you a more gradual upgrade path - it isn't about failure to modernize - it is about being able to modernize at your own convenience.
If you have a modern PC motherboard with a floppy controller (like most still have), you can boot a DOS v2 floppy from it just fine. And I bet that if you could find calc.exe from windows 3.0 it would probably run fine on Windows 7 64-bit edition.
I'm typing this email on a USB keyboard that goes into a PS2 dongle for my ancient KVM. Sure, a USB KVM would work fine, but why spend $40 that I don't have to? That's the essence of the PC.
You know, with issues as complex as Universal Health Care I think there is plenty of room for intelligent and principled people to disagree. Let's let them debate the REAL issues and maybe come up with a good solution. I never mind discussing issues with intelligent people I disagree with, even if in the end we still disagree, because I feel like I've gained something from the exchange (hopefully a mutual feeling). On the other hand, arguing with somebody touting the party line is just tiring - I gain nothing but slogans, and know that my words are falling on deaf ears.
The problem is that it isn't people of intelligence and principle who end up leading the debates - it is people touting sound-bytes to get re-elected or otherwise benefit personally.
I've worked more in the physical sciences so I can't vouch for CompSci, but I've seen this kind of thing fairly often even in fairly prestigious institutions. I've heard similar reports from grad students pursing CompSci degrees as well. One guy worked in a group that wanted to solve every problem with neural networks, but basically that just consisted of grabbing random datasets in various fields and running them through some canned Matlab function and writing up a paper describing the output. He got grief for wanting to take the time to understand the field they were getting into and do the work in a way that was both more relevant to the actual field and more novel (novel work in a University - go figure).
Incompetence can be found anywhere...
Yup, only movies I've seen in 3D which I thought were done well were Avatar and Tron Legacy. I rarely bother to see movies in 3D - usually they're just visually distracting and headache-inducing. It isn't even a matter of money for me so much as paying more for what I'd consider an inferior product to the 2D most of the time.
To make a movie in 3D you need to actually plan it that way - just like you have to plan for movies in 2D. They don't "just happen."
True - bickering over details.
Supply chain integrity matters a lot more than most people realize. The average company has to trust their suppliers - even in critical industries like health care. You can audit, but audits rarely catch intentional deception unless they are very invasive. And, if you're going to go to the trouble to keep that much of a watch on your supplier, why not just make the stuff yourself?
Didn't actually say that. I'm certainly for trying to make pricing more transparent and equitable. Charge $5000 for a procedure if you must, but don't charge a guy without insurance $10k and an insurance company $2k. And so on... More transparency can help reduce costs, but it isn't a complete solution.
Long term I don't believe that voluntary medical insurance is viable. Sooner or later genetics will get to the point where we can predict somebody's medical costs from birth (for the most part). At that point if insurance is voluntary than either insurers will try to deny care to those who will be expensive, or people who are cheap will avoid buying insurance. The second bit is impossible to solve without making coverage universal, and will destroy the insurance industry (as a private industry) very quickly. People only talk about the first bit, which is more easily regulated but in the end unimportant.
So, I think that eventually everybody will have universal coverage only because no other system works in a system where everybody actually has strong knowledge of risk. Either that or we just write off "the weak."
Those are the real stores. And if you only have four stores in an entire country they're going to tend to have high revenue. If I want to go to an Apple store there are probably 4 within an hour's drive here. If there were only one it would get a lot more business, but probably not as much as all four combined. So, more at one store isn't always better.