Well, at work the computers submit bills, and then the accounts payable department punches the info into one of our own computers, which decides whether to pay the other computer. If the first computer said $55, and the PO was for $50, then two computers would no doubt start sending each other hate mail for a few months before it got escalated to humans on one side or the other...
The $450 includes a number of items that might not be immediately obvious:
1. A fair bit of profit for the doctor. 2. Money to pay the army of clerks processing the bills. 3. Money to pay for malpractice insurance. 4. Money to pay for the 1/500 cases where something goes wrong and requires 3 visits to fix, which the insurance probably won't allow them to charge for.
What I've found in medicine is that the average procedure costs $50 for 95% of the population, $5000 for 4%, and $50,000 for 1%. As a result, everybody ends up paying something like $400 since that is how the system works. Then, throw in all the guys who get the procedure done but don't pay their bills for whatever reason...
The only problem with that line of argument is that insurance companies do compete, since employers are the ones paying for them. The employer usually ends up bearing most of the cost of insurance, so they have incentive to pay as little as they can. If an insurance company comes along and offers the same effective coverage for less, chances are employers will switch.
I tend to agree with the GP - insurance companies struggle more with execution than intent. They do tend to save money, however. Typically they end up paying maybe 20-30% of what the hospitals bill them, and then I end up paying 10% of that. From what I've heard it is almost impossible to negotiate rates this low as an individual.
Yup, for three months after I moved I would mail in payments for the new account (with phone/acct/etc on the check) and it would get credited to my OLD account. Then a month later I'd get a bill for the old account showing a credit, and a month after that a check in the mail refunding my payment. All the while I'm getting overdue notices on my new account.
In the end I had to let them directly bill my credit card - it was the only way to get the payment applied to the correct account...
If one goes to school/church and just silently takes in the lecture, then you are right, it can be done much cheaper. But if the point of school/church is not just lecture, but developing relationships with peers and helping each other through coursework (or faith issues, life issues, etc), then it can't be virtualized that easily.
Sure it can. I'm not proposing that schools/churches/etc should be scaled back. What I'm suggesting is that the most effective way to delivery one-way lecture-style communication is not putting 100 people in a big room or whatever.
By all means have classes/services or whatever. But, spend the time doing the things that you mentioned (helping each other out, interaction, praying together, etc), and not have the time dominated by a function better served by a media player. In the case of a church you could probably also avoid using buildings dominated by a huge room that holds 500+ people with a big lectern at the front, which is a HUGE expense. In fact, if churches spent their time interacting in smaller groups they might find it far more effective to just rent the local public school, which is already configured for such a use. That would be a benefit to everybody - less money wasted on fancy cathedrals, and schools can recoup their capital investments by utilizing them when they're otherwise idle.
As I said, I can't speak for the parent personally... Presumably it actually happened to him, or he's just making things up.
I imagine you'll find a broad spectrum, ranging from people who could care less about kids, to people who are moderate, to people who are extreme. If you're unlucky enough to run into the last category, then you can be in trouble.
I'm sure most cops don't frame people who they don't like either, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
In any case, I'm hardly worried about the state confiscating my children, considering that I don't have any.:)
Well, the issue is how hard it is to get it out. Suppose you securely encrypt the contents of the device. That might make it much harder to rapidly extract the data by imaging the memory and analyzing it. However, somebody could still browse the data on the screen and copy it down. That is, unless you combine it with a secure passcode. However, how useful is your phone going to be if it needs a STRONG passcode every 30 seconds, or whatever?
Also, you're not going to be able to trust that it is secure unless you have the source. Unless you want a boot-time passkey that means interfacing with TPM/etc however your phone provides it, and that is going to be very tricky and device-dependent.
That said, you'd get reasonable security if you implement the following: 1. Modify firmware so that you can't remotely mount or debug the device without entering a PIN on the phone. You of course need the source to as much of the phone as you can get to ensure you remove all backdoors. 2. Modify the firmware to encrypt just about everything but the bootloader with a strong boot-time password (with lots of rounds/etc). 3. Build into the firmware a panic key of some sort that does a quick shutdown (long-press of some button, etc). 4. Build into the hardware tamper switches that power off the phone if the case is breached (otherwise you're vulnerable to JTAG/etc).
Doing just this is going to be minimally intrusive to normal use. Maybe throw in a weak unlock PIN. However, you are vulnerable to being stopped with your phone unlocked and denied the opportunity to hit the panic key.
This doesn't protect you from being jailed until you reveal the code. A plausible-deniability system is the only thing that would work, but that would be really tricky. You'd need the fake OS updated as if it were in use with logs corresponding to anything that could be verified from the network. If your call log shows your last call six months ago and the phone company has a call a day ago then you'll lose plausible deniability.
And all of this begs the question of why they don't just get all this data from the cell towers. They wouldn't have screen-shots or camera data most likely, but they would be able to log location and call history, and most data is sent in the clear which gives a pretty good picture of what you're up to. All they need to do is just require companies to log all this stuff for 30 days or whatever.
I've been thinking the same thing about church for a long time now. A typical contemporary church service goes something like this:
1. A bunch of songs are sung interactively - the unspoken goal of the guy organizing the music is to get it to sound like one of a dozen CDs that sell a bazillion copies every year. 2. Everybody listens to somebody give a lecture on some topic. 3. People pay money towards the operation of the church. 4. Somebody stands up and reads the calendar of events for the next few weeks.
I can get #1 by spending $5 on iTunes. I can get #2 from one of 40 bazillion podcasts (many of which are better than anything the average person hears at their church) - and only a moderate bit of effort would create the equivalent of the Kahn Academy for sermons. The cost of operating said Kahn Academy of sermons would make #3 MUCH smaller, or would allow money to get spent on things like helping people in need rather than creating a manual replica of an mp3 player and a podcast. #4 is trivially solved with a webpage, and in many cases already is.
It dawned on me that the average person spends very little time in church doing anything that couldn't be more efficiently done elsewhere. Rather than sitting in a seat for an hour listening to a lecture, perhaps it would make more sense to actually spend time helping out somebody in need or actually building relationships with people, and save the lectures for the ride to work or whatever...
Obviously I can't speak for the parent personally, but I imagine that it starts off with a nice concerned conversation, then moves on to a polite but firm phone call with direct threats of escalation, and then it moves on to allegations of abuse filed with the state child protective services organization. Typically these groups confiscate children first, and then you can battle it out in court for a year to get to see them again. Maybe there are some intermediate steps in-between.
However, courts certainly can order parents to take action and punish you for not doing so.
I'm not sure which is the greater travesty - the number of kids who don't get proper medical care because their parents are loons, or the number of parents who have to deal with stuff like this.
I suspect that half of this drugging is for the benefit of the schools. Kids are just so much calmer when they're doped up. For some I imagine this is necessary and allows the kid to actually get an education. However, I've been very successful with my education and I have no doubt that I'd have been drugged if I were in elementary school today.
Everything medical costs 10x as much without insurance. If I were in charge I'd pass two laws:
1. Everybody providing a medical service must publish a price list. 2. The medical service provider must collect the same fee from everybody.
Go to the hospital without insurance. You'll get a $100k bill in the mail. Beg and plead, they'll send you an application for charity care. After submitting in triplicate every financial record you've ever had or not had and spending 100 hours on this, chances are they'll deem you to have a genuine need and offer to settle the bill for a payment plan that only comes to $30k. What they don't mention is that no insurer on the planet pays more than $10k for the same bill, and nobody has to beg for anything. I've seen some crazy explanation-of-benefits statements and they consist of 5 pages of charges where 3/4ths of the charges are simply marked as not allowable, and the rest are paid for 1/3rd the billed amount. The bottom of the letter states that the patient cannot be billed for the difference. Hospitals go along, since otherwise they'd lose half their patients overnight. And then we call the insurance companies evil...
Plenty of blame to go around in the US healthcare system...
Sure, but there was no reason that this couldn't have been upgraded ages ago. Support both protocols in parallel for a few years until tower software is updated.
Instead, we're going to hit a wall at some point when GSM is completely cracked, and suffer with a ton of issues as a result.
I would say the problem is the market, but even the NPV of a hit that big is large today. The real problem is that nobody holds managers accountable for the real consequences of failing to take action over the long term. Sure, you can fire them, but you can't take back the money you paid them for years beforehand.
I think the problem in America is that just about everything involves waste - and nobody really has incentive to fix it.
We are always looking for quick fixes. If only we banned malpractice suits, if only we banned drug patents, if only we banned non-evidence-based procedures, and so on. The problem is that any one of these "big-ticket" items only saves a portion of the budget, and usually has serious negative consequences unless only pursued in moderation. Real reform is going to make for fewer sound-bites - we really need lots of moderate changes all over the place.
In the US a day in the ICU is billed at $10 (which does NOT include any doctors), and probably paid at $2k (if you have insurance - if you don't then you are at the "mercy" of the hospital who might let you bargain them down to $5k after a ton of paperwork). Why does it cost $2k for maybe a dozen medications, half a nurse, half an aide, and some school-cafeteria-grade food? Those are really the only true consumable expenses - the rest is capital and overhead. I'm sure a big chunk goes to malpractice, and then the general operation of the hospital, billing, administration, paperwork, etc. And, the hospital really wants $10k, and will pick on anybody who doesn't have the protection of an insurance company to try to get it.
The health-care industry is also almost completely non-competitive at the end-user point. Before that point there is lots of competition between device makers, and even to an extent drug makers (patents limit this, but the fact is that there is still usually more than one patented drug to treat a condition). However, who comparison shops for surgery? People just don't have incentive to save money.
Some quick reforms that probably would go a long way would include: 1. Hospital must publish full rate schedule. 2. Everybody must pay the same rate - insurers can choose to not cover the hospital, but they can't negotiate a preferential rate. This will drive down costs for everybody, not just people with big insurance companies. This will also lower the barrier to entry for smaller insurance companies.
There are probably about 100 more things that would help quite a bit. However, at least giving people some visibility into cost would be a good start. Plus, visibility into cost helps ALL strategies for health care, both public and private.
Uh, in 2010 the US market only sold $307B in pharmaceuticals, so even if nobody bought a pill that wasn't 100% paid for in full by the US government less than half of the health care subsidies could have gone to Pharma. The reality is that about 10% of US healthcare spending goes to pharmaceuticals (source - wikipedia, but generally in line with figures I've seen all over the place). Sure, it could be lower, but the fact is that 9/10ths of all that money is in fact going to doctors, nurses, and health care facilities (I wouldn't say "new" however).
It should also be noted that 75% of all prescribed drugs are not patented in the US. I'm sure the patented ones are responsible for a disproportionate share of the costs, but that is how the world has chosen to fund drug development. I'm all for having the NIH or WHO start churning out royalty-free new drugs, but I'm not convinced that this will save taxpayers much money on the pills themselves. If you want to ditch patents then somebody has to pick up the slack, and there is no reason to not prove the new model before getting rid of the old one (after all, the pharma industry hasn't actually come out with many new drugs in the last 10 years, so if the NIH had been successfully churning out royalty-free ones we'd probably be 95% generics by now). My issue with those who want to end drug patents is that nobody is willing to actually do the harder work of coming up with new drugs under a different model.
Also, nobody HAS to take a patented drug - they can always take whatever the standard of care was in early 90s which was at the time the best in the world. It seems to me like many want cutting edge health care, but they don't want to pay for it. I guess I can't blame them - I'd like to have a free Guflstream too...:)
Mod parent up - either symmetric or public-key encryption requires authentication with some trusted server (is the phone's account activated, etc), and if the central server can hold a copy of a symmetric key it can hold a copy of a public key.
There is also no need to escrow private keys - the network already needs access to the clear voice conversation and dialing info just to complete the call, and that is all the FBI needs. There is no need to be able to clone phones. Plus, if you wanted to clone a phone just assign a new key and have the central server give a positive authentication for either one (ie you manipulate the central database).
As with most things crypto, the GSM creators decided to re-invent the wheel, and the only reason it works is that hackers just haven't quite caught up yet. Once rogue base stations are seeded all over the place, cloned SIM cards will be sold on every street corner in New York, and once again we'll be punching in PINs or whatever to make phone calls as an almost-effective stop gap until the whole system is torn down and replaced.
This of course does not fix the core of the problem: The femto transfers key material from the core network right down to the femto."
I'd say the core of the problem is that authentication credentials ever leave the phone in the first place. Didn't they ever hear of RSA/etc?
I just don't get it - why doesn't ANYBODY use asymmetric crypto for authentication. And when they do something remotely clever, why don't they ever use a proven off-the-shelf cryptosystem to do it? DRM may be mathematically impossible to achieve, but authentication is something that is completely achievable with the right key infrastructure. And they obviously have the key infrastructure already since symmetric crypto doesn't work without it either...
I could see using something like this for inspection work/etc. A phone-based solution might also be useful if you need surveying but without any legal need for a certified survey (small building projects, etc). It would be nice to be able to easily dig posts for a fence or deck and have everything just "line up" in the end.
Yup. You'd think that accepting money would be something for-profit companies would be good at. I can see delays on refunds, but inability to hold on to money?
3) For reasons that are beyond me, many people have their phone bills set up to auto-pay (basically have the phone company just withdraw the money from the user's bank account).
Well, I have it sent to my credit card where I have more recourse, and there is a reason.
First - I don't let just about anybody else auto-bill my credit card or bank account. I use bill payment where I send the money to them (and it is under my control as a result).
I tried this with the phone company. They consistently applied my payments to an old phone number I used to own (despite having the correct phone number and account on the payments). So, every month I would get a past-due bill for the new number, and a statement showing a credit on my old number. After about 60-90 days they'd send me a check back for the credit, and a nasty-gram about the late phone bills. Every time I'd send them money they'd just send it back.
While the story was as amusing then as it is now, in the end I really just wanted my phone to work, so I signed up for auto-payment by credit card. For whatever reason they could competently manage that and a few refund checks later everything was resolved. They didn't charge me any fees after my phone calls, but it did waste plenty of my time, and no doubt even more of theirs.
No need for huge hurdles for credit card use. There are simple solutions:
1. Consumer not liable for charges they did not authorize, and consumer cannot waive this right. Authorize is defined by the consumer (the human being) agreeing to the charge, not to the PIN getting sent to the bank or whatever. Liability remains with the bank even if the problem was caused elsewhere (the bank can go after them).
2. Credit reporting agencies are liable for errors contained in their reports. Errors must be removed, and not merely have a letter from the consumer appended to. Negative credit comments of any kind must be backed by an award of judgement by a court. Liability remains with the reporting agency even if the problem was caused elsewhere (they can recover their loss).
The purpose of #1 and #2 is to give the big companies incentive to get it right, and liability if they don't, while getting rid of finger-pointing.
3. Banks and credit-reporting-agencies must pay the consumer a fee any time a fraudulent charge is removed. This is to compensate the consumer for the hassle. I'd suggest something around $500, adjusted for inflation. Now they have incentive to get it right the first time.
After that I'd let the market sort it out. Banks really should just give out smartcards with a PIN keypad and display, and then use digital signatures on all transactions, with no trust for the hardware the card interfaces with (the credentials and key never leave the card).
Cramming wouldn't bother me much at all if I got $500 every time I reported a mistake. I suspect the phone companies would be a LOT more stringent about accepting charges in the first place.
Well, that's the whole point in opening new markets - you have to have a product to sell before you can tell whether it will sell - at least to some extent.
If I managed IT for a small business I'd probably be giving ChromeOS a good look unless I was an empire builder. Google managed to eliminate almost all the overhead of properly managing a corporate laptop. The only way Windows can come out cheaper is if you're not backing it up, encrypting it, properly updating it, and provisioning it.
The main issue is that you need to be able to operate in the cloud 100%. That is certainly an issue, but I'm not convinced it is a huge barrier.
In any case, maybe it sinks, and maybe it floats - Google should be commended for at least trying to create something new. Too many companies don't enter a market unless it is already saturated.
Well, the OS itself supports full offline operation. However, you need to be using an offline-capable application (ie HTML5). Very little is written to work well offline, including Google's applications. So, this is the biggest gap - it isn't the OS so much as the applications.
Now, the fact that not even Google is investing in offline capabilities for its cloud apps might be a red flag. On the other hand, Chrome OS really strikes me as a 95% solution, and it is a good solution if you can live with the limitations.
My only real complaint is the price. I shouldn't be paying more for ChromeOS than I would for comparable hardware running Windows/etc. The price has to at least be equivalent, if not cheaper.
Chrome does have real benefits for small businesses - you get all the features of a good enterprise workstation (encryption, backup, cheap provisioning, etc). As long as you don't do work on airplanes/etc you're probably fine. Also, if you can tether to a phone or use the built-in 3G then you're also fine. In fact, the cost of a data plan for a ChromeOS laptop probably is cheaper than what it costs to properly support a Windows PC.
Yup. I feel the same way about conscientious objector status to the draft (you have to prove that you're "conscientious" or whatever - usually by getting a signoff from some state-licensed (whoops - recognized) religious body), and being able to opt-out of social security if you're clergy.
It seems like choosing not to conform to the laws of society is perfectly acceptable as long as you can prove that you're conforming to somebody else's laws.
If people wearing hats are a security issue then all photos should be hat-less, with medically-necessary surgical implants being the only exception. If it isn't a serious security issue, then just let people wear whatever they want within certain guidelines.
Law should be completely ignorant of religion. If religious motives lead many to consider that a particular law should have an opt-out provision, then just make it up to individual preference and leave it at that. If the law doesn't work if everybody can opt-out of it, then either don't allow it or question the need for the law in the first place.
Anybody who truly cares about the practice of their religion should be in favor of these kinds of reforms - the last thing somebody who is truly devout should want is some court dictating when a particular religious practice is acceptable. Does somebody who feels strong personal moral objection to shooting people want some religious leader to issue a ruling that they have to pick up a gun anyway because of some nuance of doctrine they disagree over?
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Well, at work the computers submit bills, and then the accounts payable department punches the info into one of our own computers, which decides whether to pay the other computer. If the first computer said $55, and the PO was for $50, then two computers would no doubt start sending each other hate mail for a few months before it got escalated to humans on one side or the other...
The $450 includes a number of items that might not be immediately obvious:
1. A fair bit of profit for the doctor.
2. Money to pay the army of clerks processing the bills.
3. Money to pay for malpractice insurance.
4. Money to pay for the 1/500 cases where something goes wrong and requires 3 visits to fix, which the insurance probably won't allow them to charge for.
What I've found in medicine is that the average procedure costs $50 for 95% of the population, $5000 for 4%, and $50,000 for 1%. As a result, everybody ends up paying something like $400 since that is how the system works. Then, throw in all the guys who get the procedure done but don't pay their bills for whatever reason...
The only problem with that line of argument is that insurance companies do compete, since employers are the ones paying for them. The employer usually ends up bearing most of the cost of insurance, so they have incentive to pay as little as they can. If an insurance company comes along and offers the same effective coverage for less, chances are employers will switch.
I tend to agree with the GP - insurance companies struggle more with execution than intent. They do tend to save money, however. Typically they end up paying maybe 20-30% of what the hospitals bill them, and then I end up paying 10% of that. From what I've heard it is almost impossible to negotiate rates this low as an individual.
Yup, for three months after I moved I would mail in payments for the new account (with phone/acct/etc on the check) and it would get credited to my OLD account. Then a month later I'd get a bill for the old account showing a credit, and a month after that a check in the mail refunding my payment. All the while I'm getting overdue notices on my new account.
In the end I had to let them directly bill my credit card - it was the only way to get the payment applied to the correct account...
If one goes to school/church and just silently takes in the lecture, then you are right, it can be done much cheaper. But if the point of school/church is not just lecture, but developing relationships with peers and helping each other through coursework (or faith issues, life issues, etc), then it can't be virtualized that easily.
Sure it can. I'm not proposing that schools/churches/etc should be scaled back. What I'm suggesting is that the most effective way to delivery one-way lecture-style communication is not putting 100 people in a big room or whatever.
By all means have classes/services or whatever. But, spend the time doing the things that you mentioned (helping each other out, interaction, praying together, etc), and not have the time dominated by a function better served by a media player. In the case of a church you could probably also avoid using buildings dominated by a huge room that holds 500+ people with a big lectern at the front, which is a HUGE expense. In fact, if churches spent their time interacting in smaller groups they might find it far more effective to just rent the local public school, which is already configured for such a use. That would be a benefit to everybody - less money wasted on fancy cathedrals, and schools can recoup their capital investments by utilizing them when they're otherwise idle.
As I said, I can't speak for the parent personally... Presumably it actually happened to him, or he's just making things up.
I imagine you'll find a broad spectrum, ranging from people who could care less about kids, to people who are moderate, to people who are extreme. If you're unlucky enough to run into the last category, then you can be in trouble.
I'm sure most cops don't frame people who they don't like either, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
In any case, I'm hardly worried about the state confiscating my children, considering that I don't have any. :)
Well, the issue is how hard it is to get it out. Suppose you securely encrypt the contents of the device. That might make it much harder to rapidly extract the data by imaging the memory and analyzing it. However, somebody could still browse the data on the screen and copy it down. That is, unless you combine it with a secure passcode. However, how useful is your phone going to be if it needs a STRONG passcode every 30 seconds, or whatever?
Also, you're not going to be able to trust that it is secure unless you have the source. Unless you want a boot-time passkey that means interfacing with TPM/etc however your phone provides it, and that is going to be very tricky and device-dependent.
That said, you'd get reasonable security if you implement the following:
1. Modify firmware so that you can't remotely mount or debug the device without entering a PIN on the phone. You of course need the source to as much of the phone as you can get to ensure you remove all backdoors.
2. Modify the firmware to encrypt just about everything but the bootloader with a strong boot-time password (with lots of rounds/etc).
3. Build into the firmware a panic key of some sort that does a quick shutdown (long-press of some button, etc).
4. Build into the hardware tamper switches that power off the phone if the case is breached (otherwise you're vulnerable to JTAG/etc).
Doing just this is going to be minimally intrusive to normal use. Maybe throw in a weak unlock PIN. However, you are vulnerable to being stopped with your phone unlocked and denied the opportunity to hit the panic key.
This doesn't protect you from being jailed until you reveal the code. A plausible-deniability system is the only thing that would work, but that would be really tricky. You'd need the fake OS updated as if it were in use with logs corresponding to anything that could be verified from the network. If your call log shows your last call six months ago and the phone company has a call a day ago then you'll lose plausible deniability.
And all of this begs the question of why they don't just get all this data from the cell towers. They wouldn't have screen-shots or camera data most likely, but they would be able to log location and call history, and most data is sent in the clear which gives a pretty good picture of what you're up to. All they need to do is just require companies to log all this stuff for 30 days or whatever.
I've been thinking the same thing about church for a long time now. A typical contemporary church service goes something like this:
1. A bunch of songs are sung interactively - the unspoken goal of the guy organizing the music is to get it to sound like one of a dozen CDs that sell a bazillion copies every year.
2. Everybody listens to somebody give a lecture on some topic.
3. People pay money towards the operation of the church.
4. Somebody stands up and reads the calendar of events for the next few weeks.
I can get #1 by spending $5 on iTunes. I can get #2 from one of 40 bazillion podcasts (many of which are better than anything the average person hears at their church) - and only a moderate bit of effort would create the equivalent of the Kahn Academy for sermons. The cost of operating said Kahn Academy of sermons would make #3 MUCH smaller, or would allow money to get spent on things like helping people in need rather than creating a manual replica of an mp3 player and a podcast. #4 is trivially solved with a webpage, and in many cases already is.
It dawned on me that the average person spends very little time in church doing anything that couldn't be more efficiently done elsewhere. Rather than sitting in a seat for an hour listening to a lecture, perhaps it would make more sense to actually spend time helping out somebody in need or actually building relationships with people, and save the lectures for the ride to work or whatever...
Education is no different.
Obviously I can't speak for the parent personally, but I imagine that it starts off with a nice concerned conversation, then moves on to a polite but firm phone call with direct threats of escalation, and then it moves on to allegations of abuse filed with the state child protective services organization. Typically these groups confiscate children first, and then you can battle it out in court for a year to get to see them again. Maybe there are some intermediate steps in-between.
However, courts certainly can order parents to take action and punish you for not doing so.
I'm not sure which is the greater travesty - the number of kids who don't get proper medical care because their parents are loons, or the number of parents who have to deal with stuff like this.
I suspect that half of this drugging is for the benefit of the schools. Kids are just so much calmer when they're doped up. For some I imagine this is necessary and allows the kid to actually get an education. However, I've been very successful with my education and I have no doubt that I'd have been drugged if I were in elementary school today.
Everything medical costs 10x as much without insurance. If I were in charge I'd pass two laws:
1. Everybody providing a medical service must publish a price list.
2. The medical service provider must collect the same fee from everybody.
Go to the hospital without insurance. You'll get a $100k bill in the mail. Beg and plead, they'll send you an application for charity care. After submitting in triplicate every financial record you've ever had or not had and spending 100 hours on this, chances are they'll deem you to have a genuine need and offer to settle the bill for a payment plan that only comes to $30k. What they don't mention is that no insurer on the planet pays more than $10k for the same bill, and nobody has to beg for anything. I've seen some crazy explanation-of-benefits statements and they consist of 5 pages of charges where 3/4ths of the charges are simply marked as not allowable, and the rest are paid for 1/3rd the billed amount. The bottom of the letter states that the patient cannot be billed for the difference. Hospitals go along, since otherwise they'd lose half their patients overnight. And then we call the insurance companies evil...
Plenty of blame to go around in the US healthcare system...
I'm pretty sure I voted for a candidate who promised the exact opposite of what he's done for 2+ years.
So has about 95% of the voting population for the last 20 years. For whatever reason nobody ever figures this out...
Sure, but there was no reason that this couldn't have been upgraded ages ago. Support both protocols in parallel for a few years until tower software is updated.
Instead, we're going to hit a wall at some point when GSM is completely cracked, and suffer with a ton of issues as a result.
I would say the problem is the market, but even the NPV of a hit that big is large today. The real problem is that nobody holds managers accountable for the real consequences of failing to take action over the long term. Sure, you can fire them, but you can't take back the money you paid them for years beforehand.
I think the problem in America is that just about everything involves waste - and nobody really has incentive to fix it.
We are always looking for quick fixes. If only we banned malpractice suits, if only we banned drug patents, if only we banned non-evidence-based procedures, and so on. The problem is that any one of these "big-ticket" items only saves a portion of the budget, and usually has serious negative consequences unless only pursued in moderation. Real reform is going to make for fewer sound-bites - we really need lots of moderate changes all over the place.
In the US a day in the ICU is billed at $10 (which does NOT include any doctors), and probably paid at $2k (if you have insurance - if you don't then you are at the "mercy" of the hospital who might let you bargain them down to $5k after a ton of paperwork). Why does it cost $2k for maybe a dozen medications, half a nurse, half an aide, and some school-cafeteria-grade food? Those are really the only true consumable expenses - the rest is capital and overhead. I'm sure a big chunk goes to malpractice, and then the general operation of the hospital, billing, administration, paperwork, etc. And, the hospital really wants $10k, and will pick on anybody who doesn't have the protection of an insurance company to try to get it.
The health-care industry is also almost completely non-competitive at the end-user point. Before that point there is lots of competition between device makers, and even to an extent drug makers (patents limit this, but the fact is that there is still usually more than one patented drug to treat a condition). However, who comparison shops for surgery? People just don't have incentive to save money.
Some quick reforms that probably would go a long way would include:
1. Hospital must publish full rate schedule.
2. Everybody must pay the same rate - insurers can choose to not cover the hospital, but they can't negotiate a preferential rate. This will drive down costs for everybody, not just people with big insurance companies. This will also lower the barrier to entry for smaller insurance companies.
There are probably about 100 more things that would help quite a bit. However, at least giving people some visibility into cost would be a good start. Plus, visibility into cost helps ALL strategies for health care, both public and private.
Uh, in 2010 the US market only sold $307B in pharmaceuticals, so even if nobody bought a pill that wasn't 100% paid for in full by the US government less than half of the health care subsidies could have gone to Pharma. The reality is that about 10% of US healthcare spending goes to pharmaceuticals (source - wikipedia, but generally in line with figures I've seen all over the place). Sure, it could be lower, but the fact is that 9/10ths of all that money is in fact going to doctors, nurses, and health care facilities (I wouldn't say "new" however).
It should also be noted that 75% of all prescribed drugs are not patented in the US. I'm sure the patented ones are responsible for a disproportionate share of the costs, but that is how the world has chosen to fund drug development. I'm all for having the NIH or WHO start churning out royalty-free new drugs, but I'm not convinced that this will save taxpayers much money on the pills themselves. If you want to ditch patents then somebody has to pick up the slack, and there is no reason to not prove the new model before getting rid of the old one (after all, the pharma industry hasn't actually come out with many new drugs in the last 10 years, so if the NIH had been successfully churning out royalty-free ones we'd probably be 95% generics by now). My issue with those who want to end drug patents is that nobody is willing to actually do the harder work of coming up with new drugs under a different model.
Also, nobody HAS to take a patented drug - they can always take whatever the standard of care was in early 90s which was at the time the best in the world. It seems to me like many want cutting edge health care, but they don't want to pay for it. I guess I can't blame them - I'd like to have a free Guflstream too... :)
Mod parent up - either symmetric or public-key encryption requires authentication with some trusted server (is the phone's account activated, etc), and if the central server can hold a copy of a symmetric key it can hold a copy of a public key.
There is also no need to escrow private keys - the network already needs access to the clear voice conversation and dialing info just to complete the call, and that is all the FBI needs. There is no need to be able to clone phones. Plus, if you wanted to clone a phone just assign a new key and have the central server give a positive authentication for either one (ie you manipulate the central database).
As with most things crypto, the GSM creators decided to re-invent the wheel, and the only reason it works is that hackers just haven't quite caught up yet. Once rogue base stations are seeded all over the place, cloned SIM cards will be sold on every street corner in New York, and once again we'll be punching in PINs or whatever to make phone calls as an almost-effective stop gap until the whole system is torn down and replaced.
The base unit is parsec, you insensitive clod!
This of course does not fix the core of the problem: The femto transfers key material from the core network right down to the femto."
I'd say the core of the problem is that authentication credentials ever leave the phone in the first place. Didn't they ever hear of RSA/etc?
I just don't get it - why doesn't ANYBODY use asymmetric crypto for authentication. And when they do something remotely clever, why don't they ever use a proven off-the-shelf cryptosystem to do it? DRM may be mathematically impossible to achieve, but authentication is something that is completely achievable with the right key infrastructure. And they obviously have the key infrastructure already since symmetric crypto doesn't work without it either...
I could see using something like this for inspection work/etc. A phone-based solution might also be useful if you need surveying but without any legal need for a certified survey (small building projects, etc). It would be nice to be able to easily dig posts for a fence or deck and have everything just "line up" in the end.
While I understand the complaint, they actually exceed the 4G spec for cell phone use, and that is what they're advertising.
If they were selling tower-based point-to-point dish antennas I could see where this might be deceptive.
Yup. You'd think that accepting money would be something for-profit companies would be good at. I can see delays on refunds, but inability to hold on to money?
3) For reasons that are beyond me, many people have their phone bills set up to auto-pay (basically have the phone company just withdraw the money from the user's bank account).
Well, I have it sent to my credit card where I have more recourse, and there is a reason.
First - I don't let just about anybody else auto-bill my credit card or bank account. I use bill payment where I send the money to them (and it is under my control as a result).
I tried this with the phone company. They consistently applied my payments to an old phone number I used to own (despite having the correct phone number and account on the payments). So, every month I would get a past-due bill for the new number, and a statement showing a credit on my old number. After about 60-90 days they'd send me a check back for the credit, and a nasty-gram about the late phone bills. Every time I'd send them money they'd just send it back.
While the story was as amusing then as it is now, in the end I really just wanted my phone to work, so I signed up for auto-payment by credit card. For whatever reason they could competently manage that and a few refund checks later everything was resolved. They didn't charge me any fees after my phone calls, but it did waste plenty of my time, and no doubt even more of theirs.
No need for huge hurdles for credit card use. There are simple solutions:
1. Consumer not liable for charges they did not authorize, and consumer cannot waive this right. Authorize is defined by the consumer (the human being) agreeing to the charge, not to the PIN getting sent to the bank or whatever. Liability remains with the bank even if the problem was caused elsewhere (the bank can go after them).
2. Credit reporting agencies are liable for errors contained in their reports. Errors must be removed, and not merely have a letter from the consumer appended to. Negative credit comments of any kind must be backed by an award of judgement by a court. Liability remains with the reporting agency even if the problem was caused elsewhere (they can recover their loss).
The purpose of #1 and #2 is to give the big companies incentive to get it right, and liability if they don't, while getting rid of finger-pointing.
3. Banks and credit-reporting-agencies must pay the consumer a fee any time a fraudulent charge is removed. This is to compensate the consumer for the hassle. I'd suggest something around $500, adjusted for inflation. Now they have incentive to get it right the first time.
After that I'd let the market sort it out. Banks really should just give out smartcards with a PIN keypad and display, and then use digital signatures on all transactions, with no trust for the hardware the card interfaces with (the credentials and key never leave the card).
Cramming wouldn't bother me much at all if I got $500 every time I reported a mistake. I suspect the phone companies would be a LOT more stringent about accepting charges in the first place.
Well, that's the whole point in opening new markets - you have to have a product to sell before you can tell whether it will sell - at least to some extent.
If I managed IT for a small business I'd probably be giving ChromeOS a good look unless I was an empire builder. Google managed to eliminate almost all the overhead of properly managing a corporate laptop. The only way Windows can come out cheaper is if you're not backing it up, encrypting it, properly updating it, and provisioning it.
The main issue is that you need to be able to operate in the cloud 100%. That is certainly an issue, but I'm not convinced it is a huge barrier.
In any case, maybe it sinks, and maybe it floats - Google should be commended for at least trying to create something new. Too many companies don't enter a market unless it is already saturated.
Well, the OS itself supports full offline operation. However, you need to be using an offline-capable application (ie HTML5). Very little is written to work well offline, including Google's applications. So, this is the biggest gap - it isn't the OS so much as the applications.
Now, the fact that not even Google is investing in offline capabilities for its cloud apps might be a red flag. On the other hand, Chrome OS really strikes me as a 95% solution, and it is a good solution if you can live with the limitations.
My only real complaint is the price. I shouldn't be paying more for ChromeOS than I would for comparable hardware running Windows/etc. The price has to at least be equivalent, if not cheaper.
Chrome does have real benefits for small businesses - you get all the features of a good enterprise workstation (encryption, backup, cheap provisioning, etc). As long as you don't do work on airplanes/etc you're probably fine. Also, if you can tether to a phone or use the built-in 3G then you're also fine. In fact, the cost of a data plan for a ChromeOS laptop probably is cheaper than what it costs to properly support a Windows PC.
Yup. I feel the same way about conscientious objector status to the draft (you have to prove that you're "conscientious" or whatever - usually by getting a signoff from some state-licensed (whoops - recognized) religious body), and being able to opt-out of social security if you're clergy.
It seems like choosing not to conform to the laws of society is perfectly acceptable as long as you can prove that you're conforming to somebody else's laws.
If people wearing hats are a security issue then all photos should be hat-less, with medically-necessary surgical implants being the only exception. If it isn't a serious security issue, then just let people wear whatever they want within certain guidelines.
Law should be completely ignorant of religion. If religious motives lead many to consider that a particular law should have an opt-out provision, then just make it up to individual preference and leave it at that. If the law doesn't work if everybody can opt-out of it, then either don't allow it or question the need for the law in the first place.
Anybody who truly cares about the practice of their religion should be in favor of these kinds of reforms - the last thing somebody who is truly devout should want is some court dictating when a particular religious practice is acceptable. Does somebody who feels strong personal moral objection to shooting people want some religious leader to issue a ruling that they have to pick up a gun anyway because of some nuance of doctrine they disagree over?