see thats the problem with insurance. Its about making money. Combine with "health", the healthcare systems is not designed to help you, but rob from you where you are least able to defend yourself.
And that is something AFAIK this law does not address. Care providers have a natural extortion racket going. Only they don't have to threaten you, nature does it for them. Then they get to charge exorbitant amounts to save you. There are a number of ways to address cost issues, but I haven't seen any of them in this new law. In fact, making everyone participate may inadvertently make it worse.
I cheated on a physics exam once. There was a question about radiation pressure - a 5mW laser is reflected off a perfect mirror, what's the pressure exerted on the mirror. Now I missed the lecture on radiation pressure where they talked all about electromagnetic stuff and derived an equation for this. So I computed the mass equivalent of 5mJ of energy and then the impulse it would produce from bouncing off the mirror with a deltaV of 2C. Impulse/Time = Force. Got the answer correct while neglecting to show most of the work (might get marked down). Only later used the same method to derive the same general formula rather than a specific case. So light acts as a particle with mass moving at speed C. You can also arrive at this conclusion from other angles like allowing Energy/Mass conversion along with the conservation of the CG of a system (If I convert an object to energy and beam it to the other side of a room and convert it back, there must be a reaction force, the CG of the system must not move etc...). Light MUST behave this way. This also means that matter must also be gravitationally attracted to photons. But yes, there are plenty of ways "massless" photons behave much like particles with mass, and yet they don't contain any Higgs.
I don't think physics has an answer to your question, nor a number of questions I have.
I would have thought cheap high-deductible catastrophic coverage policies would proliferate with this (a good thing) but if they don't count, then all it's really doing is forcing people to take part in a system that is progressively becoming a savings account (with negative interest rate) for stupid people. That's my description for coverage of expected expenses and the people who think it's good to have a company skimming 15 percent (by law now) from that. Do catastrophic policies really not count?
Add something about religious beliefs or some such nonsense so that when you get in an accident/get seriously sick/have a heart attack/whatever, you aren't forced into participating in the health care system to which you do not want to contribute.
But is there a mandate for a minimum level of covered services? I could see insurance companies playing all kinds of games with shitty policies that don't cover much at the minimum payment level.
The thing that has people upset is that they will be required to buy health insurance.
People do not like not being excluded due to pre-existing conditions.
People do not like being force to buy insurance.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Otherwise young healthy people wait until they have a problem and then expect to start paying the same rate as everyone else. The function of insurance is to amortize the costs of unexpected (randomly occurring?) events over time and over population. This is broken both by people selectively participating and by companies selectively allowing people to participate. You must eliminate the cheaters on both sides or you really screw one side.
Not passing judgement, just pointing out one of the fundamental issues this law attempts to address.
The solution to that - and this could have been a big help in the US even without "Obamacare" is to require providers to charge everyone the same price for the same service. Not to make different providers charge the same prices, but each one charge all their patients the same price - no discounts, no brakes to people with insurance. Charge whatever you want but to all patients. Then you can shop for the lowest price on services.
Isn't HTML5 storage that shit where they just dump data in a database on YOUR machine? Fuck figuring out who you are and matching shit up - just store it all on your own machine bit by bit and glurb it all in as needed. The problem is these fucking standards shitbags enabling all this. First it was cookies, now it's a full blown local database. Oh, and they can read enough info to identify the machine (recent Orbitz story?) because MSIE6 and other browsers couldn't implement the standards well enough and webdevs had to have more information about your setup just to make shit work.
Just to be clear, the web can work with zero client side storage just by giving a site visitor a GUID embedded in every link - yes this requires the server to then inject the GUID dynamically into every page served, but who gives a shit when half the pages are dynamically created anyway? It wasn't easy in 1993, but today it would be trivial. Can someone please build a framework that makes this simple so we can turn off cookies and still have a "session"?
and no, this is NOT a complete solution to privacy issues by any means - just a start - get peoples machines to stop betraying them.
If people would just get an ANTENNA and drop cable TV we'd have:
1) TV would cost nothing
2) All TV would be HD - there haven't been analog broadcasts for years now.
3) With limited channels there would be competition among shows and mostly good stuff would be on all channels
There is more local programming than you think with sub-channels on DTV. We only need to take this approach in the city to have a positive effect - that's where most the viewers are.
Bummer, they modded you "insightful" not funny. And hence I was apparently hostile and got Troll;-)
You: made a joke.
Me: thought you were serious and in need of a clue.
Slashdot: thought you were serious and insightful !?!?!?!
Yeah, remember that Air France flight a couple years ago? The autopilot worked great until the pitot tube froze up. It then spontaneously gave up control to a co-pilot who was scared, didn't know what was going on, apparently didn't know how to fly a fucking airplane, and crashed in the middle of the ocean. He stalled in spite of a stall warning going off over 70 times. 200 people died because the computer couldn't handle something a little out of the ordinary and the human had become too reliant on the machine to do his job. At least that's the way I saw it after reading about it several times.
This is the latest hyped up excuse for poor driving. Driving is about making decisions, at 50mph. Teach people to make good decisions and the problem is solved.
Sending a txt while going 5mph in a traffic jam is not going to kill anyone.
So I was in a 3 lane traffic jam at a stop ending a call - I was in the center lane. I looked down to press the button to end my call. The was a bang, I looked up and it took me a good while to figure out what was happening. The car in front (or 2 in front I dunno 'cause I was looking down) of me had left a gap for someone coming out of a parking lot to cross all the lanes to get to a U-turn lane in the median (a 4th lane). The 3rd lane (left of me) had cleared quite a bit, so someone in a truck pulling a trailer was going rather quickly past all the stopped cars in the other 2 lanes. The SUV pulled through my lane into the 3rd lane just in time to get T-boned and pushed sideways a good 70 feet which involved going over the curb and part way around the U-turn before coming to a stop. As traffic started and I passed them I could see the vehicle quite caved in right at the B pillar (closing point of driver door). The entire picture of what had happened did not become clear to me until I drove past, where it would have all been clear from the start had I not been looking down at the critical moment. Let me rephrase this - someone may have died 20 feet in front of me and I didn't even see it or know what happened until I had a chance to piece it all together after the fact. This lapse was due to simply pressing the red button to end a call.
Now from my imagination: Imagine you're stopped at a red light sending a text. Just as you hit send someone honks loudly from behind you. You look up, the light is green and the car in front of you is already through the intersection. What is your reaction? Most people (you can claim to be special, but most people) will hit the gas to get moving while neglecting to take a few seconds to assess the overall situation (pedestrians, bikes, cross traffic, etc...). That loss of context can be very hazardous. Driving is about knowing what's happening so you can make decisions while sitting in the driver seat - not just at 50mph.
then the user is most welcome to write his own s/w. this whole argument is shit. do you think about who's gonna spy on you when you talk on the phone, when you watch tv, when you drive your on-star car?? accept it, you can't have total control over stuff that you didn't make yourself. and you can't make everything yourself.
If you switch to an open source/free VOIP software it would be much more trustworthy and could be encrypted in a way you can trust (more). If you watch OTA TV it can't spy on what you watch. On-star... Well OK, it's hard to build your own car. But to say people should just give up on privacy altogether is pretty stupid IMHO.
ESR was all about "Open Source", but this sounds a bit like he's starting to lean against closed source. I wonder if he groks the implications of that distinction.
The entire purpose of patents and copyrights is to create incentives for new works.
Patents were intended to get inventors to publish "how to" information to further society. The limited term of exclusivity is a form of compensation for revealing what might otherwise be kept a trade secret. OTOH if you use that definition, anything that is obvious in hind-sight should not be patentable since introduction of a product would be disclosure of the idea - at least ideas like the shape of a laptop.
According to TFA the top layer is flexible, so for all we know these screens might be a more durable alternative in the future?
They don't mention what the flexible layer is, but that it is 200nm thick. For comparison your regular plastic wrap is 11um thick. That's over 50 times thicker than the layer they're putting on the screen. So lets assume it's something stronger than polypropylene. Aluminum would not be transparent (except in Star Trek), but thinking from a strength point of view the foil in your house is probably a little thicker than the plastic wrap, so lets go with the same 50x thicker than the film on these displays. Now imagine a little fluid filled bubble of aluminum foil 50x thinner than what we're used to, and think how long it is likely to last as a button on an electronic gadget.
The only hope I can imagine is if they're using something like this which is stronger than kevlar. But without any information on the strength of this thing I have to remain skeptical.
Good thing it only produces water (con trails) at altitude - those don't have any effect. At high altitude it would be better to burn coal so the result is just CO2 which doesn't seed clouds and reflect sunlight. Anyone got a coal powered aircraft?
Does the signing use a public key for UEFI to verify the signature? Does anyone know the key so people can get crackin? Sure it's probably a large key beyond current methods to crack, but it makes research in such areas feel more relevant with a specific target you can talk about. Theoretically with algorithm X is would take 169 years to break the MS UEFI key using 50000 CPUs. Using Y it only take 165 years...
However, rest of the patent describes ideas that will seem less than novel to most people who use the Internet.
... and, so what? If the patent describes something unusual and nonobvious, then the fact that it also describes computers, or the Internet, or TCP, or anything else is irrelevant, provided the patent claims - the only part with any legal weight - recite that unusual, nonobvious bit.
The "unusual and nonobvious" part then has to do with a business transaction - terms of payment. IIRC business methods are out or on the way out for patents. In the real world part of this is covered by sending products C.O.D. (cash on delivery). Putting this in place via the net is literally taking an ordinary concept, putting "electronic" or "internet" in front of it and claiming a patent. Now if you think that is OK, then every new product ever devised should claim patents on using bolts, screws, snapping parts or whatever to hold it together. In the case of the internet, the network is like a bolt or glue and everyone is patenting existing stuff held together by the new fastener. That is bullshit. If there were to be a patent it should be on the glue, but the internet is 40 years old by now... Even the "modern internet" of www is 20 years old now. So this new glue is really just an existing tool at this point.
Linux copyright holders should be involved in compliance actions on embedded systems.
I believe they MUST be involved. As a 3rd party SFLC really has no say ( IIRC the legal term is "standing".). IANAL but If someone strips the GPL from some code and puts that code in their product, the copyright holders are the only one who can legitimately make a complaint. The users may notice, but their rights to source code are defined in the GPL - which is absent in such a case.
Manufacturing is still important. You can't design products without knowing details of how they will be manufactured. Well you can try, but there is an interplay between physical product, electrical circuits, software, and manufacturing process. Even the MBA over at HBR are writing about how new products can not be created in the US. The classic example is thin films - which are in an ever increasing number of things from batterys to OLED displays and touch screens and much more. The problem is we outsourced TV production, so when that shifted to LCDs it was the other countries who developed large scale thin film manufacturing capability. Now it's hard to even research anything with such materials in the US because nobody does anything (read Makes anything) with them here. Another example would be IC fabrication - everyone outsource production (or part of their production) except Intel. If you can't make chips you can't make anything anymore - not even "cheap toys from China".
Slashdot Mirror
And that is something AFAIK this law does not address. Care providers have a natural extortion racket going. Only they don't have to threaten you, nature does it for them. Then they get to charge exorbitant amounts to save you. There are a number of ways to address cost issues, but I haven't seen any of them in this new law. In fact, making everyone participate may inadvertently make it worse.
I cheated on a physics exam once. There was a question about radiation pressure - a 5mW laser is reflected off a perfect mirror, what's the pressure exerted on the mirror. Now I missed the lecture on radiation pressure where they talked all about electromagnetic stuff and derived an equation for this. So I computed the mass equivalent of 5mJ of energy and then the impulse it would produce from bouncing off the mirror with a deltaV of 2C. Impulse/Time = Force. Got the answer correct while neglecting to show most of the work (might get marked down). Only later used the same method to derive the same general formula rather than a specific case. So light acts as a particle with mass moving at speed C. You can also arrive at this conclusion from other angles like allowing Energy/Mass conversion along with the conservation of the CG of a system (If I convert an object to energy and beam it to the other side of a room and convert it back, there must be a reaction force, the CG of the system must not move etc...). Light MUST behave this way. This also means that matter must also be gravitationally attracted to photons. But yes, there are plenty of ways "massless" photons behave much like particles with mass, and yet they don't contain any Higgs.
I don't think physics has an answer to your question, nor a number of questions I have.
And 0.000101.1THz is WRIF in Detroit. Making jokes about visible light is misleading. What do we call 1-50THz?
I would have thought cheap high-deductible catastrophic coverage policies would proliferate with this (a good thing) but if they don't count, then all it's really doing is forcing people to take part in a system that is progressively becoming a savings account (with negative interest rate) for stupid people. That's my description for coverage of expected expenses and the people who think it's good to have a company skimming 15 percent (by law now) from that. Do catastrophic policies really not count?
Not to get too far off topic, but don't forget the "payroll tax" that your employer pays which bring it to 40 percent :-)
But is there a mandate for a minimum level of covered services? I could see insurance companies playing all kinds of games with shitty policies that don't cover much at the minimum payment level.
People do not like not being excluded due to pre-existing conditions.
People do not like being force to buy insurance.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Otherwise young healthy people wait until they have a problem and then expect to start paying the same rate as everyone else. The function of insurance is to amortize the costs of unexpected (randomly occurring?) events over time and over population. This is broken both by people selectively participating and by companies selectively allowing people to participate. You must eliminate the cheaters on both sides or you really screw one side.
Not passing judgement, just pointing out one of the fundamental issues this law attempts to address.
The solution to that - and this could have been a big help in the US even without "Obamacare" is to require providers to charge everyone the same price for the same service. Not to make different providers charge the same prices, but each one charge all their patients the same price - no discounts, no brakes to people with insurance. Charge whatever you want but to all patients. Then you can shop for the lowest price on services.
Isn't HTML5 storage that shit where they just dump data in a database on YOUR machine? Fuck figuring out who you are and matching shit up - just store it all on your own machine bit by bit and glurb it all in as needed. The problem is these fucking standards shitbags enabling all this. First it was cookies, now it's a full blown local database. Oh, and they can read enough info to identify the machine (recent Orbitz story?) because MSIE6 and other browsers couldn't implement the standards well enough and webdevs had to have more information about your setup just to make shit work.
Just to be clear, the web can work with zero client side storage just by giving a site visitor a GUID embedded in every link - yes this requires the server to then inject the GUID dynamically into every page served, but who gives a shit when half the pages are dynamically created anyway? It wasn't easy in 1993, but today it would be trivial. Can someone please build a framework that makes this simple so we can turn off cookies and still have a "session"?
and no, this is NOT a complete solution to privacy issues by any means - just a start - get peoples machines to stop betraying them.
Concur. I have seen some very positive outcome from EMDR.
If people would just get an ANTENNA and drop cable TV we'd have:
1) TV would cost nothing
2) All TV would be HD - there haven't been analog broadcasts for years now.
3) With limited channels there would be competition among shows and mostly good stuff would be on all channels
There is more local programming than you think with sub-channels on DTV. We only need to take this approach in the city to have a positive effect - that's where most the viewers are.
Bummer, they modded you "insightful" not funny. And hence I was apparently hostile and got Troll ;-)
You: made a joke.
Me: thought you were serious and in need of a clue.
Slashdot: thought you were serious and insightful !?!?!?!
Yeah, remember that Air France flight a couple years ago? The autopilot worked great until the pitot tube froze up. It then spontaneously gave up control to a co-pilot who was scared, didn't know what was going on, apparently didn't know how to fly a fucking airplane, and crashed in the middle of the ocean. He stalled in spite of a stall warning going off over 70 times. 200 people died because the computer couldn't handle something a little out of the ordinary and the human had become too reliant on the machine to do his job. At least that's the way I saw it after reading about it several times.
You need to get control of your kids - period.
So I was in a 3 lane traffic jam at a stop ending a call - I was in the center lane. I looked down to press the button to end my call. The was a bang, I looked up and it took me a good while to figure out what was happening. The car in front (or 2 in front I dunno 'cause I was looking down) of me had left a gap for someone coming out of a parking lot to cross all the lanes to get to a U-turn lane in the median (a 4th lane). The 3rd lane (left of me) had cleared quite a bit, so someone in a truck pulling a trailer was going rather quickly past all the stopped cars in the other 2 lanes. The SUV pulled through my lane into the 3rd lane just in time to get T-boned and pushed sideways a good 70 feet which involved going over the curb and part way around the U-turn before coming to a stop. As traffic started and I passed them I could see the vehicle quite caved in right at the B pillar (closing point of driver door). The entire picture of what had happened did not become clear to me until I drove past, where it would have all been clear from the start had I not been looking down at the critical moment. Let me rephrase this - someone may have died 20 feet in front of me and I didn't even see it or know what happened until I had a chance to piece it all together after the fact. This lapse was due to simply pressing the red button to end a call.
Now from my imagination: Imagine you're stopped at a red light sending a text. Just as you hit send someone honks loudly from behind you. You look up, the light is green and the car in front of you is already through the intersection. What is your reaction? Most people (you can claim to be special, but most people) will hit the gas to get moving while neglecting to take a few seconds to assess the overall situation (pedestrians, bikes, cross traffic, etc...). That loss of context can be very hazardous. Driving is about knowing what's happening so you can make decisions while sitting in the driver seat - not just at 50mph.
If you switch to an open source/free VOIP software it would be much more trustworthy and could be encrypted in a way you can trust (more). If you watch OTA TV it can't spy on what you watch. On-star... Well OK, it's hard to build your own car. But to say people should just give up on privacy altogether is pretty stupid IMHO.
ESR was all about "Open Source", but this sounds a bit like he's starting to lean against closed source. I wonder if he groks the implications of that distinction.
Patents were intended to get inventors to publish "how to" information to further society. The limited term of exclusivity is a form of compensation for revealing what might otherwise be kept a trade secret. OTOH if you use that definition, anything that is obvious in hind-sight should not be patentable since introduction of a product would be disclosure of the idea - at least ideas like the shape of a laptop.
They don't mention what the flexible layer is, but that it is 200nm thick. For comparison your regular plastic wrap is 11um thick. That's over 50 times thicker than the layer they're putting on the screen. So lets assume it's something stronger than polypropylene. Aluminum would not be transparent (except in Star Trek), but thinking from a strength point of view the foil in your house is probably a little thicker than the plastic wrap, so lets go with the same 50x thicker than the film on these displays. Now imagine a little fluid filled bubble of aluminum foil 50x thinner than what we're used to, and think how long it is likely to last as a button on an electronic gadget.
The only hope I can imagine is if they're using something like this which is stronger than kevlar. But without any information on the strength of this thing I have to remain skeptical.
Good thing it only produces water (con trails) at altitude - those don't have any effect. At high altitude it would be better to burn coal so the result is just CO2 which doesn't seed clouds and reflect sunlight. Anyone got a coal powered aircraft?
Does the signing use a public key for UEFI to verify the signature? Does anyone know the key so people can get crackin? Sure it's probably a large key beyond current methods to crack, but it makes research in such areas feel more relevant with a specific target you can talk about. Theoretically with algorithm X is would take 169 years to break the MS UEFI key using 50000 CPUs. Using Y it only take 165 years...
The "unusual and nonobvious" part then has to do with a business transaction - terms of payment. IIRC business methods are out or on the way out for patents. In the real world part of this is covered by sending products C.O.D. (cash on delivery). Putting this in place via the net is literally taking an ordinary concept, putting "electronic" or "internet" in front of it and claiming a patent. Now if you think that is OK, then every new product ever devised should claim patents on using bolts, screws, snapping parts or whatever to hold it together. In the case of the internet, the network is like a bolt or glue and everyone is patenting existing stuff held together by the new fastener. That is bullshit. If there were to be a patent it should be on the glue, but the internet is 40 years old by now... Even the "modern internet" of www is 20 years old now. So this new glue is really just an existing tool at this point.
and then:
I'd hate to see how their other efforts are going.
I believe they MUST be involved. As a 3rd party SFLC really has no say ( IIRC the legal term is "standing".). IANAL but If someone strips the GPL from some code and puts that code in their product, the copyright holders are the only one who can legitimately make a complaint. The users may notice, but their rights to source code are defined in the GPL - which is absent in such a case.
Manufacturing is still important. You can't design products without knowing details of how they will be manufactured. Well you can try, but there is an interplay between physical product, electrical circuits, software, and manufacturing process. Even the MBA over at HBR are writing about how new products can not be created in the US. The classic example is thin films - which are in an ever increasing number of things from batterys to OLED displays and touch screens and much more. The problem is we outsourced TV production, so when that shifted to LCDs it was the other countries who developed large scale thin film manufacturing capability. Now it's hard to even research anything with such materials in the US because nobody does anything (read Makes anything) with them here. Another example would be IC fabrication - everyone outsource production (or part of their production) except Intel. If you can't make chips you can't make anything anymore - not even "cheap toys from China".