Expunge all "field of interest" TLDs like.com,.gov,.net,.pr0n, and all the recent spammy TLDs TLD by legal jurisdiction the domain is registered under. Country codes only, I suppose. Underneath the country codes its fair game for each NIC. I would "strongly encourage" the country NICs to not screw around with social engineering goals.
I would suspect you'd end up with multi-national corps registering a zillion domains in each country they buy or sell. So what. Cost of doing business.
I would only have a couple non-UN recognized as country domain names, for example, ".un" seems like a nice place to put the UN and maybe root DNS operators should have a.root TLD solely to host their own coordination related stuff.
The pen I used to fill out my grocery loyalty card form is probably a "device", so I've been violating this recently issued patent since the 90s, or something like that.
Every mail in rebate form that asks for excessive personal data, etc, etc.
Could be, I'm just working on numerology. I can't find anything when googling for 923 bits, although I found the IDEA FPGA implementation easy enough and I remember reading it in the past too. Its not "real crypto" if no one else knows about it. Or another way to put it is everyone in the field knows that if no one knows the algo then its probably pretty insecure, so the surprise is...
Maybe the journalist filter tried to pass 1024 bits thru a metric to english translation system resulting in 923 bits.
There are no broadcasting stations where I live, only narrowcasting stations all chasing each other trying to optimize $/hr ad revenue off the same set of top 40 songs, and about 5 stations in listenable range playing the same "conservative talk radio" shows.
Even the 80s/90s sorta-hard rock stations only have 40 to 50 song playlists and they rotate songs in and out extremely slowly.
Oh yeah, and finally broadcast "music" radio is at least 1/3 crummy local produced ads. At least the national streamers attempt to produce semi-professional ads. If it sounds like an old fashioned tape recorder held in front of a used car salesman, don't bother transmitting it, ok?
Is this a video news release from the cell phone providers?
If their music is constantly available anywhere on any device, then 'what's the difference?,' ponders the article.
The difference is my bandwidth to my phones SD flash card is free, but my cell provider wants me to pay $50 per gig.
Hmm so I could rip a DVD that I own to my phone for free, or I could pay $ to download it over wifi, or I could pay $$$ in bandwidth charges to stream.
Also service sucks everywhere I go, so if I actually want to listen, rather than listen to buffering and pauses, then I need to download first.
As a non-customer of cap one, for years (decades?) they sent me bi-weekly physical mail spam trying to get me to sign up. I worked at a commercial printing shop that occasionally printed and even mailed paper spam 20 years ago and I figure they're in the hole at least $500 cost of sales on me, so if I ever become a customer there's probably some data mining process that'll find some way to make $500 plus a hefty profit off me. Those TV commercials are not cheap either. I fail to imagine how anyone could think they'll be a good deal, other than maybe some momentary bait and switch sales tactic.
Any time you see a cost of sales of $X realize unless they're a charity or political campaign (I'm looking at you, Ron Paul) they expect to earn n * $X gross profit where n is probably pretty big.
I've found out the hard way, that merely leads to $50 / $75 / $100 annual fees which are waived for debt serfs. They'll get $50 to $100/yr out of you, one way or another.
With a credit rating of 720 there is no excuse for me to have a 23.9% APR.
That low? I'm in the low 800s last time I checked (yes, I'm old) and all my CC are the legal max of 29.9%. I'm sure the only dependency is which state you live in.
Personally I think they're pissed off that I don't carry a higher balance... gotta make $100/yr off me somehow.
One funny thing is I used to have multiple cards just in case and also the worlds crudest budgeting system, but due to endless too-big-to-fail mergers I'm down to BoA and Citibank, both with multiple cards.
Financial institutions are complaining loudly, decrying...
The real complaint is they paid billions to elect these guys, and look what happens. My suspicion is within days / weeks this will be defanged. Perhaps you'll only be able to look up complaints if you're already a customer of that bank, or it'll be made illegal to refer to these complaints in any way in advertising, or perhaps the names of the companies will be censored from public view, etc. I bet a simple hack to prevent citizens from using it would be the "only publish complaints after it has verified the consumer's relationship with the company" clause, whoops we have no budget this year for any verifications, what a surprise, I guess we can't publish anything this year... or ever. Another simple hack would be to prevent lookups solely by company name, must specify company name AND zip code AND mom's maiden name or something like that.
The new database will include not only the name of the company involved, but also the...
consumers account number, PIN number, CVW number, SS number, and mothers maiden name. Wanna bet that it'll be, at most, a select query on the same server as the sensitive personal stuff is stored? And they'll be people uploading complaints named "Bobby tables" within hours of opening. This may be part of the scheme above... complain and everyone on the net can hear about it, but all of your personal data will be on a torrent site within hours, so you better not complain in public after all, serf.
consumer... consumer...
I hate being called a consumer. The article is about modern day debt-serfs anyway, not consumers. I want to be a citizen, you know, with like rights and stuff. Just like you know anyone using the N-word probably isn't worth listening to, anyone using the C-word probably isn't worth listening to. (Cloud is another good C-word to ignore)
Apple has a patent to fool bots that aggregate people's data.
Interesting how even this can be spun to something negative.
The negative part is I've been doing this since the very early 90s, offline and online, and now its patented, so I guess I owe APPL every time I do this, or I can't do it anymore?
"I don't know of any proposed cryptographic standard with 923 bit anything."
Ha I found it, purely by luck. First of all assume the press release went thru a journalism and PR filter so its almost entirely incorrect other than some numbers might not be incorrect.
I remember reading a paper on implementing IDEA (which is a two decade old, semi-patent-unencumbered algo because its so old) on a Spartan FPGA, which I remember because I fool around with a spartan dev board at home and this is the kind of thing you find when you google for fpga and various crypto system names, etc. Anyway that specific FPGA implementation of IDEA has a latency of... 923 cycles. So its not 923 bit anything, they're talking about a streaming cryptosystem that takes 923 cycles from the first bit squirts in until that encrypted first bit bit squirts out, and the journalist filter rewrote it. Thats low enough latency for high bandwidth stuff like video, but not so good for voice or keyboard ssh unless you play some games (which is a whole nother topic)
Anyway, cracking a "mere" 128 bit sample in 148 days or whatever is still kinda interesting, even if its not cracking an entire 923 bit system. Landauer limit alone would imply they had to have cracked the algorithm not just brute forced it.
The odds are 1 in whatever gazillion that the first thing you try will be the right thing.
Yeah but more specifically, no one seems to know if "148 days" is 90% or 9% of the way thru a random search of solution space. The extremes are unlikely in proportion, like a 9% search success is probably only going to happen 1 in 11 trials.
Could "148 days" be a 100% guaranteed successful exact solution along the lines of it takes exactly "148 days" of calculations to solve and doing it in 147 is impossible and 149 is a waste of time? Who knows.
They also carefully avoided whatever their new invention was. "it wasn't until this new way of approaching the problem was applied" Whats the new way to approach the problem? Well, there isn't one in the article.
As a press release its almost the perfect opposite of science. Virtually unknown subject so there's little common ground for discussion, no method/experimental details beyond the most flimsy, no conclusion, no verifiable prediction, no suggestion of future work. Other than that, its a great anecdote of somebody did something, somehow, and it took awhile.
I realize this is a late post, but don't forget than homes, new cars, and now degrees mean a life od debt servitude... employers love that for "motivational purposes".
Worst case scenario for an employer is hiring a guy who could retire tomorrow if he wanted.
At $50/gig its cheaper to rent a video at redbox or netflix than to download and watch the trailer on youtube to see if its worth renting.
The cost superficially appears astounding. However I'm actually using about 10 megs a day on average over the air (non-wifi) according to "data counter widget" and paying $20/month to republic wireless for unlimited service... so I'm paying about $66/gig if I did my math correctly.
Ah but it has to match the laptop for styling purposes. Otherwise its visually unstylish like 500 pound dude with 100 pound wife, or 7 foot tall wife with 5 foot tall husband, etc. Clashing styles are not going to appeal to the "deep as a rain puddle" demographic.
From having worked at a regional ISP I can verify we made money off law enforcement requests because we billed their jurisdiction a reasonable rate. We made money off "real" civil suits because we could roll our bill into a trial. However, how would an ISP make money off an extortion ring, like this situation? We tended to bill kind of on the hefty side, so we'd be getting a significant fraction of the extortion money, which the extorters are not going to like and probably are not going to pay. Further 4000 users a week means hiring and staffing a small department which is not going to be cheap.
Now if the extorters would split the money 50:50 with the ISP, then they'd be talking... if and only if all the ISPs were doing that. 4000 users per week is a pretty large number of customers to send to our competitors, and hilariously maybe they're only sending requests to Comcast and not AT+T and they know it.
"my hearing aid made my pacemaker crash" would be pretty shitty.
As if thats the first piece of electronics to ever operate near a human ear. A $5000 or $500 hearing aid crashing a pacemaker isn't any more likely than my $40 bluetooth plantronics M50 ear plug / ear set / whatever crashing a pacemaker.
For a good laugh research old ham radio guys with pacemakers and RF fields. SOME, repeat SOME start getting weird around the legal 1500 watt level but most of the time if you're not in danger of getting a serious RF burn then you're in no danger of damaging a pacemaker.
Another funny anecdote is my local walmart full of old (pacemaker) people had a 10 KW AM transmitter right in the back of the parking lot. Fenced off of course, etc. But its not like there was a bullseye of dead old people around the walmart. Looking at your R ** 2 dropoffs if the 10 KW AM radio station wasn't killing every old person to shop at walmart, there is no way to generate enough power in a hearing aid to hurt a pacemaker. Just doesn't scale correctly unless your hearing aid uses a 12 volt marine deep cycle trolling motor battery (you know, like a cubic foot of lead plates, weighs about 100 pounds?)
There must be some large amount of deaf people or forcing CC on televisions would not have been would not passed.
Sorry for the awful pun as relates to deaf people, but its a "vociferous" minority thing. About 48% of the population would love full nudity on TV (straight males) and the other 48% (womens less the feminists) wouldn't care, but about 150K holy rollers completely shit their pants and mailed in photocopied complaint form letters when Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction live on the super bowel half time show some years ago. That's why prudes who are about 0.05% of the population control what 100% of the population is allowed to see on TV. I hate those people just for being anti-democratic, aside from (obvious?) religious doctrinal issues.
The CC thing is a little more complicated in that it was rolled out as a regulation around the early cable era and the terror was that we'd have 1000s of independent networks, but if we could add a costly regulation, then we'd continue to have 3 to 6 major media companies control everything the population sees... So its partially "lets me nice to deaf people, because I hope to live long enough to become deaf myself" but also, maybe more importantly, "I hate competition, and my smaller competitors could never afford CC so lets purchase a law that all TV networks and editing studios need to broadcast CC programming".
If an uninsured dude yet collectible / aka non-judgement proof walks in, they'll probably get the full $350 booked as accounts receivable, then it goes to collections for 25 cents on the dollar for a net income of $87.50 to the Dr which is competitive with the insured pay rate.
Another way to play it is put uninsured dude in accounts receivable as $350, then book a tax deductible $350 loss as a forgiven debt if no collections agency is dumb enough to buy the debt. The real loss is whatever providing the service actually cost, which is probably about half of $95 in your example unless they're operating a charity. So they "really" lost $45 or so of actual medical supplies and labor, not $350. But the $350 loss offsets $350 of income when it comes to tax time so they save perhaps 25% of $350 or whatever that could be as much as $100 tax reduction in exchange for actually losing $50 or so of labor and band aids. The IRS wants their revenue so uninsured dude gets 1099ed as a forgiven debt and gets to pay income tax on the implied income of $350, which for a retail clerk girlfriend with an uninsured broken arm was approximately zero because she made practically no money that year. As I recall it did prevent her from filing the 1040-EZ form and she had to use the 1040 or 1040A something about you can't have 1099 income while filing a EZ form, or at least that was the case in the early 90s. This was some time (decades) ago and the story is related thru a "woman doing taxes" filter so it may or may not be correct. Also her broken arm was an imaginary amount something like $20K not $350. The story originally came from a discussion of "I have to fill out extra paperwork for taxes because of my broken arm before I met you, so I won't get any tax return this year unlike you" type of discussion, leading to the above discoveries.
The above explains why docs and hospitals tend to not really care "if you can pay or not" because either collections or semi-shady tax work lets them get about the same net income even if you never pay them a penny. There will be anecdotal situations where this doesn't work.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?
Pretty high estimate. I've done software defined radio stuff, add a simple microphone and mic preamp and change the software and it would make a killer hearing aid. The point being dedicated SDR hardware has a lovely low noise low intermod input amp, a decent 16 bit A/D, some extremely hefty CPU processing capable of anything a mere hearing aid could possibly require, and a nice low distortion 16 bit D/A and amp. Its hard to find a way to spend more than $50 on materials. Now this might pass thru 5 middlemen, each demanding 50% profit, in which case, sure, the last guy to "pay for hardware" had to cough up $350, because the n-1 middleman made $175 of profit, and the n-2 middleman made $83 of profit, and the n-3 middleman made $42 profit, and the n-4 guy who imported individual components from China made a mere $21 of profit, leaving the foxconn workers $10.50 of revenue. Or something like that.
My bluetooth earset / bug / whatever you call it off the shelf at best buy it was $40 in May. Some android software to listen, buffer one second, amplify, echo can, and blast it into my ear SEEMS possible. Its a plantronics M50. My first one was $80 a couple years ago, and replacement purchased about a month ago was $40 before sales tax. In some ways its not terribly durable, but at $40 I'm not too worried if it "only" lasts 2 or 3 years of heavy use. On the other hand, a $40 pair of shoes would never survive near daily used for 3 years either.
"be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible."
Horrray!!! Someone can take the communities work, make piles of money with it, and contribute NOTHING back to the community. Greed makes the world go around, baby
I'm mystified what the motivation would be to work on something like that unless its just another paycheck.
Slashdot Mirror
more like multicast, heavily cached DNS.
A term you could google for is "namecoin"
Expunge all "field of interest" TLDs like .com, .gov, .net, .pr0n, and all the recent spammy TLDs
TLD by legal jurisdiction the domain is registered under. Country codes only, I suppose.
Underneath the country codes its fair game for each NIC.
I would "strongly encourage" the country NICs to not screw around with social engineering goals.
I would suspect you'd end up with multi-national corps registering a zillion domains in each country they buy or sell. So what. Cost of doing business.
I would only have a couple non-UN recognized as country domain names, for example, ".un" seems like a nice place to put the UN and maybe root DNS operators should have a .root TLD solely to host their own coordination related stuff.
are you a device?
The pen I used to fill out my grocery loyalty card form is probably a "device", so I've been violating this recently issued patent since the 90s, or something like that.
Every mail in rebate form that asks for excessive personal data, etc, etc.
Could be, I'm just working on numerology. I can't find anything when googling for 923 bits, although I found the IDEA FPGA implementation easy enough and I remember reading it in the past too. Its not "real crypto" if no one else knows about it. Or another way to put it is everyone in the field knows that if no one knows the algo then its probably pretty insecure, so the surprise is...
Maybe the journalist filter tried to pass 1024 bits thru a metric to english translation system resulting in 923 bits.
There are no broadcasting stations where I live, only narrowcasting stations all chasing each other trying to optimize $/hr ad revenue off the same set of top 40 songs, and about 5 stations in listenable range playing the same "conservative talk radio" shows.
Even the 80s/90s sorta-hard rock stations only have 40 to 50 song playlists and they rotate songs in and out extremely slowly.
Oh yeah, and finally broadcast "music" radio is at least 1/3 crummy local produced ads. At least the national streamers attempt to produce semi-professional ads. If it sounds like an old fashioned tape recorder held in front of a used car salesman, don't bother transmitting it, ok?
Is this a video news release from the cell phone providers?
If their music is constantly available anywhere on any device, then 'what's the difference?,' ponders the article.
The difference is my bandwidth to my phones SD flash card is free, but my cell provider wants me to pay $50 per gig.
Hmm so I could rip a DVD that I own to my phone for free, or I could pay $ to download it over wifi, or I could pay $$$ in bandwidth charges to stream.
Also service sucks everywhere I go, so if I actually want to listen, rather than listen to buffering and pauses, then I need to download first.
they know that Capital One is a bad deal
As a non-customer of cap one, for years (decades?) they sent me bi-weekly physical mail spam trying to get me to sign up. I worked at a commercial printing shop that occasionally printed and even mailed paper spam 20 years ago and I figure they're in the hole at least $500 cost of sales on me, so if I ever become a customer there's probably some data mining process that'll find some way to make $500 plus a hefty profit off me. Those TV commercials are not cheap either. I fail to imagine how anyone could think they'll be a good deal, other than maybe some momentary bait and switch sales tactic.
Any time you see a cost of sales of $X realize unless they're a charity or political campaign (I'm looking at you, Ron Paul) they expect to earn n * $X gross profit where n is probably pretty big.
I've found out the hard way, that merely leads to $50 / $75 / $100 annual fees which are waived for debt serfs. They'll get $50 to $100 /yr out of you, one way or another.
You should read up on how credit works or one day you might end up in trouble.
You might not be able to become a debt serf, oh noes!
With a credit rating of 720 there is no excuse for me to have a 23.9% APR.
That low? I'm in the low 800s last time I checked (yes, I'm old) and all my CC are the legal max of 29.9%. I'm sure the only dependency is which state you live in.
Personally I think they're pissed off that I don't carry a higher balance... gotta make $100/yr off me somehow.
One funny thing is I used to have multiple cards just in case and also the worlds crudest budgeting system, but due to endless too-big-to-fail mergers I'm down to BoA and Citibank, both with multiple cards.
Financial institutions are complaining loudly, decrying ...
The real complaint is they paid billions to elect these guys, and look what happens. My suspicion is within days / weeks this will be defanged. Perhaps you'll only be able to look up complaints if you're already a customer of that bank, or it'll be made illegal to refer to these complaints in any way in advertising, or perhaps the names of the companies will be censored from public view, etc. I bet a simple hack to prevent citizens from using it would be the "only publish complaints after it has verified the consumer's relationship with the company" clause, whoops we have no budget this year for any verifications, what a surprise, I guess we can't publish anything this year... or ever. Another simple hack would be to prevent lookups solely by company name, must specify company name AND zip code AND mom's maiden name or something like that.
The new database will include not only the name of the company involved, but also the ...
consumers account number, PIN number, CVW number, SS number, and mothers maiden name. Wanna bet that it'll be, at most, a select query on the same server as the sensitive personal stuff is stored? And they'll be people uploading complaints named "Bobby tables" within hours of opening. This may be part of the scheme above... complain and everyone on the net can hear about it, but all of your personal data will be on a torrent site within hours, so you better not complain in public after all, serf.
consumer ... consumer ...
I hate being called a consumer. The article is about modern day debt-serfs anyway, not consumers. I want to be a citizen, you know, with like rights and stuff. Just like you know anyone using the N-word probably isn't worth listening to, anyone using the C-word probably isn't worth listening to. (Cloud is another good C-word to ignore)
Apple has a patent to fool bots that aggregate people's data.
Interesting how even this can be spun to something negative.
The negative part is I've been doing this since the very early 90s, offline and online, and now its patented, so I guess I owe APPL every time I do this, or I can't do it anymore?
"I don't know of any proposed cryptographic standard with 923 bit anything."
Ha I found it, purely by luck. First of all assume the press release went thru a journalism and PR filter so its almost entirely incorrect other than some numbers might not be incorrect.
I remember reading a paper on implementing IDEA (which is a two decade old, semi-patent-unencumbered algo because its so old) on a Spartan FPGA, which I remember because I fool around with a spartan dev board at home and this is the kind of thing you find when you google for fpga and various crypto system names, etc. Anyway that specific FPGA implementation of IDEA has a latency of ... 923 cycles. So its not 923 bit anything, they're talking about a streaming cryptosystem that takes 923 cycles from the first bit squirts in until that encrypted first bit bit squirts out, and the journalist filter rewrote it. Thats low enough latency for high bandwidth stuff like video, but not so good for voice or keyboard ssh unless you play some games (which is a whole nother topic)
Anyway, cracking a "mere" 128 bit sample in 148 days or whatever is still kinda interesting, even if its not cracking an entire 923 bit system. Landauer limit alone would imply they had to have cracked the algorithm not just brute forced it.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590g/01sp/fccm00_idea1.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Data_Encryption_Algorithm
The odds are 1 in whatever gazillion that the first thing you try will be the right thing.
Yeah but more specifically, no one seems to know if "148 days" is 90% or 9% of the way thru a random search of solution space. The extremes are unlikely in proportion, like a 9% search success is probably only going to happen 1 in 11 trials.
Could "148 days" be a 100% guaranteed successful exact solution along the lines of it takes exactly "148 days" of calculations to solve and doing it in 147 is impossible and 149 is a waste of time? Who knows.
They also carefully avoided whatever their new invention was.
"it wasn't until this new way of approaching the problem was applied"
Whats the new way to approach the problem? Well, there isn't one in the article.
As a press release its almost the perfect opposite of science. Virtually unknown subject so there's little common ground for discussion, no method/experimental details beyond the most flimsy, no conclusion, no verifiable prediction, no suggestion of future work. Other than that, its a great anecdote of somebody did something, somehow, and it took awhile.
I realize this is a late post, but don't forget than homes, new cars, and now degrees mean a life od debt servitude... employers love that for "motivational purposes".
Worst case scenario for an employer is hiring a guy who could retire tomorrow if he wanted.
At $50/gig its cheaper to rent a video at redbox or netflix than to download and watch the trailer on youtube to see if its worth renting.
The cost superficially appears astounding. However I'm actually using about 10 megs a day on average over the air (non-wifi) according to "data counter widget" and paying $20/month to republic wireless for unlimited service... so I'm paying about $66/gig if I did my math correctly.
Does a hearing aid really "buffer one second" while processing sound?
Lazy mans echo canceller. You can do much better, but the deeper the buffer the better the echo cancellation.
Ah but it has to match the laptop for styling purposes. Otherwise its visually unstylish like 500 pound dude with 100 pound wife, or 7 foot tall wife with 5 foot tall husband, etc. Clashing styles are not going to appeal to the "deep as a rain puddle" demographic.
From having worked at a regional ISP I can verify we made money off law enforcement requests because we billed their jurisdiction a reasonable rate. We made money off "real" civil suits because we could roll our bill into a trial. However, how would an ISP make money off an extortion ring, like this situation? We tended to bill kind of on the hefty side, so we'd be getting a significant fraction of the extortion money, which the extorters are not going to like and probably are not going to pay. Further 4000 users a week means hiring and staffing a small department which is not going to be cheap.
Now if the extorters would split the money 50:50 with the ISP, then they'd be talking... if and only if all the ISPs were doing that. 4000 users per week is a pretty large number of customers to send to our competitors, and hilariously maybe they're only sending requests to Comcast and not AT+T and they know it.
"my hearing aid made my pacemaker crash" would be pretty shitty.
As if thats the first piece of electronics to ever operate near a human ear. A $5000 or $500 hearing aid crashing a pacemaker isn't any more likely than my $40 bluetooth plantronics M50 ear plug / ear set / whatever crashing a pacemaker.
For a good laugh research old ham radio guys with pacemakers and RF fields. SOME, repeat SOME start getting weird around the legal 1500 watt level but most of the time if you're not in danger of getting a serious RF burn then you're in no danger of damaging a pacemaker.
Another funny anecdote is my local walmart full of old (pacemaker) people had a 10 KW AM transmitter right in the back of the parking lot. Fenced off of course, etc. But its not like there was a bullseye of dead old people around the walmart. Looking at your R ** 2 dropoffs if the 10 KW AM radio station wasn't killing every old person to shop at walmart, there is no way to generate enough power in a hearing aid to hurt a pacemaker. Just doesn't scale correctly unless your hearing aid uses a 12 volt marine deep cycle trolling motor battery (you know, like a cubic foot of lead plates, weighs about 100 pounds?)
There must be some large amount of deaf people or forcing CC on televisions would not have been would not passed.
Sorry for the awful pun as relates to deaf people, but its a "vociferous" minority thing. About 48% of the population would love full nudity on TV (straight males) and the other 48% (womens less the feminists) wouldn't care, but about 150K holy rollers completely shit their pants and mailed in photocopied complaint form letters when Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction live on the super bowel half time show some years ago. That's why prudes who are about 0.05% of the population control what 100% of the population is allowed to see on TV. I hate those people just for being anti-democratic, aside from (obvious?) religious doctrinal issues.
The CC thing is a little more complicated in that it was rolled out as a regulation around the early cable era and the terror was that we'd have 1000s of independent networks, but if we could add a costly regulation, then we'd continue to have 3 to 6 major media companies control everything the population sees... So its partially "lets me nice to deaf people, because I hope to live long enough to become deaf myself" but also, maybe more importantly, "I hate competition, and my smaller competitors could never afford CC so lets purchase a law that all TV networks and editing studios need to broadcast CC programming".
If an uninsured dude yet collectible / aka non-judgement proof walks in, they'll probably get the full $350 booked as accounts receivable, then it goes to collections for 25 cents on the dollar for a net income of $87.50 to the Dr which is competitive with the insured pay rate.
Another way to play it is put uninsured dude in accounts receivable as $350, then book a tax deductible $350 loss as a forgiven debt if no collections agency is dumb enough to buy the debt. The real loss is whatever providing the service actually cost, which is probably about half of $95 in your example unless they're operating a charity. So they "really" lost $45 or so of actual medical supplies and labor, not $350. But the $350 loss offsets $350 of income when it comes to tax time so they save perhaps 25% of $350 or whatever that could be as much as $100 tax reduction in exchange for actually losing $50 or so of labor and band aids. The IRS wants their revenue so uninsured dude gets 1099ed as a forgiven debt and gets to pay income tax on the implied income of $350, which for a retail clerk girlfriend with an uninsured broken arm was approximately zero because she made practically no money that year. As I recall it did prevent her from filing the 1040-EZ form and she had to use the 1040 or 1040A something about you can't have 1099 income while filing a EZ form, or at least that was the case in the early 90s. This was some time (decades) ago and the story is related thru a "woman doing taxes" filter so it may or may not be correct. Also her broken arm was an imaginary amount something like $20K not $350. The story originally came from a discussion of "I have to fill out extra paperwork for taxes because of my broken arm before I met you, so I won't get any tax return this year unlike you" type of discussion, leading to the above discoveries.
The above explains why docs and hospitals tend to not really care "if you can pay or not" because either collections or semi-shady tax work lets them get about the same net income even if you never pay them a penny. There will be anecdotal situations where this doesn't work.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?
Pretty high estimate. I've done software defined radio stuff, add a simple microphone and mic preamp and change the software and it would make a killer hearing aid. The point being dedicated SDR hardware has a lovely low noise low intermod input amp, a decent 16 bit A/D, some extremely hefty CPU processing capable of anything a mere hearing aid could possibly require, and a nice low distortion 16 bit D/A and amp. Its hard to find a way to spend more than $50 on materials. Now this might pass thru 5 middlemen, each demanding 50% profit, in which case, sure, the last guy to "pay for hardware" had to cough up $350, because the n-1 middleman made $175 of profit, and the n-2 middleman made $83 of profit, and the n-3 middleman made $42 profit, and the n-4 guy who imported individual components from China made a mere $21 of profit, leaving the foxconn workers $10.50 of revenue. Or something like that.
My bluetooth earset / bug / whatever you call it off the shelf at best buy it was $40 in May. Some android software to listen, buffer one second, amplify, echo can, and blast it into my ear SEEMS possible. Its a plantronics M50. My first one was $80 a couple years ago, and replacement purchased about a month ago was $40 before sales tax. In some ways its not terribly durable, but at $40 I'm not too worried if it "only" lasts 2 or 3 years of heavy use. On the other hand, a $40 pair of shoes would never survive near daily used for 3 years either.
"be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible."
Horrray!!! Someone can take the communities work, make piles of money with it, and contribute NOTHING back to the community. Greed makes the world go around, baby
I'm mystified what the motivation would be to work on something like that unless its just another paycheck.