The issue isn't that insurance companies are evil. It's that they need to be profitable. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. And as Potter explains, he's watched an insurer's stock price fall by more than 20 percent in a single day because the first-quarter medical-loss ratio had increased from 77.9 percent to 79.4 percent.

The reason we generally like markets is that the profit incentive spurs useful innovations. But in some markets, that's not the case. We don't allow a bustling market in heroin, for instance, because we don't want a lot of innovation in heroin creation, packaging and advertising. Are we really sure we want a bustling market in how to cleverly revoke the insurance of people who prove to be sickly?

I have a problem with the concept of medical insurance companies. The goal of a corporation is to maximize share-holder value. Officers and employees of the corporation are negligent if they are not pursuing that goal as rigorously as possible within the confines of the law. Only we are not talking about using market forces to drive innovation to make the best, cheapest, yet acceptable widget. We are talking about the lifespan and quality of life of a human. Can you imagine the concept of Planned Obsolescence applied to healthcare?

A more chilling (and often overlooked) point is that the entire purpose of insurance is to protect you from the effects of rarely occurring but catastrophic events. So you have in place a system whose function is to be as profitable as possible when its customers are struggling with the most damaging and life altering events that can occur. Yet the needs of the medical insurance corporation seem completely perpendicular to the needs of the patient.

I have a very difficult time reconciling this.

Rescission

Gold Star!

Don't be put off by the first page as the rants of a paranoid, technical Luddite. This is a well written examination of American privacy and the laws and regulations attempting to protect it. From the creation of companies like Equifax (in 1899 to help grocery stores in Atlanta track who paid their bills and who didn't) to the 4 four distinct kinds of invasion and the legal safeguards around each (embodied today in regulations like HIPAA), to the digitization of records in the 1960s and the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, to the effects of 9/11 and beyond.

An excellent read to privacy advocates and the lay-person alike.

Technology Review: Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence

default:
  throw new Exception("Oops! I tried to process  but got a " + this.Kind + " .  I don't like that :-(");

Funniest exception I've seen all month.

Hijexx wrote:

Acidus wrote:
This could be interesting...

Looks like putting munging logic in a separate .js is a workaround... for now.

Email munging failing is only a mildly cool side effect of a much more fundamental issue. If this is true (and it might not be), its a sign that Google is toying with JavaScript execution, most likely in an effort to crawler the deeper, JavaScript-focus web apps of today.

As someone who has spend 4 years or so writing tokenizers, parsers, interpreters, machine controlled dynamic execution logic, and static analysis frameworks for JavaScript, this is extremely interesting. There's an enormous amount of IP in that space, things that all fall in that stuff I love but cannot chat about box. I'd like to see how the PhD stud field that is Google R&D tackled some of these issues.

RE: Google parsing document.write()'s?

Penny Arcade! - Le Twittre

This is a very cool use of shimming native functions. So far I've only seen malicious uses of function shimming. We discussed shimming Ajax calls to man-in-the-middle browser traffic in Chapter 7 in Ajax Security and Jeremiah had the very cool Array() constructor attack against Google before that.

Here MooTools is shimming document.write() to prevent its blocking behavior. 3rd party advertisers and others use document.write()'s and it can harm page performance quite a bit. Typically web developers cannot do anything because since these commands come from 3rd party components they do not control. Now a developer can shim document.write(), still have ads, and not kill page load performance.

very very cool.

Replace document.write using MooTools

This could be interesting...

Google parsing document.write()'s?

Some interesting graphs in here about IE adoption. IE 8 is gaining at the expense of IE 7, not IE6. IE6 and IE8 now have a larger market share than IE7. This is mainly due to corporation intranet apps that require IE6.

msdevdays.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Not as good of a song as his cover of Sweet Dreams but good none the less...

Pretty sure that Cheerleader is the chick from My Name is Earl.

And, to paraphase Tom's wisdom about sheep I can only get off if the lingerie model is wearing a bunny head. ;-)

Tainted Love Cover

the is excellent.

I absolutely love the massive security advances made by Microsoft with IE8. So much so that I wish I had the power to magic kill all instances of IE6 with my eyebrow.

Every family's got one.