Health insurance is different from most other forms of insurance, though - auto insurance, for example, doesn't pay for oil changes to mitigate the risk of expense of future liability claims.
At least in my country it is very common for auto insurance companies to pay to have windscreen chips repaired, as it's cheaper than waiting for the whole window to fail (possibly causing am accident in the process).
automobile risk avoidance is a lot less complex than health risk avoidance - a lot more people change their own oil than draw their own blood. Also, oil changes would only mitigate the risk of early engine failure which wouldn't be covered by typical policies.
Okay, that was a bad example. I've never carried comprehensive/collision insurance, so I mistakenly thought there was coverage for mechanical failures. As you stated, this is not common.
> There’s nothing preventing the FBI from writing that hacked software itself, aside from budget and manpower issues.
My understanding is that this isn't correct, and is in fact the focal point of the order:
> This signature check is why the FBI cannot load new software onto an iPhone on their own — the FBI does not have the secret keys that Apple uses to sign firmware.
The FBI can subpoena/nsl/all-writs-act the necessary signing key, if necessary. That would probably be easier than ordering Apple to write a new (miss-)feature, as this would only be turning over existing data, similar to a subpoena for common business records or the footage from a surveillance-camera.
As a non US person me either, I wonder what the long term prospects for US tech firms will be like in a post-snowden world, general public mostly doesn't care but techies in other countries do.
I'm in the process of pull our stuff back towards virtualization on hardware we control in a DC up the road, it's not that our gov are any better but at least it minimises one risk surface.
indeed what puzzles me most in the public discussion is that it revolves around the effects to US citizens. Not just in this discussion but also others that evaluate backdooring or outlawing encryption, there is a strong argument (mostly from law enforcement friendly camps) on how to best do this from a semi tech-perspective. And I wonder have they actually thought further about what happens if not just Apple but Google, Microsoft, and the network vendors (CISCO, Alcatel etc) are going to be forced to intentionally break their security in some way.
Never mind the Chinese then requesting their own backdoors in US products or localized versions of these backdoors. The bigger issue is who will buy their stuff? How do they market their products without being laughed at? EU market might be splintered and can easily be dismissed compared to Asia in volume and EU is currently loudest in terms of pro-privacy (often just so they can say they are in the face of the US to cover their own incompetence (disclosure: European here)). The way I see it from a business pov: if you break a reasonably good product and everyone knows it's broken then other competitors maybe in other markets will move in to fill the gap.
> indeed what puzzles me most in the public discussion is that it revolves around the effects to US citizens.
Well, debates about US laws involve how those laws affect things and people within US jurisdiction, who are almost entirely US residents.
And IMO it's a very very good thing when judges decide based on what the actual law is, rather than based on what some transnational corporation's balance sheet might look like next quarter.
Confusing title - to add some clarification from the article:
> He's a federal police officer at the Marine Corps Air Station-Miramar in San Diego.
Ronnie, the male passenger is employed as a Federal police officer, but his wife (driving) does not have her employment specified, nor are they driving an official vehicle or on Federal business. He also sounds more worried about losing his job than having his employer go to bat for him:
> "It makes me angry that someone would attack my character because not only do they attack my character, but that could cost me my job," Ronnie said.
If there were two tiers of citizenship - the police and the non-police - and the former has an implicit right to confiscate assets from the latter, of course anyone would worry about losing their police job.
>> Watts is also off the road, but by her own choosing. She remains with the Florida Highway Patrol but no longer looks for speeders because she is afraid her fellow officers would no longer back her up in an emergency.
Miami PD is one of the most corrupt departments in FL. My wife was harassed and ticketed by a fat cop who got out of the car smoking a cigar and stunk of alcohol with gold chains around his neck.
Earlier she had pulled into a parking garage that was mislabeled and scrapped the roof of the truck. The attendant called their boss who called their insurance, who said to get a police report and they would cover it. She got a ticket for reckless driving. Thankfully the attendant stayed on the scene the whole time, because my wife got the sense that the cop was alluding to her negotiating her way out of such a hefty ticket.
Fortunately my wife's friend (who we where visiting) is very good friends with the chief of the Hollywood PD and made a call, who then made a call to Miami PD, long story short a supervisor came out, ripped up the ticket apologized to my wife, wrote the police report about the garage and left, but before he did he told her it would be best if this where the end of the incident. Nothing was ever said or done about the other officer.
Agreed it is a shame that one has to have connections to avoid transgressions that should not happen in the first place. I was thankful for those connections at the time but very uneasy about the whole situation. The lesson learned is that we avoid Miami, which is difficult given that we live in the Florida Keys and it sits directly in our path to the mainland.
I hadn't heard of this case before but it'd not a surprise to me.
It's completely tangential but I have taken great delight in the reaction of people to Making a Murderer.
I have talked to people who are in absolute disbelief that police officer can and do act that way. I tell them that they're only surprised because they haven't been paying attention.
"American Greetings said Thursday that it has acquired Blue Mountain Arts, the struggling online greeting division of Excite@Home, for $35 million in cash"
oh yeah, I forgot how it imploded so soon after the acquisition. I knew it stuck out in my head as the worst acquisition for a reason other than the price paid, especially the cash part - $350M in cash.
And so, if you look at the pictures, you'll see an interesting number denoting the quantity of plutonium powering the device. It's not measured in grams, or even micrograms, or any unit of mass, as would be common with ordinary materials. Instead, the quantity of plutonium is measured in curies.
And is there a means of converting curies to mass?
Well, sort of... except radioactive decay generally means the original mass of a sample of material has been steadily converting itself into something else over time, so to provide a measurement of mass might not be a practical piece of information later on, and given the application in these circumstances, the gross weight of the device is more relevant than the mass of the plutonium therein, and the power provided by the plutonium, and how hot the slug is, turns out to be the more interesting number.
So what's a curie?
The term "specific activity" is defined as the amount
of radioactivity - or the decay rate - of a particular
radionuclide per unit mass of the radionuclide. For
example, the specific activity of Ra-226 is 1, meaning
that one gram of Ra-226 contains one (1) curie (assumed
to be uniformly distributed throughout that mass)
http://www.iem-inc.com/information/tools/specific-activities
And, so based on all those pictures, the devices seem to average ~2.0 to ~4.3 curies of plutonium.
The specific radioactivity of plutonium, according to the above source, is:
Pu-238 - 1.7E1
So, approximately one or two grams per device.
Based on all this information, I bet harvesting plutonium pacemakers would be way more lucrative than stealing kidneys.
A very interesting document. Unfortunately you can't trivially copy-paste text from it, so instead I'll like to direct readers to page 4, to the text that starts below figure 5. It seems that most of the size/weight of the nuclear pacemaker was because of shielding, that was designed to withstand even an airplane crash or getting hit by a bullet - all because plutonium is a substance from hell that will kill you if you let it in your blood or expose to air. OTOH radiation was not a concern, measured levels under normal operation were way below safety limits.
I wish more devices could make use of something like this. In sure there are other safety concerns involved but I'd love to replace the forever dying AA batteries in my mouse with one of these and forget about it forever. What does a nuclear battery cost I wonder...
