Not really. You are aware that not all GSM or CDMA networks are configured identically, operate on the same frequency bands, etc., right? That translates to different radio tables in the baseband firmware, different dipole antenna lengths in the per-carrier phone models, and so on. There are also differences in the SIM/IMEI code exchange when doing a cell hand-off between cell towers in various countries.

Further, one of the things that the iPhone did early on with Orange was reclock the application CPU to a different frequency in the UK, since the CPU frequency happened to be a harmonic of the carrier band preferred by that provider. That meant that grey-market iPhones imported from the U.S., as opposed to configured for sale in the U.K., tended to drop calls, and ran at a slightly slower clock frequency than those configured for the U.S..

Rogers (the GSM carrier in Canada) faced similar issues.

You mean snarky, as in suffixing every paragraph with the snarky, pseudo-pedantic "See how easy that was?", and being pedantic about being too damn literal about terms when it's obvious that other countries have similar regulatory agencies to the FCC, but limiting yourself to pretending that the FCC is only a problem for the U.S., and it's totally clear sailing through the regulatory agencies of other countries?

All you had to do was ask politely.

See how easy that was?

The carriers don't pay the money; the money is paid per device by the OEM who wants to sell those devices.

Quite correct. I use "the FCC" in its royal sense here, i.e. to refer to all the regulatory agencies like the FCC that operate all over the world. I'm not going to list 120 regulatory agencies every time I talk about the type of regulation that's carried out by:

Albania: Telecommunication Regulatory Entity
Argentina: Secretaría de Communicaciones
Austria: Austrian Regulatory Authority for Telecommunications and Broadcasting
Australia: Australian Communications and Media Authority
Bahrain: Telecommunications Regulatory Authority
Barbados: Ministry of Finance, Investment, Telecommunications and Energy (MFIE)
[...]
United States: Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
[...]
Venezuela: Comisión Nacional de Telecommunicaciones
Western Samoa: Ministry of Communications and Information technology
Zambia: The Communications Authority (CAZ)

I think you get the freaking point here.

Passive voice effectively disclaims responsibility, and disclaims chain of responsibility, by making a statement without anyone owning it. It's also frequently used as an argument-without-evidence technique.

Uh... what other governments in supposedly non-corrupt jurisdictions respond to "Freedom Of Information Act" requests with ... actual information?

Try getting information on e.g. "Pussy Riot" out of the Putin government.

This is trivial, given that there are only a couple of federated diagnostic testing services in her area.

Looks like a bacterial infection of some kind, although they also checked for Pappilomavirus, two other STDs, and a fungal yeast infection, BVAB2, and strep.

87481 SureSwab ®, Vaginosis/Vaginitis Plus
87481 SureSwab ®, Bacterial Vaginosis/Vaginitis

87491 SureSwab ®, Vaginosis/Vaginitis Plus
87491 SureSwab ®, CT/NG, T. vaginalis
87491 Chlamydia/Neisseria gonorrhoeae, T. vaginalis, Qualitative, TMA and HSV 1/2 DNA, Real-Time PCR, Pap Vial
87491 Chlamydia/N. gonorrhoeae and T. vaginalis RNA, Qualitative, TMA, Pap Vial

87798 SureSwab ®, Trichomonas vaginalis RNA, Qualitative, TMA
87798 SureSwab ®, Vaginosis/Vaginitis Plus
87798 SureSwab ®, CT/NG, T. vaginalis
87798 Trichomonas vaginalis RNA, Qualitative, TMA, PAP Vial
87798 Chlamydia/N. gonorrhoeae and T. vaginalis RNA, Qualitative, TMA, Pap Vial
87798 Chlamydia/Neisseria gonorrhoeae, T. vaginalis, Qualitative, TMA and HSV 1/2 DNA, Real-Time PCR, Pap Vial

MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC LABORATORIES, L.L.C.
105 Chlamydia trachomatis
127 Group B Streptococcus (GBS)
164 Bacterial Vaginosis Associated Bacteria 2 (BVAB2)

These are probably not test codes that she should have published, given their sensitive nature.

I do agree with her assertion that medical billing is kind of terrible.

On the other hand, they intentionally make billing and coding as difficult as possible so that the doctors office has to correctly code it to the insurance companies liking before they are obligated to pay. Usually a medical office will try a couple of times, and then give up if they don't hit pay dirt, and just send the bill to the patient, and let them argue with the insurance company long enough to damage their credit for non-payment, or pay it out of pocket to save their credit.

HMOs are absolutely the worst for this, followed by PPOs.

I would have much preferred a single payer system, like Richard Nixon wanted (he was the first president to propose a national health care system), rather than the TARP III bailout for the insurance companies which we ended up getting with the ACA.

They pretty much requires a commercial policy.

http://www.kslegislature.org/l...

"Insurers writing automobile insurance in the state are allowed to exclude any and all coverage under the driver’s or vehicle owner’s insurance policy for any loss or injury occurring while the driver is logged on to a TNC’s digital network or providing a prearranged ride."

So basically, it's requiring that Uber carry the insurance on their drivers, rather than the drivers self-insuring, and gives insurance companies an "out" if they want to exclude insurance while the driver has the app running (i.e. is "on call") and while the driver is actually driving.

What insurance company is going to pass up being paid double for what would otherwise be a single policy?

I'm fairly certain that the biggest security threat is unverified and unmoderated software packages in the various web stores, and the ability to side-load applications. Most of the malware probably comes through the app installer, rather than a security exploit.

Although there have been issues with untrusted parties signing domain certs -- the latest was China's CNNIC root certificate removal -- and there are the heartbleed and other SSL exploits -- those are mostly untrusted public hotspot access or governmental eavesdropping attacks.

Malware is a much bigger problem.

Note that Apple is starting to have this same problem in China: there are unauthorized app stores which pirate apps (at best) or pirate them, and bundle them with malware, and then use an enterprise enrollment to let you install from their "enterprise app store", which is actually a pirate/malware site. But it's not nearly as widespread or fragmented as the Android marketplaces, and it's pretty easy to avoid -- unless you are going there because the app you want is not legally being sold by the app vendor in China. In which case: you take your chances.

Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Count Dooku, and the other Sith, of course.

They can prioritize all they want, but no one wants to pay for the carrier certification of thee modified SDRs, particularly when using a T-Zone on a Snapdragon chip in order to run the baseband, and the FCC demands that the SDR be certified as a unit (software + hardware). That's a carrier certifiiation per carrier, per country, per device, per version update.

Also no carrier using a contract lock-in revenue model is going to provide an update that doesn't lock you into a new contract, and a version update won't do that unless there's a charge for the update, based on FAS (Federal Accounting Standard) rules, since without an exchange of consideration, there is no contract. This is why Apple charged for the WiFi software update on iPods, and non-cellular network iPads, but didn't charge for cellular connected iPads and iPhones. It had to do with realization of revenue over time, versus a one time sale, and adding features to the device via software.

You should also be aware that the image that's shipped by the OEM is often not even buildable by Google engineers; apart from the fact that the devices used during development are generally signature neutered, and it's impossible to cryptographically sign the image for the given device without it either being neutered like that, or signing code that they device manufacturer generally does not share due to it containing a signing key they don't want out there... they entirety of the board file is generally not committed back to the Google maintained Android source tree. Nor is it maintained going forward so that it's up to date, nor is the remainder of the OS productization standardized across all the OEMs. They are trying to differentiate their products, after all, and my Samsung device looking and feeling exactly like a non-Samsung device is not in Samsung's interest: it makes them into a commodity, which is a quick race to the bottom on margin.

Google has significant dictatorial powers when it comes to Chromebooks, which are not available to the Android folks, even if they had the ability to code sign, and could dictate a code cut, the Android in the tree is pretty raw, and never productized.

Finally, Android lacks a uniform app ecosystem; this is a more or less direct consequence of having allowed third party stores, without a strong compatibility for the apps across all devices.

Seriously, one of the smartest things that Apple did was keep the baseband processor separate from the application processor so that there was no telecom recertification required, unless they were explicitly hacking the baseband for some reason (e.g. the carrier lock they did by re-doing the SIM/IMEI handshake when doing a hand-off between cell towers in order to intentionally break SuperSIMs and similar techniques for hardware carrier unlocks).

Without the app ecosystem and the continuity of app and other content going forward on Android -- which it doesn't -- I don't see a means of enforcing carrier lock-in to support that economic model, particularly if you started supporting software updates.

Actually, it does.

The Android partner model is to snapshot the tree, and then the OEM productizes the snapshot, adding hardware driver support, their own apps and UI changes, and then they do a deal with the carrier for badging and more apps -- like pointing by default to the OEM or carrier's app store, in order to monetize the device further.

This model exists to avoid disclosing information between OEMs and different carriers, since Google does not do the actual productization.

Because of this, pretty much every Android device, other than the ones which were Google-badged as "buy them from Samsung, resell them under the Google name", is a one-off with a one-off version of the OS. In order to update the OS, it'd be necessary to (effectively) re-do the port of the OS to the device for each new version.

On top of that, there's really not a lot of incentive for the carrier to have the versions of the OS an Android phone is running changing on them, since each new one requires recertification, and, depending on the degree of changes made to things like the baseband and changes in electronic noise due to changes in the software, FCC recertification, or whatever the local equivalent happens to be in your home country.

It's like building a whole new phone, except you're not getting paid for it, and theres no upsell to get you back under contract for the next 18 months.

In other words, it's a lose for everyone involved, due to the way the Android/OEM/Carrier relationship is structured, and there's no product continuity upsell like you have with the various iPhone models.

So Is Mac OS X.

I converted time_t to 64 bits on 64 bit systems (which include the most recent iPhones) as part of the changes for 64 bit binary support on the G5 when I wrote the 64 bit binary loader support into exec/fork/spawn, and again as part of UNIX Conformance. It's basically been fixed since Tiger.

Obviously... if it's AI, and it has some real world utility, then we rename it so that it's not AI any more. Then we complain loudly that "AI has never produced anything useful".

It's not like the script can run without the interpreter. Even if you were stupid enough to mount /tmp other than noexec (the default).

That's not what arbiter1 meant.

"Reading your opponent" doesn't rely on facial expressions or tells when you are playing online poker.

We send drivers on the road every day who don't have a clear idea how cars work.

Knowing how something works is nice, but not knowing how it works won't diminish its utility, so long as it *does*.

We use gravity daily to generate hydroelectric power. Ask a group of physicists how gravity works. We have the math for it, but we don't have the story of it. Either way, the lights come on when the water weight is converted from potential to kinetic energy, and we are still damned if we know the mechanism of conversion. If we did, we'd al be riding around on hoverboards.