Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclusion, and shown that he has thoughtfully weighed the contrary argument. He may well have done so and formed a very sound opinion of the project. We just don't know.

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-handed. Once they actually go down that road, we'd want them to think our agencies are completely incompetent.

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

Right.

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.

Sure. We're better. But we need to be even better than that.

I'd say more than just the "community". We have a great many companies that incorporate this software and generate billions from the sales of applications or services incorporating it, without returning anything to its maintenance.I think it's a sensible thing to ask Intuit, for example: "What did you pay to help maintain OpenSSL?". And then go down the list of companies.

OK guys. We've promoted Open Source for decades. We have to own up to our own problems.

This was a failure in the Open Source process. It is just as likely to happen to closed source software, and more likely to go unrevealed if it does, which is why we aren't already having our heads handed to us.

But we need to look at whether Open Source projects should be providing the world's security without any significant funding to do so.

You seem to think that Harvard divesting from fossil fuels will cause companies like Exxon-Mobil to collapse overnight.

This is largely a symbolic action. If many other institutional investors follow suit, it's *still* not going to stop companies from pumping natural gas out of their wells, any more than divesting in gold mining would cause gold mines to stop taking gold out of the ground. The last thing a troubled business would do is starve a cash cow.

What divestiture *might* do, in the most wildly optimistic scenario imaginable, is divert a *tiny* fraction of the world's investment in developing new energy stocks toward renewables. Were that to lead eventually to electricity shortages, the price of fossil fuels would automatically rise. That would attract plenty of new investment. A modest rise in prices would swamp any conceivable stock price effect of divestiture, even if all the universities in the world did this.

Finally, as an MIT alum who's taken courses at Harvard, people who manage to land a professorship at the country's oldest and most prestigious university are usually pretty damned smart. That doesn't mean "always right", but it does mean that they probably understand the practical effects of such a move better than you apparently do. This is a university that has managed to build the largest endowment of any educational institution in the world: over 32 *billion*. If that were *market capitalization*, it'd put them on S&P's list of the 100 largest companies in the world. Halliburton's only worth 30 billion.

Jeff, I'm sorry that you're paying more. I'm envious that your state is implementing single-payer, though! California considers and rejects the bill every session, so far.

MVP itself is not-for-profit. Interesting that they think the pool in the two states they focus on is now that much more expensive. I can't imagine why.

Thanks

Bruce

To pick a nit, if you require medical attention after an auto accident, typically the at-fault driver's auto policy would need to cover that.

If they are so kind to stick around and your expenses do not exceed the limits.

Certainly such scams existed, but 30 seconds of googling can typically separate the good from the fraud.

The web helps. At the time, I was not able to see the plan until the salesman was present.

I think you are confusing laissez-faire capitalism with freedom. In this particular case the insurers had the task of operating a risk pool, but no incentive to allow any but the lowest risk customer into the pool. Freedom was harmed overall, as a significant number of people had no viable path to medical care.

There are a good number of people who, like you, would feel less encumbered if they were able to live on an island without any civil services and thus without any burden to pay for their fellow man rather than themselves. My surmise is that few of them would survive very long. However, I would encourage you to try if you are able to find such a place. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

I am hardly surprised that insurance companies do not like the situation of having any additional regulation imposed upon them and will raise fees or do anything else they can do to protest and to discredit it.

If you've even hung around the emergency department of a hospital, you will have seen where the real cost of uninsured patients was going. Suddenly this cost is transferred from the hospital to subsidized plans. Ultimately, it should result in better management of the expense.

If you have so few choices in that state, I'll bet the problem is government-based cronyism.

I think it's called laissez-faire capitalism. Too little regulation means that the market will concentrate on the most profitable customers and not necessarily provide any service at all to others.

The point of insurance is that it's a risk pool that lowers the cost of saving to pay for a catastrophe for every participant, based on the probability that most folks won't need it. But it doesn't work for the folks who aren't allowed in the pool. And the reality is that everyone will need it sometime, and that it is normal for a society for some proportion of its people to be sick.

We have actually had some good insurance regulators in California. I don't know much about the current one but he seems to have achieved a pro-citizen rather than pro-company record.

I did not check with the state before I rejected the trash plan, perhaps it wasn't legal.