It also works for car insurance. Car insurance and health insurance require you purchase a product from a variety of companies. With CMMI requirements you can only purchase the product from a single company.

When a person is incarcerated they lose their privacy. The "right to privacy" may not be spelled out in the constitution but I think it is obvious the government considers taking away a person's privacy to be a form of punishment. The Constitution says the government may not punish the citizens without a trial.

I pay something like $15/gig for overages on Verizon's 6/gig/month "Mobile Broadband" service. Looks like the days of 3G/4G on phones being cheaper than 3G/4G on USB dongles is over. I am a bit surprised overage prices for phone data are so high. Are you sure you are not on an old plan where overage charges were sky high?

The main difference to these "if the government can force you to buy health insurance, then the government can force you to buy anything" people seems to be which government is forcing you to do something. They accept when state or local governments force you to buy something such as auto insurance, liability insurance, trash pick up, etc. They only have a problem with the idea when those dirty stinking socialists who run the federal government force you to buy something. States have had the opportunity to do health insurance reform for a very long time. For the most part they didn't even try.

I still have nightmares from that. We call it Intel NIC Debacle of 2013 (or sometimes just The Dark Times). Lost business and had many very angry customers because of that NIC. Kristian Kielhofner should be named some sort of geek Saint or something for finding the root of the problem.

When I said "information which identifies specific individuals" I meant Name, birthdate, social security number, address, etc. I did not mean gender, smoker, or specific genes.

Genetic data is a thorny issue. It can be very useful to have as complete genetic profile as possible in some data sets, especially when you don't know exactly what you are looking for. An example might be the genetic profiles of large numbers of breast cancer patients. As you learn more it could be useful to go back and different other queries against the genetic data.

We need laws which prohibit most data sets from having personally identifiable information as well as laws which require the data be kept secure and not sold. More importantly we need existing laws enforced.

I wondered if anyone was going to bring that up. I do not feel a birth date belongs in anonymous data. Age (birth year) should be enough for most data sets. The zipcode issue is tougher, but I don't think it is needed for most data sets.

Each new disclosure will push another bunch of people "over the line" and they will stop believing the NSA is a good thing. Welcome to the Paranoid Nutjob side, soon to be simply called "everyone". For years and years we were few, but now our ranks are growing every day. Soon you'll start wondering if your SSL session is secure, then start using cash more often, then stop shopping online. You'll either go totally crazy or find a balance between privacy and convenience. Eventually you'll assume everything a person in power says is a lie unless proven otherwise.</onlypartlyinjest>

It's hard to do any sort of study of large groups of people if you can't at some point collect and aggregate data about all the individuals involved.

I disagree. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals for market research or television ratings. Those are just a few examples. Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness.

I think most human behavior will eventually be explained by 100,000 years of evolution and the drive to pass on genes. I wonder how making stuff up when you can't know the answer improves the chances of a human passing on their genes. There must have been some evolutionary advantage during the 90,000 years humans were hunter-gatherers.

<blockquote>BTW, how effective can QoS really be? I'm a little bit skeptical.</blockquote>

You can only QoS the transmits. To do it correctly, you must do QoS on both ends of the circuit. You can do some "poorman's QoS" by putting it on the transmit side of your router, but that only helps with TCP, not UDP and relies on TCP's throttling.

If governments don't reign in corporate abuses with regulations and oversight, who do you think should? Corporations have demonstrated they cannot self-regulate and cannot self-oversee. Cronyism is the default, unless prevented by someone/something more powerful than the corporation.

some people don't want health care

I disagree. Some people don't want to pay for health insurance, but when (not if) they break a leg, get pneumonia, or any number of problems which require medical care they want medical care. If they can't pay, someone else has to foot the bill. I call those people freeloaders because they show up expecting health care even if they can't have to pay for it.

Some people also don't want automobile insurance, but I don't see many of them calling it socialist and fighting it at every opportunity.

He is a rather lousy as a king or as a president. He allowed his "signature legislation" to be gutted to become the worst of socialized health care combined with the worst of privatized health care. The same people screaming about the evils of Obamacare are the same people who would be screaming about how terrible socialized medicine is. With socialized health care at least everyone would get health care.

Like just about everything, you can go to the extreme with vitamins. However, $7.68 for 220 count store brand multi-vitamins is not going to break my budget. If the pharmaceutical industry can make enormous profits from that, well good for them.