Unlocked phones are becoming more available, and more carriers offer "bring-your-own-device" plans. So this should be offered as something you get installed by small phone retailers or, for more volume, bulk importers of phones and tablets. It's useful for people who don't want to be tied to Google or Apple online services.

Thank you for that small courtesy.

Long story short: The same reason Coca-cola is rolling out machines that change the price depending on how hot it is. It's not just about how much it costs, or what the profit margin is... it's also about how much you're willing to pay. And when it's pay up or die, unsurprisingly, they charge infinity.

It's not a simple model. It's you're an asshole. I've worked in hospitals. I have several friends who are doctors. They are some of the most compassionate and caring people you'll find, albeit with morbid senses of humor. You, on the other hand, have a stick up your ass thinking you can come in and shit on people who's jobs it is to save lives because you think you can make a political statement out of it. And yes, I will swear, and this is one of the few times when swearing is called for: It's when someone goes above and beyond to shit on good people.

And you sir, you did that. You didn't just pick on one person, you decided to unzip and drop a log on an entire industry filled with mostly good people, doing good things. And then you come and insult me? For calling you what you are - an asshole? Let me say this again: Fuck you. I have no respect for people like you... you're so wrapped up in your own ego you wouldn't know the truth if it burned your nose.

Just remember that the objective of the system is to satisfy a statutory requirement. Can whoever is responsible for this 'virtual fence' system testify in court/legislative session that they are 'aggressively using industry-standard IP geolocation technology to ensure that New Jersey electronic gaming is conducted in accordance with the law'? Probably so, even without anything arising to the level of perjury. After that, why try harder? If there are lucrative, or sufficiently whiny, customers too close to the border for IP geolocation to work, maybe the ROI/flack avoidance value of working with ISPs to whitelist a few edge-case customers will be worth it; but leave crowing about having shut down somebody's trivial proxy site to the Attorney General or the DA, they get off on that kind of feel-good nonsense, and it's one less thing for you to do.

It's like doing CISPA compliance. Do you think that the people who do that are utter morons who actually think that they can keep horny adolescents away from smut? Hardly. But they need a system that complies with that mandate, without breaking the budget or soaking up lots of admin time, and in it goes.

What the fuck man? Seriously... you're signing up to pull parts of cars out of people. You're gonna tell someone they have cancer and 3 months to live. You're gonna be explaining to someone the surgery didn't go well and they're going to be leaking shit out of their ass for the rest of their life. Or that you have to amputate their leg. Or that they have AIDS. You think people sign up for that so they can be indoctrinated? And you think I don't understand? Fuck you man. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! These people bust their asses for long hours for years, dealing with blood, guts, shit, and gore, out of a genuine conviction that life is sacred. And you come here and you shit on that to serve your own political needs? FUCK. YOU.

The high costs are because they need to be highly trained, there is no margin for error, because unlike your job, when they fuck up, they have to bury their mistakes. So don't you dare twist around a profession that sooner or later, you're gonna need because that's what they do. They don't judge. They heal drug dealers and terrorists, and saints and grade school teachers. That's their job. That's what they do. No politics. No bullshit. Just the job. The job of saving lives.

No, these implementations are clearly incomplete, 'Simple Newborn Management Protocol', they say; but it's all read-only. The MIBs look a bit thin, as well.

Until they fix that, you'll still need a supply of excuses for why it's always the junior admin's turn when you need to go poke the thing.

Monitoring isn't free (either in terms of instruments, operator attention, or reactions to false positives), so throwing some unvalidated mechanism at a group of deeply emotionally invested, and mostly statistically clueless, operators is pretty much certain to give them another thing to stress out about, but far less certain to provide either reduced mortality or even useful information.

There are a great many things that would be neat to look at if the cost of looking were lower; but there are a lot of low-probability events where the cost of looking (either in instruments, or in operator attention and sanity) is just too high to be worth the trouble.

Just think of it as a Tamagotchi; but connected to some obnoxious squirmy thing that smells funny, eventually turns into a teenager, does some drugs, and has to be sent to college.

Are you saying that staring at a screen full of numbers isn't somehow intrinsically enlightening, even when you don't know what the numbers mean, and have no idea what they should look like, so you can't even say that they don't look right, much less anything more enlightened than that?

Heresy!

First, this hasn't been verified. You're citing a single (deleted) post on an internet forum. It would be like me claiming Microsoft CEO Ballmer visits my cube during late nights coding and molests me. Credibility = Zero.

Second, quality control is handled externally to FoxConn -- or at least it damn well should have been. I don't think this is a worker revolt. We would have seen more than one post. If you ask me, it's one of two things -- the most likely is a bad batch of capacitors or other commodity parts. It's happened before -- just ask Monkey Man (who isn't molesting me, btw) about the XBox 360's RROD (Red Ring Of Death) -- which was traced to substandard parts and compounded by poor design regarding air circulation within the unit. The other possibility, an outlier, but considering this is Sony... is that their DRM has malfunctioned in a spectacular fashion. There are literally dozens of layers of DRM in this device, and it could be that a conflict has emerged at the hardware level due to authentication, etc. But like I said, it's an outlier; My money is on shit components.

P.S. I can already hear the heads bubbling over of certain people because I mentioned regulation as being a problem, yet am suggesting institutionalizing health care. This is not the paradox you think it is: Much of our regulation is due to private interests demanding it. Just ask Tesla Motor Co. Canada, Spain, the UK, they've all done quite well at providing decent health care in an institutional capacity... though the UK system is showing signs of needing some attention due to neglect of late.

And yes, I know you can probably demonstrate any one of fifty different angles and case studies on how those systems are sub-optimal compared to ours. I answer with two statistics: Infant mortality in the United States, and current life expectancy. In those countries, they're going down, and up, respectively. In ours, the reverse is currently true. It's generally true that if you have money here and get sick, this is the best place to be. But in those countries, you don't get sick as often, because there's a focus on preventative care, not treatment. Here, specialists outnumber general practitioners about 3 to 1. There, the reverse is true.

If we look at it from a macro-perspective; At the societal level, their system is beating ours on both costs, and quality of life. And if the overall health of the general public, while maintaining reasonable costs, are your priorities, you cannot support our current privatized system.

You're both wrong. That's not why our health care system went to hell. It's insurance companies. They're turning a profit on human misery. But ignoring that side of the equation, there's also excessive regulation. This article talks about how low-cost it is to actually make the equipment. And they're right. Meeting the standards is pretty easy. But that's not where the costs are. As I'm sure the designers know, or will soon discover, it's getting certification for their equipment. Certification is the reason why a table-side bed in a hospital costs $500, but you can pick up the exact same item, for home use, off Amazon for about $35 plus S&H.

If you want to fix the health care system, you're going to have to do something you don't want to do: You're going to have to give up on capitalism. Private-run insurance, private-run health care, private-run... kill it. Burn it all to the ground. Europeans figured out a long time ago that capitalism is good with non-essential commodities, but it's absolute shit with natural resources or essential goods and services that have a non-trivial cost. Electricity. Telecommunications. Gas. Internet. Health care. Transportation. These are not things that capitalism has done well with; The owners of these key resources make a fuckton of money, but the rest of us are enslaved to poverty to do so. Capitalism only works when there's a natural tendancy towards competition, and there isn't any in those areas. The invisible hand can kiss my invisible ass, because it doesn't work the way people have been led to believe. It works well much of the time. It works very well when the cost of entry into the market is low and there's no natural monopoly (like land, to use the quintessential example). But to say it always works, or to try and shoehorn it into markets and situations that it has a poor history with, is stupid. Nothing always works. Ever. Capitalism is no different -- put it to good use where it is efficient and effective, but it's not a "spray on all surfaces" sort of ideology. In fact, no such ideology has ever been created.

$22,000 doesn't buy a lot of "world change". Sorry. And there's this other thing called quality of life: Our suck. We work 40, 50, even 60 hours a week doing stressful jobs, waking up at the butt crack of dawn, and dragging ourselves and our cars through miles of clogged roadways, etc., all for those few glorious hours on friday night and saturday where we can relax. And do you wanna know what I think of "world change" at 3pm on a Friday? Fuck. World. Change. I wanna go home, kick off my shoes, and forget that I'm just one of a couple hundred million other Americans grinding away their body and soul in thankless jobs. All I want, is some soothing, mind numbing entertainment. And alcohol. Over a third of Americans are alcoholics, and we have the highest incident rate of mental illness of any country on Earth. Three guesses as to why, and first two don't count.

So don't ask me about "world change". Nobody really cares about it once they get out of college and realize the next forty years of their life is going to be spent worrying about bills, about the car, about the kids, about whether the boss likes you, about... well, everything. Entertainment... and drugs... is what allows us to get by. Don't even think about trying to take either one away... it's all we have left besides over-priced coffee and status symbol cars to make us happy.

Excuse me, but you're wrong. Very. Wrong. You think your doctors, nurses, etc., have an easy time of it? Let me break it down for you:

Wanna be a doctor? You're going to need four years of medical school. Cha-ching: $156,000 was the average student loan debt for a graduate. In 2009. You may have heard; tuition has been showing double-digit percentage gains every year since. But let's ignore that. Now you'll need another five years of surgical residency training. Yay! You get to start making money here! Er, $56,000 a year average. Great, right? Nope. That average salary comes with the expectation of up to eighty hours a week. Rumor has it the government plans on putting restrictions on this; if that happens, your 5 years just became about 7. Fun fact: Most residents defer their student loans during this time period (did you say compound interest? Oh yeah baby!). There's another cost too: Medical malpractice insurance. It's quite a bit higher for residents, but let's say you make it all the way out into the field. Yay! You're a doctor! A prestigious position where you make so much money even Tony Stark would nod his head approvingly. Well... actually, no. For all this work; you can now earn $156,000 a year as a pediatrician or family practitioner. Nice, huh? Not so fast there, sunshine: The government wants its due: Your takehome is now about $4022 biweekly, or a take home of $104,572 per year. Om nom nom! And don't even think about trying to get a specialist job for another 4-8 years.

Oh, and now that you can pay those student loans you might have forgotten about? on a 10 year repayment plan, your monthly loan payment will be $1,795.25 or thereabouts. That's $21,543 per year. Sooo now your take home is down to $83,029. But wait, there's more: Medical malpractice insurance to the tune of around $3,000 per year. Burp. $80k.

So after 11 years of hard work, maybe more, you can finally sit back and enjoy your first year's wages. You probably won't reach parity with your non-college educated peers that are making median income for another 7 years, but hey -- it's a prestigious line of work. Oh, I should mention one more thing: Thanks to the medicare crisis, your salary's probably going to drop by 15-20% over the next 7 years because of all those old people that are going to no longer be contributing anything to the economy except racking up medical bills and passing on their massive consumer debt (which eclipses the national debt, by the way -- you think the government is bad at managing their checkbook, wait until you see what the Boomers did with theirs) to those still able to work. And you can bet the top earners -- of which you are now in that category despite your own high debt load, are going to be paying for.

And to use your own words, "That's why in the US there's almost no money spent educating people on basic health and nutrition" ... except that's a lie. We do educate them, they just don't listen. Not that it would matter much at this point even if we shovelled piles of cash by the dump truck load into our public schools... because the Boomers bled us dry, and there's nobody investing in infrastructure or anything anymore. They lived beyond their means, and I sincerely doubt America will recover, at least not in our lifetimes. Get used to each generation earning less than the previous for the next 70 years or so.

You're ignoring another part of the equation, perhaps even more important: A 100% conviction rate. Law enforcement need only enter a properly-formatted search string into one of dozens of popular search engines, and it will happily print out a list of every website bearing this meta tag. A whois search and a phone call later, it's time to kick in the door of Sir Web Provider, demand the customer records for the web site, and then rain down upon him like... well, like the NSA. -_-

The fact that a company has received a NSL doesn't provide any context by itself; Any sufficiently large company can probably be expected to have received at least one. It offers you no guidance on a course of action, either as a citizen or a criminal.

And you're giving them an argument to expand their powers that may just hold weight with the current sitting justices: If companies are leaking that they're receiving NSLs, then one easy solution would be to spam them on pretty much every company with over 500 employees. Thus your "canary" meta tag appears on every. damn. page., and loses any value as an indicator.