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Comment One way around this is kind of plagerism.. (Score 1) 44

by museumpeace (#63955915) Attached to: Bloomsbury Chief Warns of AI Threat To Publishing
is to quit publishing original works of fiction or news or research on line. Publish descriptions of the content and paywall the rest. Restore paper and ink publishing and watermark the hard copies with whitespace "signatures" so you might trace the sources of parties that scan works just to be vacuumed up into some LLM. Sounds kinda luddite but we have painted ourselves into a technological corner...from which a low tech escape will leave the AI's few options for stealing content.
Medicine

US Health Insurers Caught Negotiating Worse Rates Than For Those With No Insurance (nytimes.com) 240

Posted by EditorDavid from the bad-deals dept.
In the U.S. healthcare system, "hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services," reports the New York Times — citing an investigation into medical care costs at 60 major hospitals.

This year the U.S. government ordered hospitals to publish complete lists of the prices they negotiate with private insurers, "and it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world's largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers." In fact America's government-run Medicare health insurance for senior citizens is negotiating much lower rates than the privately-insured patients are getting, the Times points out — sometimes paying just 10% of what the major health plans are paying.

"In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all..." Until now, consumers had no way to know before they got the bill what prices they and their insurers would be paying. Some insurance companies have refused to provide the information when asked by patients and the employers that hired the companies to provide coverage. This secrecy has allowed hospitals to tell patients that they are getting "steep" discounts, while still charging them many times what a public program like Medicare is willing to pay. And it has left insurers with little incentive to negotiate well.

The peculiar economics of health insurance also help keep prices high. Customers judge insurance plans based on whether their preferred doctors and hospitals are covered, making it hard for an insurer to walk away from a bad deal. The insurer also may not have a strong motivation to, given that the more that is spent on care, the more an insurance company can earn. Federal regulations limit insurers' profits to a percentage of the amount they spend on care. And in some plans involving large employers, insurers are not even using their own money. The employers pay the medical bills, and give insurers a cut of the costs in exchange for administering the plan.

Comment asbestos diapers (Score 1) 190

by museumpeace (#59171692) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Will The Internet Affect The Next Generation?
we had to invent e-mail before we could have flame wars. There are lots of communication modes which neither culture nor innate behavior are adapted to use responsibly. We keep digging up more. The anonymity factor of some social media make intense vitriol too easy to deliver...and so it gets delivered. As long as we keep handing out asbestos clothing, our weaknesses will have us tossing Molotov cocktails and brandishing flame throwers. And once used to that sort of behavior, it spills over. Also, talking just gets easier and faster but listening seems to be intractably difficult for most of us.

Comment I never trusted DRM'ed anything (Score 1) 161

I mourn O'Reilly getting Amazoned out out the ebook market...but I always and promptly downloaded the PDF versions. So I lost nothing. The premise of much of this market for media content is "we will make the stuff so cheaply they will buy our peculiar restrictions". No consumer should think a format or a vendor is a "forever" proposition. And "owning" a music library because you can always stream the track you want? Fugiddaboudit.

Comment CS is multi-platform software. (Score 1) 128

by solios (#58294200) Attached to: Is Adobe's Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good?

Yes, certain elements are kind of a pain in the ass on the Mac. But the Mac hasn't been the best platform to run CS apps on in years. Windows is. Hell, Photoshop runs better in Windows than it does in OS X *on identical hardware.*

Since the 90s, to maintain an Apple product, Adobe has had to: Port from 68k to PPC, then from Classic MacOS to OS X (Photoshop 7 SUCKED on the Mac, but it ran in both operating systems), then they had to adapt from OS X PPC to OS X Intel. Apple jerks their developers around constantly, while Windows just isn't the same kind of moving target.

While I'm sure you'd love it if Adobe conformed completely to Apple guidelines and played nicely with comparatively recent (I know 10.7 is "old" but the move to Intel is older than that) features that have no Windows equivalent, keep in mind that the more hassle the Apple market is to develop for, the less likely they are to develop for it. Remember when they stopped releasing Premiere for the Mac for awhile because it couldn't compete with Final Cut Pro?

I still use Photoshop on a Mac but only occasionally - I've moved my entire toolchain to Windows, and while it sucks in some ways the Mac experience doesn't I've gotten used to it. I'm looking at expanding my line art production software, as there's a few options in that space, but for graphical heavy lift Adobe has effectively cornered the market.

Importantly, I've been using it since 1997 - any alternative has to be featureful and intuitive, and it's competing with 20+ years of muscle memory and needs to be able to correctly read ~15 years of files.

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