Under US federal law (Medicare/Medicaid), an individual hospital/doctor is required to bill patients the same amount for the same exact service, so you're also going to see them billing the most they're ever going to see out of any insurer at a minimum. This amount gets lowered significantly under what you referred to under the Contractual Obligation section you see on your insurance statement usually, unless you have some weird out of network rules. The Contractual Obligation is what the insurance company has bargained with the medical providers to pay for the service. Unfortunately this rule tends to hurt people without insurance, as they have to be billed the same amount initially as well too, although at least hospitals will often be willing to work with people and lower this amount afterward, as they'd rather get paid a lower amount than not at all.

I'm a few years removed from Usenet, but outside of a few moderated groups, the spam was out of control. If you think ads are bad now, the cost of ads/spam there was essentially 0, so people went all out. If people were going to make a move back there, it would take something a bit more robust than Google groups or some simple spam filters on your favorite Usenet client to make it usable on any scale, especially once advertisers realized there was a critical mass.

Several months ago after one of the Internet large password breaches the company offered several "forever" codes on Reddit as a gesture of goodwill. Amazingly enough those are now coming up as these suspicious licenses now. I suppose you can't complain about something you got for free, even if it wasn't pirated. I have another year of the license now before it expires instead of lifetime.

And then you have the random car driving off scene from The Shining?

Notice what she says: "She went on to note that the DOJ dedicates significant time and resources to protecting the privacy of Americans from criminals who steal financial and credit card information, online predators that stalk and exploit children, and cyber thieves who steal the trade secrets of American organizations." The DOJ may very well still be spying on you. She even throws in the "for the children" card.

I blame the animal lovers. Hands off the pigs.

I've had good luck with them, it uses Golden Frog. I'll admit I haven't come up against a situation where turning over logs or IP addresses to any outside party is an issue that I'm aware of. It is nice to be able to jump to location specific vpn's at will. Outside of the occasional out of region game, I'm more interested in stopping my ISP from seeing my traffic. I get this service "free" with my giganews account.

And the pharmaceutical companies that patented the new "environmentally friendly" inhalers didn't do any lobbying on the issue I'm sure.

I've found that insurance companies don't always want you to know either. My current explanations of benefits from my insurance company will not tell me what any of the procedures are, and I've found they won't tell me what they are when I call either. It is only by eventually matching it up with the itemized doctors' bills later, that I'm able to have any idea why a visit warranted 4 charges. I would not think this would be a good way to get people to report fraud.

I remember some old AMD slot style CPU's would smell like waffles when they burned out. Good times.

I stopped taking naps when I was three, and have had insomnia ever since. Luckily I have discovered the joy that is amitriptyline.