Recently I learned from health.net, the insurer which did my individual plan, that they were canceling it. I'm one of those who lost his health plan with the switch to the ACA (Obamacare) plans, so I need to shop in the healthcare marketplace and will likely end up paying more.

What surprised me when I went to the marketplace was the math of the plans. For those who don't know, there are 4 main classes of plans (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) which are roughly the same for all insurers. There is also a 5th, "Catastrophic" plan available to under-30s and hardship cases, which is cheaper and covers even less than Bronze. Low income people get a great subsidized price in the marketplace, but people with decent incomes get no subsidy.

The 4 plans are designed so that for the average patient, they will end up paying 60% (Bronze), 70% (Silver), 80% (Gold) or 90% (Platinum) of health care costs, with the patient, on average, bearing the rest. All plans come with a "Maximum out of pocket" (MOOP) that is at most $6,350 for all plans but $4,000 (or less) for the Platinum.

Here's some analysis based on California prices and plans. The other states can vary a fair bit. Insurance is much cheaper in some regions, and there are plans that use moderately different formulae. In every state the MOOP is no more than $6,350 and the actuarial percentages are the same.

As you might expect, the Platinum costs a lot more than the Bronze. But at my age, in my early 50s, I was surprised how much more. I decided to plug in numbers for Blue Cross, which is actually slightly cheaper than many of the other plans. I actually have little information with which to compare the companies. This is quite odd -- my health insurance is going to be by biggest annual expenditure after my mortgage. More than my car -- but there's tons of information to help you choose a car. (Consumer Reports does have a comparison article on the major insurance companies before the ACA for their subscribers.)

The Platinum plan costs $350/month extra over Bronze, $4200/year. Almost as much as the MOOP. So I decided to build a spreadsheet that would show me what I would end up paying on each plan in total -- premiums plus my personal outlays. Here is the sheet for me in my early 50s:

The X axis is how much your health care actually cost, ie. what your providers were paid. The Y axis is how much you had to pay. The green line is unity, with your payout equal to the cost, as might happen in theory if you were uninsured. In theory, because in reality uninsured people pay a "list price" that is several times the cost that insurance companies negotiate. Also in theory because those uninsured must pay a tax penalty.

All the plans go up at one rate until they first hit your deductibles (Bronze/Silver) and then at a slower rate until you hit your MOOP. After the MOOP they are a flat line almost no matter what your health spending does. The Silver plan is the most complex. It has a $250 drug deductible and a $2000 general deductible and the usual $6,350 MOOP. In reality, these slopes will not be smooth lines. For example, on the silver plan if you are mostly doing doctor visits and labs, you do copays, not the deductible. If you hit something else, like MRI scans or hospitalization, you pay out the full cost until you hit the deductible. So each person's slope will be different, but these slopes are meant to represent an estimate for average patients.

The surprising thing about this chart is that the Bronze plan is pretty clearly superior. Only for a small region of costs does your outlay exceed the other plans, and never by much. However, in the most likely region for most people (modest health care) or the danger zone (lots of health care) it is quite a bit cheaper. The catastrophic plan, if you can get your hands on it over 30, is even better. It almost never does worse than the other plans.

I will note that the zone where Bronze is not the winner is around the $8,400 average cost of health care in the USA. However, what I really want to learn is the median cost, a statistic that is not readily available, or even better the median cost or distribution of costs at each age cohort. The actuaries obviously know this, and I would like pointers to a source.

Premiums are tax deductible for the self-employed, as are large medical expenses for all, but the outlays above premiums can also come from a Health Savings Account (HSA) which is a special IRA-like instrument. You put in up to around $3K each year tax-free, and can pay the costs above from it. (You also don't pay tax on appreciation of the account, and can draw out the money post-retirement at a decent rate.) If you are self-employed, depending on your tax bracket, this can seriously alter the chart and push you to a more expensive plan, because the premium money comes from pre-tax dollars and the health expenses don't, unless they are more than 10% of your total income.

The chart suggests the Bronze plan is the clear winner unless you know you will be in the $6K to $10K zone where it's a modest loser. It seems to beat the Platinum all the time (at least in this simplified model) but might have minor competition from the Silver. The Gold is essentially always worse than the Silver.

If we move to age 60, now the win for Bronze is very clear. At age 60, the $5500 extra premium for Platinum almost exceeds the MOOP on the Bronze -- the Bronze will always be cheaper. This makes no sense, and seems to be a result of the fact that the MOOP remains the same no matter how old you are (and is also the same for B/S/G/Cat.) Perhaps varying deductibles and the MOOP over time would have made more variety.

Here the Gold is clearly a loser to the Silver if you were thinking about it. Nobody in this age group should buy the Gold plan but I doubt the sites will say that. Platinum is almost as clearly a loss.

Thinking about money every time you use health care

With the choice for the older person so obvious, this opens up another question, namely one of psychology. The rational thing to do is to buy the Bronze plan. But with its $5,000 deductible, you will find yourself paying out of pocket for almost all your health care except in years you need major treatments and hospitalizations.

I always feel strange when I see blog and social network posts about the death of a pet or even a relative. I know the author but didn't know anything about the pet other than that the author cared.

Like many, I go to a lot of conferences and events. And many of those events have decided that they should give everybody a bag. Most commonly it's a canvas laptop sized bag, though sometimes it's a backpack and at cheaper events just a tote. Some of the bags are cheap, some are quite nice. Some come with just the logo of the event on them, and others come festooned with many logos from sponsors who bought a space on the bag.

Spokesmen for the MPAA, RIAA and several other content industry companies recently issued a statement of support for the new "Stop Airline Piracy Act" or SAPA, now before congress.

There are a large number of constitutional amendments being proposed to reverse the effects of the recent US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Here the court held that Citizens United, a group which had produced an anti-Hilary Clinton documentary, had the right to run ads promoting their documentary and its anti-Clinton message. It had been held at the lower court that because the documentary and thus the ads advocated against a candidate, they were restricted under campaign finance rules. Earlier, however, the court had held earlier that it was OK for Michael Moore to run ads for Fahrenheit 9/11, his movie which strongly advocated against re-electing George W. Bush. The court could not find the fine line between these that the lower court had held, but the result was a decision that has people very scared because it strips most restrictions on campaigning by groups and in particular corporations. Corporations have most of the money, and money equals influence in elections.

Most attempts at campaign finance reform and control have run into a constitutional wall. That's because when people talk about freedom of speech, it's hard to deny that political speech is the most sacred, most protected of the forms of speech being safeguarded by the 1st amendment. Rules that try to say, "You can't use your money to get out the message that you like or hate a candidate" are hard to reconcile with the 1st amendment. The court has made that more clear and so the only answer is an amendment, many feel.

It seems like that should not be hard. After all, the court only ruled 5-4, and partisan lines were involved. Yet in the dissent, it seems clear to me that the dissenters don't so much claim that political speech is not being abridged by the campaign finance rules, but rather that the consequences of allowing big money interests to dominate the political debate are so grave that it would be folly to allow it, almost regardless of what the bill of rights says. The courts have kept saying that campaign finance reform efforts don't survive first amendment tests, and the conclusion many have come to is that CFR is so vital that we must weaken the 1st amendment to get it.

With all the power of an amendment to play with, I have found most of the proposed amendments disappointing and disturbing. Amendments should be crystal clear, but I find many of the proposals to be muddy when viewed in the context of the 1st amendment, even though as later amendments they have the right to supersede it.

The problem is this: When they wrote that the freedom of the press should not be abridged, they were talking about the big press. They really meant organizations like the New York Times and Fox News. If those don't have freedom of the press, nobody does. And these are corporations. Until very recently it wasn't really possible to put out your political views to the masses on your terms unless you were a media corporation, or paid a media corporation to do it for you. The internet is changing that but the change is not yet complete.

Many of the amendments state that they do not abridge freedom of the press. But what does that mean? If the New York Times or Fox News wish to use their corporate money to endorse or condemn a candidate -- as they usually do -- is that something we could dare let the government restrict? Would we allow the NYT to do it in their newspaper, but not in other means, such as buying ads in another newspaper, should they wish to do so? Is the Fox News to be defined as something different from Citizens United?

I'm hard pressed to reconcile freedom of the press and the removal of the ability of corporations (including media ones) from using money to put out a political message. What I fear as that to do so requires that the law -- nay, the constitution -- try to define what is being "press" and what is not. This is something we've been afraid to do in every other context, and something I and my associates have fought to prevent, as lawsuits have tried to declare that bloggers, for example, were not mainstream press and thus did not have the same freedom of the press as the big boys.

At the positive end of my prediction that robocars will enable people to travel in "the right vehicle for the trip" and given that most trips are short urban ones, it follows that most robocars, if we are efficient, will be small light vehicles meant for 1-2 people, with a lesser number of larger ones for 4-5 people.

I've been predicting a great deal of innovation in cars with the arrival of robocars and other automatic driving technologies. But there's a lot of other computerization and new electronics that will be making its way into cars, and to make that happen, we need to make the car into a platform for innovation, rather than something bought as a walled garden from the car vendor.

In the old days, it was fairly common to get a car without a radio, and to buy the radio of your choice. This happened even in higher end cars. However, the advantages in sound quality and dash integration from a factory-installed radio started to win out, especially with horizontal market Japanese companies who were both good at cars and good at radios.

For real innovation, you want a platform, where aftermarket companies come in and compete. And you want early adopters to be able to replace what they buy whenever they get the whim. We replace our computers and phones far more frequently than our cars and the radios inside them.

To facilitate this, I think the car's radio and "occupant computer" should be merged, but split into three parts:

1. The speakers and power amplifier, which will probably last the life of the car, and be driven with some standard interface such as 7.1 digital audio over optical fiber.
2. The "guts" which probably live in the trunk or somewhere else not space constrained, and connect to the other parts
3. The "interface" which consists of the dashboard panel and screen, with controls, and any other controls and screens, all wired with a network to the guts.

Ideally the hookup between the interface and the guts is a standardized protocol. I think USB 3.0 can handle it and has the bandwidth to display screens on the dashboard, and on the back of the headrests for rear passenger video. Though if you want to imagine an HDTV for the passengers, its possible that we would add a video protocol (like HDMI) to the USB. But otherwise USB is general enough for everything else that will connect to the guts. USB's main flaw is its master-slave approach, which means the guts needs to be both a master, for control of various things in the car, and a slave, for when you want to plug your laptop into the car and control elements in the car -- and the radio itself.

Of course there should be USB jacks scattered around the car to plug in devices like phones and memory sticks and music players, as well as to power devices up on the dash, down in the armrests, in the trunk, under the hood, at the mirror and right behind the grille.

Finally there need to be some antenna wires. That's harder to standardize but you can be we need antennas for AM/FM/TV, satellite radio, GPS, cellular bands, and various 802.11 protocols including the new 802.11p. In some cases, however, the right solution is just to run USB 3.0 to places an antenna might go, and then have a receiver or tranceiver with integrated antenna which mounts there. A more general solution is best.

This architecture lets us replace things with the newest and latest stuff, and lets us support new radio protocols which appear. It lets us replace the guts if we have to, and replace the interface panels, or customize them readily to particular cars.

Today an interesting paper (written with the assistance of the EFF) was released. The authors have found evidence that governments are compromising trusted "certificate authorities" by issuing warrants to them, compelling them to create a false certificate for a site whose encrypted traffic they want to snoop on.

One of the things that's harder to predict about robocars is what they will mean for how cities are designed and how they evolve. We're notoriously bad at predicting such things, but it is still tempting.

I was recently approached by a programmer named Keith Curtis, formerly at Microsoft and now a FOSS devotee. He wants to develop a driving simulator for testing robocar systems. I think this is a very worthwhile idea -- sort of a "Second Life" for robots. We have a head start -- the world of racecar video games has already done a lot of the legwork to simulate driving, and there are two open source car racing systems.

A good simulator would bring some tremendous benefits to robocar development.

Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe.

(Follow the genetics for part two and other articles.)

23andMe is one of a small crop of personal genomics companies. For a cash fee (ranging from $400 to $1000, but dropping with regularity) you get a kit to send in a DNA sample. They can't sequence your genome for that amount today, but they can read around 600,000 "single-nucleotide polymorphisms" (SNPs) which are single-letter locations in the genome that are known to vary among different people, and the subject of various research about disease. 23andMe began hoping to let their customers know about how their own DNA predicted their risk for a variety of different diseases and traits. The result is a collection of information -- some of which will just make you worry (or breathe more easily) and some of which is actually useful. However, the company's second-order goal is the real money-maker. They hope to get the sequenced people to fill out surveys and participate in studies. For example, the more people fill out their weight in surveys, the more likely they might notice, "Hey, all the fat people have this SNP, and the thin people have that SNP, maybe we've found something."

However, recently they added a new feature called "Relative Finder." With Relative Finder, they will compare your DNA with all the other customers, and see if they can find long identical stretches which are very likely to have come from a common ancestor. The more of this they find, the more closely related two people are. All of us are related, often closer than we think, but this technique, in theory, can identify closer relatives like 1st through 4th cousins. (It gets a bit noisy after this.)

Relative Finder shows you a display listing all the people you are related to in their database, and for some people, it turns out to be a lot. You don't see the name of the person but you can send them an E-mail, and if they agree and respond, you can talk, or even compare your genomes to see where you have matching DNA.

For me it showed one third cousin, and about a dozen 4th cousins. Many people don't get many relatives that close. A third cousin, if you were wondering, is somebody who shares a great-great-grandparent with you, or more typically a pair of them. It means that your grandparents and their grandparents were "1st" cousins (ordinary cousins.) Most people don't have much contact with 3rd cousins or care much to. It's not a very close relationship.

However, I was greatly shocked to see the response that this mystery cousin was Jonathan Zittrain. Jonathan and I are not close friends, more appropriately we might be called friendly colleagues in the cyberlaw field, he being a founder of the Berkman Center and I being at the EFF. But we had seen one another a few times in the prior month, and both lectured recently at the new Singularity University, so we are not distant acquaintances either. Still, it was rather shocking to see this result. I was curious to try to figure out what the odds of it are.

Everybody has an Avatar review. Indeed, Avatar is a monument of moviemaking in terms of the quality of its animation and 3-D. Its most interesting message for Hollywood may be "soon actors will no longer need to look pretty." Once the generation of human forms passes through the famous uncanny valley there will be many movies made with human characters where you never see their real faces. That means the actors can be hired based strictly on their ability to act, and their bankability, not necessarily their looks, or more to the point their age. Old actors will be able to play their young selves before too long, and be romantic leading men and women again. Fat actors will play thin, supernaturally beautiful leads.

And our images of what a good looking person looks like will get even more bizarre. We'll probably get past the age thing, with software to make old star look like young star, before we break through the rest of the uncanny valley. If old star keeps him or herself in shape, the skin, hair and shapes of things like the nose and earlobes can be fixed, perhaps even today.

But this is not what I want to speak about. What I do want to speak about involves Avatar spoilers.

I just returned from Jeff Pulver's "140 Characters" conference in L.A. which was about Twitter. I asked many people if they get Twitter -- not if they understand how it's useful, but why it is such a hot item, and whether it deserves to be, with billion dollar valuations and many talking about it as the most important platform.

Some suggested Twitter is not as big as it appears, with a larger churn than expected and some plateau appearing in new users. Others think it is still shooting for the moon.

I've written a lot about how to do better power connectors for all our devices, and the quest for universal DC and AC power plugs that negotiate the power delivered with a digital protocol.

While I've mostly been interested in some way of standardizing power plugs (at least within a given current range, and possibly even beyond) today I was thinking we might want to go further, and make it possible for almost every connector we use to also deliver or receive power.

The total eclipse of the sun is the most visually stunning natural phenomenon there is. It leaves the other natural wonders like the Grand Canyon far behind. Through an amazing set of circumstances I got to see my 4th on Enewetak, an isolated atoll in the Marshall Islands. Enewetak was the site of 43 nuclear explosions including Mike, the first H-bomb (which erased one of the islands in the chain.)

I have written before about how overzealous design of cryptographic protocols often results in their non-use. Protocol engineers are trained to be thorough and complete. They rankle at leaving in vulnerabilities, even against the most extreme threats. But the perfect is often the enemy of the good. None of the various protocols to encrypt E-mail have ever reached even a modicum of success in the public space. It's a very rare VoIP call (other than Skype) that is encrypted.

The two most successful encryption protocols in the public space are SSL/TLS (which provide the HTTPS system among other things) and Skype. At a level below that are some of the VPN applications and SSH.

TLS (the successor to SSL) is very widely deployed but still very rarely used. Only the most tiny fraction of web sessions are encrypted. Many sites don't support it at all. Some will accept HTTPS but immediately push you back to HTTP. In most cases, sites will have you log in via HTTPS so your password is secure, and then send you back to unencrypted HTTP, where anybody on the wireless network can watch all your traffic. It's a rare site that lets you conduct your entire series of web interactions entirely encrypted. This site fails in that regard. More common is the use of TLS for POP3 and IMAP sessions, both because it's easy, there is only one TCP session, and the set of users who access the server is a small and controlled set. The same is true with VPNs -- one session, and typically the users are all required by their employer to use the VPN, so it gets deployed. IPSec code exists in many systems, but is rarely used in stranger-to-stranger communications (or even friend-to-friend) due to the nightmares of key management.

TLS's complexity makes sense for "sessions" but has problems when you use it for transactions, such as web hits. Transactions want to be short. They consist of a request, and a response, and perhaps an ACK. Adding extra back and forths to negotiate encryption can double or triple the network cost of the transactions.

Skype became a huge success at encrypting because it is done with ZUI -- the user is not even aware of the crypto. It just happens. SSH takes an approach that is deliberately vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks on the first session in order to reduce the UI, and it has almost completely replaced unencrypted telnet among the command line crowd.

I write about this because now Google is finally doing an experiment to let people have their whole gmail session be encrypted with HTTPS. This is great news. But hidden in the great news is the fact that Google is evaluating the "cost" of doing this. There also may be some backlash if Google does this on web search, as it means that ordinary sites will stop getting to see the search query in the "Referer" field until they too switch to HTTPS and Google sends traffic to them over HTTPS. (That's because, for security reasons, the HTTPS design says that if I made a query encrypted, I don't want that query to be repeated in the clear when I follow a link to a non-encrypted site.) Many sites do a lot of log analysis to see what search terms are bringing in traffic, and may object when that goes away.

Twenty years ago (Monday) on June 8th, 1989, I did the public launch of ClariNet.com, my electronic newspaper business, which would be delivered using USENET protocols (there was no HTTP yet) over the internet.

ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its platform for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of the "dot-com" concept which so affected the world in the two intervening decades. There are other definitions and other contenders which I discuss in the article below.

While I have over 30 galleries of panoramic photos up on the web, a while ago I decided to generate some pages of favourites as an introduction to the photography. I'm way behind on putting up galleries from recent trips to Israel, Jordan, Russia and various other places, but in the meantime you can enjoy these three galleries:

My Best Panoramas -- favourites from around the world