bengebre

As someone with an High Deductible Healthcare Plan, I pay most medical costs out of pocket up to an annual limit. It's crazy that for such expensive services I NEVER know what my bill is going to be until months after the procedure has happened. I always try to guesstimate costs beforehand, but I've been off by an order of magnitude on more than one occasion. Having transparent pricing in the healthcare world, even if it was just an estimate, would help people with HDHPs immensely.

First I've seen on completion stats for the Stanford online courses:

"Besides the Artificial Intelligence course, Stanford offered two other MOOCs last semester — Machine Learning (104,000 registered, and 13,000 completed the course), and Introduction to Databases (92,000 registered, 7,000 completed)."

Have any of you signed up for the service yet? It looks quite slick. I've tipped a couple of people as well as verified my own website so that I can claim tips that people leave for me. The really neat thing (as the ERE post mentions) is that you don't have to sign up for people to start tipping you. All the tips for a site are logged until you claim them as the site owner (via meta tags or file upload). It's a great way to overcome the initial adopter problem WRT getting people to accept your payment method. So website owners don't need to install anything in order to accept tips. I'm interested to see if this catches on. It's really great from both a concept and implementation perspective.