Generally the answer is sort of. They take your insurance information, and are not allowed to lie about being in network. That's insurance fraud and they get in big trouble.

They usually make you sign something agreeing to pay whatever insurance won't. This is sort of redundant, but you essentially are confirming that you understand that insurance may not fully cover your care. You should not have to sign this at an in network facility when undergoing non-elective care. Exceptions arise for emergency care where you sign on a blanket basis, because it's likely to overrun your premiums.

They are not legally required to tell you what the price will be and they are not legally required to honor the price advertised when they bill you. Importantly, they also can't just lie. They're bound by what's called "good faith". As long as they price they give you is honestly their best guess, they're off the hook.

Forcing medical providers, especially hospitals to publish and honor the price of their services not subject to insurance negotiation was a big part of Trumps healthcare reform initiatives, along with right to try and other misc small items.

Both of those ("in network" and "out of network") can accept your insurance, and your insurance will pay a portion of the costs.

The main difference is that "in network" has agreed on what the cost of a procedure will be, and exactly how much insurance will pay for (taking into account deductibles and co-pays, and what insurance covers - for instance 80%). There is a fixed total cost.

Out of network means the doctor has not agreed to a price with you and your insurance company. The doctor can charge you much more. So you insurance will pay a certain amount but the doctor will bill you directly for the remaining costs.

For instance, you need surgery and it costs $5,000 according to your insurance company. An in-network place will charge you $5000 (and for instance, you might bay $1000 deductible plus 20% of remainder for a total of $1800).

However, go to an out-of-network place, and they might charge you $10,000. You insurance will kick the same $3200 dollars (maybe, they could just say it is flat out not covered), so you have to pay the remaining $6800.

Keep in mind you are always still paying your premiums for health insurance, but if you don't follow their rules and see their in network people, you typically get screwed. And this is a small example (like getting a wart removed). There can be medical bills in the 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands dollars easily.

Note: this only occurs in the USA.

Thanks for explaining. Do you know if they have to inform you of this? I ask because I’ve been with the same doctor’s office for 3 years and had multiple appointments with them through those years. But today when I went it I was informed I am out of network and they asked me to sign a form acknowledging so. This has never happened at any of my in person or telehealth appointments before today.

Your insurance has an advertised price for a procedure saying "we will pay upto X price". If the doctor thinks "well that's a fair price" then they accept the insurance. If not, they don't.

Sometimes they'll ask you to cover the difference between what insurance will pay and what the doctor charges.

These are different from co-pays, which the insurance expects you to pay before the insurance pays, meaning you pay no matter how much the insurance covers, even all of it.

Thank you!

Insurance will have in network and out of network rates. In network gets special lower rates than out of network. So a doctors office can still accept it but not be in contact with that insurance.

Likely because the infrastructure isn't set up for it. But also because potable water systems have more issues than an electrical grid that would exacerbate the issue.

Firstly, water supply is generally a much more gradual process. Sure there are demand peaks and troughs, but it's not as reliant on immediately supplying the quantity consumed in the same way as electrical power is. Where there are high demand spikes, passive buffer systems like water towers naturally smooth out the demand. The supply issues are generally on the scale of weeks/months rather than minutes/hours.

Secondly, you can't just shut off a potable water system for a bit. When a supply is shut off, inevitably the downstream system loses pressure. This is a problem as you can never guarantee there are no leaks - there are often dozens of active leaks at any time, but small enough to have a limited impact and not be worth repairing in the short term.
In normal circumstances a leak isn't a huge deal - sure you lose a bit of water, but that outward flow with the pressurised water pipe keeps contaminants out of the potable supply. When the water is shut off, dirt, debris and microorganisms can instead enter the pipework, particularly with buried pipes (like much of public distribution pipework). As a result, the system isn't safe for drinking water until the contamination has been flushed out - usually a couple of days to be sure, which may or may not involve additional chemical dosing. During that period, the water company has to instruct everyone connected to that system not to drink the water/boil it and/or supply alternatives (usually bottled).

ELI3: turning water off makes pipes dirty. Turning electricity off just annoys people.

A 100MB update might be 100MB of new content, so your 500MB game install grows to 600MB.

Or it might be 100MB of files that replace existing files, so your 500MB install might stay the same or even shrink, if the new files are smaller than the ones they're replacing.

Or the update might itself be an application which plays a video while it's installing the update. So the 100MB update might be 90MB of installer code and video, and 10MB of actual content (which again, could be either additional files, or replacement files).

Or maybe the update is compressed, so the 100MB update actually expands into 200MB of files (so if it's all new content, your game now takes 700MB on disk).

Most likely the update is some combination of those things. So it's impossible to predict what the new size of the game will be on disk. It depends on what that particular update contains, which is in turn a function of what the development priorities were.

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You can't just stop supplying water to distribution pipes: that would create widespread pressure drops and consequently huge areas would be entering boil water advisory situations, and testing water after a mains pressure loss gets expensive.

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You mean... cut off peoples' water? The thing you absolutely need to, you know. Survive?

Electricity is a (mostly) national grid while water systems are closed off systems serving much more local system.

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It would be your last idea.

Another way to look at it is that a game is essentially a collection of files on a hard drive. There are files that contain or describe audio information, or 3d models, or image textures that get applied to 3d models, or animations, or logic code that performs functions etc. There can be tens of thousands of files.

As you can imagine, keeping track of all those isn't easy. So quite often what happens is a whole file directory and management structure is included in the game. Sometimes you can see the layout of that in the games installation folder but it's more common for the game to package it all into one or more large "container" files. Think of it like how a Zip file works, as lots of files within one big file.

And normally that file management system has a way to distinguish a newer version of a file from an older version. So it doesn't have to delete the old file, it just points the game to the newer version. And if that older file is "inside" of a container file it can't easily be deleted anyway. So normally games don't bother to delete old files.

What's normally actually happening when you patch a game is you're rebuilding that internal directory structure from the container files. The patch contains newer versions of existing files and it copies all of those into the games installation folder (either individually or all at once in another big container file) then it instructs the game to rebuild that directory tree and update it's list of newest files to use.

And that works because when you're playing the game and you e.g load a new level, the game isn't really asking Windows to open a file at C:\Games\MyCoolGame\Levels\2.lvl, the game is asking itself to load the file from it's own internally maintained directory at \Levels\2.lvl. That triggers the "find the newest version" step and that's how the game loads the patched versions of files.

I remember that and thought it was hilarious.

Often the "leading brand" is actually just the generic version and not the top name brand. It makes it easier to use a worse version of the same product without lying, which is illegal. In your example of Miller Lite and Michelob "more taste" is a subjective statement, so it can't be a lie and Miller Lite does have fewer calories than Michelob so that's not a lie either.

To clarify: That doesn't mean the space the game takes up is not going to change if there's no additional content.

The file size could grow or shrink depending on what the patch is doing.

Somewhat recently Apex Legends put out a patch that shrunk their install size from 90 gigs to about 50, and you can be sure they didn't remove half the game, they just optimized things.

patch and change/delete.

it's like if i had a book you wrote and you wanted to make some revisions to my copy. you could print the entire book and give it me a new one (redownload the entire 500MB), or you could just say "hey on page 30, remove the second paragraph, please add this image to the index, and on page 36 there is a typo change that one word" (patch just 100MB)

“Patch” as a technical term traditionally means to replace targeted data within a file. So for example if there was a value that should be changed in a file, the patch would only store the difference between the original file and the patched version. Back in the day, often times software (including games) would be shipped entirely in a single binary/executable file and this was the most efficient method to ship updates, especially if they were being delivered over dial-up internet or BBSes. Patch files would be absolutely tiny, depending on what was in them.

These days, it’s more common to just replace the entire file of whatever you are changing because it’s no longer an issue of transmission speed (so why bother with that added complexity). Especially with games, which are usually installed as thousands of individual files, rather than a single monolithic file.

The name stuck though, as rather than the actual “patch” process described above, people came to associate “patch” with “software update”

So it depends on what is added/removed/changed as part of the patch whether the total install size goes up/down. If a lot of new content is added then installed size goes up of course. If they’re just rebalancing the game and replacing some sound effects with better ones, you might not see much difference at all.

Diff patch is a way to go for certain games or files, other requiere to delete old file and replace with new, for example

a EXE file that need a few tweaks can be patched with a Diff patcher justa few bytes

but a graphic, media or bug files are deleted for a new one or added.

The patch doesn’t just replace the small part of code they want to update, I think that’s called a hot fix usually

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This depends on each platform.

PC platforms are installing patches by editing/replacing existing files and adding new ones if necessary.

On game consoles patch as a whole is mounted next to base game when game is launched, it's not replacing physically installed files. Patch usually for assets doesn't include whole files, but only changed bits with informations where those changes in original files happened. So when game will want to load texture that was patched, system will read data from both base game for original data and patch for changed data.