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Other important questions: how many of those 7.1 million have actually paid for the policies, and how many just went through the web site? Also, how many of these policies are insuring the previously uninsured, and how many are insuring people who lost their previous insurance due to the ACA?

I don't have those numbers. Nobody seems to have those numbers... Kathleen Sebelius has said "we don't know that" (see YouTube link below).

I have a suspicion that if the numbers were good, somehow they would have the numbers.

The DailyMail article says that a RAND Corporation study estimates that the number of previously uninsured people who have actually paid for their policies is: 858,000 (well under a million!). I haven't found a source for this. I believe they computed this number themselves, by reading the RAND report and by using the percentages in that report.

Avik Roy read the same report, and reports the number as 1.4 million +/- 0.7 million, i.e. 700,000 people to 2.1 million people, 95% confidence.

I believe this is the RAND Corporation study being discussed: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR656/RAND_RR656.pdf

References:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594309/President-plans-victory-lap-strong-Obamacare-enrollment-Sebelius-faces-unpopular-law-blank-stare-tough-questions-remain-whos-signing-up.html

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/30/news/economy/obamacare-premiums/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDdmRaJy2c

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/04/09/rand-comes-clean-obamacares-exchanges-enrolled-only-1-4-million-previously-uninsured-individuals/

Are you talking about the studies that show men who work longer hours in the same field as women get paid more?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...

http://www.commentarymagazine....

http://mediamatters.org/video/...

I'd say we've got a pretty big freaking problem.

Yeah, and 95.6% of all Fortune 1000 CEOs are male.

Regarding the gender gap in college: Boys get lower grades than girls, and report liking school less, not because girls are naturally more studious or because schools aren't "boy-friendly" enough, they write. Rather, "our research shows that boys' underperformance in school has more to do with society's norms about masculinity Boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama, and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these activities are often denigrated as un-masculine."

There is, however, still a significant gender gap in STEM careers, with most positions being held by men. So, yeah, there is a problem, but the problem isn't related to educational opportunities for men. There is gender inequality in STEM careers and women aren't usually encouraged to pursue those kinds of careers. So offering a subsidy to teachers who make a point of enabling girls to pursue STEM careers isn't discrimination, exactly ... it is an effort to correct discrimination that is already occurring.

If you are interested in some of the reasons that might cause men to have higher rates of homelessness, or to attend college less frequently, this documentary is probably a good place to start.

There's also a complete inequality in girls graduating high school, enrolling in college, and graduating college.

Yes there is. There are considerably more women in college than men. Has been for decades, now. Higher graduation rates, too (roughly 5% higher for women). I suspect that is the exact opposite inequality from what you meant, but there definitely is an inequality there.

It should be noted I'm not complaining about that inequality. I don't know for sure why it exists, but I suspect it has to do with boys being encouraged during high school (and to some extent college as well) to pursue sports and "manly" activities rather than their studies, which leaves them less prepared for higher education. I could be wrong, though.

400 Words per minute is by no way "super-high".

From http://www.forbes.com/sites/br...

Third-grade students = 150 words per minute (wpm)
Eight grade students = 250
Average college student = 450
Average âoehigh level execâ = 575
Average college professor = 675
Speed readers = 1,500
World speed reading champion = 4,700
Average adult: 300 wpm

From my education i am roughly at "Average College Professor". And 400 wpm was a conservative estimation of mine.

You could ask my colleagues about me regularly correcting semantic and syntactic mistakes in pages of code which i never saw before in minutes without running the program.

You could ask my boss about me analyzing typical presentations in about 5-10seconds per slide and yet remembering more of the specific content than people who sit for half an hour in front of it and never even penetrate the surface.

You could ask my coworkers about me reading abstracts of scientific papers in less than 5seconds and classifying them as interesting or not (did that when i did a group-internal rss feed on our topic).

We have 111 billionaires in Cali.

California Leads All States (And All But 2 Countries) With 111 Billionaires.

While the number of apps downloaded is coming from 3rd parties we are still left with Google's financial reports indicating $900M paid to developers compared to Apple's claim of $5,000M paid to developers.

Plus its not just Forbes indicating a huge disparity.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://techland.time.com/2013/...
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ay...

You make it up in volume. This is a false dilemma.

Actually you do not get enough volume to make it up, at least as of August 2013. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/tr...

Number of downloads per app, Android 60,000 and iOS 40,000.
Average revenue per download, Android $0.01875 and iOS $0.10.
Average revenue per app, Android $1,125 and iOS $4,000.

Just look at this. The representative here is spouting around claiming that his assumptions, essentially, flout the experiments of numerous scientists. During the Bush administration the government came up for some bright plan for fuel-cell cars, and essentially decided to kill off electric cars in favor of fuel cells. Guess how many hydrogen stations you see across to country now? And the Kevin Mitnick case. The ignorant justice officials in the court case apparently were so paranoid about giving a computer to the defendant, they wouldn't even let him review the evidence on a computer disconnected from a network. The prosecution also pressed for this, citing that the evidence was so much they couldn't print it all out. Is that constitutional to not allow the accused to review the evidence with an attorney? And the "oh-global-warming-climate-change is a joke" attitudes? Well, go ask the Chinese. I'm pretty sure they would have some choice things to say about that. And why the f**k do 'mericans elect these guys to office in the first place? Do we really need to shove everything in our politicians' faces to get them to understand?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...

Sorry. I kind of wish it was just a trend too, but the fact is, the Wii is still very popular with a lot of people. It seems like a joke to a lot of more "hardcore" gamers, but it's still dominant in a market that was largely ignored before: casuals. I don't play Wii much anymore, especially since I picked up a PS4, but when I do it's because my girlfriend still enjoys it more than any other platform we've tried, and we try every game we can to see if she's interested.
Is it the future of console gaming? No. But for a lot of people it's all they'll ever need for a price they can easily afford.

I think we're soon entering the world of nitpicking. The Forbes author's first line of the article is about his source being controversial and possibly total s***. Then, assuming it's not, the data still shows 3DS, PS4, XBox 360, and PS3 all outselling WiiU. I call WiiU a fad because when it was first released everyone I know was talking about it and we played Wii games after going out to the bar. Now.. I know people with a Wii, but they don't try to get anyone to play it with them and nobody is talking about buying one (if they buy it, they just buy it quietly). That is why I think it's a fad.

Chattanooga TN folks!
What Ironman 3 Got Wrong About Chattanooga

Home of Iron Gaming

Photos of the school were then tweeted and shared in status updates — a reply to images of Beltran Leyva's corpse being shared on social media.

I wonder, why the cartels can't think of anything positive to say? They can, for example, emphasize the fact, that their products are primarily targeting the rich, while providing well-paying jobs for the impoverished youth, funding ample charitable donations, and investment in local communities...

By poisoning the "1%" (also known as the "golden billion"), they are spreading the wealth and leveling the playing field — without even ever forcing anyone to participate...

Clearly, the PR-masters working for the thugs have a lot to learn yet.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...

Sorry. I kind of wish it was just a trend too, but the fact is, the Wii is still very popular with a lot of people. It seems like a joke to a lot of more "hardcore" gamers, but it's still dominant in a market that was largely ignored before: casuals. I don't play Wii much anymore, especially since I picked up a PS4, but when I do it's because my girlfriend still enjoys it more than any other platform we've tried, and we try every game we can to see if she's interested.

Is it the future of console gaming? No. But for a lot of people it's all they'll ever need for a price they can easily afford.

The CEO of a company, and anyone in general, has a right to influence the society he lives in and how his government makes laws. He can do what he wishes with his money.

He should not be punished for taking part in the democratic process, he shouldn't be silenced, he should be outvoted. So, if you care enough, you need to become politically active. Boycotting things amounts to mob rule, it works the same way repression works.

The CEO of Mozilla doesn't own Mozilla, nor was he using it to influence his worldview. He's essentially an employee

OKCupid is leveraging it's own brand and Mozilla's to benefit itself and real losers are gays who let themselves be taken cynically taken advantage of.

Corporations don't have opinions, they only reflect those of it's customers. Where was the Rainbow Oreo in the 80's and 90's when gay rights was a divisive issue? Why didn't Oreo have an opinion then? These kinds of corporations only support the winning side of the culture wars. As we saw with Duck Dynasy and Cracker Barrel, if enough people complain, the company will unashamedly backflip. It's purely business, not ideological.

I assume you mean that the pro man-made climate change are the groups that get the funding. You must do because the amount of money spent by just the US Government (around $2B a year on just scientific studies alone, and growing) dwarfs that spent by the energy companies on research.

If you can be bothered here is the GAO Report and a much easier to read summary

Not saying the money isn't well spent, or that man-made climate change isn't happening - but its just plain wrong to say that Big Oil is outspending the poor universities when it comes to climate research.

Sell all the drugs you want but don't you dare sell guns with our payment service.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ab...

Here is what another group of scientists have to say.

1. AFAIK, a grand total of zero of the IPCC-favored climate models work in retrospect. I.e., one should be able to plug in data up to (say) 1990 and get an accurate "forecast" of the climate from 1990 to today. If they can't do that, why should I believe they will be accurate about the climate 50 years from now?

As far as you know? Have you bothered to look?

First off, you need to realize that there are a lot of different climate models, modeling different parts of the climate system. No one model is representative of the entire climate system, as it is too big and complex for a single statistical model -- so far. That said, there are a number of models which do very well, both in terms of hindcasting and forecasting for the specific area they were created to model. Quite a few of them are overly conservative, meaning that they under-projected the deviations due to climate change.

If you want to really understand how to interpret how the models work and what their output means, I would suggest starting here.

2. This article sums up my other objection. The TL;DR version: the IPCC-favored models are based on more than a simple (and rather inarguable) "more CO2 = hotter" greenhouse effect. They all assume various kinds of positive feedback to amplify that effect. Yet, the historical record seems to show the Earth's climate is a fairly stable system, not dominated by strong positive feedback effects.

This is woefully inaccurate. I don't know of any models which assume only positive feedbacks (well, I guess there are a few very old models pre-1990 which might, but I don't think anyone uses or references them any longer).

Yes, the Earth's climate is a fairly stable system, HOWEVER there have been periods of rapid change which cannot be accounted for by simply considering "more CO2 = hotter". The science behind both positive and negative feedbacks in the climate system is still a bit nascent, at least in terms of determining where the "tipping points" are, but the physics behind the feedback processes is pretty well-established at this point.

I don't consider myself a "warmist"; I simply follow the science with a skeptical eye. I have yet to see anything that I would consider discounts AGW/CC wholesale, but I am always looking. In the meantime, I am going to go on the premise that it is largely correct and change my lifestyle to address it, and urge others to follow suit.

After all, if climate science turns out to be completely wrong, I won't have any remorse for creating a better world as a result.

I've always been more pro-science than many, but I'm still not buying the alarming projections for several reasons.

1. 1. AFAIK, a grand total of zero of the IPCC-favored climate models work in retrospect. I.e., one should be able to plug in data up to (say) 1990 and get an accurate "forecast" of the climate from 1990 to today. If they can't do that, why should I believe they will be accurate about the climate 50 years from now?
2. 2. This article sums up my other objection. The TL;DR version: the IPCC-favored models are based on more than a simple (and rather inarguable) "more CO2 = hotter" greenhouse effect. They all assume various kinds of positive feedback to amplify that effect. Yet, the historical record seems to show the Earth's climate is a fairly stable system, not dominated by strong positive feedback effects.

Google owns waze.

Target doesn't want to ditch the magstripe. They do incredible amounts of data mining based off of data on the magstripe.

See: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.

Chip-and-Pin doesn't provide magstripe data to Target. Target can't build its demographic data. That's going to hurt sales.

If that's the case, they'll just have to do it the old fashioned way -- with affinity cards "Swipe your TargetPoints card and save $$$!".

It's not necessarily the case that chip-and-pin removes the ability for merchants to do customer tracking -- just because the card number is encrypted and protected doesn't mean that no unique identifying information is sent in the clear to let a merchant recognize a returning customer.

Target doesn't want to ditch the magstripe. They do incredible amounts of data mining based off of data on the magstripe.

See: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.

Chip-and-Pin doesn't provide magstripe data to Target. Target can't build its demographic data. That's going to hurt sales.

You do realize Notch rakes in $100+ million every year, right?

2012: http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...
2013: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/a...

Here's the source for that claim:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...

Kickstarter has always been very clear that your money didn't bring you any equity in the business. There is a very good reason for that: by the time Kickstarter was launched, soliciting investment from the general public for specific ventures was quite simply illegal. Crowd-funded investment was only made legal by the 2012 JOBS act.

If you really want to get equity from the businesses you sponsor, you can go to WeFunder or other sites. Kickstarter is not and has never been, and has been pretty explicit about it from day one.

"What is claimed is: A media player for acquiring and reproducing media program files which represent episodes as said episodes become available, said media player comprising: a digital memory, a communication port..., a processor..., an output unit for reproducing ... the media files."

Sounds like iTunes. Version 4.9 of iTunes, launched in June 28, 2005 was the first to have podcast support (according to Wikipedia). I don't even slightly believe that iTunes was the first podcast player.

RealNetwork's had the "RealChannel" concept at some point in the late 1990's (post 1996 though).

PointCast offered audio push as of 1997. Didn't last long.

Supposedly Marimba Castanet had pushed audio support in 1997 as well.

All of the "push" systems failed because they were blowing out corporate WAN bandwidth (most companies were connected via 56 kbps, 128 kbps, or 1.5 Mbps Internet connections)

Who's calling them "trolls"?

To be honest, AMERICAN culture doesn't either. Is why celebrities, athletes, and entertainers are paid dump truck loads of cash while the really intelligent folks ( scientists, reaearchers, you know folks who actually create the world as we know it today ) are compensated at a much lower level.

If this were true the why are there no celebrities, athletes, and entertainers on the Forbes Billionaires List(I didn't actually look past #800)? That list is stacked with people running businesses with either new or old money. They own or hire the celebrities, athletes, and entertainers to promote their products.

To top it off theFortune 500 isn't littered with companies that directly hire celebrities, athletes, and entertainers.

I can guarantee you that the average and top engineers makes more than the average and top celebrity/athlete/entertainer.

Maybe those credentials were posted on github by devels and then scraped from there. Or from google, there is a bunch of id_rsa that pop up with trivial searchs.

Anyway, 25.000 linux/unix servers looks like a very low number, considering the 500.000.000 servers running apache or nginx, even with multiple domain hosted in a lot of them.

Is that "better"? That were over a million Linux servers defaced in 2010, most of them actually rooted.

Maybe those credentials were posted on github by devels and then scraped from there. Or from google, there is a bunch of id_rsa that pop up with trivial searchs.

Anyway, 25.000 linux/unix servers looks like a very low number, considering the 500.000.000 servers running apache or nginx, even with multiple domain hosted in a lot of them.

Nothing at the link to Forbes says anything even remotely similar to what the post is alleging (I didn't even bother to check the other ones).

I don't think you bothered to check any of them.

Former Top Putin Advisor Sounds The Alarm: Putin Has Already Declared War On Kiev

Andrei Illarionov, formerly Vladimir Putin’s top economic advisor (and personal envoy to the G8) , has warned in an interview with Ukrainian television that Putin has already declared war on Kiev. Putin’s war is being conducted by Russian Spetsnaz (special operations) forces and KGB (now called FSB) agents and is aimed at toppling the pro-Western government in Kiev. The Spetsnaz forces’ orders include the sowing of civil unrest throughout Ukraine via strikes, demonstrations, staged incidents, and street battles. Putin’s subversive forces will also gin up neo-Nazi incidents with Nazi regalia and Swastikas on full display. Their orders include as well the deliberate killing of Russian soldiers and of ethnic Russian civilians to prove the hatred and extremism of radical Ukrainian nationalists. These orders come from Putin himself. Their goal is to create an image of intolerable chaos and loss of civil authority to justify a Russian takeover of all Ukraine. Putin’s goal is the destruction of pro-Western authority in Ukraine, the total humiliation of the West, and a makeover of the geopolitical balance.

I don't know how you missed that one slick. Simply trolling?

$5.34 million if you die this year.

Jay Carney (Mr. Shipman), is that you?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ma...
The only morons that fucked were your mum and dad, and you are douchelord...

The only reason anyone ever called this "the most transparent administration in history" is that Barack Obama made that statement. But there never was any reason to believe him.

He's an Alinskyite politician who came up through the Chicago political machine. What about this background would make you expect him to be anything other than a partisan who will say anything to advance his own agenda?

Then when he ran for President, he made vague promises that allowed everyone to project their fondest hopes onto him. The only way to have an 80% approval rating is to not be specific about anything. His greatest accomplishment has been his amazing skill in reading a prepared speech off a TelePrompter.

I no longer believe that government can do very much to help the economy; however, I firmly believe that government does have the power to screw the economy up. I'm not one of the haters who thinks that President Obama wants to screw things up, but still it keeps happening.

Here's a free tip for President Obama: find yourself some economists who actually predicted this recession, and then ask them for their advice on how to fix it. The Keynsian advice is to pump a bunch of money into the economy, borrowed is fine, and that's what this Administration did. But few, if any, of the Keynsian economists predicted the recession.

Alibaba’s portals handled gross sales of $170 billion in 2012–that is more than eBay and Amazon’s gross sales combined..

Alibaba is HUGE. Every US online retailer should be scared. Alibaba has the potential to take them ALL down.

Yea, but a big majority of that volume is wholesale and B2B. There's Alibaba Express, their eBay like site that caters to consumers but the vast majority of their main site listings are for wholesale lots of... well, damn near anything. Need 60 tonnes of rice? They have you covered. 3000 pairs of jeans? No problem. Inflatable military tank decoys? Yep, they got those too. Can we put you down for 500?

Alibaba’s portals handled gross sales of $170 billion in 2012–that is more than eBay and Amazon’s gross sales combined..

Alibaba is HUGE. Every US online retailer should be scared. Alibaba has the potential to take them ALL down.

Well that should make anarchists like Kevin O'Leary happy.

This is not just Google; all proprietary software companies (and that includes Google) are going to have that problem in future. There is an entire category on Wikipedia for Microsoft's abandoned software. The problem is that, previously they gave you an actual copy of the software so you could continue to use it. Microsoft is now going for a cloud first strategy and trying to enforce things like Sharepoint on it's customers. This is going to make them worse than Google who at least guarantee you to be able to get all your data out of their systems.

Microsoft is probably even the best of a bad bunch. They at least have an IBM like history of knowing not to piss off their big customers. Other proprietary companies are getting bought out and closed down at regular intervals (just look at the list of things Facebook bought recently).

The only way around this is to make sure that you get the full source to cloud systems you use and that the are protected under something like an Affero license. Then you have to, from time to time, have exercises where you take your latest backup and really prove you can restore it. The second best is to only use services where you can provably transfer from one supplier to another. Needless to say, very few CIOs are going to be doing something like this when they can be making out like bandits from the vendor "freebies".

Medical insurers have to have a physical presence or subsidiary in the state where they want to sell.

Citation really, really needed. I haven't found a single site that makes this claim. Some of the places I looked (from Google search 'medical insurance across state lines'):
        http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...
        http://www.ncsl.org/research/h...
        http://www.newamerica.net/pres...
        http://www.motherjones.com/kev...

Forbes disagrees that the number is "bullshit", though I doubt they'd agree with the 75% number being representative of the iPhone's current market share either, since they do agree with what you've said about the sales trends of iPhones. According to numbers from BCN (a group that measures Japanese smartphone market share on a weekly basis), the three-month rolling average for the period ending at the start of December last year was around 60% for the iPhone's market share, with a spike up above 75% for the first week of December. Apple had the first 9 out of the top 10 smartphones during that time, and 11 of the top 14.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that iPhones historically do well at the holiday season compared to their competitors, and that, as you brought up, the release cycle for the iPhones also happens to correspond with the period being mentioned by Forbes. As such, I thought I'd dig a little, and if you look at the six months prior to that three-month window I just mentioned, iPhones had a 37% share of the market. Of course, that was mostly before they launched on DoCoMo, the nation's largest carrier, so it's likely that their average this year may see a boost compared to last.

Long story short, yes, iPhones enjoyed a 75% market share in the Japanese smartphone market, but it was due to a combination of their release schedule and holiday sales, which makes the numbers legitimate, but misleading. It's likely that they are doing better than the 37% they had last year starting around this time, simply due to the greater availability of the device, but it's certainly not as high as it was during the holidays.

FWIW Apple collects $6-$8 from HTC for every device sold for patent fees too. Nokia and Qualcomm collect patent licensing fees as well. The point is that the innovators then cross-license, so the more you innovate the more you have to cross-license and the less you have to pay in licensing fees.

False. Stop with the lies, or at least look up the info you are given from the news.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Do you think, that just maybe, the slump was cause from the economy? hmmm?

Yeah, see that's where you have to take those green colored glasses off and realize that its not working in Germany and its not going to work in the US either.

Germany's green energy is
Generally
Considered
A failure.
It's not getting better
Any time soon

There simply isn't enough windy places to power all of the United States 24/7. The sun doesn't shine at night, and we can't build a grid to someplace where it does.

Grid is a substitute for storage and local generation. But grids simply aren't world wide, and aren't likely to be.

And which include Apple and other corporations paying 1/1000th the tax rate that individuals do.

Apple is paying about an 18% tax rate, so I guess the average individual has around a 0.018% income tax rate?

From the article:

"To steal the coins of users who encrypt their private keys with passwords, many of the Bitcoin stealing programs also included keyloggers designed to eavesdrop on users’ typing. Even more tricky are malware types that wait for users to copy a Bitcoin address they want to send bitcoins to into their clipboard. When the user tries to paste the address, the malware replaces it with a different string, irreversibly sending the currency to the malware operator’s wallet. That last method never sends data to a remote server, so it can be much harder to detect, SecureWorks’ researchers say. In fact, they tested a range of antivirus scanners on their malware samples and found that roughly 50% went unnoticed."

iOS has yet to have a single piece of malware in the wild for it.

You mean like this one?

Can this be said about any other widespread ecosystem in the computing arena?

OpenBSD? ;)

I'm sure Apple's Irish divisions have great talent and produce great output, but I bet that those 4,000 employees do not work for the specific Apple subsidiary that is claiming the global profits. Even if it's the same company, claiming all the global revenues there is still a gross misrepresentation of Apple's business since 4000 employees would only account for 5% of Apple's global work force (60% are based in the US). I also believe in Apple's case specifically, they don't even pay the normal Irish corporate tax rates due to some other loopholes or agreements. Forbes has a good write-up on it that is way over my head.

No more reason than to hound any of the people on this list, all of whom have provably multiple orders of magnitude more wealth than this guy is even *alleged* to have.

More to the point, who could afford the cardboard box that looks good on his 1/2 billion dollar island?

Real estate like that, you don't just slap down any ol' appliance box.

Forbes claims the Occulus Rift will cost $499 or less, with the device, an omni treadmill, and supporting software going for $999.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

This would be pretty impressive considering that Sony's 3rd generation HMD sells for $999.