In college, I attended an AA meeting as a requirement for a Psychology class. I wan't an alcoholic or even on the path to alcoholism; I just needed to fulfill the requirement and "attend an AA meeting" was the easiest way to do that.
The first thing I noticed was that all the people in the meeeting (there were maybe 40 attendees) had replaced alcohol with coffee and cigarettes. The second thing was that all of these people seemed to care about each other. A lot. It wasn't anything explicit or obvious; it just seemed to radiate from everybody and it generated this vibe that was incredibly warm and fuzzy. I didn't announce why I was there, so unless they asked me the other attendees just treated me like another anonymous alcoholic. And they treated me like I was their son or their brother. It felt really, really comfortable and nice. At one point, I actually thought to myself "it's too bad I'm not an alcoholic, because it would be great to hang out with these people every week."
I left that meeting on an emotional high. The only way I can describe it is that it was like finding out you had a whole branch of your family that been searching for you for years, and now you've been reunited and your new family just accepts you with -- not just open arms -- but with a tangible joy that you've finally joined them. It was awesome! And then I got about 50 feet out the door and said to myself "You just got hooked by a cult!"
I was shocked because I had always assumed that I was 100% absolutely immune to cults. I had read stories about people who were brainwashed into joining them and thought that I -- with my intelligence and my skepticism and my stable family life -- could never fall for something like that. But I had only been there for two hours and they had hooked me. Had I been less intelligent or cynical or more lonely maybe I wouldn't ever have realized what was happening.
But more importantly (at least for the report I had to write for my Psychology class), I understood how AA works. It's a cult. A brain-washing, mind-controlling cult that uses the same psychological techniques as Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate to control people, and then uses that control to help them conquer their addiction demons. It's atomic fission harnessed to light up a city rather than to destroy it. And it works because we're social animals and our brains normally respond to social cues at a level far beneath our concious thought. Unless we're actively guarding against it, we can all be manipulated this way. Even you.
Please note, I'm not in any way claiming that AA is bad or that they use social power to do anything other than try to help people. People's need for social interaction is just a fact, and AA uses this knowledge as the starting point to help people stop drinking. Knowing that you have several dozen people who care about you, who would be disappointed if you had a relapse, who look to you as an example of success, or who would be happy to talk to you if you just need help resisting the urge; that knowledge might make the difference between you giving in to your addiction and you staying sober for another day. That's a good thing and if AA works for somebody then that's great.
So I completely agree with AC's suggestion that AA is a cult; but I disagree that this is in any way a bad thing.
Yes, although there are dozens of lines of code omitted (ENVIRONMENT DIVISION), and in my experience COBOL's direct printing and console commands were never used. You either wrote to a file and used a third-party reporting tool to print or you interacted with the screen using CICS. But I imagine if the commands were really never used they'd have been deprecated by now, so YMMV.
I found it! (And I've looked a couple of other times in the past to no avail.) I did a GIS for "IBM RealCD", thinking to post a link to the picture-less archive.org copy and a separate link to some GIS results of the interface, and the RealCD pictures were from a heretofore unknown mirror of the site. (Way back in the day, I used to have this site bookmarked; I was bummed when the domain lapsed.) But enough about my google-fu...
Last year I wrote a simulator of a VERY simple computer. It had four instructions, 16 bytes of memory, and 2 registers. There were no branch instructions; literally the only thing you could do was write a program to add two (8-bit) numbers together. (And it would set the error bit if the result was bigger than 255.) I gave it an interface of nothing but (simulated) LED lights for the registers and memory, and then (simulated) push buttons to select a memory address and poke a value into it. It looked like a relic from 1956.
I then explained it to my then 9 and 11 year-old sons (who both are teaching themselves to program), explained base-2 math, explained how the "computer" worked and the four instructions they had available, gave them a whiteboard, and tasked them with writing a program to add two numbers.
They went NUTS! They were discussing theories, pointing out errors in each other's ideas, and getting excited when they fixed bugs. And they were doing it with a maturity level way beyond their years. They loved it. And I think that part of it was because it was simple enough that they felt in control of it. I also had the memory lights turn green as the instruction pointer advanced, so they could watch the program running. (It was slow enough that they could follow it and watch the registers change.) Granted, my boys love history, so that may have sweetened the deal for them a bit. But I was shocked at how easily they picked it up and how much they enjoyed it.
I'd like to expand it to the point where they can watch a stack operating, and see pointers and offsets getting used, but I just haven't had the time to follow up on it. But it confirms (for me) that the idea of starting at the beginning might be the most effective way to teach programming. (I also taught programming at a local trade college for a few years, and I noticed how much harder it was for the students to pick up--say--OO programming concepts when they had never had to deal with the problems that OO concepts were designed to solve. Trying to simplify it even more for elementary school students seemed mis-guided.)
The very best part of the story was six months later touring the Mercury Redstone program blockhouse at Kennedy Space Center (I know it's not technically on the KSC property, save your breath). They had an old Sperry-Rand computer with a console full of lights, and both boys lit up and told the (confused) tour guide "I KNOW THIS! I KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM IT!". It nearly brought a nerdy tear to my eye.
P.S. If anyone is curious for more information I'd be happy to share. It wasn't very complicated, but I think it has a lot of potential.
Did anybody read the comment thread in the second link? It appears to be nothing but 15-year olds, but the overwhelming sentiment is *against* George Hotz and *for* Sony. I find it depressing when I talk to normal people who cheerfully use iTunes et al with no idea what DRM is. But seeing a whole gang of young people vehemently defending Sony against those mean, mean pirates is just demoralizing.
And why are they defending Sony? Because Sony was forced (by the scurvy pirates) to issue a useless update that prevents them from using their PS3 for 30 minutes while it's downloading and installing. So Sony does something useless and annoying, and the 15-year olds blame the pirates for it.
I hate to say this, but we've lost. The public has accepted HDMI. They've accepted devices locked in firmware. They've accepted Blu-Ray. They've accepted the iOS app store. They've accepted the Kindle. In 5 years the PCs from the big vendors will have locked firmware to "protect the user experience" and to prevent "hackers and pirates" from "compromising the security of the system" so they can download child porn and terrorist handbooks. In 10 years the only way you'll be able to run FOSS software will be to buy an unlocked "corporate" PC for an absurd amount of money and possibly only after "registering" your unprotected box so the authorities can monitor you for illicit activities. For a big company this won't be any issue at all (they already have policies to prevent their employees for using the servers for non-corporate activities), but for the home user it will be an enormous barrier.
Honestly your post looks like someone who was set in their ways and simply unwilling to do things differently.
Would it be unsporting to point out that you responded to an anecdotal argument ("Repeatedly my iPhone has been wiped when connecting to iTunes") with an anecdotal argument ("I have never had my phone wiped by connecting to iTunes"). If you're going to accuse the GP of being unwilling to do things differently, you might want to try doing something differently.
I have never owned an iPhone, and therefore conclude that Apple has never sold one. Did I do that right?
Software patents are stupid, but I'm happy to give MS a monopoly on fontlings, if only so that I can spend the next 17 years never being subjected to a fontling.
(I hope.)
I only got into one small edit war once and it was enough to discourage me from ever contributing to wikipedia again. The concept of deleting knowledge (not correcting or challenging it; DELETING it) just strikes me as wrong on a visceral level.
The worst part is that it probably wasn't deleted by a malicious HD Radio hater. It was probably deleted by somebody who was too lazy to be careful with his edits.
It's your own fault. You were supposed to monitor the page every hour, and get friends in different time zones to watch the page while you slept. That way as soon as somebody so much as corrected a spelling mistake you could revert it nearly instantly and discourage other hooligans from messing with your article.
I'm not really familiar with this project, but couldn't they just call Princess Rosella like "Princess Rosetta" and so on? It's not like Activision can lay claim to the entire swords and sorcery genre.
The alternative is an Internet controlled by the ISPs, which can simply be paid by the RIAA and their friends to shape traffic as they see fit. The only way to prevent people with deep pockets from controlling your network access is to own the network yourself. Hell, if I remember correctly your "naive people" were demanding government interference BECAUSE the ISP sysadmins were blocking paying customers from using P2P protocols -- with no government involvement at all. When you're paying to use somebody else's network you're at somebody else's mercy, period, full stop.
P.S. Don't interpret this post as a defense of government involvement.
There are only so many hours in a day, and there are only so many movies and television shows that people can consume. If the costs of reproduction and distribution fall precipitously, people aren't going to see ten movies a week or watch TV for an additional four hours a day. They'll just spend less money to consume about the same amount of content. That would be true even in a world with no piracy. And with more bandwidth to fill, that smaller pool of money needs to fund the creation of even more content. Risky, expensive productions were going to wither away even if BitTorrent had never been created. Or put another way, don't blame piracy for The Jay Leno Show or Saw VI. In fact (although the huge biases make it hard to trust any study of the topic), I wouldn't be surprised if most pirates haven't greatly reduced their spending on media as distribution costs fell; but rather started accumulating more bits for the same amount of money.
Once content producers figure out how to make money in a world without physical media (which requires them to figure out how to offer their customers what they want at a prices they'll pay -- you'd think it wouldn't be so hard), the content will flow again. There may be less money available to create it, and they may need to change the ways they fund it, but people with a story to tell will find a way to tell their story. The radio and the phonograph didn't kill live music, movies didn't kill live theater, television didn't kill movies, and the VCR didn't kill anything. In all of these cases there were big winners and big losers, and the scope and/or quality of the content may have morphed over the decades, but there is more stuff (both good and bad) than ever before.
It would be an interesting experiment (for very small values of interesting) to see how long it takes for every website to get Firsted. I wouldn't be surprised if it identified new sites faster than Google's own spiders.
Don't forget "This is a [ Socialist | Fascist } lie!", "I also found this site (nigerian.spambot.com) to be helpful", "XXX !! SEE YOUNG GIRLZ DO IT WITH FARM ANIMALZ!!! XXX", "This [ music | team | artist | writer | company ] sucks and everyone who disagrees is [a hipster douchebag | trailer trash ]", and "...b-b-b-but [ Obama | Bush | Clinton ] did it and the MSM [didn't have | had ] a problem with it/then/."
I'm normally the first in line to defend executives who work for their shareholders, because if they don't they'll just be replaced with someone who does. But in this case "wasting" means paying too much money to people in category #2.
It's reasonable to assume that if insurance company X saved $1,000,000 by buying cheap solutions instead of gold-plated ones, the $1,000,000 wouldn't be used to buy more medical care for their policyholders; it would be (properly) spent on executive bonuses and dividends. So from the standpoint of the only people who matter (the shareholders), the money was wasted.
Now in real life the insurers will simply raise their policy rates and/or reduce other payments to people in category #2 to maintain their margins. But in the first case they'll end up with fewer customers and presumably lower profits or increased risk. And in the second case they risk alienating customers or doctors or -- even worse -- attracting the attention of regulators.
Putting aside the legitimate concern that if they covered iPhones they would suffer from more fraud, this isn't all that different than if the insurance company CEO set that rule because his brother-in-law is the CEO of Myers-Briggs. It's a transfer of money from the people who've earned it (the shareholders) to those who haven't (assistive device manufacturers). Unless the extra $7,500 per device is cheaper than the additional (hidden) costs of paying for iPhones (or iPhone software), then it's waste.
Hell, maybe Myers-Briggs would become more efficient if all of their products weren't paid for by insurance and taxes. I've used their software, and it's not much better than pretty good in-house software. They could use the competition.
It would depend on the contract you signed when you bought the policy. You can pay however much you want for whatever coverage you like; it's no one else's business.
Wow. You have anger issues, my friend. But regardless, perhaps it would be wise if you took a Valium and then went back and read the article in question. Nowhere is it suggested that insurers pick up the tab for things that their customers currently pay for. The issue is that they are currently paying $8,000 for equipment that could be replaced with $500 worth of off-the-shelf kit, and that kit would be more effective and useful, to boot.
Your argument seems to be that insurance companies shouldn't actually pay out on claims, because that would make their customers "irresponsible" and "helpless twits", and you're absolutely correct that if all insurance companies refused to pay claims, then the price of insurance would surely plummet. But there's some sort of logical flaw in your argument that I can't quite put my finger on...
I believe the high cost of insurance is largely due to insurers wasting money, rather than insurers not telling their customers that they should just buy it themselves. But that's just me.
But in all seriousness, if you're ever in the market for insurance look me up. You would be a dream customer.
I know. And that's one of the tests I use to determine if something is a bad idea. "Always show all menu items" in Office XP/2003. "Never show Clippy" (also in Office). Etc.
Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background. And if it's only a little transparent (OS X), the menu can look like it got smudged with dirt. Are we expected to use only low-contrast, muted backgrounds?
If I wanted to see a partially obscured, blurry version of what's behind my browser, I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
My AA story...
In college, I attended an AA meeting as a requirement for a Psychology class. I wan't an alcoholic or even on the path to alcoholism; I just needed to fulfill the requirement and "attend an AA meeting" was the easiest way to do that.
The first thing I noticed was that all the people in the meeeting (there were maybe 40 attendees) had replaced alcohol with coffee and cigarettes. The second thing was that all of these people seemed to care about each other. A lot. It wasn't anything explicit or obvious; it just seemed to radiate from everybody and it generated this vibe that was incredibly warm and fuzzy. I didn't announce why I was there, so unless they asked me the other attendees just treated me like another anonymous alcoholic. And they treated me like I was their son or their brother. It felt really, really comfortable and nice. At one point, I actually thought to myself "it's too bad I'm not an alcoholic, because it would be great to hang out with these people every week."
I left that meeting on an emotional high. The only way I can describe it is that it was like finding out you had a whole branch of your family that been searching for you for years, and now you've been reunited and your new family just accepts you with -- not just open arms -- but with a tangible joy that you've finally joined them. It was awesome! And then I got about 50 feet out the door and said to myself "You just got hooked by a cult!"
I was shocked because I had always assumed that I was 100% absolutely immune to cults. I had read stories about people who were brainwashed into joining them and thought that I -- with my intelligence and my skepticism and my stable family life -- could never fall for something like that. But I had only been there for two hours and they had hooked me. Had I been less intelligent or cynical or more lonely maybe I wouldn't ever have realized what was happening.
But more importantly (at least for the report I had to write for my Psychology class), I understood how AA works. It's a cult. A brain-washing, mind-controlling cult that uses the same psychological techniques as Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate to control people, and then uses that control to help them conquer their addiction demons. It's atomic fission harnessed to light up a city rather than to destroy it. And it works because we're social animals and our brains normally respond to social cues at a level far beneath our concious thought. Unless we're actively guarding against it, we can all be manipulated this way. Even you.
Please note, I'm not in any way claiming that AA is bad or that they use social power to do anything other than try to help people. People's need for social interaction is just a fact, and AA uses this knowledge as the starting point to help people stop drinking. Knowing that you have several dozen people who care about you, who would be disappointed if you had a relapse, who look to you as an example of success, or who would be happy to talk to you if you just need help resisting the urge; that knowledge might make the difference between you giving in to your addiction and you staying sober for another day. That's a good thing and if AA works for somebody then that's great.
So I completely agree with AC's suggestion that AA is a cult; but I disagree that this is in any way a bad thing.
Yes, although there are dozens of lines of code omitted (ENVIRONMENT DIVISION), and in my experience COBOL's direct printing and console commands were never used. You either wrote to a file and used a third-party reporting tool to print or you interacted with the screen using CICS. But I imagine if the commands were really never used they'd have been deprecated by now, so YMMV.
I found it! (And I've looked a couple of other times in the past to no avail.) I did a GIS for "IBM RealCD", thinking to post a link to the picture-less archive.org copy and a separate link to some GIS results of the interface, and the RealCD pictures were from a heretofore unknown mirror of the site. (Way back in the day, I used to have this site bookmarked; I was bummed when the domain lapsed.) But enough about my google-fu...
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm
Some relevant pages: (The rest of the site is excellent, too.)
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/readplease.htm
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/phone.htm
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/realcd.htm
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
Last year I wrote a simulator of a VERY simple computer. It had four instructions, 16 bytes of memory, and 2 registers. There were no branch instructions; literally the only thing you could do was write a program to add two (8-bit) numbers together. (And it would set the error bit if the result was bigger than 255.) I gave it an interface of nothing but (simulated) LED lights for the registers and memory, and then (simulated) push buttons to select a memory address and poke a value into it. It looked like a relic from 1956.
I then explained it to my then 9 and 11 year-old sons (who both are teaching themselves to program), explained base-2 math, explained how the "computer" worked and the four instructions they had available, gave them a whiteboard, and tasked them with writing a program to add two numbers.
They went NUTS! They were discussing theories, pointing out errors in each other's ideas, and getting excited when they fixed bugs. And they were doing it with a maturity level way beyond their years. They loved it. And I think that part of it was because it was simple enough that they felt in control of it. I also had the memory lights turn green as the instruction pointer advanced, so they could watch the program running. (It was slow enough that they could follow it and watch the registers change.) Granted, my boys love history, so that may have sweetened the deal for them a bit. But I was shocked at how easily they picked it up and how much they enjoyed it.
I'd like to expand it to the point where they can watch a stack operating, and see pointers and offsets getting used, but I just haven't had the time to follow up on it. But it confirms (for me) that the idea of starting at the beginning might be the most effective way to teach programming. (I also taught programming at a local trade college for a few years, and I noticed how much harder it was for the students to pick up--say--OO programming concepts when they had never had to deal with the problems that OO concepts were designed to solve. Trying to simplify it even more for elementary school students seemed mis-guided.)
The very best part of the story was six months later touring the Mercury Redstone program blockhouse at Kennedy Space Center (I know it's not technically on the KSC property, save your breath). They had an old Sperry-Rand computer with a console full of lights, and both boys lit up and told the (confused) tour guide "I KNOW THIS! I KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM IT!". It nearly brought a nerdy tear to my eye.
P.S. If anyone is curious for more information I'd be happy to share. It wasn't very complicated, but I think it has a lot of potential.
And that card makes him look like a giant, pompous jerk with an ego the size of Jupiter.
A business card is designed to give people basic information about a person. This card works.
I can't speak for anybody else, but a lot of the time I don't *want* people to overhear what I'm asking my computer to do...
Did anybody read the comment thread in the second link? It appears to be nothing but 15-year olds, but the overwhelming sentiment is *against* George Hotz and *for* Sony. I find it depressing when I talk to normal people who cheerfully use iTunes et al with no idea what DRM is. But seeing a whole gang of young people vehemently defending Sony against those mean, mean pirates is just demoralizing.
And why are they defending Sony? Because Sony was forced (by the scurvy pirates) to issue a useless update that prevents them from using their PS3 for 30 minutes while it's downloading and installing. So Sony does something useless and annoying, and the 15-year olds blame the pirates for it.
I hate to say this, but we've lost. The public has accepted HDMI. They've accepted devices locked in firmware. They've accepted Blu-Ray. They've accepted the iOS app store. They've accepted the Kindle. In 5 years the PCs from the big vendors will have locked firmware to "protect the user experience" and to prevent "hackers and pirates" from "compromising the security of the system" so they can download child porn and terrorist handbooks. In 10 years the only way you'll be able to run FOSS software will be to buy an unlocked "corporate" PC for an absurd amount of money and possibly only after "registering" your unprotected box so the authorities can monitor you for illicit activities. For a big company this won't be any issue at all (they already have policies to prevent their employees for using the servers for non-corporate activities), but for the home user it will be an enormous barrier.
Stallman was right. I'm depressed.
Honestly your post looks like someone who was set in their ways and simply unwilling to do things differently.
Would it be unsporting to point out that you responded to an anecdotal argument ("Repeatedly my iPhone has been wiped when connecting to iTunes") with an anecdotal argument ("I have never had my phone wiped by connecting to iTunes"). If you're going to accuse the GP of being unwilling to do things differently, you might want to try doing something differently.
I have never owned an iPhone, and therefore conclude that Apple has never sold one. Did I do that right?
Isn't that what Apple did with the letter "i"?
Software patents are stupid, but I'm happy to give MS a monopoly on fontlings, if only so that I can spend the next 17 years never being subjected to a fontling. (I hope.)
My friend once told me that Apple fanbois were petulant, childish, small-minded, rude, and unable to engage in civil discussion.
My friend is apparently an apologist for fanbois.
I only got into one small edit war once and it was enough to discourage me from ever contributing to wikipedia again. The concept of deleting knowledge (not correcting or challenging it; DELETING it) just strikes me as wrong on a visceral level.
The worst part is that it probably wasn't deleted by a malicious HD Radio hater. It was probably deleted by somebody who was too lazy to be careful with his edits.
It's your own fault. You were supposed to monitor the page every hour, and get friends in different time zones to watch the page while you slept. That way as soon as somebody so much as corrected a spelling mistake you could revert it nearly instantly and discourage other hooligans from messing with your article.
Hasn't wikipedia taught you anything?
...unless you're willing to use it.
I'm not really familiar with this project, but couldn't they just call Princess Rosella like "Princess Rosetta" and so on? It's not like Activision can lay claim to the entire swords and sorcery genre.
The alternative is an Internet controlled by the ISPs, which can simply be paid by the RIAA and their friends to shape traffic as they see fit. The only way to prevent people with deep pockets from controlling your network access is to own the network yourself. Hell, if I remember correctly your "naive people" were demanding government interference BECAUSE the ISP sysadmins were blocking paying customers from using P2P protocols -- with no government involvement at all. When you're paying to use somebody else's network you're at somebody else's mercy, period, full stop.
P.S. Don't interpret this post as a defense of government involvement.
There are only so many hours in a day, and there are only so many movies and television shows that people can consume. If the costs of reproduction and distribution fall precipitously, people aren't going to see ten movies a week or watch TV for an additional four hours a day. They'll just spend less money to consume about the same amount of content. That would be true even in a world with no piracy. And with more bandwidth to fill, that smaller pool of money needs to fund the creation of even more content. Risky, expensive productions were going to wither away even if BitTorrent had never been created. Or put another way, don't blame piracy for The Jay Leno Show or Saw VI. In fact (although the huge biases make it hard to trust any study of the topic), I wouldn't be surprised if most pirates haven't greatly reduced their spending on media as distribution costs fell; but rather started accumulating more bits for the same amount of money.
Once content producers figure out how to make money in a world without physical media (which requires them to figure out how to offer their customers what they want at a prices they'll pay -- you'd think it wouldn't be so hard), the content will flow again. There may be less money available to create it, and they may need to change the ways they fund it, but people with a story to tell will find a way to tell their story. The radio and the phonograph didn't kill live music, movies didn't kill live theater, television didn't kill movies, and the VCR didn't kill anything. In all of these cases there were big winners and big losers, and the scope and/or quality of the content may have morphed over the decades, but there is more stuff (both good and bad) than ever before.
It would be an interesting experiment (for very small values of interesting) to see how long it takes for every website to get Firsted. I wouldn't be surprised if it identified new sites faster than Google's own spiders.
Maybe that's part of the plan?
Don't forget "This is a [ Socialist | Fascist } lie!", "I also found this site (nigerian.spambot.com) to be helpful", "XXX !! SEE YOUNG GIRLZ DO IT WITH FARM ANIMALZ!!! XXX", "This [ music | team | artist | writer | company ] sucks and everyone who disagrees is [a hipster douchebag | trailer trash ]", and "...b-b-b-but [ Obama | Bush | Clinton ] did it and the MSM [didn't have | had ] a problem with it /then/."
I think I'll pass...
I'm normally the first in line to defend executives who work for their shareholders, because if they don't they'll just be replaced with someone who does. But in this case "wasting" means paying too much money to people in category #2.
It's reasonable to assume that if insurance company X saved $1,000,000 by buying cheap solutions instead of gold-plated ones, the $1,000,000 wouldn't be used to buy more medical care for their policyholders; it would be (properly) spent on executive bonuses and dividends. So from the standpoint of the only people who matter (the shareholders), the money was wasted.
Now in real life the insurers will simply raise their policy rates and/or reduce other payments to people in category #2 to maintain their margins. But in the first case they'll end up with fewer customers and presumably lower profits or increased risk. And in the second case they risk alienating customers or doctors or -- even worse -- attracting the attention of regulators.
Putting aside the legitimate concern that if they covered iPhones they would suffer from more fraud, this isn't all that different than if the insurance company CEO set that rule because his brother-in-law is the CEO of Myers-Briggs. It's a transfer of money from the people who've earned it (the shareholders) to those who haven't (assistive device manufacturers). Unless the extra $7,500 per device is cheaper than the additional (hidden) costs of paying for iPhones (or iPhone software), then it's waste.
Hell, maybe Myers-Briggs would become more efficient if all of their products weren't paid for by insurance and taxes. I've used their software, and it's not much better than pretty good in-house software. They could use the competition.
It would depend on the contract you signed when you bought the policy. You can pay however much you want for whatever coverage you like; it's no one else's business.
Wow. You have anger issues, my friend. But regardless, perhaps it would be wise if you took a Valium and then went back and read the article in question. Nowhere is it suggested that insurers pick up the tab for things that their customers currently pay for. The issue is that they are currently paying $8,000 for equipment that could be replaced with $500 worth of off-the-shelf kit, and that kit would be more effective and useful, to boot.
Your argument seems to be that insurance companies shouldn't actually pay out on claims, because that would make their customers "irresponsible" and "helpless twits", and you're absolutely correct that if all insurance companies refused to pay claims, then the price of insurance would surely plummet. But there's some sort of logical flaw in your argument that I can't quite put my finger on...
I believe the high cost of insurance is largely due to insurers wasting money, rather than insurers not telling their customers that they should just buy it themselves. But that's just me.
But in all seriousness, if you're ever in the market for insurance look me up. You would be a dream customer.
Far from the truth, but I LOL'ed.
I know. And that's one of the tests I use to determine if something is a bad idea. "Always show all menu items" in Office XP/2003. "Never show Clippy" (also in Office). Etc.
Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background. And if it's only a little transparent (OS X), the menu can look like it got smudged with dirt. Are we expected to use only low-contrast, muted backgrounds?
If I wanted to see a partially obscured, blurry version of what's behind my browser, I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.