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User: JDS13

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Comments · 35

  1. Bad review got me a free updated product on Do Retailers Often Screen User Reviews? · · Score: 1

    I posted a bad review of some $25 men's travel briefs at a clothing web site, saying that the construction and quality were excellent but the design was bad. The site didn't publish that review - instead I got an e-mail from customer service offering me a free new version of the product, and an offer to exchange any old ones that I had. They had indeed fixed the design problem and they posted my new rave review.

  2. Missing the biggest outflows on Serious Design Failure At USAspending.gov? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The whole exercise is a political manipulation anyway. The largest government outlays - the so-called entitlements - are omitted from the chart. Medicare, Social Security, and reimbursements to states for social services are not shown on these charts. Those items constitute more than half of Federal spending - that's where your tax dollars go - but they're completely omitted in this analysis.

  3. Definitive analysis on Woman Fired For Using Uppercase In Email · · Score: 1
  4. Simple strong passwords on Strong Passwords Not As Good As You Think · · Score: 1

    One way to make easy-to-remember very strong passwords is to scramble an address, viz. Ukiah2035Elm.

    If you must use a public computer, you can protect yourself from keyloggers by jumping from box to box: type part of your userid in one box, click elsewhere and type other stuff, click the password box and type part, back to the userid to finish, back to the password, etc.

    There are so many naive users that even very simple precautions make you an unattractive target.

  5. Legal citations? Bibliographic references? on Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal · · Score: 1

    What would happen to human discourse if we banned bibliographic references and footnotes, which are, after all, links to copyrighted materials?

    And banning paraphrases? This could be used to squelch nearly all creative or derivative work.

    How can anyone take this idea seriously?

  6. Re:Smart move on Why Doctors Hate Science · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Your story is puzzling for several reasons. Paxil (paroxetine) is off-patent and now costs $15/month. For many patients, it is the best choice - really a lifesaver. Might it be possible that your physician decided it was the best choice for you after examining you carefully and knowing something about your history, and not because of a free lunch? Maybe he took your complaints seriously, rather than just suggesting a change in work environment and sleep habits?

    Typically, patients ramp up to a therapeutic dose of SSRIs over several weeks. These drugs require considerable time to achieve any effect. It's unlikely that one or two pills would have had the effects you describe.

  7. Re:Why is govt-provided health care worse? on Why Doctors Hate Science · · Score: 1

    Nonsense. A friend with rheumatoid arthritis was overcome with severe abdominal pain one Saturday. She needed a CT scan, but to save money National Health has shut down its Lancashire imaging centre on weekends. For a while they allowed people to pay for veterinary imaging but the newspaper headlines forced an end to the practice ("My cat could get scanned, but I couldn't!"). NICE decides what drugs people get, and how long they have to wait for surgery (another friend has waited three years so far for a bunion repair).

  8. Re:Politics of health care on Why Doctors Hate Science · · Score: 1

    The Medicare statistic is misleading. Medicare mostly pays huge hospital bills so its overhead inevitably will be less than an insurer that covers well-patient care and small claims. Also, in my area it's getting very difficult to find a doctor who accepts Medicare for payment. Medicare sets reimbursement and coverage by bureaucratic fiat. If you want something more, or to see a physician outside Medicare, you're out of luck.

  9. Re:Politics of health care on Why Doctors Hate Science · · Score: 1

    Holman Jenkins pointed out that "We already bribe, through supremely asinine tax policy, the most affluent, capable consumers on the planet not to use their smarts to make sure the system returns value for money."

  10. 1and1 and ipower are cheap and fairly good on Email-only Providers? · · Score: 1

    1and1.com will give you 2GB of mail, 5 mailboxes, POP, IMAP, spam filtering, etc for $12/year. ipower.com will give you 200 mailboxes for $15/year. Both support SSL and alternate ports. I've used 1and1 for ten years, and ipower for one year. They're both pretty reliable and responsive. If e-mail is the criterion, I'd go with 1and1 - you can't train the ipower spam filter, and it's only mediocre.