The legal costs in defending a single hostile workplace complaint suit can easily exceed the cost of the monitoring system, and the company faces even greater loses if they lose the suit.
Clearly, then, it's time for those of us who oppose such monitoring to start suing over it (whether or not there is a chance to win), just so the incentives don't push the employer towards evil whether they like it or not.
I'm not sure that bringing a frivolous lawsuit against your employer for doing something completely legal and accepted in the industry is going to change anything...
But if you're really concerned with the privacy and security of your internet use, you should probably spend your energy fighting government attempts to monitor your personal internet use rather than fighting your employer for monitoring use of their own network. At least it's easy to opt out of workplace monitoring by using your own web device (i.e. smartphone) or by waiting until you get home.
What about if you're viewing or downloading content that can get them into trouble like porn (which can get them a harassment complaint from someone who sees a coworker's porn), downloading and/or sharing pirated content (employers that look the other way can face liability), child porn, etc.
That is a _completely_ different situation to spending time on personal matters and not even playing the same game as the original topic of hacking into HTTPS connections.
Stop trying to disingenuously conflate things. No-one is arguing people should be able to fire up a youporn session and have a wank at their desk.
If you agree that *some* web content filtering is appropriate, how can you agree that decrypting and filtering on https sessions is inappropriate? How does the company know whether https://100.100.100.100/ is your online banking session or a web proxy that serves up youporn content unless their content filter can look at keywords in the page?
It's hardly "hacking into" https sessions if it's the company's network and computers - they already have a policy saying that they are monitoring web usage so users shouldn't be surprised when they do.
"The _only_ time an employer has a moral leg to stand on is if you're spending so much time on non-work activities you are unable to complete your assigned duties. "
Not even then because, in that case, the problem would be you being unable to fulfill your tasks, not why you didn't fulfill them.
What about if you're viewing or downloading content that can get them into trouble like porn (which can get them a harassment complaint from someone who sees a coworker's porn), downloading and/or sharing pirated content (employers that look the other way can face liability), child porn, etc.
If you're using social networking sites for 6 hours a day, then you're clearly not going to be able to perform your work duties. If you _are_ able to complete your work duties, then the fact you're spending 6 hours a day on Facebook is irrelevant.
The scenario you are describing is a failing of the manager, not the employee.
Isn't it a failing of the manager *and* the employee? If a manager lets an employee get away with hours of wasted time, the company still wants to know about it.
Call me a subservient scum if you want to, but if people could be trusted to not abuse personal internet use, we wouldn't have to monitor it. The vast majority of employees don't abuse it, but there's that small percentage that ruin it for everyone.
I call you subservient scum not because you are looking for the minority, but because you are using their actions to try and morally justify intrusive monitoring of everybody.
You are no different to the "think of the children" or the "if it catches one terrorist it was worth it" brigades. You're just operating on a smaller scale.
We're looking for the minority because those are the ones that are going to cost the company money. The legal costs in defending a single hostile workplace complaint suit can easily exceed the cost of the monitoring system, and the company faces even greater loses if they lose the suit. Workplace internet monitoring has become so commonplace that if we are not doing it, then that shows that we're not taking prudent measures to prevent abuse making it harder to defend against a lawsuit. If you don't like it, then talk to your legislators and get a law passed prohibiting workplace internet monitoring *and* shielding employers from litigation based on improper internet use by employees.
Believe me, your IT department doesn't want to monitor your internet use anymore than you do, but we don't often get to say "no" to projects when it comes down to shielding the company from risk.
But nowadays, smartphones are so common and powerful that there's really no excuse for using your employer's network for anything private - I don't even check my personal email through work's network any more, I just read it on my phone. I don't want them to read it, so I keep my personal traffic off their network.
So rather than complain that the company is looking over your shoulder when you're using their computer and their network, just use your own.
We have someone at work that takes an 30 minutes (no exaggeration) to wash her hands both before and after using the toilet. This person will then call the tech department because she is not competent enough at her job of 20+ years to handle FTP uploads.
I'm not sure how that's relevant to this article, but just because someone can't use FTP doesn't make them useless. Our payroll supervisor calls IT for help to do her rare FTP transfers, yet she's very good at her job. When we were looking at a new payroll system, during the demo (and her first exposure to the system), she pointed out that their tax calculations were wrong. The company argued that it was not, but 90 minutes later after a conference call with a payroll specialist and engineer at the company, they found out that they had indeed set up their test system incorrectly, but no one ever noticed.
FTP isn't a critical job skill for many positions, and even though it's trivial for many Slashdot readers, it's not always trivial to the rest of the world. (i.e. "Why can't I use FTPS, the website says I need sFTP, isn't that the same?" "How do I use Passive mode?" "Binary mode - whats that?")
Browse your porn (or whatever it is you do that you don't want your employer watching) from your smartphone. Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do.
No.
Fuck 'em if they can't handle the idea people have lives outside of work and sometimes need to deal with those lives.
Morally bankrupt employers who cannot handle the fact that their employees won't spend every second labouring deserve nothing more than contempt.
Which is still more respect than subservient scum like you should be shown.
At my employer, we don't really care if you're using Facebook or other "personal use" on your lunch break or occasionally during the day, but where we draw the line is excessive use or browsing porn because the company has a real liability if someone is browsing porn at their desk, and an employee sees it and makes claim for being in a 'hostile workplace'.
Also, we use simple heuristics to help prevent employees from inadvertently (or purposely) leaking confidential data (credit card numbers, SSN's, etc). While it won't stop a determined employee from taking the data with a USB stick (or encrypting it in a zip file), we've caught a few employees sending data to a personal email account so they can work on it from home. This too is a liability to the company since we're responsible for data breaches.
If you're using facebook for an hour a day, no one cares. But if you're using social networking sites for 6 hours/day, you're going to come under more scrutiny. Just like you'd come under scrutiny if you're a real estate agent spending hours/day talking to clients (which recently happened when a project manager was literally making over 4 hours of calls/day on a company phone, including during business hours and we found out he had a real estate business on the side)
No one is telling you that you can't post on your kid's facebook page during the day, just don't spend hours/day using facebook (and don't try to view adult content at work - hanging a racy picture on your office door will get you a visit with HR, as will having the same racy picture on your monitor)
We don't hide our monitoring policies, everyone signs a statement saying that they read and understand the policy. IT doesn't even look at the reports, they go straight to HR, and they are the ones that decide who is abusing the "incidental personal use" policy. Few companies of substantial size can afford to *not* do monitoring.
Call me a subservient scum if you want to, but if people could be trusted to not abuse personal internet use, we wouldn't have to monitor it. The vast majority of employees don't abuse it, but there's that small percentage that ruin it for everyone.
Fair enough. I get a half hour break for lunch, during which I have been informed I may use the company internet connection. If they are snooping my https details during that period, we have a problem captain.
Browse your porn (or whatever it is you do that you don't want your employer watching) from your smartphone. Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do.
At my company, we tell employees that they are free to use computers for personal use on breaks, but we also tell them that we monitor usage and recommend that they not use our network for anything of a private or personal nature.
In the absence of the FDA, why couldn't someone start a business testing the quality of drugs? Why would any company intent on running and maintaining a profitable business deliberately sell garbage to their customers?
Because they can? If cutting the drug with 10% inert (or even hazardous) ingredients increases their profit by 10% without being obvious to the customer, why wouldn't an unregulated industry do that? Who's going to notice that their Vioxx is 10% weaker? And a little Melamine in the pills probably won't kill anyone.
It doesn't seem that for-profit testing agencies would help much, because either the drug sellers would give pure samples to the testing agency, or they'd shop around until they found a testing agency that gave them the results they wanted - testing agencies that are more cooperative with manufacturers would get more business than "honest" agencies. Government regulation is supposed to be unbiased and immune to corruption since they don't accept money for goods.
Companies will cut corners where they can. Do you really think Coke is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup because the Coca-Cola company thinks it's better for you and because it's better tasting than sugar? They use HFCS because it's cheaper than sugar. Many people find that sugar sweetened goods taste better (and many think that HFCS is less healthy than sugar, but that's debatable). I know I prefer sugar sweetened Coke (imported from Mexico), and I am willing to pay a premium for it (though since I drink less than one Coke per month, the price is immaterial).
This drug was not covered on her insurance, and the ones that were covered were not effective for her condition.
Name and shame?
I think it was Prandin, a diabetes drug. This was the only drug that proved to be effective for her
This was several years ago and her monthly cost dropped from around $350 at the cheapest domestic place she could find (she compared a number of local pharmacies including Costco, Walmart and others and some mail order places) to under $60 by buying from Canada. I don't know what current prices are.
Canada puts price controls on their drugs. If every country put price controls on drugs, you might find many less new drugs making it to market.
So you mean Canada is abusing our drug industry by forcing the drug companies sell drugs below cost? Why don't the manufacturers refuse to sell at such low prices? Is there some international law that forces drug manufacturers to sell drugs at any price set by any country?
Maybe lower prices would mean fewer drug ads on TV and fewer multi-page magazine advertisements? How much of a drug's total cost goes into marketing?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is bored and screws with a guy who helps people buy the health products they want to buy. News at 11.
While what he is doing may be shady, I will say that Canadian drug stores enabled my mom to take a much more expensive brand-name drug that she wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. This drug was not covered on her insurance, and the ones that were covered were not effective for her condition.
She refused to let her children buy it for her, but when I found it online for 20% of the price (after pill splitting), she was able to afford it.
The problem I wish the FDA would address is exorbitant drug prices in the USA compared to what the rest of the world pays.
So was he selling counterfeit drugs or foreign, non-Canadian drugs that could possibly be counterfeit but there's no evidence that they are? They seem like two different things.
Maybe people hear microsoft and then think about operating systems that crash and are prone to viruses. Maybe not a fair perception, but I know my dad became anti-MS after repeated virus infections on his Windows computer despite having up to date antivirus. He would complain of endless popup windows and spam ads windows that he couldn't close. I'm sure he was partially responsible by clicking on malware links and maybe even downloading and running malware directly.
I tried walking him through running some malware cleanup tools over the phone, but in the end I ended up sending him a Laptop running Linux that automatically pulls up Google Chrome when he starts up. He's had it for about 6 months now and has been completely happy with it, no more malware. So now he's got a terrible perception of Microsoft and probably wouldn't buy a Microsoft phone (not realizing that the phone OS is completely different than Win XP).
Right but you totally neglected to mention how someone can go to the range, pick up YOUR brass, and leave that at the scene of the crime. There are certainly people who are smart and calculating enough to do that. That's the thing. Sure if I lose my gun and it turns up, the police are going to come knocking on my door. How much worse is to to HAVE the gun, and then have your brass turn up at a crime scene? The police would think it was a slam dunk! After all, you have the weapon that stamped the brass at the crime scene. Will it happen often? Probably not, certainly not in crimes of passion. But in other cases, it wouldn't be hard at all. There are ranges that are "lost brass" where you are supposed to leave your casings behind. That would be a great opportunity to get a bunch of stamped brass.
Wouldn't these same smart and calculating people also go your barber and pick up some hair to leave DNA evidence at the scene? Or maybe break into your gym locker to steal some clothes to leave at the scene? DNA evidence is more damning than a few shell casings and harder to explain.
I think you're overestimating the intelligence of the average criminal with a gun, and underestimating the intelligence of the average police investigator.
You don't really need to go too far up the intelligence tree to find guys using stolen weapons for their crime. At which point, this does very little. About the best it can do is improve the ability to link crimes together (you have to go MUCH further up the intelligence tree to find guys using a new weapon for each crime once fired).
Sounds like pretty valuable information if you can link multiple crimes together just by looking at shell casings left at the scene.
Increased cost? Yes... Inconvenience? How, other than a larger cost?
Your gun is stolen and used in a crime. The cops come looking for you.
When selling your gun to someone else, add on the cost and time of changing the micro-code registration.
When the paperwork for a legal sale gets lost, and the buyer uses the gun in a crime, police come looking for you.
When the paperwork is lost, and the new owner has his gun stolen and used in a crime, the cops come looking for you, then you finger the buyer, so double the fun and double the inconvenience for twice as many people.
When your "helpful" "friend" helps you police your brass at the shooting range and then drops a few casings at his next shooting, he's effectively framed you.
When the market for old guns explodes and it becomes harder and more expensive to buy one, it both costs money and time.
If you are trying to repair your gun, having to buy a new registered firing pin instead of someone's cheaper and readily available used one.
But...but... the other gun guys said that microprinting is useless because the first thing a criminal will do is erase the microprinting, so microprinting is useless. But now you're saying that microprinting is bad because criminals will steal guns and innocent gun owners will get blamed for the crime due to the microprinting.
So which is it -- are criminals smart enough to sand the microprinting off a gun before using it, or will they not bother because they use stolen guns? I can think of lots of reasons a smart criminal would erase the microprinting even from a stolen gun - so if he gets caught with the stolen gun, the microprinting doesn't tie him to other crimes with the same gun.
In reality, I think sometimes microprinting will help solve crimes, sometimes it won't. But it seems like such a small expense that it's probably worth it. Since serial numbers are already recorded in gun sales (in some (all?) states), so recording the microprinting serial number during a transaction or when reporting it stolen seems like little additional work. And the gunowner whose gun is found at a scene of a crime will get a call from the police when they trace back the serial number, just like a gunowner whose microprinting is found on shell casings found at the scene.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?
Pretty high estimate. I've done software defined radio stuff, add a simple microphone and mic preamp and change the software and it would make a killer hearing aid. The point being dedicated SDR hardware has a lovely low noise low intermod input amp, a decent 16 bit A/D, some extremely hefty CPU processing capable of anything a mere hearing aid could possibly require, and a nice low distortion 16 bit D/A and amp. Its hard to find a way to spend more than $50 on materials. Now this might pass thru 5 middlemen, each demanding 50% profit, in which case, sure, the last guy to "pay for hardware" had to cough up $350, because the n-1 middleman made $175 of profit, and the n-2 middleman made $83 of profit, and the n-3 middleman made $42 profit, and the n-4 guy who imported individual components from China made a mere $21 of profit, leaving the foxconn workers $10.50 of revenue. Or something like that.
But does your SDR radio stuff fit in a package the size of your little fingernail and last for days on a battery that weighs less than a gram?
My bluetooth earset / bug / whatever you call it off the shelf at best buy it was $40 in May. Some android software to listen, buffer one second, amplify, echo can, and blast it into my ear SEEMS possible. Its a plantronics M50. My first one was $80 a couple years ago, and replacement purchased about a month ago was $40 before sales tax. In some ways its not terribly durable, but at $40 I'm not too worried if it "only" lasts 2 or 3 years of heavy use. On the other hand, a $40 pair of shoes would never survive near daily used for 3 years either.
Does a hearing aid really "buffer one second" while processing sound? It would be annoying if a Bluetooth headset did it, I can't believe a hearing aid could get away with it - how would that work with people that wear a hearing aid in only one ear because their other ear doesn't have hearing loss.
But is certification really necessary in this case? If a company just made a device to insert in your ear (like an earbud or headset) which amplified sound in a particular way, that wouldn't be much different from a Bluetooth headset or a set of earbuds...I don't see how they could be prohibited from selling them, though perhaps with a different name. Insurance might not pay for them, but if you insurance covers a hering aid then what's the problem?
If I were going to wear a sound amplifier in my ear all day every day, I'd like some assurance that it's been tested and that it isn't outputting such high sound levels that it's killing off whatever amount of hearing I have left.
Just because it's not implanted inside the body doesn't mean that it can't cause harm.
I wouldn't use a machine without an SSD. Who wants a slow-moving operating system, when they could have their computer instantly respond to commands?
I'll take predictable failure from write limits over the instant complete failure of hard drives any day.
I put an SSD in my laptop and didn't notice much difference aside from faster boot times. For normal office use it seemed about the same as before the SSD (but with less capacity so I had to move much of my media to a USB hard drive.
I ended up putting the hard drive back into the laptop and moved the SSD to my desktop where I do more I/O intensive work like compiling software. I definitely notice the difference there and since I kept the 2TB drive, I have the best of both worlds - a small fast SSD for I/O intensive tasks, and a big hard drive for more storage.
If I'm going to pay a premium for a laptop, I'd like to be able to upgrade the RAM and HDD. Or even replace the battery. Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.
You want a T series Thinkpad (Maybe W and X is also similar)
I second that - I wanted something solidly built and long lived, so my previous laptop was a T20, I kept that one for 5 years before replacing it with a T520. I picked up a cheap used X60 for travel - I've dropped it more times than I can count and it's still working fine.
The new screen has a much different front, they said in the marketing materials 60-70% less reflective than the older glossy models. It's why there's no matte option this time around (I have a matte screen currently and wouldn't go for a glossy option again either).
Wouldn't the diffusion of a matte screen partially obscure the tiny higher resolution pixels?
I would love a better term. But since you understood what I mean, and for all intents and purposes it was as useful as a brick while it was in that state, it's not a bad term. Dictionaries show multiple meanings for most words, and we manage just fine.
Because "Brick" is a permanent state (without specialized knowledge and/or equipment to bring it back). When I turn off my phone, it's as useful as a brick (less so since mortar won't stick to it so I can't even use it to build a house). However, no one would call it bricked since all I need to do is turn it on to use it.
If reflashing the phone brings it back to life, it's not "bricked".
They sound good to me, but I'm not a serious audiophile, I just use them to cover up background office noise. I think the sound is comparable to the $80 Sennheiser's I use at home. (which, a friend tells me are completely unbearable compared to his $500 Sennheiser HD650's, so I refuse to listen to music through his headphones, 'lest some of his "golden ears" rub off and I find myself needing more expensive gear)
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Clearly, then, it's time for those of us who oppose such monitoring to start suing over it (whether or not there is a chance to win), just so the incentives don't push the employer towards evil whether they like it or not.
I'm not sure that bringing a frivolous lawsuit against your employer for doing something completely legal and accepted in the industry is going to change anything...
But if you're really concerned with the privacy and security of your internet use, you should probably spend your energy fighting government attempts to monitor your personal internet use rather than fighting your employer for monitoring use of their own network. At least it's easy to opt out of workplace monitoring by using your own web device (i.e. smartphone) or by waiting until you get home.
That is a _completely_ different situation to spending time on personal matters and not even playing the same game as the original topic of hacking into HTTPS connections.
Stop trying to disingenuously conflate things. No-one is arguing people should be able to fire up a youporn session and have a wank at their desk.
If you agree that *some* web content filtering is appropriate, how can you agree that decrypting and filtering on https sessions is inappropriate? How does the company know whether https://100.100.100.100/ is your online banking session or a web proxy that serves up youporn content unless their content filter can look at keywords in the page?
It's hardly "hacking into" https sessions if it's the company's network and computers - they already have a policy saying that they are monitoring web usage so users shouldn't be surprised when they do.
"The _only_ time an employer has a moral leg to stand on is if you're spending so much time on non-work activities you are unable to complete your assigned duties. "
Not even then because, in that case, the problem would be you being unable to fulfill your tasks, not why you didn't fulfill them.
What about if you're viewing or downloading content that can get them into trouble like porn (which can get them a harassment complaint from someone who sees a coworker's porn), downloading and/or sharing pirated content (employers that look the other way can face liability), child porn, etc.
We're looking for the minority because those are the ones that are going to cost the company money. The legal costs in defending a single hostile workplace complaint suit can easily exceed the cost of the monitoring system, and the company faces even greater loses if they lose the suit. Workplace internet monitoring has become so commonplace that if we are not doing it, then that shows that we're not taking prudent measures to prevent abuse making it harder to defend against a lawsuit. If you don't like it, then talk to your legislators and get a law passed prohibiting workplace internet monitoring *and* shielding employers from litigation based on improper internet use by employees.
Believe me, your IT department doesn't want to monitor your internet use anymore than you do, but we don't often get to say "no" to projects when it comes down to shielding the company from risk.
But nowadays, smartphones are so common and powerful that there's really no excuse for using your employer's network for anything private - I don't even check my personal email through work's network any more, I just read it on my phone. I don't want them to read it, so I keep my personal traffic off their network.
So rather than complain that the company is looking over your shoulder when you're using their computer and their network, just use your own.
We have someone at work that takes an 30 minutes (no exaggeration) to wash her hands both before and after using the toilet. This person will then call the tech department because she is not competent enough at her job of 20+ years to handle FTP uploads.
I'm not sure how that's relevant to this article, but just because someone can't use FTP doesn't make them useless. Our payroll supervisor calls IT for help to do her rare FTP transfers, yet she's very good at her job. When we were looking at a new payroll system, during the demo (and her first exposure to the system), she pointed out that their tax calculations were wrong. The company argued that it was not, but 90 minutes later after a conference call with a payroll specialist and engineer at the company, they found out that they had indeed set up their test system incorrectly, but no one ever noticed.
FTP isn't a critical job skill for many positions, and even though it's trivial for many Slashdot readers, it's not always trivial to the rest of the world. (i.e. "Why can't I use FTPS, the website says I need sFTP, isn't that the same?" "How do I use Passive mode?" "Binary mode - whats that?")
No.
Fuck 'em if they can't handle the idea people have lives outside of work and sometimes need to deal with those lives.
Morally bankrupt employers who cannot handle the fact that their employees won't spend every second labouring deserve nothing more than contempt.
Which is still more respect than subservient scum like you should be shown.
At my employer, we don't really care if you're using Facebook or other "personal use" on your lunch break or occasionally during the day, but where we draw the line is excessive use or browsing porn because the company has a real liability if someone is browsing porn at their desk, and an employee sees it and makes claim for being in a 'hostile workplace'.
Also, we use simple heuristics to help prevent employees from inadvertently (or purposely) leaking confidential data (credit card numbers, SSN's, etc). While it won't stop a determined employee from taking the data with a USB stick (or encrypting it in a zip file), we've caught a few employees sending data to a personal email account so they can work on it from home. This too is a liability to the company since we're responsible for data breaches.
If you're using facebook for an hour a day, no one cares. But if you're using social networking sites for 6 hours/day, you're going to come under more scrutiny. Just like you'd come under scrutiny if you're a real estate agent spending hours/day talking to clients (which recently happened when a project manager was literally making over 4 hours of calls/day on a company phone, including during business hours and we found out he had a real estate business on the side)
No one is telling you that you can't post on your kid's facebook page during the day, just don't spend hours/day using facebook (and don't try to view adult content at work - hanging a racy picture on your office door will get you a visit with HR, as will having the same racy picture on your monitor)
We don't hide our monitoring policies, everyone signs a statement saying that they read and understand the policy. IT doesn't even look at the reports, they go straight to HR, and they are the ones that decide who is abusing the "incidental personal use" policy. Few companies of substantial size can afford to *not* do monitoring.
Call me a subservient scum if you want to, but if people could be trusted to not abuse personal internet use, we wouldn't have to monitor it. The vast majority of employees don't abuse it, but there's that small percentage that ruin it for everyone.
Fair enough. I get a half hour break for lunch, during which I have been informed I may use the company internet connection. If they are snooping my https details during that period, we have a problem captain.
Browse your porn (or whatever it is you do that you don't want your employer watching) from your smartphone. Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do.
At my company, we tell employees that they are free to use computers for personal use on breaks, but we also tell them that we monitor usage and recommend that they not use our network for anything of a private or personal nature.
3rd party Vendors / suppliers make it hard to find who is at fault.
I thought the company that hired the shoddy vendor is at fault? Does HIPAA, SOX, etc let you push responsibility onto a vendor that you hired?
In the absence of the FDA, why couldn't someone start a business testing the quality of drugs? Why would any company intent on running and maintaining a profitable business deliberately sell garbage to their customers?
Because they can? If cutting the drug with 10% inert (or even hazardous) ingredients increases their profit by 10% without being obvious to the customer, why wouldn't an unregulated industry do that? Who's going to notice that their Vioxx is 10% weaker? And a little Melamine in the pills probably won't kill anyone.
It doesn't seem that for-profit testing agencies would help much, because either the drug sellers would give pure samples to the testing agency, or they'd shop around until they found a testing agency that gave them the results they wanted - testing agencies that are more cooperative with manufacturers would get more business than "honest" agencies. Government regulation is supposed to be unbiased and immune to corruption since they don't accept money for goods.
Companies will cut corners where they can. Do you really think Coke is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup because the Coca-Cola company thinks it's better for you and because it's better tasting than sugar? They use HFCS because it's cheaper than sugar. Many people find that sugar sweetened goods taste better (and many think that HFCS is less healthy than sugar, but that's debatable). I know I prefer sugar sweetened Coke (imported from Mexico), and I am willing to pay a premium for it (though since I drink less than one Coke per month, the price is immaterial).
This drug was not covered on her insurance, and the ones that were covered were not effective for her condition.
Name and shame?
I think it was Prandin, a diabetes drug. This was the only drug that proved to be effective for her
This was several years ago and her monthly cost dropped from around $350 at the cheapest domestic place she could find (she compared a number of local pharmacies including Costco, Walmart and others and some mail order places) to under $60 by buying from Canada. I don't know what current prices are.
Canada puts price controls on their drugs. If every country put price controls on drugs, you might find many less new drugs making it to market.
So you mean Canada is abusing our drug industry by forcing the drug companies sell drugs below cost? Why don't the manufacturers refuse to sell at such low prices? Is there some international law that forces drug manufacturers to sell drugs at any price set by any country?
Maybe lower prices would mean fewer drug ads on TV and fewer multi-page magazine advertisements? How much of a drug's total cost goes into marketing?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is bored and screws with a guy who helps people buy the health products they want to buy. News at 11.
While what he is doing may be shady, I will say that Canadian drug stores enabled my mom to take a much more expensive brand-name drug that she wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. This drug was not covered on her insurance, and the ones that were covered were not effective for her condition.
She refused to let her children buy it for her, but when I found it online for 20% of the price (after pill splitting), she was able to afford it.
The problem I wish the FDA would address is exorbitant drug prices in the USA compared to what the rest of the world pays.
So was he selling counterfeit drugs or foreign, non-Canadian drugs that could possibly be counterfeit but there's no evidence that they are? They seem like two different things.
Maybe people hear microsoft and then think about operating systems that crash and are prone to viruses. Maybe not a fair perception, but I know my dad became anti-MS after repeated virus infections on his Windows computer despite having up to date antivirus. He would complain of endless popup windows and spam ads windows that he couldn't close. I'm sure he was partially responsible by clicking on malware links and maybe even downloading and running malware directly.
I tried walking him through running some malware cleanup tools over the phone, but in the end I ended up sending him a Laptop running Linux that automatically pulls up Google Chrome when he starts up. He's had it for about 6 months now and has been completely happy with it, no more malware. So now he's got a terrible perception of Microsoft and probably wouldn't buy a Microsoft phone (not realizing that the phone OS is completely different than Win XP).
Right but you totally neglected to mention how someone can go to the range, pick up YOUR brass, and leave that at the scene of the crime. There are certainly people who are smart and calculating enough to do that. That's the thing. Sure if I lose my gun and it turns up, the police are going to come knocking on my door. How much worse is to to HAVE the gun, and then have your brass turn up at a crime scene? The police would think it was a slam dunk! After all, you have the weapon that stamped the brass at the crime scene. Will it happen often? Probably not, certainly not in crimes of passion. But in other cases, it wouldn't be hard at all. There are ranges that are "lost brass" where you are supposed to leave your casings behind. That would be a great opportunity to get a bunch of stamped brass.
Wouldn't these same smart and calculating people also go your barber and pick up some hair to leave DNA evidence at the scene? Or maybe break into your gym locker to steal some clothes to leave at the scene? DNA evidence is more damning than a few shell casings and harder to explain.
I think you're overestimating the intelligence of the average criminal with a gun, and underestimating the intelligence of the average police investigator.
You don't really need to go too far up the intelligence tree to find guys using stolen weapons for their crime. At which point, this does very little. About the best it can do is improve the ability to link crimes together (you have to go MUCH further up the intelligence tree to find guys using a new weapon for each crime once fired).
Sounds like pretty valuable information if you can link multiple crimes together just by looking at shell casings left at the scene.
Increased cost? Yes... Inconvenience? How, other than a larger cost?
But...but... the other gun guys said that microprinting is useless because the first thing a criminal will do is erase the microprinting, so microprinting is useless. But now you're saying that microprinting is bad because criminals will steal guns and innocent gun owners will get blamed for the crime due to the microprinting.
So which is it -- are criminals smart enough to sand the microprinting off a gun before using it, or will they not bother because they use stolen guns? I can think of lots of reasons a smart criminal would erase the microprinting even from a stolen gun - so if he gets caught with the stolen gun, the microprinting doesn't tie him to other crimes with the same gun.
In reality, I think sometimes microprinting will help solve crimes, sometimes it won't. But it seems like such a small expense that it's probably worth it. Since serial numbers are already recorded in gun sales (in some (all?) states), so recording the microprinting serial number during a transaction or when reporting it stolen seems like little additional work. And the gunowner whose gun is found at a scene of a crime will get a call from the police when they trace back the serial number, just like a gunowner whose microprinting is found on shell casings found at the scene.
I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?
Pretty high estimate. I've done software defined radio stuff, add a simple microphone and mic preamp and change the software and it would make a killer hearing aid. The point being dedicated SDR hardware has a lovely low noise low intermod input amp, a decent 16 bit A/D, some extremely hefty CPU processing capable of anything a mere hearing aid could possibly require, and a nice low distortion 16 bit D/A and amp. Its hard to find a way to spend more than $50 on materials. Now this might pass thru 5 middlemen, each demanding 50% profit, in which case, sure, the last guy to "pay for hardware" had to cough up $350, because the n-1 middleman made $175 of profit, and the n-2 middleman made $83 of profit, and the n-3 middleman made $42 profit, and the n-4 guy who imported individual components from China made a mere $21 of profit, leaving the foxconn workers $10.50 of revenue. Or something like that.
But does your SDR radio stuff fit in a package the size of your little fingernail and last for days on a battery that weighs less than a gram?
My bluetooth earset / bug / whatever you call it off the shelf at best buy it was $40 in May. Some android software to listen, buffer one second, amplify, echo can, and blast it into my ear SEEMS possible. Its a plantronics M50. My first one was $80 a couple years ago, and replacement purchased about a month ago was $40 before sales tax. In some ways its not terribly durable, but at $40 I'm not too worried if it "only" lasts 2 or 3 years of heavy use. On the other hand, a $40 pair of shoes would never survive near daily used for 3 years either.
Does a hearing aid really "buffer one second" while processing sound? It would be annoying if a Bluetooth headset did it, I can't believe a hearing aid could get away with it - how would that work with people that wear a hearing aid in only one ear because their other ear doesn't have hearing loss.
But is certification really necessary in this case? If a company just made a device to insert in your ear (like an earbud or headset) which amplified sound in a particular way, that wouldn't be much different from a Bluetooth headset or a set of earbuds...I don't see how they could be prohibited from selling them, though perhaps with a different name. Insurance might not pay for them, but if you insurance covers a hering aid then what's the problem?
If I were going to wear a sound amplifier in my ear all day every day, I'd like some assurance that it's been tested and that it isn't outputting such high sound levels that it's killing off whatever amount of hearing I have left.
Just because it's not implanted inside the body doesn't mean that it can't cause harm.
Here's an article that attempts to justify the cost:
http://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-05-2011/hearing-aids-cost.html
Overall cost — $3,600
Costs for the manufacturer:
Materials — $360
Research — $1,080
Other retailer costs:
Rent/overhead — $450
Testing/diagnostic machines — $288
Licenses/insurance — $108
Salaries — $540
Marketing — $270
Continuing education/training — $180
Potential profit for the retailer (pretax) — $324
Approximate product cost for retailer — $1,440
I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?
I wouldn't use a machine without an SSD. Who wants a slow-moving operating system, when they could have their computer instantly respond to commands?
I'll take predictable failure from write limits over the instant complete failure of hard drives any day.
I put an SSD in my laptop and didn't notice much difference aside from faster boot times. For normal office use it seemed about the same as before the SSD (but with less capacity so I had to move much of my media to a USB hard drive.
I ended up putting the hard drive back into the laptop and moved the SSD to my desktop where I do more I/O intensive work like compiling software. I definitely notice the difference there and since I kept the 2TB drive, I have the best of both worlds - a small fast SSD for I/O intensive tasks, and a big hard drive for more storage.
If I'm going to pay a premium for a laptop, I'd like to be able to upgrade the RAM and HDD. Or even replace the battery. Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.
You want a T series Thinkpad (Maybe W and X is also similar)
I second that - I wanted something solidly built and long lived, so my previous laptop was a T20, I kept that one for 5 years before replacing it with a T520. I picked up a cheap used X60 for travel - I've dropped it more times than I can count and it's still working fine.
No matte option, only glossy
The new screen has a much different front, they said in the marketing materials 60-70% less reflective than the older glossy models. It's why there's no matte option this time around (I have a matte screen currently and wouldn't go for a glossy option again either).
Wouldn't the diffusion of a matte screen partially obscure the tiny higher resolution pixels?
I would love a better term. But since you understood what I mean, and for all intents and purposes it was as useful as a brick while it was in that state, it's not a bad term. Dictionaries show multiple meanings for most words, and we manage just fine.
Because "Brick" is a permanent state (without specialized knowledge and/or equipment to bring it back). When I turn off my phone, it's as useful as a brick (less so since mortar won't stick to it so I can't even use it to build a house). However, no one would call it bricked since all I need to do is turn it on to use it.
If reflashing the phone brings it back to life, it's not "bricked".
Monoprice's $23 headphones have gotten some pretty good reviews:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-57337747-47/how-good-can-$21.59-headphones-be/?tag=mncol;txt)
http://www.head-fi.org/t/608453/monoprice-dj-headphones-8323-review
They sound good to me, but I'm not a serious audiophile, I just use them to cover up background office noise. I think the sound is comparable to the $80 Sennheiser's I use at home. (which, a friend tells me are completely unbearable compared to his $500 Sennheiser HD650's, so I refuse to listen to music through his headphones, 'lest some of his "golden ears" rub off and I find myself needing more expensive gear)