This. It's been noted that desktop PC sales have been slipping yet component sales have been increasing. For instance we have a 3 year old AlthonIIx4 in the house that runs at 3ghz a core, has 12GB of Ram (Upgraded a year ago) and I wanted to run some newer games. So I bought a beefier PSU and a new Graphics card. Should last another 18 - 24 months before it will be time to buy a new machine. I know a lot of people doing the same.
Kids these days are getting tablets. Most adults are replacing their home desktop with laptops. I have to say that the desktop wasn't mine. It is my wife's and she bought it before we were together. I've not purchased a desktop in a decade.
People seem to miss that there are employees, in particular field service employees, at all the major vendors who earn a nice second pay check from 3 letter agencies and their employer is none the wiser.
My dad spent a 30 year career in the finance and accounting area of one of the big defense contractors. His areas dealt with a lot of high security clearance stuff and there were always FBI and spooks in their office. They knew they were there, but they had no idea who the spook or agent was. They paid the people a salary just like anyone else. Was it the computer geek? The Janitor? The Facilities guy? One of the engineers? An office cleft? Or the guy/gal standing next to them? They never knew.
There are contributors to open source projects who work for these agencies either directly or as assets paid or otherwise.
It's more like 8M by the time you figure in law enforcement at all levels. And then there is the fact that there are over 100M households with firearms in the United States.
I have a 3 year old desktop, quad core 3Ghz machine with 12GB of ram, but the video card was too weak to run the modern games. Well the new R7 series actually uses less power than the one in there. So for $100 for a R7 250 I find the old machine keeps going. Granted it as PCIE 2.1 where the newer ones are 3.0, but I plan on getting a new computer in 2015. Considering it's $20 to go see a movie at the theater I'll get my $100 out of it in the next year to 18 months.
I have to speak up here on the agriculture thing. I own about 500 acres of row crops raising wheat, soybeans, and rice primarily. Every now and then there is 20 acres of corn on one field. At any rate I monitor global agriculture trends pretty closes. For instance the growing seasons in S. America are the single biggest factor these days on what the price of Soybeans will be come harvest time in the US.
I'm not sure where this 1.2% GDP comes from exactly. Because right now food and food stuffs are one of our largest exports. Now I do believe that we don't have nearly as many people involved in that sector because we are highly mechanized. The framer who rents my 500 acres farms 4500 acres with himself, his father, an uncle, and two hired hands. I imagine the Chinese use quite a bit more labor and as a result has a larger percentage of GDP involved in that sector than we do. Now we are approaching a crisis in farming because the average age of a farmer, at least a couple years ago, was something like 58 years old. Young people have not replaced the aging workforce.
When it comes to global trade, it's an extremely powerful weapon, especially against China. One of China's main imports is food other than rice. Even in the world, while we don't have the dominance we once did, if the US withheld it's grains from the global markets just watch as the prices jump and parts of the world literally erupt into flames.
Just had this debate with a current project with some wanting to use a NoSQL solution for the whole thing. Problem is most of the data is relational and I stuck my foot down and said we're using PostgreSQL for anything that needs to be retained. That mean users accounts & transaction records, and really all the data is relational.
Now there are other elements, like the chat system and distributing JSON strings to large numbers of persistent clients that seem a perfect fit for a NoSQL database. Since the JSON strings are basically information caches from the backend database to be widely distributed so what if the NoSQL db crashes. Spin up a new instance and reload the data from the main DB and start distributing again. Chat messages only need to persist for a few minutes at most. So honestly a crash or glitch and frankly very little of value would be lost.
Which is about to reach $30M in crowd funding...although hurry as the ability to get life time insurance for your ships will be ending next week. Then LTI will only be on the grey market...
Apple and MS have been at a patent truce for more than a decade, since the late 1990's. And continue to offer each other a very broad cross patent license agreement.
Remember the jog dial control on the iPod. Turns out MS held the patent on it. And it was covered under their cross patent licenses agreement.
MS offered the truce because they desperately needed Apple to avoid DOJ break up. But over the past decade it's proven to be useful for both sides. Largely the two companies don't directly compete with each other. Apple is a consumer electronics company. Microsoft is an enterprise software provider. There isn't a lot of overlap. At least not as much as people on/. would like to believe.
And strangely enough, the both need each other at this point to stem Google.
This. I went to law school, but am one of those has a JD but never sat for the Bar. Instead I was part of a start up we eventually sold. Frankly I made more money that I would have becoming an attorney. Plus my wife is an attorney. So having two in the house would probably be a disaster...
At any rate, I've started working for another start up. They got their first large customer wanting a Value Added Resellers contract to bundle our software with theirs. The VAR agreement I supplied was 47 pages. And the founders of the company about went googlie eyed when I presented it to them. I had enough contracts experience that I knew what to look over plus the wife read through it to make sure there was nothing I missed before handing it off to outside counsel to review.
What makes you think overseas is safe? Because once it's outside the United States it's then legally fair game for the NSA and CIA to tap because spying on foreign assets is supposed to be their jobs.
After all who are they buying vendor support services from? How many of the leading tech support agents from companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, also draw a nice second pay check from the 3-letter agencies to install special devices/software/updates for said agency against a particular target. Even the local tech support guys can be bought or blackmailed. And if it's in a foreign country, that's within the CIA's mandate. Again, that's their job.
The US intelligence agencies run a fleet of international cable tapping submarines. If your traffic travels across an ocean, any ocean, or major body of water with ocean access it's tapped. How many "weather" satellites also contain communications intercept gear?
So you think your safe not hosting in the United States? Well think again.
At my last company we developed an online ordering system for restaurants in the mid 2000's and deployed on FreeBSD over Linux using Pair Networks as our server & colo provider. When younger developers who only knew of Linux asked why my response was, "I don't want to waist time with the systems end of things. BSD will sit there and do it's job." Granted a lot of the backend was also written in Perl.
Once the software was written there wasn't a lot of maintenance, especially once we replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL. We'd have to power down one of the cluster to replace a harddrive, or rather Pair handled that, now and then. Maybe have a hardware failure, but we didn't have any problems stemming from the server OS in six years of operation.
Compare that to the point of sale we wrote which was powered on Linux. There was a number of times that changes to the Linux kernel borked something. Unfortunately touchscreen support & BSD was sorely lacking at the time. It got to the point where I considered hiring someone to write a driver.
Fact is just about everything you use today contains parts of FreeBSD. TCP/IP Networking stack. Well Microsoft adopted that from FreeBSD back in the 1990's. There are more parts of Linux that came from the BSD's. Oh and let's not forget the most popular Unix Desktop OS MacOS X & iOS. Oh and now the PS4.
So yeah, FreeBSD is this obscure thing nobody knows about, but pieces of it are everywhere these days.
But what is "under-insurance"? I ask because I'm one of those people who got a cancelation notice and as far as I can tell the replacement "ACA Certified" plan is exactly the same as what I have only with twice the monthly premium and 2x the deductible.
And for the record I'm a white male in his early 30's.
Right now I pay $86 a month for a plan with a $3,500 deductible and max $8,000 out of pocket costs. It has prescription drug coverage, which I've filled exactly 1 prescription which was a generic and $4 out of pocket at WalMart, in the 3 years I've had the plan. Doctor visits are free for annual check up, $35 non-check up. $60 co-pay for a specialist visit, $40 urgent care, and $250 emergency room visit. I've had the coverage for 3 years now plus an HSA from the last state I was in that was the way to go.
The closest plan "to what I pay now" is $156 a month for a "bronze plan" and is a $6,000 deductible and $12,000 max out of pocket in network, $17,000 out of network. The "Closest to what I have" is almost $300 a month.
Next year I'm getting married and will have the option to go on the wife's company plan. Well at least for a few months. She's an attorney in their legal department and one of her assignments for next year: see how we can dump employer coverage.
I've been shopping around. And no one's been able to tell me exactly what happens to the $8,000 in my HSA. So much so that I'm considering getting some elective dental work done just to use that $8,000.
And no, they're won't be subsidized solution offered to me. I make over the personal limit and next combined household income will make us "rich" by somebody's definition.
There is a major difference. Most iPhone users don't give a flying fuck about rooting or modding our damn phones. Many of us have enough in our day to day lives with work computers, personal computers, friends and family's computers that the last thing we want to do is fuck around with the computers in our pockets.
That is major difference I see between iOS users and Android users around here.
For better, and probably worse, Android is the new Microsoft Windows. iOS is still pretty much the same old Mac in terms of user base. My prediction is that we'll continue to see most attack vectors go towards Android devices because manufactures have a spotty record when it comes to releasing security patches and updates on their phones and the phones will allow users to side load apps from whatever marketplace they want. People can cry all they want about "Freedom" with android, but if it was really all the free and open, why are there secured boot loaders on most of the handsets. Unless you mean freedom to the handset manufactures and carriers. I mean the carriers are the customers. Not the users. (Except oddly enough with the iPhone where Apple was able to bend the carriers to their will and not the other way around).
Have to remember the carriers wanted android as much as users because they saw it as a possible way to gain control back from Apple when it comes to Apple devices on their networks. Maybe without Jobs they'll be able to turn the table eventually....
I was looking at lower end cards to get a 3 year old desktop with integrated AMD graphics to last another year, but run Star Citizen. Tower had a 300 watt power supply and I was looking at having to replace both the power supply and get a video card at around $150. Or about 1/10th of what I'm planning to spend next year when it will be time to upgrade PC's anyway.
Well ended up getting the R7 240 which runs on 30 watts. I know it's about the equivalent of a 6670, but it will run Star Citizen on Low/Medium settings at least and no need to up grade the PSU and the card was about $80.
Difference being Apple had an actual product for sale as in the iPad. I've yet to see the fuel cell technology produced that delivers on the promises we've been hearing for the past decade or more.
Again, when one of these companies produces a fuel cell that can power rack level servers with low heat, then there's something to talk about.
...who spends 25% of their published budget blatantly on industrial espionage on guess who...the UK, US, Canada, China, Germany, and others...
The international espionage is pretty much *yawn*. Anyone who has ever followed international politics on any level knows everybody does it to each other. And all the players certainly know it.
Where the outrage, what little there has been frankly, is the fact that those capabilities were turned inward domestically that has some people ticked off. Again many of us highly suspected this was going on, but we lacked proof. It doesn't surprise me when it comes to things like parallel construction and massive dragnets. Yes it should be illegal, but even if it is, there are ways around it such as giving our cousins over at GCHQ the access, let them do the spying on americans and pass it back in the name of "cooperation".
What saddens me is that the only thing that can stop this insanity are the people of the United States. And most don't seem to care. As long as there is Football on the weekends to keep the masses entertained...
I said after 9/11 there were some things we needed to look at like adding armored cockpit doors to airplanes, reassessing and even so far as banning sharped objects on carryon. We needed some sort of centralized intelligence operations. It was clear there was too much politicking for budgets instead of working together. US Intelligence had all the pieces, but spread across too many agencies that wouldn't work together. That needed to be addressed by eliminating and folding agencies. Instead we got DHS. It was sold as just that kind of agency. Instead we've ended up with what is increasingly turning into a domestic para-military agency. I know, they don't have M1 Abrams yet, but they do have their own helicopter gun ships and APC's. TSA has gone from airport rentacops to VIPR teams...
I remember a couple years ago they were doing drills with the US Army & MO National Guard patrolling the streets of North St. Louis as though it was a war zone (Which maybe arguably it is) in an "Urban Pacification Drill". When the news interviewed locals they welcomed the show of force. The benefit of a doubt part of me knew this was the National Guard showing off some new toys it had gotten. But there is a part of me that also raised an eyebrow.
If you look at the past 10 - 12 years there's been a chess game afoot here in the US. The governments been setting the board. They've got small scale operations down. Look at how quickly they locked down Boston earlier in the year. Look at how quickly the people followed the orders to cower indoors because of 2 kids.
We aren't quite there yet, but unless something drastic changes and soon, we're one major "event" away from waking up and no longer in the land of free.
The one thing the NSA has that other countries largely don't: a fleet of submarines with cable tapping abilities and a bunch of com intercept sats in orbit. So if your traffic crosses an ocean at any point chances are it's tapped.
This ain't new shit either. The US was doing this to the soviet union back in the cold war 30 years ago. Blind Man's Bluff...good book if you want to read about it.
I've been looking at getting a card to that will run Star Citizen decently during the dogfighting module. Not looking to spend more than $100 as I'll buy a new desktop computer next year as originally scheduled. Biggest problem was the weak power supply in the existing PC. Well the the R7 240 only draws 30 watts of power for about $90. I know it's not the highest performance card. Existing 7750's and 7770's beats it's performance, but with the R7 240 I didn't have to worry about spending $50 and replacing the power supply.
I sold my last company in 2010. I bought a new MacBook Pro and decided to get iWork as it was far cheaper than Office. I needed to write a formal letter here and there, keep track of Farm expenses on a spreadsheet, and create presentations for start ups I was mentoring at a local technology incubator. Only thing that annoyed me slightly was having to buy the programs again for iOS. I felt if I bought them for mac they should have offered the iOS versions as part of the price.
Well then one of the companies I was mentoring started to take off and it went from mentoring to consulting to now being offered an executive position with the company. They were all Mac users as well, but that's when we found the problem with iWork. While documents synced between our own devices, Apple doesn't offer iCloud for small businesses where we could all sync to a company drive. Ironically to solve this we went to Microsoft SkyDrive and then eventually to Office365.
I still use iWork, especially Keynote for developing internal reports & presentations. As bad as this may sound, it's because I have a water proof case for my iPad and it's in my shower. That's where I often have my best ideas and it's handy to write them down, or go threw a presentation or write a todo list.
Where this is nice is for my Dad who now gets an office suite free with the latest version of the OS that will do everything he needs.
I wrote a paper and gave a presentation in college about the likelihood that internet would become balkanized by 2020, the wild west would be over, and the genie put back in the bottle. (i'm sure I'm missing a cliche there). My reasonings behind it were the increasing capabilities of off the shelf technology to then allow countries to filter and control content would come available and the legal will to do so. The professor of the class, ironically this was a cyber-philosophy class (yes liberal arts college, but it was a fun topic) and the professor did have CS undergrad (UC Berkley in the 1960's), masters in Mathematics, and PhD in Philosophy) who taught us what the idea of "hyper-text" was about back in the 1980s'. (Closest we got to how hypertext was supported to work hypothetically is Wikipedia). So the prof did have actually a good understanding of the principles of things like networking etc..
His counter argument was the "Internet sees damage and routes around it" and "Censorship = damage" and also that technology would evolve to counter what I was envisioning at the time and that the good days of the internet would continue. My main point in the paper & presentation was if you looked at the backbone of the internet, especially undersea cables and satellites, that the core infrastructure was owned at the time by about 15 companies and the first round of M&A and bankruptcies were starting back then with Worldcomm's collapse. It's very hard for the internet to "route around" as the model of the internet worked was less mesh that was envisioned and more a hub and spoke if you got to looking at it. Especially in the US where a few players own the last mile of service. So you have your last mile going back to your ISP, which then to get to someone else's ISP travels through a backbone providers' cables. While it seems like point to point it really isn't. My argument was there would be further market consolidation to around 5 big players. This consolidation would be allowed by regulators because once you got to that stage of oligopoly it would be far easier for government bodies to control them via regulation and large government contracts.
I did end up with an A for the project/paper. I think he wished the utopia ideal would continue, but even by 2000 I think things were beginning to shape up.
Actually I've been able to find 9mm again here recently including the Hornaday Critical Duty rounds that I normally carry as my CCW weapon. And I was having trouble finding it this time last year even before the craziness with ammo began. (Have since learned it is due to manufacturing cycles of ammo. They make all the 9mm they plan to sell for a year in one production run, then go to.40,.45, etc.) I picked up 3 boxes of 9mm last time out.
I've not seen anything other than Gemtech Subsonic & Match Grade.22LR imported from England that's $12 a box of 50 since last november. And I used to buy a brick of.22 every couple months as that's what I primarily shot. I own the.22 version of my CCW pistol as well as conversion kit for my AR..22 was $.04 a shot vs. $.25 - $.40 for.223/5.56.
Other than the brick of 22 every few months, I used to keep at most 4 - 5 boxes of ammo on hand as I'd find it on sale. I was never one of these "must keep 1000's of rounds around for the end of the world" types.
Last time I was at Bass Pro last month they had 1000 round boxes of.223 for $450. I bought one and it's now in the ammo locker. I plan to do the same for 9mm,.40S&W, and.38 Special over the next year.
Made me glad that most of my firearms I got from my Grandfather were all C&R eligible. The 1903 Springfield & M1 Garand both shoot.30-06 which I was able to find on the shelves throughout this whole mess.
Although I probably own enough firearms to be considered a Turrorist these days....
I've seen it snow upwards before. I was in a city and on the 7th floor of a building. Apparently they got updrafts when the wind was blowing from the north and it was indeed snowing upwards!
If the same thing happened on the streets of the US, chances are people would pull out their cell phones and record rather than help. I hope that I am wrong. A lot of jurisdictions have done away with good samaritan laws and the US is law suit happy. It's enough that I'd hesitate to act as I have personal net worth in the 7 figures and a family.
And I say this as someone who also has a CCW and carries daily. Bob Costas made fun of the people who "Check if they have wallet, phone, keys, and Glock before leaving the house". Well I do check to se if I have wallet, phone, keys, Walther, and spare mags before leaving the house.
While in my state it would be legal to intervene with force to stop such an attack on another it doesn't grant me any legal immunity from civil action unless happening on my personal property. I step in and pull the trigger, it's going to to cost me at least $50,000 to lawyer up. And that's if I win. If the attackers turned and come for me or my family, all bets are off. I'll pay the $50,000 in a heartbeat. Am I going to risk $50,000 to intervene on the part of a stranger when I don't know the situation. Probably not.
It may be harsh to say, but another man's life is not worth $50,000 to me.
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This. It's been noted that desktop PC sales have been slipping yet component sales have been increasing. For instance we have a 3 year old AlthonIIx4 in the house that runs at 3ghz a core, has 12GB of Ram (Upgraded a year ago) and I wanted to run some newer games. So I bought a beefier PSU and a new Graphics card. Should last another 18 - 24 months before it will be time to buy a new machine. I know a lot of people doing the same.
Kids these days are getting tablets. Most adults are replacing their home desktop with laptops. I have to say that the desktop wasn't mine. It is my wife's and she bought it before we were together. I've not purchased a desktop in a decade.
People seem to miss that there are employees, in particular field service employees, at all the major vendors who earn a nice second pay check from 3 letter agencies and their employer is none the wiser.
My dad spent a 30 year career in the finance and accounting area of one of the big defense contractors. His areas dealt with a lot of high security clearance stuff and there were always FBI and spooks in their office. They knew they were there, but they had no idea who the spook or agent was. They paid the people a salary just like anyone else. Was it the computer geek? The Janitor? The Facilities guy? One of the engineers? An office cleft? Or the guy/gal standing next to them? They never knew.
There are contributors to open source projects who work for these agencies either directly or as assets paid or otherwise.
It's more like 8M by the time you figure in law enforcement at all levels. And then there is the fact that there are over 100M households with firearms in the United States.
I have a 3 year old desktop, quad core 3Ghz machine with 12GB of ram, but the video card was too weak to run the modern games. Well the new R7 series actually uses less power than the one in there. So for $100 for a R7 250 I find the old machine keeps going. Granted it as PCIE 2.1 where the newer ones are 3.0, but I plan on getting a new computer in 2015. Considering it's $20 to go see a movie at the theater I'll get my $100 out of it in the next year to 18 months.
I have to speak up here on the agriculture thing. I own about 500 acres of row crops raising wheat, soybeans, and rice primarily. Every now and then there is 20 acres of corn on one field. At any rate I monitor global agriculture trends pretty closes. For instance the growing seasons in S. America are the single biggest factor these days on what the price of Soybeans will be come harvest time in the US.
I'm not sure where this 1.2% GDP comes from exactly. Because right now food and food stuffs are one of our largest exports. Now I do believe that we don't have nearly as many people involved in that sector because we are highly mechanized. The framer who rents my 500 acres farms 4500 acres with himself, his father, an uncle, and two hired hands. I imagine the Chinese use quite a bit more labor and as a result has a larger percentage of GDP involved in that sector than we do. Now we are approaching a crisis in farming because the average age of a farmer, at least a couple years ago, was something like 58 years old. Young people have not replaced the aging workforce.
However take a look at this: http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/ogamaps/Default.aspx?cmdty=Corn&attribute=Production
When it comes to global trade, it's an extremely powerful weapon, especially against China. One of China's main imports is food other than rice. Even in the world, while we don't have the dominance we once did, if the US withheld it's grains from the global markets just watch as the prices jump and parts of the world literally erupt into flames.
Just had this debate with a current project with some wanting to use a NoSQL solution for the whole thing. Problem is most of the data is relational and I stuck my foot down and said we're using PostgreSQL for anything that needs to be retained. That mean users accounts & transaction records, and really all the data is relational.
Now there are other elements, like the chat system and distributing JSON strings to large numbers of persistent clients that seem a perfect fit for a NoSQL database. Since the JSON strings are basically information caches from the backend database to be widely distributed so what if the NoSQL db crashes. Spin up a new instance and reload the data from the main DB and start distributing again. Chat messages only need to persist for a few minutes at most. So honestly a crash or glitch and frankly very little of value would be lost.
Which is about to reach $30M in crowd funding...although hurry as the ability to get life time insurance for your ships will be ending next week. Then LTI will only be on the grey market...
Apple and MS have been at a patent truce for more than a decade, since the late 1990's. And continue to offer each other a very broad cross patent license agreement.
Remember the jog dial control on the iPod. Turns out MS held the patent on it. And it was covered under their cross patent licenses agreement.
MS offered the truce because they desperately needed Apple to avoid DOJ break up. But over the past decade it's proven to be useful for both sides. Largely the two companies don't directly compete with each other. Apple is a consumer electronics company. Microsoft is an enterprise software provider. There isn't a lot of overlap. At least not as much as people on /. would like to believe.
And strangely enough, the both need each other at this point to stem Google.
This. I went to law school, but am one of those has a JD but never sat for the Bar. Instead I was part of a start up we eventually sold. Frankly I made more money that I would have becoming an attorney. Plus my wife is an attorney. So having two in the house would probably be a disaster...
At any rate, I've started working for another start up. They got their first large customer wanting a Value Added Resellers contract to bundle our software with theirs. The VAR agreement I supplied was 47 pages. And the founders of the company about went googlie eyed when I presented it to them. I had enough contracts experience that I knew what to look over plus the wife read through it to make sure there was nothing I missed before handing it off to outside counsel to review.
What makes you think overseas is safe? Because once it's outside the United States it's then legally fair game for the NSA and CIA to tap because spying on foreign assets is supposed to be their jobs.
After all who are they buying vendor support services from? How many of the leading tech support agents from companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, also draw a nice second pay check from the 3-letter agencies to install special devices/software/updates for said agency against a particular target. Even the local tech support guys can be bought or blackmailed. And if it's in a foreign country, that's within the CIA's mandate. Again, that's their job.
The US intelligence agencies run a fleet of international cable tapping submarines. If your traffic travels across an ocean, any ocean, or major body of water with ocean access it's tapped. How many "weather" satellites also contain communications intercept gear?
So you think your safe not hosting in the United States? Well think again.
At my last company we developed an online ordering system for restaurants in the mid 2000's and deployed on FreeBSD over Linux using Pair Networks as our server & colo provider. When younger developers who only knew of Linux asked why my response was, "I don't want to waist time with the systems end of things. BSD will sit there and do it's job." Granted a lot of the backend was also written in Perl.
Once the software was written there wasn't a lot of maintenance, especially once we replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL. We'd have to power down one of the cluster to replace a harddrive, or rather Pair handled that, now and then. Maybe have a hardware failure, but we didn't have any problems stemming from the server OS in six years of operation.
Compare that to the point of sale we wrote which was powered on Linux. There was a number of times that changes to the Linux kernel borked something. Unfortunately touchscreen support & BSD was sorely lacking at the time. It got to the point where I considered hiring someone to write a driver.
Fact is just about everything you use today contains parts of FreeBSD. TCP/IP Networking stack. Well Microsoft adopted that from FreeBSD back in the 1990's. There are more parts of Linux that came from the BSD's. Oh and let's not forget the most popular Unix Desktop OS MacOS X & iOS. Oh and now the PS4.
So yeah, FreeBSD is this obscure thing nobody knows about, but pieces of it are everywhere these days.
Did you pay for the physical lines in order to get your power to their system? Or did they provide those lines and hook up?
But what is "under-insurance"? I ask because I'm one of those people who got a cancelation notice and as far as I can tell the replacement "ACA Certified" plan is exactly the same as what I have only with twice the monthly premium and 2x the deductible.
And for the record I'm a white male in his early 30's.
Right now I pay $86 a month for a plan with a $3,500 deductible and max $8,000 out of pocket costs. It has prescription drug coverage, which I've filled exactly 1 prescription which was a generic and $4 out of pocket at WalMart, in the 3 years I've had the plan. Doctor visits are free for annual check up, $35 non-check up. $60 co-pay for a specialist visit, $40 urgent care, and $250 emergency room visit. I've had the coverage for 3 years now plus an HSA from the last state I was in that was the way to go.
The closest plan "to what I pay now" is $156 a month for a "bronze plan" and is a $6,000 deductible and $12,000 max out of pocket in network, $17,000 out of network. The "Closest to what I have" is almost $300 a month.
Next year I'm getting married and will have the option to go on the wife's company plan. Well at least for a few months. She's an attorney in their legal department and one of her assignments for next year: see how we can dump employer coverage.
I've been shopping around. And no one's been able to tell me exactly what happens to the $8,000 in my HSA. So much so that I'm considering getting some elective dental work done just to use that $8,000.
And no, they're won't be subsidized solution offered to me. I make over the personal limit and next combined household income will make us "rich" by somebody's definition.
There is a major difference. Most iPhone users don't give a flying fuck about rooting or modding our damn phones. Many of us have enough in our day to day lives with work computers, personal computers, friends and family's computers that the last thing we want to do is fuck around with the computers in our pockets.
That is major difference I see between iOS users and Android users around here.
For better, and probably worse, Android is the new Microsoft Windows. iOS is still pretty much the same old Mac in terms of user base. My prediction is that we'll continue to see most attack vectors go towards Android devices because manufactures have a spotty record when it comes to releasing security patches and updates on their phones and the phones will allow users to side load apps from whatever marketplace they want. People can cry all they want about "Freedom" with android, but if it was really all the free and open, why are there secured boot loaders on most of the handsets. Unless you mean freedom to the handset manufactures and carriers. I mean the carriers are the customers. Not the users. (Except oddly enough with the iPhone where Apple was able to bend the carriers to their will and not the other way around).
Have to remember the carriers wanted android as much as users because they saw it as a possible way to gain control back from Apple when it comes to Apple devices on their networks. Maybe without Jobs they'll be able to turn the table eventually....
I was looking at lower end cards to get a 3 year old desktop with integrated AMD graphics to last another year, but run Star Citizen. Tower had a 300 watt power supply and I was looking at having to replace both the power supply and get a video card at around $150. Or about 1/10th of what I'm planning to spend next year when it will be time to upgrade PC's anyway.
Well ended up getting the R7 240 which runs on 30 watts. I know it's about the equivalent of a 6670, but it will run Star Citizen on Low/Medium settings at least and no need to up grade the PSU and the card was about $80.
Difference being Apple had an actual product for sale as in the iPad. I've yet to see the fuel cell technology produced that delivers on the promises we've been hearing for the past decade or more.
Again, when one of these companies produces a fuel cell that can power rack level servers with low heat, then there's something to talk about.
Until then it's a lot of pie in the sky.
...who spends 25% of their published budget blatantly on industrial espionage on guess who...the UK, US, Canada, China, Germany, and others...
The international espionage is pretty much *yawn*. Anyone who has ever followed international politics on any level knows everybody does it to each other. And all the players certainly know it.
Where the outrage, what little there has been frankly, is the fact that those capabilities were turned inward domestically that has some people ticked off. Again many of us highly suspected this was going on, but we lacked proof. It doesn't surprise me when it comes to things like parallel construction and massive dragnets. Yes it should be illegal, but even if it is, there are ways around it such as giving our cousins over at GCHQ the access, let them do the spying on americans and pass it back in the name of "cooperation".
What saddens me is that the only thing that can stop this insanity are the people of the United States. And most don't seem to care. As long as there is Football on the weekends to keep the masses entertained...
I said after 9/11 there were some things we needed to look at like adding armored cockpit doors to airplanes, reassessing and even so far as banning sharped objects on carryon. We needed some sort of centralized intelligence operations. It was clear there was too much politicking for budgets instead of working together. US Intelligence had all the pieces, but spread across too many agencies that wouldn't work together. That needed to be addressed by eliminating and folding agencies. Instead we got DHS. It was sold as just that kind of agency. Instead we've ended up with what is increasingly turning into a domestic para-military agency. I know, they don't have M1 Abrams yet, but they do have their own helicopter gun ships and APC's. TSA has gone from airport rentacops to VIPR teams...
I remember a couple years ago they were doing drills with the US Army & MO National Guard patrolling the streets of North St. Louis as though it was a war zone (Which maybe arguably it is) in an "Urban Pacification Drill". When the news interviewed locals they welcomed the show of force. The benefit of a doubt part of me knew this was the National Guard showing off some new toys it had gotten. But there is a part of me that also raised an eyebrow.
If you look at the past 10 - 12 years there's been a chess game afoot here in the US. The governments been setting the board. They've got small scale operations down. Look at how quickly they locked down Boston earlier in the year. Look at how quickly the people followed the orders to cower indoors because of 2 kids.
We aren't quite there yet, but unless something drastic changes and soon, we're one major "event" away from waking up and no longer in the land of free.
The one thing the NSA has that other countries largely don't: a fleet of submarines with cable tapping abilities and a bunch of com intercept sats in orbit. So if your traffic crosses an ocean at any point chances are it's tapped.
This ain't new shit either. The US was doing this to the soviet union back in the cold war 30 years ago. Blind Man's Bluff...good book if you want to read about it.
I've been looking at getting a card to that will run Star Citizen decently during the dogfighting module. Not looking to spend more than $100 as I'll buy a new desktop computer next year as originally scheduled. Biggest problem was the weak power supply in the existing PC. Well the the R7 240 only draws 30 watts of power for about $90. I know it's not the highest performance card. Existing 7750's and 7770's beats it's performance, but with the R7 240 I didn't have to worry about spending $50 and replacing the power supply.
I sold my last company in 2010. I bought a new MacBook Pro and decided to get iWork as it was far cheaper than Office. I needed to write a formal letter here and there, keep track of Farm expenses on a spreadsheet, and create presentations for start ups I was mentoring at a local technology incubator. Only thing that annoyed me slightly was having to buy the programs again for iOS. I felt if I bought them for mac they should have offered the iOS versions as part of the price.
Well then one of the companies I was mentoring started to take off and it went from mentoring to consulting to now being offered an executive position with the company. They were all Mac users as well, but that's when we found the problem with iWork. While documents synced between our own devices, Apple doesn't offer iCloud for small businesses where we could all sync to a company drive. Ironically to solve this we went to Microsoft SkyDrive and then eventually to Office365.
I still use iWork, especially Keynote for developing internal reports & presentations. As bad as this may sound, it's because I have a water proof case for my iPad and it's in my shower. That's where I often have my best ideas and it's handy to write them down, or go threw a presentation or write a todo list.
Where this is nice is for my Dad who now gets an office suite free with the latest version of the OS that will do everything he needs.
I wrote a paper and gave a presentation in college about the likelihood that internet would become balkanized by 2020, the wild west would be over, and the genie put back in the bottle. (i'm sure I'm missing a cliche there). My reasonings behind it were the increasing capabilities of off the shelf technology to then allow countries to filter and control content would come available and the legal will to do so. The professor of the class, ironically this was a cyber-philosophy class (yes liberal arts college, but it was a fun topic) and the professor did have CS undergrad (UC Berkley in the 1960's), masters in Mathematics, and PhD in Philosophy) who taught us what the idea of "hyper-text" was about back in the 1980s'. (Closest we got to how hypertext was supported to work hypothetically is Wikipedia). So the prof did have actually a good understanding of the principles of things like networking etc..
His counter argument was the "Internet sees damage and routes around it" and "Censorship = damage" and also that technology would evolve to counter what I was envisioning at the time and that the good days of the internet would continue. My main point in the paper & presentation was if you looked at the backbone of the internet, especially undersea cables and satellites, that the core infrastructure was owned at the time by about 15 companies and the first round of M&A and bankruptcies were starting back then with Worldcomm's collapse. It's very hard for the internet to "route around" as the model of the internet worked was less mesh that was envisioned and more a hub and spoke if you got to looking at it. Especially in the US where a few players own the last mile of service. So you have your last mile going back to your ISP, which then to get to someone else's ISP travels through a backbone providers' cables. While it seems like point to point it really isn't. My argument was there would be further market consolidation to around 5 big players. This consolidation would be allowed by regulators because once you got to that stage of oligopoly it would be far easier for government bodies to control them via regulation and large government contracts.
I did end up with an A for the project/paper. I think he wished the utopia ideal would continue, but even by 2000 I think things were beginning to shape up.
Actually I've been able to find 9mm again here recently including the Hornaday Critical Duty rounds that I normally carry as my CCW weapon. And I was having trouble finding it this time last year even before the craziness with ammo began. (Have since learned it is due to manufacturing cycles of ammo. They make all the 9mm they plan to sell for a year in one production run, then go to .40, .45, etc.) I picked up 3 boxes of 9mm last time out.
I've not seen anything other than Gemtech Subsonic & Match Grade .22LR imported from England that's $12 a box of 50 since last november. And I used to buy a brick of .22 every couple months as that's what I primarily shot. I own the .22 version of my CCW pistol as well as conversion kit for my AR. .22 was $.04 a shot vs. $.25 - $.40 for .223/5.56.
Other than the brick of 22 every few months, I used to keep at most 4 - 5 boxes of ammo on hand as I'd find it on sale. I was never one of these "must keep 1000's of rounds around for the end of the world" types.
Last time I was at Bass Pro last month they had 1000 round boxes of .223 for $450. I bought one and it's now in the ammo locker. I plan to do the same for 9mm, .40S&W, and .38 Special over the next year.
Made me glad that most of my firearms I got from my Grandfather were all C&R eligible. The 1903 Springfield & M1 Garand both shoot .30-06 which I was able to find on the shelves throughout this whole mess.
Although I probably own enough firearms to be considered a Turrorist these days....
I've seen it snow upwards before. I was in a city and on the 7th floor of a building. Apparently they got updrafts when the wind was blowing from the north and it was indeed snowing upwards!
If the same thing happened on the streets of the US, chances are people would pull out their cell phones and record rather than help. I hope that I am wrong. A lot of jurisdictions have done away with good samaritan laws and the US is law suit happy. It's enough that I'd hesitate to act as I have personal net worth in the 7 figures and a family.
And I say this as someone who also has a CCW and carries daily. Bob Costas made fun of the people who "Check if they have wallet, phone, keys, and Glock before leaving the house". Well I do check to se if I have wallet, phone, keys, Walther, and spare mags before leaving the house.
While in my state it would be legal to intervene with force to stop such an attack on another it doesn't grant me any legal immunity from civil action unless happening on my personal property. I step in and pull the trigger, it's going to to cost me at least $50,000 to lawyer up. And that's if I win. If the attackers turned and come for me or my family, all bets are off. I'll pay the $50,000 in a heartbeat. Am I going to risk $50,000 to intervene on the part of a stranger when I don't know the situation. Probably not.
It may be harsh to say, but another man's life is not worth $50,000 to me.