It appears that most of the replies to your question are actually rants on health care, so I'll see if I can be more helpful.
You didn't say where you live but my experience is in the USA. I am single and purchase insurance only for myself.
I was in a group plan sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers which blew up--there were a small number of very expensive cases and the rest of the group gets to pay for the increased cost. (This is true even for "non-group" plans but the degree differs. There is always an insured pool even if the "group" is, say, the population of your state.) My premiums shot past $600 per month and I bailed.
I quickly found ehealthinsurance.com which is an amazing site where you can compare all of the available plans for your state in a table form--kind of like a good shopping site for, say, TVs. As you may know, it is illegal for insurance companies to sell insurance to people out-of-state, so that is why you have to shop by state. As far as I know, _all_ of the available plans were listed on this site--123 for my state. So all that is left is to pick one that works best for you (and your family).
You will have to pass the pre-existing conditions test. If you are normally healthy and have been for a while, this won't be a problem. You will have to answer lots of questions about your recent health for the company to decide if you have such conditions. I recall that they went back n years where n is a small integer (2 or 3???). Minor stuff is OK--they are mainly looking for more major conditions. I don't know if pre-existing conditions automatically rule you out or increase your premium payments. This is probably not a good place to lie because if you get caught, they can drop you.
Once you get covered, you had better not get sick and then try to move to another state, because you will have to re-apply with an insurance company in that state. If you get sick, you are a prisoner in your state until you once again become well for n years. (Note that I am not an expert in this area and I have not consulted with my own policy to see if it is actually true.)
You will discover versions of basically the same plan offered with different deductible structures and premium payments, per insurance company. If you have the means to cover a large deductible and/or expect to be pretty healthy, you can opt for say $2,500 annual deductible and get a good plan at a really decent price.
(This is the basis for the Republican plan to fix health insurance in the U.S. You or your employer would annually contribute an amount equal to a large deductible to a Health Savings Account which accumulates earnings tax-free like an Individual Retirement Account, IRA. You are then motivated to shop for cost-effective health care because you get to keep any part of the HSA that is not spent towards the deducible. This is the market mechanism which is claimed will reduce costs. In a year when the deductible is spent, then the insurance kicks in. Certain incidental items would not be charged against the deductible but instead are paid in full or in part by the insurance company. For example, office visits and preventative care would be either fully covered or covered with a co-payment.)
Finally, you might consider how many physicians an insurance company is contracted with in your area. I'm not sure how you find this out but the insurance companies might be helpful in that regard. (I have found that my insurance company is surprisingly responsive and helpful when reached by telephone. All other things being equal, you will want a company that has contracts with lots of physicians. Even then, you may well be referred to a specialist only to be told that that particular person is not contracted with your insurance company. You will then have to ask the referring physician for another referral.
On OS X, check out Papers (already mentioned in response to OP), Skim (free) for awesomely marking up and notating PDFs, and DEVONthink Pro (optionally, the DEVONthink Pro Office version for OCR and added functionality). I don't think these will provide you with all the functionality you mentioned (version control, however. But Skim and Papers play nicely together.
Why do the KDE developers insist on using uber-bizarre names for user programs? Can you get even the slightest idea what these programs do from reading their names: Neopomuk, Dolphin, Gwenview, Blogilo, KGet, Kopete, Kstars, Parley, Marble, Cantor, Rocs, Nepomuk, Akonadi, Kauth, KNewStuff3?
This is incredibly bad design, and for what? To make sure that KDE is used only by the cognoscenti on the outside chance that application program improvements might appeal to the casual user? And isn't it about time for someone to post the biannual question, is Linux ready for the desktop?
(Please tag as flamebait since./ers don't like these kinds of challenges.)
I have used ginkgo biloba and for me, it indeed does work. I don't notice it affecting me until I need to think (e.g., it doesn't make me jittery like caffeine can) but then it is like the skids of my mind are greased. I am 54 years old.
I appreciate that people doing medical research have a hard task, and finding answers to questions such as this can be interesting work, but in a subtle way, once "the answer" is found and practitioners incorporate the findings into their practices, many patients can be harmed. Here's why, and I'll use the ginkbo biloba study cited. A large (ideally) population is studied for a single variable, in this case, susceptibility to ginkgo biloba with respect to cognitive function. The "result" is determined (in this case, it doesn't do anything _on average_) and from that point forward every person is considered average in that one variable. In other words, some people in the study might have been helped by the substance in question while others were not helped or were harmed. But when you go to your doctor, he/she doesn't test you to see which group you fall into: you are automatically assumed to be "average."
This is possibly the single biggest flaw in the practice of medicine today. In the future, one would hope that more personalized medicine will be practiced as knowledge increases and as individualized (e.g., DNA) testing are available. But it is also possible that a tragic delay will be inserted into the system as governments establish more and more panels to determine the averages and to penalize physicians for practicing outside of the government-mandated guidelines which are set for that average. This is currently being planned in the United States.
"Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts."
Yeah, right. We'll get our American politicians to engage with those pesky air molecules in order to get them to crowd together for zero cost and with no carbon emissions.
The phrase "directed-energy weapons" for lasers always cracks me up. Show me a weapon that is not "directed-energy." Hell, hitting someone over the head with a stick is "directed-energy."
Get a Mac. It has had a keychain manager, Keychain Access, since 1995. It works with _all_ password-using programs, not just browsers, and it is beautifully integrated across the system like more and more of OS X.
"and so far have only deployed it as a 'consulting' project with two other small companies"
By doing this, you have already forfeited your patent rights in most countries. In the United States, you have one year from the time of public disclosure or offer for sale to apply for a patent. BTW, I'm not a lawyer.
Great hint, except for the "ta da!". 8^) When the tabs are placed on the left or right side, there are no thumbnails displayed.
Smaller complaint--The preferences under Tools should be under Preferences where one would expect to find them.
There are a number of other rough spots with this browser. I don't know if it is considered beta but is sure looks like it.
One deal-killer for Mac users is that it is not integrated with Keychain, forcing the user to keep an entire separate list of passwords just for Opera. Ditto for Firefox, of course.
I'm glad to see that some of the major browsers are finally using thumbnail tabs that have been in OmniWeb for many years, but in the case of Opera 10, they made a major mistake by putting them at the top of the window, thus limiting the vertical area available for displaying content. The thumbnail tabs should be at the side of the main window, leaving the full height for content display. Why is vertical space more important than horizontal screen space for displaying content? Because web pages scroll vertically and robbing vertical screen space forces more scrolling. Web pages are limited in their horizontal extent for the same reason that newspapers are printed in columns--it makes reading text easier.
The Opera folks should put an option to place the thumbnail tabs on the right or left side.
A more minor mistake with the thumbnail tabs is that rather than scaling the thumbnails when revealing them, they are simply truncated.
I'll be sticking with OmniWeb at least until someone finally rips off every innovative and years-old feature of that browser.
Most browser tab implementations are lame beyond belief. For a non-lame implementation, see OmniWeb at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/. This puts thumbnails in a moveable drawer at the side of the browser. If the vertical space is filled up, a scroll bar appears. There is a plugin for Firefox that emulates parts of this behavior but is less integrated with the browser and the rest of the OS (in this case OS X). Of course, I'm leaving out many features due to lack of space and will.
Any browser that uses precious vertical space for anything but displaying page content and minimal controls and URL display is poorly designed in the first place.
OmniWeb has many, many other features (workspaces, site-specific preferences, and world-class ad blocking come readily to mind) that makes it the finest browser I have ever used.
These... flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that most of the replies to your question are actually rants on health care, so I'll see if I can be more helpful.
You didn't say where you live but my experience is in the USA. I am single and purchase insurance only for myself.
I was in a group plan sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers which blew up--there were a small number of very expensive cases and the rest of the group gets to pay for the increased cost. (This is true even for "non-group" plans but the degree differs. There is always an insured pool even if the "group" is, say, the population of your state.) My premiums shot past $600 per month and I bailed.
I quickly found ehealthinsurance.com which is an amazing site where you can compare all of the available plans for your state in a table form--kind of like a good shopping site for, say, TVs. As you may know, it is illegal for insurance companies to sell insurance to people out-of-state, so that is why you have to shop by state. As far as I know, _all_ of the available plans were listed on this site--123 for my state. So all that is left is to pick one that works best for you (and your family).
You will have to pass the pre-existing conditions test. If you are normally healthy and have been for a while, this won't be a problem. You will have to answer lots of questions about your recent health for the company to decide if you have such conditions. I recall that they went back n years where n is a small integer (2 or 3???). Minor stuff is OK--they are mainly looking for more major conditions. I don't know if pre-existing conditions automatically rule you out or increase your premium payments. This is probably not a good place to lie because if you get caught, they can drop you.
Once you get covered, you had better not get sick and then try to move to another state, because you will have to re-apply with an insurance company in that state. If you get sick, you are a prisoner in your state until you once again become well for n years. (Note that I am not an expert in this area and I have not consulted with my own policy to see if it is actually true.)
You will discover versions of basically the same plan offered with different deductible structures and premium payments, per insurance company. If you have the means to cover a large deductible and/or expect to be pretty healthy, you can opt for say $2,500 annual deductible and get a good plan at a really decent price.
(This is the basis for the Republican plan to fix health insurance in the U.S. You or your employer would annually contribute an amount equal to a large deductible to a Health Savings Account which accumulates earnings tax-free like an Individual Retirement Account, IRA. You are then motivated to shop for cost-effective health care because you get to keep any part of the HSA that is not spent towards the deducible. This is the market mechanism which is claimed will reduce costs. In a year when the deductible is spent, then the insurance kicks in. Certain incidental items would not be charged against the deductible but instead are paid in full or in part by the insurance company. For example, office visits and preventative care would be either fully covered or covered with a co-payment.)
Finally, you might consider how many physicians an insurance company is contracted with in your area. I'm not sure how you find this out but the insurance companies might be helpful in that regard. (I have found that my insurance company is surprisingly responsive and helpful when reached by telephone. All other things being equal, you will want a company that has contracts with lots of physicians. Even then, you may well be referred to a specialist only to be told that that particular person is not contracted with your insurance company. You will then have to ask the referring physician for another referral.
On OS X, check out Papers (already mentioned in response to OP), Skim (free) for awesomely marking up and notating PDFs, and DEVONthink Pro (optionally, the DEVONthink Pro Office version for OCR and added functionality). I don't think these will provide you with all the functionality you mentioned (version control, however. But Skim and Papers play nicely together.
Why do the KDE developers insist on using uber-bizarre names for user programs? Can you get even the slightest idea what these programs do from reading their names: Neopomuk, Dolphin, Gwenview, Blogilo, KGet, Kopete, Kstars, Parley, Marble, Cantor, Rocs, Nepomuk, Akonadi, Kauth, KNewStuff3?
This is incredibly bad design, and for what? To make sure that KDE is used only by the cognoscenti on the outside chance that application program improvements might appeal to the casual user? And isn't it about time for someone to post the biannual question, is Linux ready for the desktop?
(Please tag as flamebait since ./ers don't like these kinds of challenges.)
I have used ginkgo biloba and for me, it indeed does work. I don't notice it affecting me until I need to think (e.g., it doesn't make me jittery like caffeine can) but then it is like the skids of my mind are greased. I am 54 years old.
I appreciate that people doing medical research have a hard task, and finding answers to questions such as this can be interesting work, but in a subtle way, once "the answer" is found and practitioners incorporate the findings into their practices, many patients can be harmed. Here's why, and I'll use the ginkbo biloba study cited. A large (ideally) population is studied for a single variable, in this case, susceptibility to ginkgo biloba with respect to cognitive function. The "result" is determined (in this case, it doesn't do anything _on average_) and from that point forward every person is considered average in that one variable. In other words, some people in the study might have been helped by the substance in question while others were not helped or were harmed. But when you go to your doctor, he/she doesn't test you to see which group you fall into: you are automatically assumed to be "average."
This is possibly the single biggest flaw in the practice of medicine today. In the future, one would hope that more personalized medicine will be practiced as knowledge increases and as individualized (e.g., DNA) testing are available. But it is also possible that a tragic delay will be inserted into the system as governments establish more and more panels to determine the averages and to penalize physicians for practicing outside of the government-mandated guidelines which are set for that average. This is currently being planned in the United States.
"This article asks, 'Why bother to type a document using a keyboard when you can write it by simply thinking about the letters?'"
And then the article answers:
[It requires] "a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of the brain after a surgical incision into the skull."
I forgot to mention that there is a plug-in that does automatic commercial skipping. For me, that's a killer app.
Thanks for the informative post. From what I've read, EyeTV rocks. I'm actually installing it as I write this.
"Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts."
Yeah, right. We'll get our American politicians to engage with those pesky air molecules in order to get them to crowd together for zero cost and with no carbon emissions.
Welcome to the 20th Century, Microsoft.
The phrase "directed-energy weapons" for lasers always cracks me up. Show me a weapon that is not "directed-energy." Hell, hitting someone over the head with a stick is "directed-energy."
Get a Mac. It has had a keychain manager, Keychain Access, since 1995. It works with _all_ password-using programs, not just browsers, and it is beautifully integrated across the system like more and more of OS X.
"ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year"
Really? Is this some kind of government math? That's 2.84 billion chips shipped in 2009.
"It really is rocket science."
That's, uh, rocket engineering.
"and so far have only deployed it as a 'consulting' project with two other small companies"
By doing this, you have already forfeited your patent rights in most countries. In the United States, you have one year from the time of public disclosure or offer for sale to apply for a patent. BTW, I'm not a lawyer.
"Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007...."
Huh? Have I passed into the Twilight Zone?
Great hint, except for the "ta da!". 8^) When the tabs are placed on the left or right side, there are no thumbnails displayed.
Smaller complaint--The preferences under Tools should be under Preferences where one would expect to find them.
There are a number of other rough spots with this browser. I don't know if it is considered beta but is sure looks like it.
One deal-killer for Mac users is that it is not integrated with Keychain, forcing the user to keep an entire separate list of passwords just for Opera. Ditto for Firefox, of course.
I'm glad to see that some of the major browsers are finally using thumbnail tabs that have been in OmniWeb for many years, but in the case of Opera 10, they made a major mistake by putting them at the top of the window, thus limiting the vertical area available for displaying content. The thumbnail tabs should be at the side of the main window, leaving the full height for content display. Why is vertical space more important than horizontal screen space for displaying content? Because web pages scroll vertically and robbing vertical screen space forces more scrolling. Web pages are limited in their horizontal extent for the same reason that newspapers are printed in columns--it makes reading text easier.
The Opera folks should put an option to place the thumbnail tabs on the right or left side.
A more minor mistake with the thumbnail tabs is that rather than scaling the thumbnails when revealing them, they are simply truncated.
I'll be sticking with OmniWeb at least until someone finally rips off every innovative and years-old feature of that browser.
I use Apple's Xcode with the Ada plug-in from www.macada.org
Most browser tab implementations are lame beyond belief. For a non-lame implementation, see OmniWeb at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/. This puts thumbnails in a moveable drawer at the side of the browser. If the vertical space is filled up, a scroll bar appears. There is a plugin for Firefox that emulates parts of this behavior but is less integrated with the browser and the rest of the OS (in this case OS X). Of course, I'm leaving out many features due to lack of space and will.
Any browser that uses precious vertical space for anything but displaying page content and minimal controls and URL display is poorly designed in the first place.
OmniWeb has many, many other features (workspaces, site-specific preferences, and world-class ad blocking come readily to mind) that makes it the finest browser I have ever used.
Can I get something like this for my ex-wife?
Do what you love.
The town is Salina, not Saline. It is pronounced sa-LI-nu, not sa-LEE-nu.
Does this include the MIT Press Journals e.g. Presence http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres?
"... and research is only starting."
Hmmm... I remember people doing research on this subject at the University of Illinois when I was a graduate student there in the 1980s.
The Illinois legislature once declared that the value of pi is 3.
I'm not making this up.