Seems like this is an issue only for those going through a proxy server. No HTTP proxy, no problem. So this affects a minor smidgen of users in the world, and only those that are smart enough to set one up in the first place. (Companies that set this up should be smart enough to deal with this problem)
This is one of the fallacies of modern MBA-style management: management is a specific skill that's the same across all industries.
In it's worst form, it's what gets us CEOs who slash costs and show growth for the first year, then leave with a golden parachute while the company flounders.
An MBA without requisite skills in the field you're managing means you're nothing more than a modern pirate looting the ship.
Use Pidgin/Adium with OTR. Then use any service. Just expect that they're going to intercept any and all communications out of your house if they want to, which honestly isn't the biggest problem with privacy. What is the problem is that Google, MS, et al are all cataloguing and storing everything you say. So if they can't read it, you're already 99% covered.
Christ, space nutters are delusional. Anti-matter rockets? Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory? It isn't something you just stuff in a rocket. Christ.
Sure, anti-matter rockets are merely theoretical. Anti-matter, however, exists.
To me, emoji's were the graphical representation of emoticons that millennials seemed unable to process despite their 733t speak. The fact that you can type emoticons in most emoji enabled apps and get emoji's should tell you everything you need to know.
Perhaps by not engaging them on FB to begin with? Whenever someone tells me "did you see..." and I say no, where'd you see it and they mention FB, I ask them to forward it to me via email. Soon enough, they just send things through email, and FB becomes less and less a problem.
Anyway, since you reckon BMI is useless, I challenge you to come up with something better. I don't mean something merely more accurate: that's easy.
I am not sure that banding will actually address any problems with BMI other than the age shift. It would be an improvement, but a lot of older people would be upset.;)
To actually get a better meaningful measurement add a set of measurements for waist, chest (bottom of breastbone) and shoulder width. How, exactly, those would figure into a single number beats me, but in a chart based system, it's easy enough to use those measurements to refine where you should be. I'd go so far as to say a waist larger than a chest size will for most indicate obesity all by itself (obvious exception: pregnant women in the last trimester, for sure)
I agree that additional measurements allow for error, but I'd guess that those errors are less than the current BMI nonsense. Yes, I've always thought BMI was stupid, for the same reason that the pilot study couldn't find an average pilot.
Being more than a standard deviation taller than average and large framed I obviously have been skeptical about BMI results that listed me as obese when my body fat was below 8%. Were I to ever hit "normal" on the BMI scale there'd be questions of whether I was severely ill.
FWIW, I really hate whatever settings you have that cause your quotes to not be actual "quotes".
Well done, you've discovered conditional independence.
Merely using it to prove that BMI is nothing more than a fitted set of statistics to a specific population. As such, it doesn't mean much unless it is used within a similar population.
...ah and now we get down to the crux of the matter. You're clearly vey deeply emotionally invested in this topic,
Not at all, you still don't really address why you're so vested in this value when many scientists of note have ditched it. A useless measure is a useless measure, no matter how many times it happens to be right. If something's right 730 times a year, would you use it? Now consider that it is a stopped clock...
Why: because it misses too many people, not that it calls too many non obese people obese. Whereas on every corner of the internet, evey fat related thread is ful of the special snowflakes claiming to be not in the 20% of the population that BMI incorrectly classifies as "not obese", but in the 1-5% that BMI classifies incorectly as obese.
It would appear, you see, that hte internet is full of muscle-bound Arnold Schwarznegger lookalikes of both sexes.
All you have to be is average proportions but tall. Nothing more. Add a heavy bone structure, and obese territory looms. BTW, you're special, just like everyone else.
I had a longer reply, but let's get down to the fundamentals:
Fine with me. So let's pick a large group of US southerners. I'd say your curve fits them just fine. Then lets pick a group of Amazonian aborigines. I'd say your curve is meaningless applied to them. That likely goes for Asians, as one specific sub-group. Let's pick only people above 6 feet tall. Gee, your curves seem to be rather incorrect. Let's pick a group of folks that are under 5.5 feet. Now they're much more likely to be correct. Let's grab only people under 20. Hmm, those curves are off again. Same thing for those over 60.
Any single number that varies that much merely by shifting the observed population is relatively useless. As for IQ, I'd need to know more than just IQ. Because a 90 IQ might do just fine in some parts of the world, perhaps better than high IQs. These things are all merely statistical models, and where BMI fails is that it has too few metrics involved in its calculation to account for the large variance of its supposed observed group. In fact, the BMI number should be more of an asymmetric bell curve with regards to height and breadth and shifted by age. But then it no longer is as simple to condemn a person as obese nor to have an obesity epidemic (not that I don't think we have one in the US btw)
Finally, while those reports linked to earlier have nice standards of deviation listed for various initial factors, such as age of participants, there are no standard deviations mentioned for the resulting BF to BMI correlations. They only claim that their results are 95% sensitivity (not accuracy). That in itself is suspect for anything that relies on statistical analysis. You know the line: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And for honesty, even the reports that claim 95% sensitivity conclude that BMI shouldn't be used to determine obesity. Why? Because it is useless. Arguing about ROC curves when the originating data isn't available is IMHO pointless.
One guy hit 39. He ran 2 miles in less than 11 minutes 5 days a week as a warm up. I'll restate for the slow - BMI is meaningless.
There are two reasons you're wrong, both independent:
1. BMI is a predictor of body fat percentage not health or fitness, so saying "BMI is useless because here's a fit guy with a high BMI" is a complete non sequiteur. It also doesn't predict the price of gold. Doesn't make it useless.
BMI is not a predictor of body fat percentage. The fact that you can be 39 and be lean, or 20 and be fat indicates just how flawed BMI is as a predictor of obesity. The NIH and other respectable entities came to this conclusion after much study. Why are you arguing against them?
2. No one said BMI is a perfect predictor of obesity. The claim is it's 95% accurate for men.
You lack an understanding of exactly what was stated. BMI doesn't predict body fat percentages anymore than IQ predicts success. What it claims is that if BMI (IQ) states you're obese (successful) then there's a 95% chance it's correct, at least for the range of subjects studied. In the total pool of subjects, however, it misses an astonishingly large percentage of those that are obese, and it's still wrong, because it's only a correlation of 2 measurements that trend with the desired measurement but by themselves have no direct relationship to what you're trying to measure. If you want to measure body fat percentages, then measure those factors that give you that percentage. Height alone has no bearing in this measurement. If you included breadth and depth, and an accurate volume calculation, then you'd be getting somewhere, but that's impractical from a pure length measurement standpoint.
It's like taking height and adding it to IQ. CEOs (successful people) tend to be taller. (You're probably already getting the drift here)
If you have a BMI over 30 then you should definitely go and get yourself checked out somehow with another technique (a clue, if you can grab rolls of fat and you have a BMI of over 30 then hoo boy do you have weight to lose).
That is the use of BMI.
Your "clue" is a non-sequitor - if you can grab rolls of fat, it doesn't matter what your BMI is, you have weight to lose.
Your non-sequitor does lead to a different question: why not do the "pinch an inch" test? Then again, it's not very accurate either and prone to measurement error. It's still far more accurate than BMI will ever be. BMI is nothing more than a height / weight chart with designated lines on it. It's attempting to force everyone into a single "average" for lack of a better term. And we all know how all humans are average, right?
Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.... if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions.
Less than 40 of the 3,864 contestants were average size on just five of the nine dimensions and none of the contestants — not even Martha Skidmore — came close on all nine dimensions.
But while Daniels and the contest organizers ran up against the same revelation, they came to a markedly different conclusion about its meaning. Most doctors and scientists of the era did not interpret the contest results as evidence that Norma was a misguided ideal. Just the opposite: many concluded that American women, on the whole, were unhealthy and out of shape.
You appear to fall into the contest organizers group.
Also:
Obesity is defined as body fat percentage greater than some threshold.
At this point, I've provided statistics and reasoning, and you've merely said "nuh uh" and restated your original position without adding any actual reasoning behind it. I'm getting the impression that you have high BMI and are in denial about what that means.
OK, here's some statistics:
BMI-defined obesity ( 30 kg/m2) was present in 21% of men and 31% of women, while BF %-defined obesity was present in 50% and 62%, respectively. A BMI 30 had a high specificity (95% in men and 99% in women), but a poor sensitivity (36% and 49 %, respectively) to detect BF %-defined obesity. The diagnostic performance of BMI diminished as age increased. BMI had a good correlation with BF % in men (R2 = 0.44) and women (R2 = 0.71), but also with lean mass (R2 = 0.50 and 0.55, respectively).
To further assess the variability of BF% for a given BMI value, we selected 108 subjects (54 men and 54 women) who had a BMI of 25 kg/m2, and found that in men, the distribution of BF % widely ranged from 13.8% to 35.3%, while in women the distribution of BF % ranged from 26.4% to 42.8%
There's some shocking variations and misses there. It's not that BMI of 25 or 30 is always obese, it's that a BMI of 25 will cover a significant percentage of obese people, as well as 40-50% of people that are not obese. BMI by itself is useless. It's like saying here's a group of successful people, most have an IQ above 100, 95% have an IQ above 125. However, there's a large group of not successful people that also have IQs above 100. If I grab everyone above 90, then I'll have covered 99% of all successful people (without defining success here, it's just semi-abstract).
As for high BMI, when I was a teen, we used to have a chart with BMI on it. One guy hit 39. He ran 2 miles in less than 11 minutes 5 days a week as a warm up. I'll restate for the slow - BMI is meaningless. You can have a BMI of 20 and be clinically obese. You can have 30+ and be dangerously low on body fat. BMI is meaningless.
BMI sucks per nih.gov as well.
I'll stand by my statement that using BMI to determine obesity is like trying to measure success by IQ. The relationships would be very similar, and by your own admission, useless. This is independent of any meaningful definition of success/obesity. The more I think of it the more accurate the analogy.
My feeling is eventually you won't be able to connect to the Internet without an "approved" network connection device/router and that device will be monitored and encrypted traffic will be either disallowed or the router will do MITM to allow the monitoring to take place. This is all technologically possible today. Secure boot, locked down devices are just the start.
with end to end keyed encryption available, this will be hard to enforce unless encryption AND VPNs are disallowed. I don't think a lot of companies would be too keen on allowing the gov full access to all their internet traffic any more than they'd be happy to send copies of all their documents, with the exception of RIM, of course.
You can have 2 people, identical height, same actual body fat, and one will be obese according to BMI merely because they are large framed and heavily boned vs the other being small framed and light boned. BMI is like trying to measure success by IQ.
So is my Thinkpad, infact it is a lot unixier by being Linux
Technically, your Thinkpad is less "unixier" because it's Linux. BSD, the core of OS X, IS UNIX.
B) It's case is good. It doesn't fall apart over time.
Neither does any laptop costing more than $100
Come back after 2 years of daily use. Then again, it's the one thing Thinkpads were known for. Whatever else, they were rugged compared to the competition in the windows world. But, this is Lenovo designs that are competing with Apple we're talking about now.
F) The battery lasts long enough for my needs.
Shorter than everybody elses-
This would be a new development. In real world tests, Apple's numbers hold up. No one else's has, at least the last time I was in the market.
Maxed out because the max specs are ridiculously low, and you had to pay 10x overprice at purchase for the upgrades, because it is unopgradable later.
You can upgrade the SSD. The memory actually doesn't need to be upgraded for 95+% of users if they buy adequate to begin with. I know you'll argue "but but but...". For a laptop, when's the last time you ran a process that consumed 16GB of RAM? Or any combination that required that much RAM? Unless you're into heavy video editing, but then a laptop is probably not what you should be using. I develop enterprise and mobile software. Running everything, including multiple DBs and IDEs rarely gets me into the 12GB range for processes. I actually passed on upgrading my desktop to 48GB because I just never filled up RAM unless I did something silly, like run 100 tabs on Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or all of them combined. More RAM for normal people is a myth, at this point.
Seriously though, I've managed to change my laptop habits to where I have divided my true "mass store" needs (things I might occasionally want but don't need access to at all times, like my full music or video collections) onto externals. Also historical projects move there. This leaves my core frequently used info on the 1TB SSD, and right now, I have more than 500GB free. I do have a subset of videos (recent unwatched) and music (core playlist) that I carry with me as well. After those changes, I externalized those external drives onto my HTPC, and now they're available to everyone in the household, and my laptop is free to move at will.
They need to bring back the quad mini. I'd buy at least another couple the second they go on sale. As it stands today, I'm running a bunch of late 2013 minis (yes, there was an "update", memory chip speed was increased), with no plans to replace them any time in the near future. Those boxes are awesome for certain tasks. If Apple doesn't release a significant upgrade soon, the generic small form factor intel boxes will wind up being replacements, running some form of *nix (Linux or BSD)
Heck, I bought a $600 scanner tool. Already paid for itself and everything from now on is money on top. That doesn't include the fact that I can continue running an older car for far less than buying a new one.
Slashdot Mirror
Linked In is a public billboard. Treat it like that and this doesn't matter.
Seems like this is an issue only for those going through a proxy server. No HTTP proxy, no problem. So this affects a minor smidgen of users in the world, and only those that are smart enough to set one up in the first place. (Companies that set this up should be smart enough to deal with this problem)
This is one of the fallacies of modern MBA-style management: management is a specific skill that's the same across all industries.
In it's worst form, it's what gets us CEOs who slash costs and show growth for the first year, then leave with a golden parachute while the company flounders.
An MBA without requisite skills in the field you're managing means you're nothing more than a modern pirate looting the ship.
Use Pidgin/Adium with OTR. Then use any service. Just expect that they're going to intercept any and all communications out of your house if they want to, which honestly isn't the biggest problem with privacy. What is the problem is that Google, MS, et al are all cataloguing and storing everything you say. So if they can't read it, you're already 99% covered.
Christ, space nutters are delusional. Anti-matter rockets? Don't you realize that anti-matter is simply a theory? It isn't something you just stuff in a rocket. Christ.
Sure, anti-matter rockets are merely theoretical. Anti-matter, however, exists.
Now I'm giving thanks for never having to deal with TR personally..... BNC was bad enough. At least I only had to tap a thick cable once....
To me, emoji's were the graphical representation of emoticons that millennials seemed unable to process despite their 733t speak. The fact that you can type emoticons in most emoji enabled apps and get emoji's should tell you everything you need to know.
disabled it from ever calling home
It's been the only way to deal with it ever since MS created it.
And there is no huge missing feature or limitation that can be easily solved by an upstart.
Privacy?
The only reason I have a FB account, somewhere, is because a job made me have one to integrate with it.
Perhaps by not engaging them on FB to begin with? Whenever someone tells me "did you see..." and I say no, where'd you see it and they mention FB, I ask them to forward it to me via email. Soon enough, they just send things through email, and FB becomes less and less a problem.
Anyway, since you reckon BMI is useless, I challenge you to come up with something better. I don't mean something merely more accurate: that's easy.
I am not sure that banding will actually address any problems with BMI other than the age shift. It would be an improvement, but a lot of older people would be upset. ;)
To actually get a better meaningful measurement add a set of measurements for waist, chest (bottom of breastbone) and shoulder width. How, exactly, those would figure into a single number beats me, but in a chart based system, it's easy enough to use those measurements to refine where you should be. I'd go so far as to say a waist larger than a chest size will for most indicate obesity all by itself (obvious exception: pregnant women in the last trimester, for sure)
I agree that additional measurements allow for error, but I'd guess that those errors are less than the current BMI nonsense. Yes, I've always thought BMI was stupid, for the same reason that the pilot study couldn't find an average pilot.
Being more than a standard deviation taller than average and large framed I obviously have been skeptical about BMI results that listed me as obese when my body fat was below 8%. Were I to ever hit "normal" on the BMI scale there'd be questions of whether I was severely ill.
Well done, you've discovered conditional independence.
Merely using it to prove that BMI is nothing more than a fitted set of statistics to a specific population. As such, it doesn't mean much unless it is used within a similar population.
Not at all, you still don't really address why you're so vested in this value when many scientists of note have ditched it. A useless measure is a useless measure, no matter how many times it happens to be right. If something's right 730 times a year, would you use it? Now consider that it is a stopped clock...
Why: because it misses too many people, not that it calls too many non obese people obese. Whereas on every corner of the internet, evey fat related thread is ful of the special snowflakes claiming to be not in the 20% of the population that BMI incorrectly classifies as "not obese", but in the 1-5% that BMI classifies incorectly as obese.
It would appear, you see, that hte internet is full of muscle-bound Arnold Schwarznegger lookalikes of both sexes.
All you have to be is average proportions but tall. Nothing more. Add a heavy bone structure, and obese territory looms. BTW, you're special, just like everyone else.
I had a longer reply, but let's get down to the fundamentals:
Fine with me. So let's pick a large group of US southerners. I'd say your curve fits them just fine. Then lets pick a group of Amazonian aborigines. I'd say your curve is meaningless applied to them. That likely goes for Asians, as one specific sub-group. Let's pick only people above 6 feet tall. Gee, your curves seem to be rather incorrect. Let's pick a group of folks that are under 5.5 feet. Now they're much more likely to be correct. Let's grab only people under 20. Hmm, those curves are off again. Same thing for those over 60.
Any single number that varies that much merely by shifting the observed population is relatively useless. As for IQ, I'd need to know more than just IQ. Because a 90 IQ might do just fine in some parts of the world, perhaps better than high IQs. These things are all merely statistical models, and where BMI fails is that it has too few metrics involved in its calculation to account for the large variance of its supposed observed group. In fact, the BMI number should be more of an asymmetric bell curve with regards to height and breadth and shifted by age. But then it no longer is as simple to condemn a person as obese nor to have an obesity epidemic (not that I don't think we have one in the US btw)
Finally, while those reports linked to earlier have nice standards of deviation listed for various initial factors, such as age of participants, there are no standard deviations mentioned for the resulting BF to BMI correlations. They only claim that their results are 95% sensitivity (not accuracy). That in itself is suspect for anything that relies on statistical analysis. You know the line: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And for honesty, even the reports that claim 95% sensitivity conclude that BMI shouldn't be used to determine obesity. Why? Because it is useless. Arguing about ROC curves when the originating data isn't available is IMHO pointless.
One guy hit 39. He ran 2 miles in less than 11 minutes 5 days a week as a warm up. I'll restate for the slow - BMI is meaningless.
There are two reasons you're wrong, both independent:
1. BMI is a predictor of body fat percentage not health or fitness, so saying "BMI is useless because here's a fit guy with a high BMI" is a complete non sequiteur. It also doesn't predict the price of gold. Doesn't make it useless.
BMI is not a predictor of body fat percentage. The fact that you can be 39 and be lean, or 20 and be fat indicates just how flawed BMI is as a predictor of obesity. The NIH and other respectable entities came to this conclusion after much study. Why are you arguing against them?
2. No one said BMI is a perfect predictor of obesity. The claim is it's 95% accurate for men.
You lack an understanding of exactly what was stated. BMI doesn't predict body fat percentages anymore than IQ predicts success. What it claims is that if BMI (IQ) states you're obese (successful) then there's a 95% chance it's correct, at least for the range of subjects studied. In the total pool of subjects, however, it misses an astonishingly large percentage of those that are obese, and it's still wrong, because it's only a correlation of 2 measurements that trend with the desired measurement but by themselves have no direct relationship to what you're trying to measure. If you want to measure body fat percentages, then measure those factors that give you that percentage. Height alone has no bearing in this measurement. If you included breadth and depth, and an accurate volume calculation, then you'd be getting somewhere, but that's impractical from a pure length measurement standpoint.
It's like taking height and adding it to IQ. CEOs (successful people) tend to be taller. (You're probably already getting the drift here)
If you have a BMI over 30 then you should definitely go and get yourself checked out somehow with another technique (a clue, if you can grab rolls of fat and you have a BMI of over 30 then hoo boy do you have weight to lose).
That is the use of BMI.
Your "clue" is a non-sequitor - if you can grab rolls of fat, it doesn't matter what your BMI is, you have weight to lose.
Your non-sequitor does lead to a different question: why not do the "pinch an inch" test? Then again, it's not very accurate either and prone to measurement error. It's still far more accurate than BMI will ever be. BMI is nothing more than a height / weight chart with designated lines on it. It's attempting to force everyone into a single "average" for lack of a better term. And we all know how all humans are average, right?
You appear to fall into the contest organizers group. Also:
The B.M.I. tables are excellent for identifying obesity and
Obesity is defined as body fat percentage greater than some threshold.
At this point, I've provided statistics and reasoning, and you've merely said "nuh uh" and restated your original position without adding any actual reasoning behind it. I'm getting the impression that you have high BMI and are in denial about what that means.
OK, here's some statistics:
There's some shocking variations and misses there. It's not that BMI of 25 or 30 is always obese, it's that a BMI of 25 will cover a significant percentage of obese people, as well as 40-50% of people that are not obese. BMI by itself is useless. It's like saying here's a group of successful people, most have an IQ above 100, 95% have an IQ above 125. However, there's a large group of not successful people that also have IQs above 100. If I grab everyone above 90, then I'll have covered 99% of all successful people (without defining success here, it's just semi-abstract).
As for high BMI, when I was a teen, we used to have a chart with BMI on it. One guy hit 39. He ran 2 miles in less than 11 minutes 5 days a week as a warm up. I'll restate for the slow - BMI is meaningless. You can have a BMI of 20 and be clinically obese. You can have 30+ and be dangerously low on body fat. BMI is meaningless.
It'd be interesting how they would enforce this. Seems like a "freedom of speech" issue right off the bat, much like that wonderful number:
/. won't allow you to print a single "word" that long
485650789657397829309841894694286137707442087351357924019652073668698
513401047237446968797439926117510973777701027447528049058831384037549
709987909653955227011712157025974666993240226834596619606034851742497
735846851885567457025712547499964821941846557100841190862597169479707
991520048667099759235960613207259737979936188606316914473588300245336
972781813914797955513399949394882899846917836100182597890103160196183
503434489568705384520853804584241565482488933380474758711283395989685
223254460840897111977127694120795862440547161321005006459820176961771
809478113622002723448272249323259547234688002927776497906148129840428
345720146348968547169082354737835661972186224969431622716663939055430
241564732924855248991225739466548627140482117138124388217717602984125
524464744505583462814488335631902725319590439283873764073916891257924
055015620889787163375999107887084908159097548019285768451988596305323
823490558092032999603234471140776019847163531161713078576084862236370
283570104961259568184678596533310077017991614674472549272833486916000
647585917462781212690073518309241530106302893295665843662000800476778
967984382090797619859493646309380586336721469695975027968771205724996
666980561453382074120315933770309949152746918356593762102220068126798
273445760938020304479122774980917955938387121000588766689258448700470
772552497060444652127130404321182610103591186476662963858495087448497
373476861420880529443
Which would be a single number except
Then there are tons of other ways to send encrypted information that aren't as obvious and much harder to confirm.
BMI sucks per nih.gov as well. I'll stand by my statement that using BMI to determine obesity is like trying to measure success by IQ. The relationships would be very similar, and by your own admission, useless. This is independent of any meaningful definition of success/obesity. The more I think of it the more accurate the analogy.
That's not a confidence scheme, Officer, it's performance art!
That's what I told the judge, and he commissioned a 3-to-5 year "performance art" piece complete with living accommodations, meals and housekeeping
Got to keep in character.
My feeling is eventually you won't be able to connect to the Internet without an "approved" network connection device/router and that device will be monitored and encrypted traffic will be either disallowed or the router will do MITM to allow the monitoring to take place. This is all technologically possible today. Secure boot, locked down devices are just the start.
with end to end keyed encryption available, this will be hard to enforce unless encryption AND VPNs are disallowed. I don't think a lot of companies would be too keen on allowing the gov full access to all their internet traffic any more than they'd be happy to send copies of all their documents, with the exception of RIM, of course.
Notable researchers and organizations agree BMI is useless.
You can have 2 people, identical height, same actual body fat, and one will be obese according to BMI merely because they are large framed and heavily boned vs the other being small framed and light boned. BMI is like trying to measure success by IQ.
So is my Thinkpad, infact it is a lot unixier by being Linux
Technically, your Thinkpad is less "unixier" because it's Linux. BSD, the core of OS X, IS UNIX.
B) It's case is good. It doesn't fall apart over time.
Neither does any laptop costing more than $100
Come back after 2 years of daily use. Then again, it's the one thing Thinkpads were known for. Whatever else, they were rugged compared to the competition in the windows world. But, this is Lenovo designs that are competing with Apple we're talking about now.
F) The battery lasts long enough for my needs.
Shorter than everybody elses-
This would be a new development. In real world tests, Apple's numbers hold up. No one else's has, at least the last time I was in the market.
Maxed out because the max specs are ridiculously low, and you had to pay 10x overprice at purchase for the upgrades, because it is unopgradable later.
You can upgrade the SSD. The memory actually doesn't need to be upgraded for 95+% of users if they buy adequate to begin with. I know you'll argue "but but but...". For a laptop, when's the last time you ran a process that consumed 16GB of RAM? Or any combination that required that much RAM? Unless you're into heavy video editing, but then a laptop is probably not what you should be using. I develop enterprise and mobile software. Running everything, including multiple DBs and IDEs rarely gets me into the 12GB range for processes. I actually passed on upgrading my desktop to 48GB because I just never filled up RAM unless I did something silly, like run 100 tabs on Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or all of them combined. More RAM for normal people is a myth, at this point.
My guess is that "you're doing it wrong". ;)
Seriously though, I've managed to change my laptop habits to where I have divided my true "mass store" needs (things I might occasionally want but don't need access to at all times, like my full music or video collections) onto externals. Also historical projects move there. This leaves my core frequently used info on the 1TB SSD, and right now, I have more than 500GB free. I do have a subset of videos (recent unwatched) and music (core playlist) that I carry with me as well. After those changes, I externalized those external drives onto my HTPC, and now they're available to everyone in the household, and my laptop is free to move at will.
They need to bring back the quad mini. I'd buy at least another couple the second they go on sale. As it stands today, I'm running a bunch of late 2013 minis (yes, there was an "update", memory chip speed was increased), with no plans to replace them any time in the near future. Those boxes are awesome for certain tasks. If Apple doesn't release a significant upgrade soon, the generic small form factor intel boxes will wind up being replacements, running some form of *nix (Linux or BSD)
Heck, I bought a $600 scanner tool. Already paid for itself and everything from now on is money on top. That doesn't include the fact that I can continue running an older car for far less than buying a new one.