I doubt it. The sharing of your data doesn't make a material difference to the contract. If anything they would probably claim it saves you money, as "they pass the savings on to you" (hahaha).
Yup, exactly. "You may opt out of this change." With fine print (or maybe not even then, but a followup letter, "By opting out of this change, we have exercised our right to close your account. All balances are now due and payable in full within 14 days."
The other sneaky one, "Your payment of your next bill indicates your acceptance of the changes to the Terms and Conditions outlined in this letter". Wow. Nice. I guess "Agree to these changes, or watch us fuck your credit score" might be likely to alienate too many people outright.
Nokia phones used to have a fantastic feature, though I'm sure they could now (or indeed any phones). You could add Contacts into Groups (no surprise there, fairly common) and set "Selective Diversion". I had my phone set up so friends could call 24/7, but calls from a work number outside 8-8 were automatically diverted to voicemail. It wasn't perfect, if I recall, as it was being done by the handset, not the network, so you might get the occasional half-ring before diversion, but was a nice way of managing this.
TBP has made it VERY clear that they do not care if their servers are being used to facilitate the downloading of movies, music, etc. Not only that but they've taken every opportunity to tell content owners to, basically, go to hell.
Everywhere it counted. They "protested" until there were actually consequences to their actions, in court, and then they changed their defense entirely to a "I know nothing. It's not my fault. Who am I to control what people do on my property? I know nothing".
Protesting what you think is wrong rings very hollow when you don't have the balls to wear the consequences of it. "All privileges, no responsibility". Bah.
As a slightly tangential aside, maybe, maybe not. Panavision does not sell lenses and cameras, only rents them. All those huge films, made on Panavision equipment? All rented. (Not that this implies Panavision has content clauses in its contracts, or that you'd use such lenses for this kind of stuff...)
"School is not cool" is a silly notion a small number of people believe in
And yet high school drop out rates are at their highest ever, approaching 50% in some major cities.
In most countries they seem to think that medical care should "just be free"
Please point to a single country that thinks that medical care should be free. Most countries think that it is better for the good of their society, and more cheap/efficient to aggregate medical services, and pay for it as a function of their taxes rather than anything else.
Americans take fewer vacations and holiday time than any other country in the world (even Japan).
No. they don't. They actually rank #4 in the world for days taken off work. Both Australians and Japanese work longer hours than Americans. On the other hand, the US is notable amongst developed nations for not mandating that employers allow employees a single day of vacation.
You were, however, correct about this:
Of course people are going to make inane, factually inaccurate hot air comments on the net all the time.
But if the old still works sufficiently well, there is little point in tossing it out in the face of trillion dollar deficits.
We take this too far. This only leads to roads falling apart, major freeways that are potholed, bridges that collapse, viaducts that are cracking, the general rundown of our infrastructure, til we get to the point where there is nothing but to have massive injections of capital in order to make things safe, let alone state of the art.
Everyone wants everything clean fresh and new. Then they're told they have to sacrifice something. Or that they might (shock) have to pay for it, and the "DONT YOU RAISE MY TAXES!" crowd starts chanting, and proposals get shot down, bridges collapse, people scream for blood, and the cycle repeats.
Extended SMS's (greater than 160 characters) are always separate text messages, it's typically up to the phone software to aggregate them into one message. Earlier versions of firmware for this functionality on Nokia phones, and the manual would warn that although they would appear as a single message, you may be billed for multiple messages.
SMS's are 160 characters. But if you know the recipient can get MMS and it works fine on your phone, etc, use that - you can do "effectively unlimited" length messages.
Verizon suck ass, but on this they are not guilty.
Because netshare ships with the iPhone, right? Oh, no.
I guess I could get it on the App Store, then? Oh, no.
Much better range than bluetooth.
I'm confused. Every laptop I've had over the last three years has Bluetooth 2.0, Class 1. As does my N95. As does the iPhone - well, apparently not. If you're getting 300' range from your iPhone's ad hoc wireless, color me impressed.
My N95 can create a wireless hotspot, fully functional, WPA, MAC filtering, infrastructure mode, and share the network, out of the box. As soon as I link it to my laptop by Bluetooth, I get a Nokia N95 over Bluetooth modem device, I create a dialup connection to dial AT&T at *99# and all is good, out of the box.
It is nice that there is the ability to control more functionality via the dock connector, but let's be honest, that's a chosen limitation at Apple's end, not an inability of USB to connect to and control a device.
Let's see, my office/home/car: iPod connectors, for iPod nano, and wife's iPhone. Mini USB connectors in open use: CF reader, graphics tablet, Nokia N95 cellphone, digital photo frame, Canon DSLR, Canon P&S, USB hub, USB hub, digital audio recorder (dictation device), label writer/printer, GPS.
And then you go after your lawyer for malpractice for not insisting he sit in upon/the review of evidence which could have very serious consequences for your freedom and / or future/...
Which is why, of course, my health care program allows a dozen visits to a licensed massage therapist for any form of massage (relaxational, or therapeutic) without referral. Health care programs have expanded well beyond the purest of definitions, typically in directions beneficial to the carrier, not the holder of a policy.
Living in Washington state, my wife and I paid a hefty premium for no-deductible insurance in 2007. In 2008, according to several resources, not a single policy available in Washington is zero deductible. Of course, they can't kick us off this one, but they can keep jacking up the premiums with no due weight given to the change in risk (or lack thereof) until we are financially compelled to change. Most health care programs charge for physicals and such as office visits, subject to deductible limits, over the last couple of years.
Exactly. Absolutely you can. "Could you state your full name?" "Blah blah blah" "And what do you do?" "Blah blah blah". "On the night of 25 February 2009, where were you between 6-8pm?" "I invoke my fifth amendment rights."
Actually, the more I read that document, the more it comes across as "FUCK PIGS". Suggestions such as waiting to talk to your buddies so you can get your stories straight, making sure "ahead of time" (ahead of time? you mean like a premeditated act?) that everyone in your group "knows not to rat on each other", "don't tell a cop you don't think they have reasonable suspicion, that'll just remind them to make up a good story"... bleh.
As interesting as that doc is. and it is - some good advice there - it's also interesting to see the inherent bias. "After the interaction, fill out a police misconduct report" making sure you note pretty much everything that didn't go 'your way' in the interaction.
No. At the mean income level, the average family will get about $70/month more, but for people surviving and raising families on $1500 a month, and many do, that equates to about a 7% pay rise. Just because you're rolling your eyes at the fact that the couples making $250K a year (which includes my family, just), will be paying approximately 0.75% more tax. Oh no! Our after tax income will change from $13,400 a month to $13,000! However will we cope?!?
I know. Us horrible people, suffering the burden of this. You'd almost think that if it wasn't for things like people buying multiple investment properties, trying to 'flip' properties after 12 months, putting $100k in, and expecting a $400k profit, and pushing the prices of housing sky high, and so forth, we'd not be in a financial crisis...
In fact, I would assume this; if we could spend 1000 dollars now to avoid a health ailment that will cost 50,000 dollars to treat in the future, I'm sure insurance/universal health care would gladly pay for it. They love preventive stuff like that.
Presuming you are in the US, "Ha ha".
My wife and I recently changed health care providers. We looked all over the shop for a plan or carrier that'd offer preventive stuff. Discounted gym memberships, exercise programs, whatever. Think we could find any? You're kidding, right? On the other hand, "Well, it's too late for anything but heroic measures now" was fairly comprehensively covered. Bariatric surgery? Lap band, gastic bypass etc? Not a problem - most plans will cover that fairly comprehensively! Think about all those ads from health care providers, "Take ten minutes to meditate, it'll lower your stress!" "Go for a walk!" "Brought to you by BIG INSURANCE CO X, for a healthier STATE YOU RESIDE IN!". Think they give you discounts for doing any of that? Of course not - not that you shouldn't be doing it anyway, sure, but my point is that health insurance has an asymptotic interest in helping you maintain/increase your health and wellbeing, and an inverse interest in enriching the healthcare system. Heathcare costs over the last decade have increased at eight times the wage increase level. How does that work? Are health care providers honestly claiming that the cost of providing health care, and associated costs (liability insurance, etc) have increased at a GEOMETRIC RATE above and beyond inflation? Of course they haven't! But they do have you between a rock and a hard place, because they know you're either petrified (and in many cases rightly so) of having to visit a hospital, let alone in an ambulance, waiting for that five digit bill to come out, and knowing that you often have very little option for anything but.
Except you're not paying to be relieved of risk. In a nice clean, pure, uncorrupted world, maybe. But speaking as someone who works in the medical insurance field, I can guarantee you you're not. If you change from Provider A to Provider B, who both supply exactly the same benefits, just with a different premium, there should be no such concept as a 'pre-existing condition'. After all, you're not changing providers to get coverage for something you know you may have but have yet to disclose, and nor has the risk of you having given condition X changed, nor has the chance of a differing medical future changed. But yet insurance companies are able to boot you off coverage for such a thing. That isn't the purpose of insurance.
I'll give you another example: Your employer may buy coverage from a third-party administrator. Now, at a base level, such a thing is bought in bulk. Insurer sells, say "$5M of health care benefits per year, for a sum of, say, $4M". Now, in theory, there is nothing to stop your employer saying that that coverage would be used, for example, for gym memberships, chakra healing, transcendental techniques, or whatever. After all, the insurer has decided that the risk of covering a particular populace to the tune of $5M comes at that cost. Provided you don't deviate from that, who are they to argue how you use this coverage?
In reality, they have actuaries, and statisticians. And they're better informed. So if you, as an employer, or TPA, are doing this, you think that the best, fairest, most equitable, least risky way of doing it is effectively by using the same policy guidelines ($x deductible, $x co-pay, etc) as the insurer uses. After all, they've done the math, right? But nothing is to say you have to.
The example you discussed is perfectly covered by a FSA. Your employer is required to make the entirety of your contributions available on Jan 1 of that year, so it is in effect an interest-free loan.
There are risks involved in not carrying insurance. But the sooner people realize that what is called health insurance in the US in no way resembles the principles on which insurance is meant to be based, the better our hopes are for making the health system better (insert whatever definition of 'better' you desire).
I'd like to do that too, but it's an account I only use for work, only work colleagues are on it, and we are expected to use it as a status monitor as much as a communication tool.
Like him or not, you are someone posting on Slashdot. Steve has managed to amass a personal net worth of $15B and runs a $50B a year company with 80,000+ employees. If you want to claim that that doesn't take intelligence, by all means...
Not sure, but it's not just you. I use a couple of different clients for work communication (the dozen people in my company telecommute) - Gtalk, Trillian, Adium, and fring on my cellphone. My boss got snarky one day recently because he said my status said available, but I was unresponsive all day. After investigating, I saw the same thing. If I set my status away on any of the non-official clients, it wouldn't propogate out. So it's a two way issue, not just one.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. The sharing of your data doesn't make a material difference to the contract. If anything they would probably claim it saves you money, as "they pass the savings on to you" (hahaha).
The other sneaky one, "Your payment of your next bill indicates your acceptance of the changes to the Terms and Conditions outlined in this letter". Wow. Nice. I guess "Agree to these changes, or watch us fuck your credit score" might be likely to alienate too many people outright.
Nokia phones used to have a fantastic feature, though I'm sure they could now (or indeed any phones). You could add Contacts into Groups (no surprise there, fairly common) and set "Selective Diversion". I had my phone set up so friends could call 24/7, but calls from a work number outside 8-8 were automatically diverted to voicemail. It wasn't perfect, if I recall, as it was being done by the handset, not the network, so you might get the occasional half-ring before diversion, but was a nice way of managing this.
Everywhere it counted. They "protested" until there were actually consequences to their actions, in court, and then they changed their defense entirely to a "I know nothing. It's not my fault. Who am I to control what people do on my property? I know nothing".
Protesting what you think is wrong rings very hollow when you don't have the balls to wear the consequences of it. "All privileges, no responsibility". Bah.
When I go out to dinner, the average bill for a two-up is $100 or so.
As a slightly tangential aside, maybe, maybe not. Panavision does not sell lenses and cameras, only rents them. All those huge films, made on Panavision equipment? All rented. (Not that this implies Panavision has content clauses in its contracts, or that you'd use such lenses for this kind of stuff...)
No. They don't. The US is #5, behind Greece, Belgium, France and Spain.
No. It's not. That honor goes to Germany.
And yet high school drop out rates are at their highest ever, approaching 50% in some major cities.
Please point to a single country that thinks that medical care should be free. Most countries think that it is better for the good of their society, and more cheap/efficient to aggregate medical services, and pay for it as a function of their taxes rather than anything else.
No. they don't. They actually rank #4 in the world for days taken off work. Both Australians and Japanese work longer hours than Americans. On the other hand, the US is notable amongst developed nations for not mandating that employers allow employees a single day of vacation.
You were, however, correct about this:
We take this too far. This only leads to roads falling apart, major freeways that are potholed, bridges that collapse, viaducts that are cracking, the general rundown of our infrastructure, til we get to the point where there is nothing but to have massive injections of capital in order to make things safe, let alone state of the art.
Everyone wants everything clean fresh and new. Then they're told they have to sacrifice something. Or that they might (shock) have to pay for it, and the "DONT YOU RAISE MY TAXES!" crowd starts chanting, and proposals get shot down, bridges collapse, people scream for blood, and the cycle repeats.
SMS's are 160 characters. But if you know the recipient can get MMS and it works fine on your phone, etc, use that - you can do "effectively unlimited" length messages.
Verizon suck ass, but on this they are not guilty.
Because netshare ships with the iPhone, right? Oh, no.
I guess I could get it on the App Store, then? Oh, no.
I'm confused. Every laptop I've had over the last three years has Bluetooth 2.0, Class 1. As does my N95. As does the iPhone - well, apparently not. If you're getting 300' range from your iPhone's ad hoc wireless, color me impressed.
My N95 can create a wireless hotspot, fully functional, WPA, MAC filtering, infrastructure mode, and share the network, out of the box. As soon as I link it to my laptop by Bluetooth, I get a Nokia N95 over Bluetooth modem device, I create a dialup connection to dial AT&T at *99# and all is good, out of the box.
It is nice that there is the ability to control more functionality via the dock connector, but let's be honest, that's a chosen limitation at Apple's end, not an inability of USB to connect to and control a device.
Sorry, you were saying?
And then you go after your lawyer for malpractice for not insisting he sit in upon /the review of evidence which could have very serious consequences for your freedom and / or future/...
Living in Washington state, my wife and I paid a hefty premium for no-deductible insurance in 2007. In 2008, according to several resources, not a single policy available in Washington is zero deductible. Of course, they can't kick us off this one, but they can keep jacking up the premiums with no due weight given to the change in risk (or lack thereof) until we are financially compelled to change. Most health care programs charge for physicals and such as office visits, subject to deductible limits, over the last couple of years.
Exactly. Absolutely you can. "Could you state your full name?" "Blah blah blah" "And what do you do?" "Blah blah blah". "On the night of 25 February 2009, where were you between 6-8pm?" "I invoke my fifth amendment rights."
Actually, the more I read that document, the more it comes across as "FUCK PIGS". Suggestions such as waiting to talk to your buddies so you can get your stories straight, making sure "ahead of time" (ahead of time? you mean like a premeditated act?) that everyone in your group "knows not to rat on each other", "don't tell a cop you don't think they have reasonable suspicion, that'll just remind them to make up a good story" ... bleh.
As interesting as that doc is. and it is - some good advice there - it's also interesting to see the inherent bias. "After the interaction, fill out a police misconduct report" making sure you note pretty much everything that didn't go 'your way' in the interaction.
No. At the mean income level, the average family will get about $70/month more, but for people surviving and raising families on $1500 a month, and many do, that equates to about a 7% pay rise. Just because you're rolling your eyes at the fact that the couples making $250K a year (which includes my family, just), will be paying approximately 0.75% more tax. Oh no! Our after tax income will change from $13,400 a month to $13,000! However will we cope?!?
I know. Us horrible people, suffering the burden of this. You'd almost think that if it wasn't for things like people buying multiple investment properties, trying to 'flip' properties after 12 months, putting $100k in, and expecting a $400k profit, and pushing the prices of housing sky high, and so forth, we'd not be in a financial crisis...
Wait, your argument is "well, other people have fucked it up, so..."? I'm sorry, I'm struggling to find the logical conclusion to your premise.
Presuming you are in the US, "Ha ha".
My wife and I recently changed health care providers. We looked all over the shop for a plan or carrier that'd offer preventive stuff. Discounted gym memberships, exercise programs, whatever. Think we could find any? You're kidding, right? On the other hand, "Well, it's too late for anything but heroic measures now" was fairly comprehensively covered. Bariatric surgery? Lap band, gastic bypass etc? Not a problem - most plans will cover that fairly comprehensively! Think about all those ads from health care providers, "Take ten minutes to meditate, it'll lower your stress!" "Go for a walk!" "Brought to you by BIG INSURANCE CO X, for a healthier STATE YOU RESIDE IN!". Think they give you discounts for doing any of that? Of course not - not that you shouldn't be doing it anyway, sure, but my point is that health insurance has an asymptotic interest in helping you maintain/increase your health and wellbeing, and an inverse interest in enriching the healthcare system. Heathcare costs over the last decade have increased at eight times the wage increase level. How does that work? Are health care providers honestly claiming that the cost of providing health care, and associated costs (liability insurance, etc) have increased at a GEOMETRIC RATE above and beyond inflation? Of course they haven't! But they do have you between a rock and a hard place, because they know you're either petrified (and in many cases rightly so) of having to visit a hospital, let alone in an ambulance, waiting for that five digit bill to come out, and knowing that you often have very little option for anything but.
I'll give you another example: Your employer may buy coverage from a third-party administrator. Now, at a base level, such a thing is bought in bulk. Insurer sells, say "$5M of health care benefits per year, for a sum of, say, $4M". Now, in theory, there is nothing to stop your employer saying that that coverage would be used, for example, for gym memberships, chakra healing, transcendental techniques, or whatever. After all, the insurer has decided that the risk of covering a particular populace to the tune of $5M comes at that cost. Provided you don't deviate from that, who are they to argue how you use this coverage?
In reality, they have actuaries, and statisticians. And they're better informed. So if you, as an employer, or TPA, are doing this, you think that the best, fairest, most equitable, least risky way of doing it is effectively by using the same policy guidelines ($x deductible, $x co-pay, etc) as the insurer uses. After all, they've done the math, right? But nothing is to say you have to.
The example you discussed is perfectly covered by a FSA. Your employer is required to make the entirety of your contributions available on Jan 1 of that year, so it is in effect an interest-free loan.
There are risks involved in not carrying insurance. But the sooner people realize that what is called health insurance in the US in no way resembles the principles on which insurance is meant to be based, the better our hopes are for making the health system better (insert whatever definition of 'better' you desire).
I'd like to do that too, but it's an account I only use for work, only work colleagues are on it, and we are expected to use it as a status monitor as much as a communication tool.
Like him or not, you are someone posting on Slashdot. Steve has managed to amass a personal net worth of $15B and runs a $50B a year company with 80,000+ employees. If you want to claim that that doesn't take intelligence, by all means...
Woah, down, fanboy.
MSFT currently has 15% less cash in Apple, $20.7B versus $24.5B...
It's a little disingenuous to use that as a comparison point of relative size and power.
Reasonable assumption. The GO 9x0 series - I have a 900 - use a large hard drive, mine came with a 20GB drive.
Not sure, but it's not just you. I use a couple of different clients for work communication (the dozen people in my company telecommute) - Gtalk, Trillian, Adium, and fring on my cellphone. My boss got snarky one day recently because he said my status said available, but I was unresponsive all day. After investigating, I saw the same thing. If I set my status away on any of the non-official clients, it wouldn't propogate out. So it's a two way issue, not just one.