I totally feel for you. I am lucky enough to be insured, but when I was shopping around for cheaper insurance, I also was rejected for trivial stuff. My grandmother (who is not a doctor) said to me several years ago: "I think my mother and uncle might have died from the effects of Marfan's Sydrome (which can cause aorta rupture), and I think I have some of the symptoms, so you should consider getting checked out." At my annual checkup I ran it by my doctor, and he said: "I doubt it, but there are a couple cheap tests I can do to be more sure." In the end he concluded that I do NOT have Marfan's Syndrome.
Fast forward 2 or 3 years. I apply for insurance with a company other than my current insurer. They request permission to do a medical history check. "No problem," I think, because I've been given a clean bill of health by my doctor.
Insurance company decision: Coverage rejected for reason--"Question of Marfans." In other words, they don't trust what my doctor said with enough confidence to risk taking me on....
Part of the idea of Obamacare is that crap like this shouldn't happen anymore.
I think that "negotiation" was in quotes there because it isn't really negotiating. If you can negotiate a price lower than the sticker, it is because the dealer had no intention of charging you that price unless you were stupid enough to not ask for a lower price. The sticker price bears little relationship to the actual value of a vehicle.
Also, I think the author fails to consider the idea that Netflix likes to keep things simple. If a move studio said "Netflix, you can license this movie for streaming, but only if it has the following limits on viewing..." or "...only if you charge an additional $___...," I think Netflix would say "No." Otherwise it would have to segregate its movies into categories with viewing limits and those without. And it would be a slippery slope. Some movies would have strict limits, others would get looser limits, and before long very few movies would have no limits. I think Netflix wants to keep things simple--if a movie shows up in instant view, it is available to watch all you want without paying extra. Period.
If you would like evidence that limits would be a less good (I won't say bad here, just less good) business move, I can only provide anecdotal evidence with a very small sample size, including only myself and my immediate family members: Amazon Prime--Amazon has a ton of content on there, some of which is free and some of which is not. Where do I go first when I want to watch something? Netflix--because I know that if it is there, I can watch it all I want for free. On Amazon, it might come up when I search, but that doesn't mean it will be free, and if it isn't free, I probably won't watch it at all.
The laser incidents are so numerous that it will be impossible to deal with the problem by prosecutions. It seems to me that a problem that cannot be solved by stopping the perpetrators needs to be solved a different way, such as designing planes to not be vulnerable to the lasers.
And I should add--we are "cord-cutters." We cut cable a long time ago, except for internet. So, we have over-the-air TV or Netflix (cancelled Hulu for nonuse). Her office is in the basement, so really Netflix is it if there is going to be TV on in the background.
I wonder what Netflix thinks of this. Like, they want it to overtake regular TV, and it is no big deal to have the regular TV running nonstop in the background. But Netflix has to pay for that content she isn't actually watching. And they don't charge us more just because she uses (way) more than average.
Our cable (and hence cable modem) went out for a day recently (we use Cox). My wife set up a mobile hotspot from her T-Mobile phone in a spot in which she had LTE service and went about her life as normal, meaning streaming Netflix in the background while she works. It turns out that at LTE speeds, Netflix feeds you rather high reception, and you can go through a 2.5 GB limit in less than two movies. So, she was throttled for the rest of the month to 2G speeds.
Supposedly they do not throttle on the unlimited plan. They are very clear on the 2.5 GB plan that they will throttle after the cap (but will not charge extra) and they did in fact throttle (and I was fine with that--that was all we paid for, and in the typical month is faaaar more than enough). On the unlimited plan, I question how much Netflix streaming they would really tolerate.
Wait Wait Don't Tell me is absolutely in the same terrible category as Prairie Home Companion. But This American Life, Radiolab, CarTalk, Planet Money, Marketplace, SciFri, The Moth, Backstory, etc... are excellent. They've got a ton of excellent stuff on NPR.
Maybe we're looking at the "bottom" of the rock. When I look at the pictures, I don't see any indication that the rock was dug in the ground where is currently sits. It looks to me more like it blew or fell into its current position (perhaps the surface of mars just got pelted by a meteor or a secret North Korean rover landing or something and knocked that rock from its prior position). Someone else said "Just look at the two pictures. The first has a shape outlined in darker 'dirt' in the area where the object appeared - a shape that is the same shape as the object." I disagree, you can see that outline sitting underneath this rock, offset a bit, like this rock just fell into place.
So, with all of the above, for all we know that is presently the top of the rock might have been the bottom of the rock for 5 million years. Or it might have broken off of a larger rock.
Worth investigating to a degree? Yes. Worth assuming that an Martian put the rock there as a joke? No.
The report costs 395 pounds to access, but the article does get slightly more specific:
Forty-five percent of the world's broadband subscribers equates to 348 million people.
I do not know whether this is inserted from ComputerWorld or if it is copied from the report, but I hope that the report gets far more specific than that.
It was no secret that the NSA was working on quantum computer technology then as well.
Speaking of it being "no secret," here is the public website for the quantum computing initiative at the Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://quantum.lanl.gov/ That page says:
Quantum information science and technology research is conducted at several outstanding universities and laboratories around the world, including LANL. At Los Alamos, however, even the most basic quantum research often has national security implications or connections.
Although the Quantum Initiative's national security mission at Los Alamos is manifest in many areas, it is perhaps most evident in two of the Laboratory's most successful quantum technology initiatives— quantum cryptography and the race for a quantum computer.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, of course, is owned and operated by the U.S. Federal Government. The fact that the Government has been working on this for some time (since the 90s) has not been a secret.
The Laboratory also revealed recently, as was reported on/. that it has been operating a quantum network for 2 1/2 years. Though I feel certain I read about that in Technology Review or the like a couple years ago, but cannot find any such article now.
I wish I had some mod points to mod this side conversation about.4% as "funny." Like, who exactly has infiltrated/. that doesn't understand this? Soon, they're going to need to remove "News for Nerds" as false.
I'm pretty sure I'm not eligible for subsidies. But the system for figuring it out is a joke. It asks if I have any tax deductions such as student loan interest. So, I pulled out my tax return and put in practically every deduction. It isn't clear which deductions are eligible to be deducted.
Even so, between my income and my wife's I'm almost certainly not eligible for any subsidies based on the information I provided. So, for those of us whose self-input information indicates $0 subsidy, why not just let us see the price? It can't possibly be worse than my holy-fraking-expensive plan available through my employer.
So, I agree that they've set it up backward, and should take people's word on showing prices and just say "eligibility for reduced prices will be confirmed prior to purchase." But even with the current backward system, there is no reason that the unsubsidized prices shouldn't be shown for those of us whose information indicates that we aren't eligible for a subsidy.
I thought it was optional everywhere. But apparently this varies from state to state and 16 states require kindergarten attendance. This website gives a break down as of 2012 (see far right column, and mandatory school attendance ages): http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp
I should note a caveat--I am in Virginia, which, according to that chart requires school attendance beginning at age 5 and is listed as having mandatory kindergarten. It so happens that I have a 6 year old in 1st grade. We put our kid in Kindergarten last year like pretty much everyone else. But among the piles of paperwork we received were documents involving not doing kindergarten, waiting a year, and starting school with first grade or starting Kindergarten at age 6, as appropriate. But, I don't still have that paperwork to review what it said. It might have required some sort of home kindergarten or something, perhaps.
And, I could be wrong, but I believe every state in the US has kindergarten, which is preschool (school starts in 1st grade, which is why they call it that. Kindergarten is not mandatory).
I wondered the same thing. Why not just turn the disk sideways and watch it sink? Also, I wondered why he didn't procure a wooden ball exactly the same shape as the ebony ball, but lower density, and show that it floats. Or use different shapes of known volume to show that the mathematical calculations of buoyancy based on density work. I suspect that the article just didn't give us the whole story because its intent (rightly or wrongly) was to show that Galileo gave the wrong reason why ice floats rather than to give a full description of the debate.
Galileo was NOT incorrect about why ice floats. He was incorrect about why a wafer of ebony floats while a ball of ebony does not. From TFA:
Delle Colombe’s basic premise was that ice was the solid form of water, therefore it was more dense than water. He argued that buoyancy was “a matter of shape only,” Caruana explained. “It had nothing to do with density.” . . . And Galileo’s primary argument for floating ice was correctly based on Archimedes’ density theory, wherein an object in water experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of water it displaces. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, it will always float on liquid water. . . . On the third day of the debate, delle Colombe stole the show with a crowd-pleasing experiment, Caruana said. Delle Colombe presented a sphere of ebony to the audience. The sphere was placed on the surface of the water, and it began to sink. Then delle Colombe took a thin wafer of ebony and placed it on the surface of the water, where it floated. Because the density of both the wafer and the sphere of ebony were the same, delle Colombe announced that density had nothing to do with buoyancy and that an object’s shape was all that mattered. . . . Galileo argued that the thin volume of air, above the wafer but below the surface of the water, had somehow united with the ebony wafer. Thus, the density of the hybrid ebony-and-air object was the average of the density of ebony and the density of air. This average density was less than the density of liquid water, thus the ebony wafer (plus air) could float on water.
Thus, according to the article, Galileo was absolutely correct about why ice floats. He only gave an improper explanation of why his opponent's ebony show didn't disprove his explanation, and thus this article was a waste of time, and, honestly, I feel a bit misled. After actually reading TFA (which is rare for me, I will admit) I ended up more convinced that Galileo was a freaking smart dude, way ahead of his time, which was exactly the opposite of the purpose of the article. It seems like they would have been better off writing about Newton and his supposed quest for alchemy.
Then, of course, if I could also personalize the route with things like "please use scenic route", "use fast route", "use a county road", etc - it would be perfect...
"Please accelerate out of the corners." "Please leave 40 feet of tracks when departing from the present intersection." "Please drop it into second and turn sideways in the next corner." [Vehicle reply] "I'm sorry; I can't do that for you, Dave. Unless you assist by pulling the e-brake at 3...2...1...now."
In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4' used to upload the torrent files.
Am I the only person that is concerned and surprised a bit about this? TPB disclosing upload IP addresses?!
I am also surprised that Prenda didn't make some effort to hide the IP.
Slashdot Mirror
UPDATE: I just signed up for insurance through the Obamacare exchange with the very insurance company that rejected me for "question of Marfans."
I totally feel for you. I am lucky enough to be insured, but when I was shopping around for cheaper insurance, I also was rejected for trivial stuff. My grandmother (who is not a doctor) said to me several years ago: "I think my mother and uncle might have died from the effects of Marfan's Sydrome (which can cause aorta rupture), and I think I have some of the symptoms, so you should consider getting checked out." At my annual checkup I ran it by my doctor, and he said: "I doubt it, but there are a couple cheap tests I can do to be more sure." In the end he concluded that I do NOT have Marfan's Syndrome.
Fast forward 2 or 3 years. I apply for insurance with a company other than my current insurer. They request permission to do a medical history check. "No problem," I think, because I've been given a clean bill of health by my doctor.
Insurance company decision: Coverage rejected for reason--"Question of Marfans." In other words, they don't trust what my doctor said with enough confidence to risk taking me on....
Part of the idea of Obamacare is that crap like this shouldn't happen anymore.
I think that "negotiation" was in quotes there because it isn't really negotiating. If you can negotiate a price lower than the sticker, it is because the dealer had no intention of charging you that price unless you were stupid enough to not ask for a lower price. The sticker price bears little relationship to the actual value of a vehicle.
Also, I think the author fails to consider the idea that Netflix likes to keep things simple. If a move studio said "Netflix, you can license this movie for streaming, but only if it has the following limits on viewing..." or "...only if you charge an additional $___...," I think Netflix would say "No." Otherwise it would have to segregate its movies into categories with viewing limits and those without. And it would be a slippery slope. Some movies would have strict limits, others would get looser limits, and before long very few movies would have no limits. I think Netflix wants to keep things simple--if a movie shows up in instant view, it is available to watch all you want without paying extra. Period.
If you would like evidence that limits would be a less good (I won't say bad here, just less good) business move, I can only provide anecdotal evidence with a very small sample size, including only myself and my immediate family members: Amazon Prime--Amazon has a ton of content on there, some of which is free and some of which is not. Where do I go first when I want to watch something? Netflix--because I know that if it is there, I can watch it all I want for free. On Amazon, it might come up when I search, but that doesn't mean it will be free, and if it isn't free, I probably won't watch it at all.
'We do have big hopes for that part of our business going forward,' Gracenote president Stephen White confirmed to Slashdot.>
Since when is /. in the news-making department rather than just the news aggregating department? Maybe I'm just out of the loop on this....
The laser incidents are so numerous that it will be impossible to deal with the problem by prosecutions. It seems to me that a problem that cannot be solved by stopping the perpetrators needs to be solved a different way, such as designing planes to not be vulnerable to the lasers.
And I should add--we are "cord-cutters." We cut cable a long time ago, except for internet. So, we have over-the-air TV or Netflix (cancelled Hulu for nonuse). Her office is in the basement, so really Netflix is it if there is going to be TV on in the background.
I wonder what Netflix thinks of this. Like, they want it to overtake regular TV, and it is no big deal to have the regular TV running nonstop in the background. But Netflix has to pay for that content she isn't actually watching. And they don't charge us more just because she uses (way) more than average.
Our cable (and hence cable modem) went out for a day recently (we use Cox). My wife set up a mobile hotspot from her T-Mobile phone in a spot in which she had LTE service and went about her life as normal, meaning streaming Netflix in the background while she works. It turns out that at LTE speeds, Netflix feeds you rather high reception, and you can go through a 2.5 GB limit in less than two movies. So, she was throttled for the rest of the month to 2G speeds.
Supposedly they do not throttle on the unlimited plan. They are very clear on the 2.5 GB plan that they will throttle after the cap (but will not charge extra) and they did in fact throttle (and I was fine with that--that was all we paid for, and in the typical month is faaaar more than enough). On the unlimited plan, I question how much Netflix streaming they would really tolerate.
Wait Wait Don't Tell me is absolutely in the same terrible category as Prairie Home Companion. But This American Life, Radiolab, CarTalk, Planet Money, Marketplace, SciFri, The Moth, Backstory, etc... are excellent. They've got a ton of excellent stuff on NPR.
A mother I was talking with yesterday . . .
I know; mothers are the worst. Completely technologically illiterate. Did you know that the average mother still uses her uterus to produce a child?
Maybe we're looking at the "bottom" of the rock. When I look at the pictures, I don't see any indication that the rock was dug in the ground where is currently sits. It looks to me more like it blew or fell into its current position (perhaps the surface of mars just got pelted by a meteor or a secret North Korean rover landing or something and knocked that rock from its prior position). Someone else said "Just look at the two pictures. The first has a shape outlined in darker 'dirt' in the area where the object appeared - a shape that is the same shape as the object." I disagree, you can see that outline sitting underneath this rock, offset a bit, like this rock just fell into place.
So, with all of the above, for all we know that is presently the top of the rock might have been the bottom of the rock for 5 million years. Or it might have broken off of a larger rock.
Worth investigating to a degree? Yes. Worth assuming that an Martian put the rock there as a joke? No.
The report costs 395 pounds to access, but the article does get slightly more specific:
Forty-five percent of the world's broadband subscribers equates to 348 million people.
I do not know whether this is inserted from ComputerWorld or if it is copied from the report, but I hope that the report gets far more specific than that.
It was no secret that the NSA was working on quantum computer technology then as well.
Speaking of it being "no secret," here is the public website for the quantum computing initiative at the Los Alamos National Laboratory:
http://quantum.lanl.gov/
That page says:
Quantum information science and technology research is conducted at several outstanding universities and laboratories around the world, including LANL. At Los Alamos, however, even the most basic quantum research often has national security implications or connections.
Although the Quantum Initiative's national security mission at Los Alamos is manifest in many areas, it is perhaps most evident in two of the Laboratory's most successful quantum technology initiatives— quantum cryptography and the race for a quantum computer.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, of course, is owned and operated by the U.S. Federal Government. The fact that the Government has been working on this for some time (since the 90s) has not been a secret.
The Laboratory also revealed recently, as was reported on /. that it has been operating a quantum network for 2 1/2 years. Though I feel certain I read about that in Technology Review or the like a couple years ago, but cannot find any such article now.
I wish I had some mod points to mod this side conversation about .4% as "funny." Like, who exactly has infiltrated /. that doesn't understand this? Soon, they're going to need to remove "News for Nerds" as false.
And they can replace Bernanke with no trouble.
Like, they could replace Bernanke with this person, who has already been selected to replace Bernanke... (though not yet confirmed by the Senate)
It seems like a bad time to have Bernanke at the top of the list. What's the bounty on the new lady?
I'm pretty sure I'm not eligible for subsidies. But the system for figuring it out is a joke. It asks if I have any tax deductions such as student loan interest. So, I pulled out my tax return and put in practically every deduction. It isn't clear which deductions are eligible to be deducted.
Even so, between my income and my wife's I'm almost certainly not eligible for any subsidies based on the information I provided. So, for those of us whose self-input information indicates $0 subsidy, why not just let us see the price? It can't possibly be worse than my holy-fraking-expensive plan available through my employer.
So, I agree that they've set it up backward, and should take people's word on showing prices and just say "eligibility for reduced prices will be confirmed prior to purchase." But even with the current backward system, there is no reason that the unsubsidized prices shouldn't be shown for those of us whose information indicates that we aren't eligible for a subsidy.
Ministry of Sound not to be confused with Ministry, of course.
I thought it was optional everywhere. But apparently this varies from state to state and 16 states require kindergarten attendance. This website gives a break down as of 2012 (see far right column, and mandatory school attendance ages):
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp
I should note a caveat--I am in Virginia, which, according to that chart requires school attendance beginning at age 5 and is listed as having mandatory kindergarten. It so happens that I have a 6 year old in 1st grade. We put our kid in Kindergarten last year like pretty much everyone else. But among the piles of paperwork we received were documents involving not doing kindergarten, waiting a year, and starting school with first grade or starting Kindergarten at age 6, as appropriate. But, I don't still have that paperwork to review what it said. It might have required some sort of home kindergarten or something, perhaps.
Yes.
Head Start (preschool for low income families across the USA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start_Program
Some states have free public preschool for all children: http://www.ksde.org/Default.aspx?tabid=3293 (Kansas Dept of Ed.)
And, I could be wrong, but I believe every state in the US has kindergarten, which is preschool (school starts in 1st grade, which is why they call it that. Kindergarten is not mandatory).
I wondered the same thing. Why not just turn the disk sideways and watch it sink? Also, I wondered why he didn't procure a wooden ball exactly the same shape as the ebony ball, but lower density, and show that it floats. Or use different shapes of known volume to show that the mathematical calculations of buoyancy based on density work. I suspect that the article just didn't give us the whole story because its intent (rightly or wrongly) was to show that Galileo gave the wrong reason why ice floats rather than to give a full description of the debate.
Galileo was NOT incorrect about why ice floats. He was incorrect about why a wafer of ebony floats while a ball of ebony does not. From TFA:
Delle Colombe’s basic premise was that ice was the solid form of water, therefore it was more dense than water. He argued that buoyancy was “a matter of shape only,” Caruana explained. “It had nothing to do with density.”
. . .
And Galileo’s primary argument for floating ice was correctly based on Archimedes’ density theory, wherein an object in water experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of water it displaces. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, it will always float on liquid water.
. . .
On the third day of the debate, delle Colombe stole the show with a crowd-pleasing experiment, Caruana said. Delle Colombe presented a sphere of ebony to the audience. The sphere was placed on the surface of the water, and it began to sink. Then delle Colombe took a thin wafer of ebony and placed it on the surface of the water, where it floated. Because the density of both the wafer and the sphere of ebony were the same, delle Colombe announced that density had nothing to do with buoyancy and that an object’s shape was all that mattered.
. . .
Galileo argued that the thin volume of air, above the wafer but below the surface of the water, had somehow united with the ebony wafer. Thus, the density of the hybrid ebony-and-air object was the average of the density of ebony and the density of air. This average density was less than the density of liquid water, thus the ebony wafer (plus air) could float on water.
Thus, according to the article, Galileo was absolutely correct about why ice floats. He only gave an improper explanation of why his opponent's ebony show didn't disprove his explanation, and thus this article was a waste of time, and, honestly, I feel a bit misled. After actually reading TFA (which is rare for me, I will admit) I ended up more convinced that Galileo was a freaking smart dude, way ahead of his time, which was exactly the opposite of the purpose of the article. It seems like they would have been better off writing about Newton and his supposed quest for alchemy.
Then, of course, if I could also personalize the route with things like "please use scenic route", "use fast route", "use a county road", etc - it would be perfect...
"Please accelerate out of the corners." "Please leave 40 feet of tracks when departing from the present intersection." "Please drop it into second and turn sideways in the next corner." [Vehicle reply] "I'm sorry; I can't do that for you, Dave. Unless you assist by pulling the e-brake at 3...2...1...now."
I know an attorney who puts a copyright notice on every document he files with the court. Does he own that?
In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4' used to upload the torrent files.
Am I the only person that is concerned and surprised a bit about this? TPB disclosing upload IP addresses?!
I am also surprised that Prenda didn't make some effort to hide the IP.