There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury.
To pick a nit, if you require medical attention after an auto accident, typically the at-fault driver's auto policy would need to cover that. Anyway, I'm not sure why you wasted your time having a salesperson to your home for a plan that your research already told you was designed never to pay a claim. Certainly such scams existed, but 30 seconds of googling can typically separate the good from the fraud.
The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.
That may have been the high risk pool.
As for me, I had a great policy pre-ObamaCare through a real insurer that pays valid claims (Aetna). However, this year, my premiums more than doubled. When I called to ask what was going on since there was no change in any of my family members' health situations, they told me that my old plan was illegal now, but that my new plan was way better than my old plan so it's really a way better deal and how lucky I am to have ObamaCare. When I asked what was better about it, they said that my new plan now covers pregnancy, IVF, and a whole host of other things that I didn't have coverage for before due to nobody in my family being at risk for those (e.g. my wife can't have kids). When I asked what the price would be after I dropped those unnecessary coverages, they said that it's illegal to drop those coverages and that I would just have to pay for them due to ObamaCare.
I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage!
Are you saying that there was no insurer in CA that would have covered any of the three of you for any plan? Because I find that very hard to believe.
I'm not familiar with California, but every state that I've ever lived in has had a high risk pool that could not reject anybody. I'm guessing that CA also had a high risk pool, but you just didn't like the price, not that I blame you.
You can't compare nominal numbers like that because there are many, many more vehicle miles traveled by auto than by airplane. Also, the air travel numbers include commercial planes, which comprise the vast majority of air miles traveled, and have different standards than General Aviation, which is what TFA is talking about.
General Aviation has 9x more fatalities annually than cars per vehicle mile traveled (link). I'll take my chances on the ground, thanks.
Donating to a single campaign for a single purpose (Prop 8) is different than donating to a politician. If you want to buy support of a politician on a single issue, it doesn't mean you endorse every single thing they've ever said or done.
Actually, the outrage was because he donated to Prop 8 and also donated to Pat Buchanan, so yes, his ouster was based in part on his support for a political candidate.
My alma mater lost its baseball program to title 9. Men's gymnastics and wrestling are an endangered species. Basically, if you like a sport that isn't football, and you have a penis, then no college athletics for you.
Title 9 can die in a fire, as far as I'm concerned.
By the way, I should mention that many restaurants -- and home cooks too -- have switched to sous vide methods instead of using an oven, since it is faster and more precise.
My feelings exactly. Looked like a shitty version of sous vide to me, just begging to overcook the steak or at the very least, dry it out by having it in a hot oven for 3 hours!
Sous vide to the temperature of desired doneness, and then finish over thermonuclear heat (30 seconds per side) immediately prior to serving. I know you know that, but just for the benefit of others who might want to try.
Oh yeah, the First Amendment supports your right to do any or all of those, and a pig buzzed me at Mach 3 yesterday.
Yes, and you still have the right to do all of these things. You just don't have the right to do them without taking responsibility for your actions!
If you publish something defamatory, that's totally fine, legally. Nobody is going to prevent you from doing that. However, if you damage someone in the process, then you must compensate that person for the damage you caused.
Basically, if you're not photoshopping someone's head onto another body, revenge porn is not defamation.
Off the top of my head, there are several areas where revenge porn could potentially be of disputed legality.
The most obvious is that if she took the photo and sent it to you, she owns the copyright. If you distribute it without permission, then that is a blatant violation of her copyright.
If the revenge porn site charges for access, then that could be commercial use of the photo, and the rules are then different. No model release, then that could also be copyright violation.
If she's at all young-looking in the photo, she could claim that she was 17 when the photo was taken. A bit of a scorched earth tactic because she would technically be in violation of child porn laws too, but I wonder if a female revenge porn victim would really be prosecuted? I doubt it.
Lastly, revenge porn could still be considered defamation, since these revenge sites are rarely just photos. There's usually a direct or implied claim that the subject of the photos is "unchaste". By way of example, if you post a photo of an ex with a caption stating that she is a slut, that would be defamatory in many jurisdictions. I suppose you could argue in court that she really is a slut, the truth being a defense against defamation and all, but that might be difficult to prove and it would suck for the defendant if he does not prevail in this argument. To my knowledge, there is no legal standard of "sluttitude", so if a court found insufficient evidence to support the assertion that she is a slut, then the statement would be defamatory, per se (i.e. she wouldn't need to prove that being called a slut is defamatory in order to assert damages because most jurisdictions consider allegations of unchastity to be defamatory automatically).
In my state, regular cars are subjected to periodic safety inspections. Every year, you have to bring your car in. I forget what-all they check. I think that your brakes aren't totally worn, tires aren't bald, turn signals, wipers, and horn work, etc. Basically, all the stuff that you should be checking before you put your car on the road, but nobody checks.
I don't think Uber was overcharging, extorting, taking the long way around, etc. My guess is that they were more than complying with the spirit of the regulations.
No, this is protectionism, plain and simple. It's no different than when states are telling Tesla that they can't sell cars unless they go through a dealer network.
Actually, at least here in Canada, they are working on changing the law so that the guy goes to jail for taking advantage of the poor helpless woman, while she gets counseling about how to transition to a new line of work.
I thought prostitution was basically legal in Canada. A buddy of mine had some pretty crazy stories to tell, anyway.
I consider code elegant if I can read it and understand it on the first try, personally.
This is a good barometer.
When I write code, my goal is to create an accurate design with the proper abstractions that will make the complex business problem look like it was trivial to solve. The easier that I made my job look, the higher the quality of my deliverables, in my mind. The next person to look at my code should say, "Of course he solved the problem that way. I would have done the exact same thing."
By the way, given the sheer volume of WTFs I encounter, the next person to look at my code probably only thinks that he would have done the exact same thing. But that's OK. WTFs are Consultant Welfare.
most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space
It kinda sorta depends.
My current client is a large enough organization to operate its own datacenters in multiple geographic locations. All of their ordinary computational and storage needs are met by company-owned and operated infrastructure. That being said, if I were to email the storage team and the Unix team and say, "Hey, I'm going to need 1000 nodes and 500TB of network attached storage for a Hadoop cluster to do some analysis. I estimate that the analysis will take roughly one week to complete, so I'll only need those resources for 2 weeks," they would not be able to satisfy that request. However, if I called up our Amazon Web Services contact and said the same thing, he'd respond with a price quote.
Also, even though we have multiple datacenters, we still use Amazon CloudFront. Just because we have multiple datacenters doesn't mean that we operate them all over the world.
So even decent-sized organizations can have a use for "that thar cloud thingydingy".
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good
I don't think you can really tell how someone's going to perform by how they did in college. I was a first-rate fuckup in college, but I like to think that I'm OK now.
With the exception of complexity theory, most of what you need to know in order to architect systems they don't teach in college. It takes a lot of experience to understand what will work, what won't, how to estimate it, etc. Implementing a compiler, while a neat challenge, won't do you much good in industry.
If you're stupid enough to store credentials that allow access to pay-for goods in your name, and to then blindly upload them to a public service, I have little sympathy.
In fairness, credentials management is a bit of a tricky problem to solve. Most people screw it up.
Here's a real life example: I wrote an automated derivatives trading program that makes trades based on certain triggers. In order to access my brokerage account, the program needs access to my brokerage credentials. How does my program get the credentials? This is not a simple question. Options are:
Enter them manually at the start of each trading day. Certainly, this is by far the best option from a security perspective. Unfortunately, that is unacceptable from a usability perspective as I do not want to have to be at my computer at 9:30am each day. What if I forget or I'm busy or something?
Store credentials in private source control repository with my code. The repository is private, so this should not be a problem, in theory. Of course, if someone were able to access my source code, that would be a problem. I would like to think that the security practices at my repository provider are up to snuff, but that isn't super reliable. After all, github has had a number of high profile security lapses. I don't use github, but anyway, I don't trust it quite enough to store my credentials there.
The platform runs in AWS, so store on the AWS image. I actually did this for a while, but that made key rotation difficult and still trusts the security of AWS (I trust AWS way more than a git provider, but still...).
My current solution is a bit more complicated, but I'm comfortable with it. I store the brokerage credentials in Amazon S3, protected by gpg and S3's access controls. This way, in order to access the credentials file, you need to be on the AWS instance that the platform runs on (due to IAM role ACL), and in order to decrypt the credentials, you need access to the source code. That way, if my source code is compromised, the attacker cannot get my brokerage credentials due to S3 access control, and if S3 is compromised, the attacker cannot decrypt the credentials due to gpg encryption. The attacker would need to compromise both services in order to gain access to the brokerage credentials.
Rocket science? No. But it's not super simple, either. It's unsurprising that many people screw it up.
That thing weighs in at 27 lbs. That's a lot to carry around with one hand for us older folks who can afford a $6000 toy.
As a point of reference, I recently bought a real scooter for $1400 that goes 35 mph, has a ton of storage, and doesn't look like a death wagon. I commute to work on it. It gets about 125 mpg.
Google voice works great for those that hop between prepaid wireless providers. I've switched providers several times in the past few years and didn't have to deal with porting my number around
How do you deal with your outgoing calls coming from a strange number instead of from your Google Voice number?
Re:Google Voice still being actively developed
on
Goodbye, Google Voice
·
· Score: 1
What has Google added to Grand Central at all?
Not much, but they did add number porting and a pretty nice integration with Sprint Wireless service.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a company that sold a "trash plan" and sent a sales person to my home. This plan was not written to provide useful medical coverage for a catastrophic condition such as an auto accident with severe injury.
To pick a nit, if you require medical attention after an auto accident, typically the at-fault driver's auto policy would need to cover that. Anyway, I'm not sure why you wasted your time having a salesperson to your home for a plan that your research already told you was designed never to pay a claim. Certainly such scams existed, but 30 seconds of googling can typically separate the good from the fraud.
The second was priced so prohibitively high that it seemed to be intended to deter the customer from purchase.
That may have been the high risk pool.
As for me, I had a great policy pre-ObamaCare through a real insurer that pays valid claims (Aetna). However, this year, my premiums more than doubled. When I called to ask what was going on since there was no change in any of my family members' health situations, they told me that my old plan was illegal now, but that my new plan was way better than my old plan so it's really a way better deal and how lucky I am to have ObamaCare. When I asked what was better about it, they said that my new plan now covers pregnancy, IVF, and a whole host of other things that I didn't have coverage for before due to nobody in my family being at risk for those (e.g. my wife can't have kids). When I asked what the price would be after I dropped those unnecessary coverages, they said that it's illegal to drop those coverages and that I would just have to pay for them due to ObamaCare.
Thanks, Obama.
I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage!
Are you saying that there was no insurer in CA that would have covered any of the three of you for any plan? Because I find that very hard to believe.
I'm not familiar with California, but every state that I've ever lived in has had a high risk pool that could not reject anybody. I'm guessing that CA also had a high risk pool, but you just didn't like the price, not that I blame you.
You can't compare nominal numbers like that because there are many, many more vehicle miles traveled by auto than by airplane. Also, the air travel numbers include commercial planes, which comprise the vast majority of air miles traveled, and have different standards than General Aviation, which is what TFA is talking about.
General Aviation has 9x more fatalities annually than cars per vehicle mile traveled (link). I'll take my chances on the ground, thanks.
General Aviation results in 9x more fatalities per mile traveled than driving (link). I'll take my chances on the ground, thanks.
Donating to a single campaign for a single purpose (Prop 8) is different than donating to a politician. If you want to buy support of a politician on a single issue, it doesn't mean you endorse every single thing they've ever said or done.
Actually, the outrage was because he donated to Prop 8 and also donated to Pat Buchanan, so yes, his ouster was based in part on his support for a political candidate.
He fucking resigned.
Everything that I've read said that he was forced to resign.
My alma mater lost its baseball program to title 9. Men's gymnastics and wrestling are an endangered species. Basically, if you like a sport that isn't football, and you have a penis, then no college athletics for you.
Title 9 can die in a fire, as far as I'm concerned.
I know five nurses, all woman. Two of them earn over $100K a year. Very few men work as nurses. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?
Blah blah blah blah privilege.
Blah blah blah blah microagression.
Blah blah blah blah rape culture.
Blah blah blah blah mansplaining.
Tra la la la, tra la la la ...
This kind of crap is why women don't want to work in IT.
Yet I saw it all the time in college. You can't ask me to unsee what I clearly saw.
By the way, I should mention that many restaurants -- and home cooks too -- have switched to sous vide methods instead of using an oven, since it is faster and more precise.
My feelings exactly. Looked like a shitty version of sous vide to me, just begging to overcook the steak or at the very least, dry it out by having it in a hot oven for 3 hours!
Sous vide to the temperature of desired doneness, and then finish over thermonuclear heat (30 seconds per side) immediately prior to serving. I know you know that, but just for the benefit of others who might want to try.
Oh yeah, the First Amendment supports your right to do any or all of those, and a pig buzzed me at Mach 3 yesterday.
Yes, and you still have the right to do all of these things. You just don't have the right to do them without taking responsibility for your actions!
If you publish something defamatory, that's totally fine, legally. Nobody is going to prevent you from doing that. However, if you damage someone in the process, then you must compensate that person for the damage you caused.
Basically, if you're not photoshopping someone's head onto another body, revenge porn is not defamation.
Off the top of my head, there are several areas where revenge porn could potentially be of disputed legality.
The most obvious is that if she took the photo and sent it to you, she owns the copyright. If you distribute it without permission, then that is a blatant violation of her copyright.
If the revenge porn site charges for access, then that could be commercial use of the photo, and the rules are then different. No model release, then that could also be copyright violation.
If she's at all young-looking in the photo, she could claim that she was 17 when the photo was taken. A bit of a scorched earth tactic because she would technically be in violation of child porn laws too, but I wonder if a female revenge porn victim would really be prosecuted? I doubt it.
Lastly, revenge porn could still be considered defamation, since these revenge sites are rarely just photos. There's usually a direct or implied claim that the subject of the photos is "unchaste". By way of example, if you post a photo of an ex with a caption stating that she is a slut, that would be defamatory in many jurisdictions. I suppose you could argue in court that she really is a slut, the truth being a defense against defamation and all, but that might be difficult to prove and it would suck for the defendant if he does not prevail in this argument. To my knowledge, there is no legal standard of "sluttitude", so if a court found insufficient evidence to support the assertion that she is a slut, then the statement would be defamatory, per se (i.e. she wouldn't need to prove that being called a slut is defamatory in order to assert damages because most jurisdictions consider allegations of unchastity to be defamatory automatically).
EC2 likely too expensive.. [...] If it's all Java / JVM, then look at the Cloudbees offering
You do realize that Cloudbees runs in EC2, right?
In my state, regular cars are subjected to periodic safety inspections. Every year, you have to bring your car in. I forget what-all they check. I think that your brakes aren't totally worn, tires aren't bald, turn signals, wipers, and horn work, etc. Basically, all the stuff that you should be checking before you put your car on the road, but nobody checks.
I don't think Uber was overcharging, extorting, taking the long way around, etc. My guess is that they were more than complying with the spirit of the regulations.
No, this is protectionism, plain and simple. It's no different than when states are telling Tesla that they can't sell cars unless they go through a dealer network.
Actually, at least here in Canada, they are working on changing the law so that the guy goes to jail for taking advantage of the poor helpless woman, while she gets counseling about how to transition to a new line of work.
I thought prostitution was basically legal in Canada. A buddy of mine had some pretty crazy stories to tell, anyway.
I consider code elegant if I can read it and understand it on the first try, personally.
This is a good barometer.
When I write code, my goal is to create an accurate design with the proper abstractions that will make the complex business problem look like it was trivial to solve. The easier that I made my job look, the higher the quality of my deliverables, in my mind. The next person to look at my code should say, "Of course he solved the problem that way. I would have done the exact same thing."
By the way, given the sheer volume of WTFs I encounter, the next person to look at my code probably only thinks that he would have done the exact same thing. But that's OK. WTFs are Consultant Welfare.
most of the cloud is for small companies who cannot afford data center space
It kinda sorta depends.
My current client is a large enough organization to operate its own datacenters in multiple geographic locations. All of their ordinary computational and storage needs are met by company-owned and operated infrastructure. That being said, if I were to email the storage team and the Unix team and say, "Hey, I'm going to need 1000 nodes and 500TB of network attached storage for a Hadoop cluster to do some analysis. I estimate that the analysis will take roughly one week to complete, so I'll only need those resources for 2 weeks," they would not be able to satisfy that request. However, if I called up our Amazon Web Services contact and said the same thing, he'd respond with a price quote.
Also, even though we have multiple datacenters, we still use Amazon CloudFront. Just because we have multiple datacenters doesn't mean that we operate them all over the world.
So even decent-sized organizations can have a use for "that thar cloud thingydingy".
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good
I don't think you can really tell how someone's going to perform by how they did in college. I was a first-rate fuckup in college, but I like to think that I'm OK now.
With the exception of complexity theory, most of what you need to know in order to architect systems they don't teach in college. It takes a lot of experience to understand what will work, what won't, how to estimate it, etc. Implementing a compiler, while a neat challenge, won't do you much good in industry.
If you're stupid enough to store credentials that allow access to pay-for goods in your name, and to then blindly upload them to a public service, I have little sympathy.
In fairness, credentials management is a bit of a tricky problem to solve. Most people screw it up.
Here's a real life example: I wrote an automated derivatives trading program that makes trades based on certain triggers. In order to access my brokerage account, the program needs access to my brokerage credentials. How does my program get the credentials? This is not a simple question. Options are:
My current solution is a bit more complicated, but I'm comfortable with it. I store the brokerage credentials in Amazon S3, protected by gpg and S3's access controls. This way, in order to access the credentials file, you need to be on the AWS instance that the platform runs on (due to IAM role ACL), and in order to decrypt the credentials, you need access to the source code. That way, if my source code is compromised, the attacker cannot get my brokerage credentials due to S3 access control, and if S3 is compromised, the attacker cannot decrypt the credentials due to gpg encryption. The attacker would need to compromise both services in order to gain access to the brokerage credentials.
Rocket science? No. But it's not super simple, either. It's unsurprising that many people screw it up.
Not sure about the rest of AWS though.
There is no annual fee to have AWS keys. With AWS, you pay only for your usage.
Seriously? getBlah()? setBlah()?
Eh. I just add accessors via AOP since I hate maintaining 'em. Or even looking at 'em, frankly.
That thing weighs in at 27 lbs. That's a lot to carry around with one hand for us older folks who can afford a $6000 toy.
As a point of reference, I recently bought a real scooter for $1400 that goes 35 mph, has a ton of storage, and doesn't look like a death wagon. I commute to work on it. It gets about 125 mpg.
Google voice works great for those that hop between prepaid wireless providers. I've switched providers several times in the past few years and didn't have to deal with porting my number around
How do you deal with your outgoing calls coming from a strange number instead of from your Google Voice number?
What has Google added to Grand Central at all?
Not much, but they did add number porting and a pretty nice integration with Sprint Wireless service.