You're not the only one. I got banned for a conversation in which a separate poster discussed the fact that I am female and have boobs. I go to bannination.com now. It's a cesspit of crazy, but at least the guy running it listens to folks, and actually cares that we go there.

I was just over at the consumerist article about Diaspora. A significant proportion of the commenters thought the name was a) made up, b) some weird open source acronym, or c) hard to pronounce. I don't think they are associating the word diaspora with anything.

I don't normally reply on this site, but I just had to say I love you for your series of posts here. Very well thought out, and well said. It's nice to see some of these ridiculous ill informed opinions put down.

I have to second this. I just bought that book from the Maker Shed, and it is more comprehensible to someone with absolutely no helpful electronic background. I've been doing the experiments, and it's been great.

I worked as a nurse for ten years in the geri-psych field. Even my patients with insurance could not always afford the cost of their hearing aids. When the hunting version came out, we bought a couple dozen of them, as a facility, and gave them out as stop gap measures to our patients. It worked. They could hear, and communicate. It's not perfect. I'm a big supporter of it.

Every time one of these fad supplements come out with these claims, I would see half the Alzheimers patients on my med pass get them. This sucks for a few reasons.

Firstly, there's never any real double blind studies when these things hit the med cart. Family are just hoping upon hope that the claims will work, and their family will be better. These companies prey upon that hope.

Secondly, it means I, as the nurse, have to find a way to shovel an obviously pointless (and usually HUGE) pill into a dementia patient. Often times these patients are confused and don't want to take a pile of legitimate medications, such as psych meds, heart meds, diabetic meds, and adding another big foul tasting pill on top of that starts pushing it.

Lastly, there are side effects, even if it's just an upset stomach. Piling on a bunch of useless supplements just increases the chances that there are going to be issues.

I cringe when each new wave comes around. I've seen it with glucosamine, ginko biloba, fish oil, and vitamin D. I have nothing against things that will help, but so much of it is just marketing.

I'm not surprised a desk jockey at an insurance company decided to make a medical decision on this. Insurance desk monkeys don't usually have any medical training, and become a hindrance.

I once had a patient come into the office. He was in near tears. I took him to the exam room, and found out that his insurance company (Molina in the US) had canceled his coverage for dialysis. He was a critically ill patient, and was panicking. I called the insurance to find out what was going on. I was told by the desk monkey that they did not cover 'elective' procedures. At this point I was incredulous. I tried a couple times to tell him dialysis was not a choice, and certainly not elective. No dice.

I had to argue for close to an hour to get a supervisor. This flunky was going to cut all coverage to this man's dialysis. No if's, and's, or but's. The supervisor reversed the decision on the spot, but damn. Most nurses don't have the kind of day they can devote an hour of arguing with an insurance company. The patient isn't medically trained, and certainly wasn't in a state to do it, what with being critically ill, and coming to grips that he was not going to ever get off of dialysis.

That's the worst of my experiences, but I can't say it was isolated. After ten years of nursing the episodes of crackpot crazy insurance company behavior just keeps happening more and more. It's not that uncommon.

As I recall, when I worked as a nurse, the facility, and the surrounding area's facilities, wanted us all to get vaccinated. It was right after 9/11. One of the ways you could get out of it was to be pregnant, or trying to get pregnant. My entire facility, and all but three nurses in the hospital, claimed pregnancy or trying.

When my Director of Nursing came up to ask me about the stupid vacc, she just said, "so am I signing you up as pregnant, or trying?"

I'm not that technically savvy, which makes open source software even more problematic. I am capable googling fixes if something doesn't work, but sometimes the fixes take me so far out of my comfort zone, that I don't feel comfortable implementing them.

I tried GIMP about five years ago. (I could try it again, and see if it's improved, I know.) Photoshop just works for me. From install onwards. With GIMP, I had to use X11 which was just one more barrier to entry for me. Then the UI for GIMP was just plain difficult for me to navigate. I didn't mind those two things, but when I needed to figure out how to do something I could do in Photoshop, it took forever to google where things were, and how to do it. After a week or more of this, I gave up, and went back to Photoshop. Which sucks because I really wanted to use GIMP instead.

When I decided I was done with MS operating systems, I didn't just jump to a Mac. My husband and I loaded up several consecutive Linux distros on an old PC to see if I could do that. The amount of fiddling was way more than I wanted. If I could have just loaded it up once, and had it work, I never would have bought a Mac. This is what I mean by not being technically savvy as a drawback for open source. Sure, I can google up answers, but sometimes they are way over my head. I can ask for help, but I have found again and again, that if you are not a computer whiz (and maybe if you are) sometimes you get a lot of crap for not RTFM. What if you are just an artsy housewife that wants to figure out a simple daily issue, like email, or layering in GIMP, or where the blasted button is for whatever? The barrier for entry is too high unless you are more technically capable.