I bought my wife an iphone 5 for christmas to use on straight talk. Compared to a $75 per month subsidized plan, the payback period was 14months. There have been some hassles with MMS (which has been a bit of a big deal), and no LTE (yet), but that's fine because it turns the telco into a commodity (which is what we want).

Additionally, if you watch the deal sites, you'll sometimes see 6 month refill cards for $220. That takes the monthly cost down to $36, which is right where I am willing to pay.

How much does an email list weigh? Do you need to print it out to weigh it? Or can you just stick it on a flash drive and weight that? Could dramatically affect the price if weight is the unit of measure.

Not True. I worked a contract for a health department, and HIPAA violations cover employers, providers, and insurers/agents. However, the key thing is if it would be considered 'protected health information' (PHI). There is alot of data that is not PHI that can legally be shared. PHI really centers on personally identifiable health information. Insurance status generally falls outside of that.

Do you like digging in the dirt, with just a pick and brush?

I completely disagree. Developers should absolutely be involved with software installs. Rarely should they have the final say, but both operations and development staff benefit from working together on software installs.

The best example I can give for this is database installs. Working with the operations staff on installs helps developers better understand engine performance. They learn about things like prepared queries, connection pools, what tables remain paged into memory, etc. These are things that help the developers write better code. Similarly, the operations staff can learn what the application focuses are. They can optimize performance through VM provisioning, tablespace layout, memory pool size, etc. They can also understand the usage goals better, which lets them keep developers informed of important changes.

I've been running IT departments for over 10 years, and my experience has shown me that there is a definite benefit to having development and ops work together on installs.

I expect you'll know when it happens.

You should take a look at NAI. It covers alot of this:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/
There is actually alot of transparency, but many/most people don't actually take the time to look at the information and opt-out options.

I work in this field, and people are acutely aware of the privacy issues, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Pragmatically, as pointed out in the infamous article about Target stores sending advertisements to women 3-6 months pregnant, people find it creepy when they're clearly being targeted. Hence, it reduces effectiveness.
Ethically, well, that varies. Many people in the industry have a merchant oriented perspective (they are trying to help the merchants find interested customers, which is not an evil motive). Many also view what advertising as heading towards a more concierge type service (i.e. ads that highlight the interests the customer has been looking for, rather than pushing an irrelevant sale). And there are also people who don't care one way or the other about the ethics, and we have privacy laws that help there.

The rebate did not factor in at all once he was ahead. The soft 17, playing perfect cards, and being allowed to vary his bets as he saw fit did it. Kid Dynamite covered this much better.

http://kiddynamitesworld.com/why-cant-journalists-who-write-articles-about-gambling-understand-math/

Where are you coming up with this? Do you know any drug reps? Are you in the business? Getting white papers, case studies, etc to doctors is probably 70% of what drug reps do (I know more than a few of them). The other 30% is price negotiation. But all of that is drug marketing.
And this is all just a matter of accounting, because the point was "Major pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than R&D". The accountants put these costs under marketing.

While it's true that the big pharmaceutical companies don't develop most of their own drugs, they do pay for the R&D done by the small firms. More importantly though, they tend to be what takes the drugs out of the lab and into a usable form. They primarily handle the drug safety (i.e. drug trials), manuafacturing, and marketing (because it's no good if the doctors don't know about it). They're just later in the chain, but they have done their work to create the drugs. If the Indian people/government paid for the work done prior to it being acquired by Bayer, then maybe you can justify setting the price so low for the work they did. But if not, it's just a straight ripoff. They better hope they know everything about the drug, because Bayer certainly won't be looking to help them.

I did exactly what you described with google voice on Tmobile's $30 prepaid plan for 3 months. It was unacceptable, and I do not recommend it to anyone. Here are the pitfalls:

1) If you just use native google voice in android, tmobile still charges you minutes for it.
2) To avoid the minutes issue, you need to get an app that forwards through gtalk (grooveIP or sipdroid).
3) Under all of these options, call quality is unacceptable (static, and much more importantly, lag. A couple seconds of lag).

It's a great idea, but the quality is too low to be usable at this time.

Clearly the work of a Sith.

+1

I have used PostGIS and Postgresql extensively for spatial systems. It has rich functionality and can perform very well.

Where are the flying cars?! We were promised flying cars!

I disagree. I've got a $30/month prepaid plan, about 1/2 the cost of when I was on a 2yr contract tied plan. I did buy my phone (a used phone), so my phone subsidy cost is about $5-10/month (based on how long I use phones and how much I will pay for my next phone). In my opinion the contract in fact brings a *higher* monthly cost, in exchange for the lock in and phone subsidy.