Tail of two health plans. I've been "self-employed" after I sold my last company in 2011. I paid ~$100 a month for health insurance including a pretty good dental package. In three years I used it basically for annual check up (covered) and a trip to urgent care after cutting my hand while doing some home improvement costs. Total bill out of pocket: $60 for the visit, $10 co-pay for the antibiotics they prescribed. That included x-rays, cleaning, and stitching the wound. My deductible was $3500, $11,000 max out of pocket on the old plan.

Well I couldn't keep that health plan. Apparently now for someone in their early 30's that was now "Catastrophic only" or something. So I went to the exchange. The most like I had was the "silver plan". Silver plan premium $280 per month, no dental. The "Bronze Plan", $156 per month with no dental coverage. Well week before the wedding the puppy dog decided my finger was part of the treat ball. So I had to go up to the same Urgent care, cleaned, x-ray'ed, and medical superglued cost: well $90 for the visit and $45 out of pocket for the same antibiotics as they weren't covered under this plan. Further more the plan I had under ACA at $6000 deductible and $17k max out of pocket.

And for months all I heard from ACA supporters was how my old plan was "crap" and this new plan "would cover so much more". Well...I wanted to keep my old plan, but we know how well that went.

I'm now on my wife's plan from her work. Cost, about $200 a month to cover me with dental. But we may only have this plan until the end of the year as her employer (a Fortune 300) is figuring it's cheaper to pay the fine and force all their employees onto the exchange. Which scares me how much that will cost us out of pocket for a family.

This. My wife's car is completely keyless. She has to have the fob to open the doors or turn it on. This past winter she came out of work and couldn't get into her car let alone turn it on because the battery in her fob died. Fortunately it was at work and she had a warm place to go back to and call me to bring her the spare fob. If she had been somewhere without such recourse when it was -15 wind chill she very well could have died.

My Chevy Volt has keyless entry, remote start, and a keyless start option, but it still has a physical key. If the battery in the Fob dies I can still get in it. My old Chevy Impala I kept a spare key in my wallet. It wouldn't start it, but would open the door or trunk in case I locked the keys in the car or I could get to the emergency supplies I kept in the trunk.

That's just it. It's a niche tool for certain industries, specially design and engineering firms, who spend a day doing the CAD specs and can let something print over night to see if the latest revision of a design will work in a prototype. For those industries it's a godsend. I can see some garage inventor wanting one to tinker around with. For those purposes it's exactly the right tool for the job.

But for stuff that I often need around the house, it's easier and quicker to run up to the store for me than to print it myself.

Actually the EMP can travel thousands of miles in the upper atmosphere and do damage. Read up on Starfish Prime and some other of the tests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Treason, no, but Snowden should absolutely be tried for espionage. (I know ironically). But what he's done is no different than John Anthony Walker or James Hall III.

I've said this before, the US Military does obliterating an opposing force quite well. Which serves well when the objective is the liberation of a territory from hostile occupation, where the US can go in, win, and then the local populace can quickly get things back the way it was. It does not do occupation very well nor really has outside of the Wester Hemisphere.

The exception being post World War II with the Marshal Plan. Which planning for that began in 1943 and by 1945 the government had managed to twist the arms of a lot of academics, economists, finance, and high ranking industry officials to spend two years post war to help rebuild western Europe.

I get MLB at bat premium so I can listen to games radio broadcasts even if I'm travelling. Also have subscriptions to The Economist and WSJ Digital...

Maybe it would be cheaper if they just obtained a copy of "The Cardinal Way". http://www.baseballprospectus....

Battery held up fine over the winter, even on the cold days she wasn't burning any gas. I think we've filled up twice since the first of the year.

We did have the 220v charger installed.

If it's ad based, then getting in front of more eyeballs via Android and derivatives is the way to go.

If it's depending upon purchases or in-app purchases then iOS is the platform to concentrate on first.

A friend of mine just bought a Tesla. As far as I know it maybe the only one in the St. Louis area. I recently bought a Chevy Volt. We were at an event and the topic came up. One of the people there asked me why I went with the volt. And the answer was fairly simple:

My wife's commute is 15 miles round trip a day. Maybe 20 if she does some afterwork shopping. So the vast majority of the time it's running on electric. But my Dad lives ~ 70 mile round trip from us. He's older and I'm usually out there once a week to check up on him or help him clean out gutters or whatever needs to be done around his house. I have farms that are 300 mile round trip that need seen after. That is certainly a problem with a Tesla.

Also my budget for a new car was between $25,000 - $30,000. With lower base price for 2014, tax credits, and GM card earnings the Volt fit in the price range and was a little bit smaller of a car than the Malibu Eco, which meant it fit in the garage better. (I really wish we had a 3 car garage, but...)

Finally, there are a dozen Chevy and GM dealers around the city. I'm not even sure there is somewhere here that can do work on a Tesla.

Um, actually the Chinese and NSA go back a long ways as the NSA and China have run a series of listening posts long the former/current Soviet border since the 1970's...

It would be interesting because if this were to go onto an actual court battle I'm not sure the kid would win. There is a legal concept in common law called: In loco parentis. In a nutshell it gives institutions such a schools quite a bit of leeway as long as it doesn't "Infringe Civil Liberties" and in the United States we've ended up with the Tinker Doctrine. But that covers more of the limitation of Freedom of Speech in a school than other items.

But In loco parentis has longed been used to allow justification of locker searches. The argument being a parent is allowed to search the room of their child, therefore the school is allowed to the right to search the locker of a student. None of those cases have actually reached the Supreme court to really have a final ruling on where the lines are actually are as far as schools are concerned with In loco parentis. I don't think any schools want this court to make a ruling and set precedence about the limits of In loco parentis because Clarence Thomas has been a critic of the Tinker Doctrine in the past and school may lose a lot of their legal power over students if it ended up there.

I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.

And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

This. Back in Janurary a client of mine and I had a few meetings. He wanted their company phones to get a push notification every time someone filled out a form on his website. But during our conversation he talked about some friends of his who were into bit coin mining and said we should go into a venture. And I said no. I think I mined 4 bit coins through a pool once many years ago, mainly because I've always been fascinated by various distributed computing things over the past decade and was interested in seeing what they had done. But it was clear to me it was going no where, especially when I read about the ASICS and then all the shenanigans about those a couple years go.

Well when I delivered the solution to the push notification thing two weeks ago I asked him what he though about bit coins now. Apparently his buddies lost nearly everything, something like over a year's worth of coins, when Mt. Gox closed down. Not sure if he ever went in on a new rig with his buddies or not, but he knows I've done fairly well for myself owning and selling a couple of businesses in my young life. He's the the type where he's looking for the next billion dollar idea and will never get there. I look for ideas and projects that have a solid idea with realistic expectations.