I don't know if Blue Cross Blue Shield has fixed this but, as of a few weeks ago (and this probably has existed for a while), living in EST has made it impossible for scrips to be fulfilled via insurance between midnight and 3AM. This is because, according to the late night pharmacist who is familiar with the issue, the servers are in PST and won't allow fulfillment from the anything but the "current day" regardless of time zone. Too bad the devs there don't understand time zones adjustments / UTC/GMT. Yet again, non-profit environments don't tend to attract the swiftest of folk in general.

I actually did read the, admittedly, rather short article and actually quoted (using "block quotes" instead of italics might I add) the only part which mentioned the methodology undertaken. (The word "relative" does not appear anywhere in the article. Even if it did, it's an ambiguous term.)

My interpretation of the methodology is one of, e.g.:
Teacher A (a true bad teacher) has 20 good students
Teacher B (a true good teacher) has 20 bad students
(such a situation is common from what I gather at least in NY state school districts by principal design such that those students who need the most help can get it from a better teacher)

Let's say that the kids in Teacher B's class yield less of an improvement than those in Teacher A's class even though Teacher B is really a better teacher.

How could any analysis, not knowing the characteristics of the students in an admittedly biased assignment, yield the true teaching quality of Teacher A versus Teacher B?

The reporters ranked the teachers using "value added" scores, which are based on the amount of progress individual students make from year to year on standardized tests administered by the school district. The teachers whose students consistently made more than a year's progress over a school term were judged to be the most effective, and those whose students made the least progress were considered the worst.

This sounds like an unbiased system, and assuming there are no substantial confounding variables, it is. However, having had many protracted discussions with friends of mine who are teachers, I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them. The "sampling" of sorts is most likely very unrandom and biased.

I'm certain this isn't captured in these test scores or being adjusted for. This would be difficult if not impossible to tease out but might be by looking for the expected patterns, i.e. a student's poor performance is less than it was with a previous teacher. Unfortunately, there are relatively objective ways to identify these problem students and add variables in a regression to adjust for them but it doesn't appear they were applied as predictors (e.g. IQ, parents taxable income, birthday, single parent household, distance to school, ADHD or not, height, weight, play a sport, play an instrument. etc.)

Too bad Lulu doesn't also integrate underpants theft .

...I'd imagine many people who bought this in the past few days aren't standard gamers who clean their machines often.

Accordingly, I bet the people experiencing crashes would experience crashes with virtually any modern 3D game, not just SC2.

Few games exist like SC2 which bring non-gamers back into the gaming market.

I agree, but it's typically worst for sellers.

Given the environment of the near monopoly that Live Nation // Ticketmaster has over venues and artists combined with the desire of artists to underprice their tickets I fear it'll be a while before we see any substantive change.

I'd check out this new yorker article (subscription required) for a good review of the poor economic situation.

It is unlikely, even in a perfectly competitive market, that there wouldn't both be be a minimum monthly charge

I disagree, even right now, so long as I don't have a phone classified as a corporate phone, I can use data a la carte (granted at a cost far in excess of average cost, but still cheaper than the lowest available plan).

strong preference on the part of customers for fixed monthly rates

Again, I disagree about this as a generality, prepay is popular and economical in other less oligopolistic markets. Further, if blackberry users could pay a la carte for their data, I'm sure most of them would love to since it would cut their $50/month to $3-$4/month even at the bloated current a la carte rates.

The real scam is where companies charge overage rates that are radically out of line with the average cost of delivering bandwidth.

Really? If this happened that often, there would be an outcry, that's why most carriers force people to buy a "virtually" unlimited data plan. I don't think the carriers are making that much over someone who accidentally uses too much data. Most people don't come close to their limits on a plan.

Customers have to play a game to change plans all the time not to gain some marginal advantage or another, but to avoid being sent to the poor house.

They can't change plans too often because of ETF's and hardware subsidies. I in fact have the same plan which I've been renewing since 2003 with verizon since it has slightly better a la carte data charges than anything currently available.

Cell phone operators in the US domestic market live or die based on the principles and availability of price discrimination.

Long story short, if carriers starting charging some flavor of reasonable rates that approximate cost (such as would occur in a perfectly competitive market whereas what the US has more closely approximates an oligopoly) then a majority of the high revenue corporate users who have $50/monthly data plans on their blackberries would all of a sudden be paying [perhaps] $5/month since they use all but a couple megabytes a month.

Further, like with voice, the true cost driver of, virtually any data use, is the maximum available bandwidth (and, to varying extents, the underlying quality of service/latency on the connection). Not all phone calls use the same amount of data but they are billed the same (e.g. if you had a long phone call where you are on hold with silence for a long time, that silence is largely compressed).

The carriers realized that most phone calls use a similar amount of data per minute. Accordingly, they decided that a reasonable and intuitive proxy to charge by bandwidth is to charge by peak or off-peak minute. They understand, like with the blackberry business users, that people have a different demand curve (i.e. they are less cost conscious, on average) during business hours for a variety of reasons.

With data on the other hand, there isn't a good intuitive proxy that makes the industry money to split up bandwidth. If carriers implemented something like peak and off-peak rates per megabyte it would decimate the money they are collecting from blackberry users, their cash cows. In fact, blackberry users are further "discriminated" against in that if they access a blackberry enterprise server, there's typically a surcharge from the carrier despite it not costing the carrier anything additional (verizon is guilty of this). This charge would also disappear with such metered usage.

The telecoms are in a tight spot though I'm not losing any sleep over it. They could get away with what they've been doing with some laughably price discrimination based plans (e.g. ~$20 for 10mb of blackberry data or $20 for 250mb of ipad data) or congress could allow some meaningful wireless carterfone legislation to pass which would eliminate this price discrimination.

I doubt the lobbyists would allow that :)

Those kids went way too far - they went beyond parody.

I completely agree with that is clearly beyond parody, but the real question is "Can schools punish students for web posts?" not "Can people be punished for [inflammatory] libel?".

In a sense, these kids got off easy. They could have had real legal consequences as opposed to a school suspension.

Bandwidth is measured in throughput, not transfer.

I completely agree though, out of curiosity, I wonder when providers will start offers plans on a reasonable proxy of transfer like currently done with voice, e.g. off peak data, peak data

Perhaps when it is feasible, I believe with 4G, people could pay extra for prioritized data during peak time, etc.

However, right now, it seems, for most things, pricing is more a function of squeezing business/corporate users as a function of providers' varying abilities to take advantage of price discrimination