fallacy of omission, right there.

probably a few of them would not be ABLE to get ANY healthcare if they had 'pre-existing' conditions. at least they did get rid of that big problem!

I have a PEC that made it (past tense!) very hard to get private insurance, so this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I know I won't have a low price on my insurance, but I will at least be able to GET SOME AT ALL.

for those that don't have PEC's, you will never know the pain of being rejected, for no fault of your own, simply because you were unlucky.

prices go up and obamacare is NOT there to stop or help with that.

how can it? with this near-religion we have about bowing down to 'free markets', the gov won't ever force the HC companies to have reasonable prices and limit the price increases. they SHOULD step in, but the republicans would throw yet another fit and since they're mostly in control now, we won't get anything else out of this system until a new guard comes in.

of course, you are IGNORING the fact that every single year, prices of HC go up and this was before obama was even in office.

perhaps that's why you are marked TROLL. people realize that 'costs going up' is nothing that any president can do anything about. especially with the blockades that stand in his way of doing ANYTHING for the regular common people of america.

I have a t420s - business grade laptop that I bought for personal use. its what everyone else had at my previous job, they were reliable, they were well built (they really are, even to the level of having a plastic spill-protector layer over the motherboard, inside the case. nice touch.)

the business grade laptops didn't have this spyware installed and they would probably not risk their business customers.

consumers: they are fuckable. we can screw them and we don't care. no one respects 'consumers' anymore anyway. if we get pissed off, so what; we are only shopping based on lowest price and not loyalty so some other schmo will come along and find we have a low price and buy our stuff. they do not care about return customers. almost no one does anymore, which is quite a shame.

would I buy another lenovo? probably not. the thing that annoyed me the most about my t-laptop is that it has a blacklist and refuses to accept a pci-e card of MY choice (ac wireless, for example). you have to buy the branded lenovo version and it has to come WITH the laptop or it will be blacklisted in the bios. I found a 3rd party hack for the bios to remove the blacklist but now, technically, I can't truly trust my bios anymore. I have no certain idea what the 3rd party did to remove the blacklist. maybe nothing bad, but who knows!

so, lenovo business lappies are locked down and that sucks. consumer grade ones are full of crapware and the company does not respect you in the least.

maybe that really is a good reason to stop buying lenovo, for ANY reason. hardware is nice, and I loved having a 3 button mouse on the bezel, but maybe I'm done with this company, at this point.

he says: "The feedback from users was that it wasnâ(TM)t useful"

what the users REALLY said was more like: "you compromised our security, you installed spyware and didn't tell us about it or provide the option to opt-out, your uninstaller did not fully uninstall it and we now have to wipe and fully reinstall, costing us all lots of time and money, since a gaping security hole was opened up and god knows what came thru that hole before we knew abou it."

ceo-speak really is an amazing language to learn. its all about lies and deceipt, but it sure is a 'skill' one has to learn to be a top ceo these days.

a lot of noise comes from oscillating windings in chokes and coils found in dc/dc converters. they often 'sing' under load, on cheap boards. ie, ALL boards for consumer grade gear are cheap boards, today.

one of my lcd displays has a really noisy dc/dc. you can hear the physical whine it makes across the room.

so, there's physical noise but also electrical noise. in some cases, I have been told that ssd's throw more has on the 5v dc psu bus than spinning drives do! I find that amazing (in a bad way).

noise on the dc bus is not something the user would normally care about; but coil whine is something that most people can hear.

it should not matter if its a linux iso or not.

the issue is: they have no need or right to look inside our packets.

ANY of our packets.

I'm not going to split hairs about society's current view toward IP rights. its a rathole that is not productive to dive into.

just leave it at: my data is my data, I will use it as I see fit and all I ask of you is to route it to the right ip addresses and route return traffic back to me. PERIOD.

I don't want them caching. if they want to try, be my guest, but I don't WANT it and I'm just fine with getting data from the real source each and every time I request it.

if this is true, then the NSA has blatantly broken law, STOLEN property (intellectual property, that's property, right? RIIIIGHT?) and nullified most of the network and systems security we have tried to put in place over the last 10 or 20 years.

they also are using fear and intimidation to keep the population in check. ie, they are terrorists. state sponsored terrorists who steal without regard to their actions.

so, when are they going to be tried for terrorism under the patriot act??

since there's nothing inside for them to inspect or cache.

(you are torrenting and NOT running a vpn? really? why?)

superfish is the hidden, non-user interface version.

note, the lesser known, CLI version is called shellfish

(thank you, I'll be here all night.)

my last tv purchase 'had' to be smart. why? because I wanted to buy from a trusted store (costco), they have only a limited of in-store brands and since I refused to buy samsung (at any cost), that left vizio. after 39" (or 37) they only sell them in 'smart' versions, sigh. so mine is smart.

but I never accepted the eula, it never init'd the network layer, it sits there with 0.0.0.0 on it (if I ever go to that screen) and the only down side is that I won't get firmware updates. but the good side is: I wont' get firmware updates! LOL

in fact, it is an upside. people are complaining about the latest forced no-choice OTA firmware that people got. they all want to revert. and so, my never-been-on-the-net tv will never have to be reverted. it works as a display device, the colors look ok once I calibrated it with my puck and my htpc system has never been better (intel onboard video, i7 fanless build, 1920 hdmi at 120hz real actual refresh. very nice!)

but to get that, I had to pay for a smart tv. which means I helped support this silliness with my money. for that, I'm sorry, but I didn't have a lot of real choice..

lenovo was caught and they are backpeddling. they SAY there is a removal script.

does it do a complete job? somehow, I have my doubts and that it leaves some stuff behind (like almost all windows 'uninstallers').

I really wish the US would punish companies (in a truly painful way, such as 10% or more of their GROSS income) when they act in bad faith, on purpose, like this.

then again, if the US punished bad actors, it would have to constantly punish ITSELF.

well, maybe that's needed too .....

as we all know, if a bad actor behaves badly and there is no punishment, what reason does he have to change his bad ways?

the fact that the US fellates all corporations, as a form of religion, is what allows them to continue the bad behavior. in fact, it encourages it by rewarding 'profit, above all else'.

it really seems clear to me that we have chosen the wrong 'god' to worship. profit, above all else, WILL be our downfall. it has started already and many of us see it. but our words are not being heard ;(

you didnt order a business-grade laptop, did you?

I have one and mostly love it. the pci-e blacklist SUCKS (tried installing a new wireless card and it refused. not on the 'ok' list. had to install a hacked bios to allow any pcie card to be installed. HP is the same stupid way, too). and to be honest, with the hacked bios (I didnt hack it) I'm now at risk since I have no good idea what that 3rd party did to create the unblack blacklist, so to speak.

but if you don't need to hack the bios (buy all your stuff at point of purchase to be safe) then the business grade models to NOT install crapware nearly as much and they all use the same chipsets since business needs each machine to be identical. consumer versions are the chip-o-the-month club and it sounds like that's what you were ordering. uhm, don't buy consumer grade lappies from lenovo. why bother? get what they are good at, the serious lappies. the t or w grade lappies.

regular ssd, usb3 interface, UASP (scsi over usb, new standard) and you have all the speed of native sata (that the drives can put out) and are still vendor neutral.

I try to avoid samsung products these days. after the fiasco with the evo drives, I'll look for another vendor.

and then there is always the worry that samsung will insert commercials between disk block seeks (inside joke, sorry if that does not make immediate sense to you).

many of us write software (I also design hardware) and give a lot of it away. I got a lot for free and so I give back when I can.

linux would not exist if your view was what everyone believed.

there is a need for making a living, but there is also a need to be a citizen of humanity and to know when the almighty dollar is NOT the be-all and end-all in life.

we lost that balance. the day of the 'angel billionaire' is pretty much over and they are all greedy assholes who could care less about what happens to anyone but their own kind.

IP should no longer be respected. the laws are created by them for them. fuck that! it has ceased to benefit us all and should be ignored whenever possible. just to TRY to tip the balance back to normal again.

but if EVERYONE (every country) would ignore monsanto, for example, and shun them (it would be hard for a while, admittedly) then the war on IP/food would be won.

being bullied by the giants lets the giants continue to own you. the countries continue to allow themselves to be bullied. no one takes the risk. so everyone is 'owned', now.