Can't say that this is recommended (i.e. don't do it!), but given the "diligence" of some medical practitioners who are more interested in maximum billing than patient care, the results could be similar :)

p>In my case, more like 15% before taxes, and with the new 10% floor for deduction of medical expenses, the deductible portion comes out less than the standard deduction. So the effective amount is 15% of gross and 20% of net. That is a lot of money. Medical insurance is my largest budget item. And this is for retiree's insurance, with my former employer paying about a third of the cost!

Not saying that heartbleed wasn't / isn't a huge problem, but I think most analysts would agree that by far the biggest security problem is (collectively) bad corporate or bad individual security practices. I realize that heartbleed is not the same in that it is not within the control of the end user, but still, things like poor passwords, clicking on every email attachment, etc., are much bigger aggregate problems.

" Everyone has to be hardcore willing to tinker, which means a lot of lost productivity."

That depends. If you do everything in your browser, and you were using Firefox before, you have little or no problem. I switched my wife from XP to Linux Mint with about five minutes of retraining under such circumstances. All she uses is the browser and her experience is better in that she likes to click on, well, everything, and the malware risk is much reduced.

Of course, I do the maintenance, but I did that before.

Now, if you're used to MS Office, photoshop, Exchange, etc. etc., I agree, it can be a much different story, at least for a while. But it all depends on willingness to learn something new and accept change.

Is the Linux learning curve more difficult than the Windows learning curve? If you start from scratch, will one be much harder than the other? There was a time when I would have said Linux was much harder but is that still true?

"If you're really old you can tell them stories about toggling in boot sequences or using punch cards"

I remember doing that stuff ... it was kind of fun in its own way. I guess I'm "really old" ... :)

This whole thing reminds me of riding on a bus way back in the days when the US actually was sending people to the moon. There was this lady, who was saying, "It just ain't right, sending all these people to the moon. It's messing everything up. Look how much it's been raining lately!" Can we PLEASE just do good science and let the science speak for itself?

After some experience (something more than three months and less than 20 years) the keystrokes come naturally, without much need to think about them.

Grant money or Al Gore.

Hmm ... my carrier (Hawaiian Telcom) uses 192.168... addresses in the router portion of the DSL modem. Supposedly you control NAT by settings made in the admin panel. Fortunately though you can set it to pure passthrough mode and run it into my nice Tomato router.

That's the essence of the problem. People like Al Gore act like they are the "experts" and there are similar loonies on the other side of the question. Can't we just do unbiased scientific work and rely on that?

I'll put forth what I always do:

1. It would be nice if global climate change were to be debated not on the basis of politics (etc.) but on a rational, unbiased, scientific basis. If we would stick 100% to the science I think we would come to a sound conclusion in fairly short order. But factor in all the special interests (on all sides) and you get the current mess.

2. Having said that, I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real. This is in the Willilam James sense: if it's real, we dare not fail to act. If it isn't real, we still have acted in a manner that supports long-term sustainability (distant paraphrase of James' views about religion).

I am neither a "supporter" or "denier" by the way. Those labels represent the idea that there is room for widely-varying opinion on something that ought to be a matter of science.

I'm on Beta now, and while it's too much into "white space" and definitely far less practical, I don't see why all current discussions have to be spammed with complaints. At present I don't want to read /. in any form.

I was once the security advisor at a Large Place. A senior manager came to me and said, I want to forward all my email to Gmail so I can read it at home. (Much of it was sensitive stuff.) He said, "what do you advise?" I said, obviously, not to do it as it presented unacceptable risk, forwarding internal sensitive email to an external source beyond our control. He replied, "OK, I asked you the question, document that, will you? I can't help it if you gave the wrong answer" and he went ahead and set up forwarding. Actually, had someone set it up because he was clueless about how to do it.

I used Chrome for quite a while but just switched back to Firefox. Chrome restricts things like downloading media (especially from YouTube) and doesn't work correctly on some ecommerce sites that I use. Firefox isn't (subjectively) that much slower than Chrome any longer and clearly has the widest choice of add-ons.

Reminds me of an old Rabbinic saying: Wisdom comes to us when we are too old to use it.