This was my second cancer. After the first one I became unable to get insurance that would cover cancer. No insurance company wants to take that sort of risk with a disease that often reappears some years later and requires very expensive treatment.

Just to make it clear, I did have health insurance. But after my first bout with cancer the insurance company decided that cancer (of any type) would not be covered in the future, and almost tripled my premium for coverage of everything else. No other company would would give me coverage at a reasonable cost - one well known company quoted $1,900 per month if I paid the first $100,000 of claims per year.

My understanding of Obamacare is that premiums cannot be raised because of preexisting conditions. Hence my comment about wishing it was around.

Four years ago I was in chemotherapy after my second bout with cancer (first was seven years ago). Things were looking grim. I couldn't work, I felt like crap because of all the drugs, and I was paying my medical bills out of savings.

Today I'm in good health, I married in February and we have twins due in December, I have an interesting job that pays well, and we just paid cash for a new minivan. Short of winning the lottery, I don't think life could be better.

I just wish that Obamacare had been around when I needed it. I would have $400k more than I have now. USA badly needs medical insurance reform and the Republicans certainly don't want to help.

Anonymous claims to be a bunch people with like aims and no leadership. So this may be just some person who happened to get hold of the info and published it claiming to be Anonymous or Anti-sec or whomever. The claim that the data came from the FBI is unsupported - proof would be some additional data from the same system such as logs, etc. which have not been produced.

My personal guess is that the most likely source is some social networking site and the guy is saying it's the FBI as some sort of disinformation. It's possible but unlikely that both Apple and the FBI are outright lying about the source. There are all sorts of other possibilities.

Jobs allowed Xerox to buy 100,000 Apple shares for one million dollars in exchange for the rights to use the IP developed at Xerox PARC. This was a year before Apple's IPO. Xerox would have made a large profit as Apple's shares jumped to $75 each on the first day of trading. Turning $1m into $7.5m in a year isn't a terrible investment, especially as Xerox had no plans to use their IP anyway.

I guess it all depends on your definition of a ripoff.

A neighbor had a similar problem several years ago - but that was with her bank account. Someone convinced the online support person to help her and as a result she lost the contents of her checking and savings accounts. No, the bank did not refund the money.

All this shows is that if a hacker knows enough about you to convince someone else that they are you, you can lose a great deal. This guy should count himself lucky.

It's a very fine line between providing good customer support and helping them, and being hard-nosed and losing a customer. When I was pick-pocketed in Paris it was a major issue getting a new American Express card to pay my hotel bill - the AMEX agent apologized for the incredible amount the fact checking that was needed, but they did provide superb help when I did manage to pass their validation checks.

The Samsung designs cannot be introduced because Samsung produced them too late in the discovery process. The concern is that they were late because they wanted to prevent Apple from doing additional discovery around the newly revealed designs. Only Samsung knows why the designs were not revealed earlier, but they effectively managed to prevent Apple from examining the evidence around the designs. Perhaps Apple believes this is because Samsung can't produce evidence that these designs were generated when they claim they were done, but were actually produced later.

The magistrate judge in charge of discovery took notice when Apple complained. Samsung appealed several times to the trial judge but she backed up the magistrate judge.

Now the judge is concerned that Samsung are trying to influence the jury by getting their undiscovered evidence to jury members by a different route.

Why exactly should Apple be doing a security scan for non-Apple malware? If the various app stores are responsible for checking for non-executable viruses on all platforms then Google Play should be looking for malware applicable to Windows, Apple or Linux. And by this logic the Windows store (when it appears) should be checking for malware on all platforms also.

It's hard enough to stay on top of malware for your own platform, why should vendors be on top of malware aimed at other platforms? Especially as the malware files would never be executed on those platforms as they are inside non-executable containers, and the OS would have no reason to look inside those containers.

It's not likely that anything will be done to harden the US infrastructure without legislation. The necessary work requires money to be spent and neither public nor private organizations will do that unless there is some sort of legal requirement that they do so.

People who think the president was "over the top" have little imagination - I'm quite certain there are some very bright people in various countries working to create a series of Stuxnet type products to attack the infrastructure of Western nations. Be in no doubt, no nation has a monopoly on brains or computer technology. Access to details of of Western infrastructure is either openly available or have already been stolen. Figuring out the weak spots and how to attack them probably isn't that hard.

However, it's not obvious exactly how to solve the problem. It's not obvious that the current cybersecurity bill will help. The sad fact is that it's been written by lawyers and politicians who have no idea about the technological challenges and how to resolve them, so they are doing what they know - add bureaucracy. Until computer scientists and engineers are taking the lead nothing worthwhile will be done.

No, Google is being fined for taking advantage of a bug in Apple's software to make money, rather than reporting the issue to Apple so they could fix it. Heck, there's even a menu item in Safari to "Report bugs to Apple..." You seem to be blaming the victim for the poor choices of the person taking advantage of them - if someone accidentally leaves a window unlocked that doesn't translate into a right to burgle the house.

Unethical is one way to describe Google's behavior. Another way to describe it is criminal, as clearly Google was obtaining unauthorized access to a computer. You know, the sort of thing that gets people time in prison.

That's a problem with corporate law - companies have all the rights of people, but only one real responsibility - to make money. Minor fines for major infractions do not deter criminal behavior.

In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
        Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
        Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
        Familiarity with how your business operates
        Longer term institutional memory

Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.

At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.

Sometimes patents are not useful, but sometimes they are.

Intuitive Surgical have spent many millions developing surgical robotics and even more millions getting the products certified and convincing doctors (some of the most conservative people around) that they can be used safely. It's reasonable that they receive substantial rewards for their work for some limited time period. It's far, far less expensive to develop the second example of a brand new concept. It's reasonable to assume that absent some legal impairment Intuitive products would be quickly copied and their prices undercut.

Truly novel products are EXACTLY why patents are are still needed. This is especially true for medical devices that can directly benefit humanity. Just because we have a substantial number of unfortunate software patents doesn't mean that the concept, when properly applied, isn't valid. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think this should be "Fortunately". When I was in chemotherapy, my capecitabene tablets cost $1600 for a 2 week supply, or I could buy them from an on-line pharmacy for $650. It was tempting to save a bunch of money but I didn't because that medication was too important for me to trust an unknown supplier. One of other patients at my clinic told me that he ordered some from an online pharmacy in the US (or so he thought) and they arrived in an anonymous envelope from Guyana and with a size, shape and color different from the tablets supplied by local pharmacies. Fake? No way to tell for sure. But how many unsuspecting people are dying from pharmacies supplying fake medications? I don't know, nobody knows.

Cutting off the ways to advertise these places is a good idea. You think it's "unfortunate" that Google was caught and you decry the methods used to go after Google. I think that this is a great way for the government to help save people's lives by enforcing reasonable and necessary laws.

Costs have declined dramatically since 2003. A similar installation these days would cost less than $30k, and rebates are pretty minimal these days.

Maintenance costs over the last 8 years have been zero. I do clean the panels with a water hose (from the ground) once a year, but no other maintenance has been necessary. The panels have a lifetime of 30+ years according to the manufacturer, and they lose efficiency at the rate of 0.4% per year (which is far less than the variance caused by weather).