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Comment Re:Please describe exactly (Score 4, Insightful) 392

Obama correctly outlawed them. He did them a favor.

What? Obama's new wonder-plan is what TOOK AWAY our low deductible plan and forced us, for more money, to buy one that will cost us thousands more each year in premiums, and ten thousand more a year in deductibles. The people you're defending - Obama, Pelosi, Reid - forced us to buy a high deductible plan with fewer benefits, minus the doctor we'd used for years, and more. Obama didn't "outlaw" bad, expensive coverage, he just forced us into that exact situation. Thanks for shilling for him, though - it's nice to see that BS so transparently on display for all to see.

Comment Re:Please describe exactly (Score 4, Informative) 392

please describe _exactly_ what you find so objectionable about the Affordable Care Act

I used to have affordable insurance for my wife and I. The ACA killed it. Were forced to go to a new plan that:

1) Has much higher monthly premiums (we went from roughly $230/month to about $500/month)

2) Has a hugely higher deductible (we went from $2,500 a year to about $12,000 a year). This means that we are much, much farther out of pocket every year, especially if we actually need medical care beyond one or two simple visits annually.

3) We are past any risk of pregnancy. None the less, we are being forced to pay for elaborate maternity care that we cannot possibly use.

4) The new plan forced us to give up the doctor we've been using for 15 years unless we want to pay cash for that in a way that doesn't help with our deductible.

5) The two best local hospitals are no longer available to us unless we want to pay retail for their use, and get no benefit against our deductible.

Prior to this "affordable" new act, we had no need to change insurance, doctors, hospitals or anything else for well over 10 years.

Because of how the math is working out, we're told to expect that next year's premiums will go up by another 45-55%. Thanks, Mr. Obamacare Cheerleader, if you're one of the people who helped to empower the people who snuck this 100% partisan monstrosity through congress on Pelosi's "deeming" technique. Thanks a lot.

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 2) 392

hatchet job using cherry picked emails to smear political opponents over now solved problems. nothing to see here, move along.

So you are ALSO saying that the information presented is incorrect ... that the people at HHS had NO idea that the site wasn't full of holes in terms of security and functionality. That the "cherry-picked" emails that show the administration knew the site was a train wreck are referring to something else, because the site wasn't a train wreck when it went live. Right? I see. So if that's incorrect, then what you're saying is that the administration did NOT know that the site was a train wreck. Which makes them stupefyingly incompetent.

So your idea of "nothing to see here" is either:

1) The administration knew exactly what a train wreck the thing was, but lied about it. Or...

2) The administration, at every level, was so foolish and incompetent that it had no idea whether or not the system was useless, and in lacking any sort of knowledge one way or the other, just assumed it was fine.

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 4, Interesting) 392

So what you're saying is that: 1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context. 2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground. I see.

Comment This is why you outsource manufacturing. (Score 1) 408

This is why you outsource manufacturing.

Outsource to a big company like Foxconn or Solectron that has already invested in all the expensive equipment and processes (in both cases, some of it actually paid for by Apple), and have them do your manufacturing for you.

The incremental cost ends up pretty tiny, relative to COGS, and you get a better finished product at only a fractionally higher cost than if you were stupid enough to do your own manufacturing. The argument in the article only holds up if you are stupidly building the widgets yourself.

Comment "How do you explain..." (Score 1) 408

"How do you explain..."

I don't really follow Microsoft acquisitions enough to speculate on their reasoning, but the Facebook reasoning was pretty obviously that the WhatsApp company cost (predominantly non-US) telephone companies $19B in per-SMS charged revenue over a period of 2 years, and it therefore gave Facebook some incredible leverage with those phone companies to make the purchase in such a way that a small group of phone companies couldn't drive WhatsApp out of business by increasing data costs to compensate (which would hurt Facebook.

Comment Re:lockin (Score 1) 264

I looked at the iPhone 6 tear down and the chip sizes are not that much smaller than a laptop's chips. So it's just miniaturized case, motherboard, battery and camera (and the battery holds a lot less charge than a laptop battery).

I haven't looked at that teardown, but I'm willing to bet that there's a lot FEWER chips because there's more integration within them, not to mention the engineering to fit that many into such a tight space. Mounting chips on BOTH sides of the motherboard? That's not normally seen in laptops or desktops.

Anyways - from a quick count I got 18 chips in an iphone 6.

In my laptop the RAM alone is 16 chips. Yes, it's a desktop replacement laptop.

Comment Edge cases (Score 1) 264

I think it might be the case of 'normal user' vs 'power user' in deciding to only offer 16GB and 64GB phones. You have 'most' people who are like Sarten-X and 16GB is 'plenty'.

Then there's power users like you who will use more than the base amount. Now considering this population of people who want more local storage, how many are going to be satisfied with a 32GB model if a 64GB version is being offered for 'only' $50* more? After all, you already 'know' that you're going to bust 16GB, which means your phone will be half full.

It's entirely possible that Apple noticed a 'hockey stick' effect in it's sales - lots and lots and lots of 16GB models, lots of 64GB models, but the 32GB model was selling the least. So why have it? Odds are the 32GB users will grumble a bit and buy the 64GB model anyways.

*It seems like it'd be pretty standard: $199 for 16GB, $249 for 32GB, $299@64.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Chances of being killed by police in the USA

So 104 people were killed by police in the USA during August, 2014. To my eyes, that's an absolutely enormous figure. As a Brit, I compare it to the 1 person killed over 3 years by the UK police. Yes, they're two different countries, yes there's a lot more people in the US, yes they have different cultures, yadda yadda yadda; people are dying here.

Let's do some maths:

Comment Re:What for? (Score 1) 183

I'm not a huge fan. The goal of D was to produce a better C++, but if you're designing a new language then C++ really isn't where I'd choose to start. It's not as bad as Ruby (I can't imagine the kind of person who would look at Smalltalk and say 'what this language really needs is Perl-like syntax'. Actually, I can't imagine the kind of person who'd say that about any language. Including Perl). Rust is probably the modern language that I like the most.

Comment Re:Paid advertisement (Score 1) 48

This system is for regular kegs, but home brewers almost always use soda kegs which are far smaller. The video mentions as small as 30 liter kegs, but the soda kegs used by home brewers are 5 gallon which is about 19 liters. The OP was probably being overly snarky without knowing the details of keg sizes. Note that there are people that have keg systems at home for personal use, but that is for commercial kegs. I doubt those home users would want to spend the money to support this system.

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