With the astounding ignorance of patents shown by the majority of posters here, not to mention lack of knowledge of the actual claims listed in the proposed patent, /. has officially gone full retard.

Minus the ridiculous fees no doubt.

I think that's the Hershey Highway you're thinking of.

http://www.moneyunder30.com/health-insurance-deductible-co-pay-out-of-pocket-maximum

Your insurance pays everything after you hit your annual out-of-pocket-maximum. For instance the lowest-end plan offered by my employer:

Lowest premium with highest deductible
No office visit co-pays, but member is responsible for full cost of care until $6,000 (individual) or $12,000 (family) deductible is met
No co-insurance responsibility - After $6,000/$12,000 deductible/out-of-pocket max is met, plan pays 100% for covered services
Certain preventative care is covered at 100%
Prescriptions have the same co-pay amounts as other PPO options ($10 for generic, $40 for formulary).

As an individual, my total yearly cost beyond the premium payments is capped at 6,000.

Note a lot of plans have a higher out-of-pocket-max than the deductible.

With various reports referring to it as a power outage and others as a test of backup systems, I'd guess this was a generator load test where something went wrong with the transfer switch. We do those off-hours monthly at the data center where I work and, being the nervous sort, I'm grateful they usually coincide with one of my days off, although ours have gone smoothly.

typo, so sorry: /dup

Why not rename this site \dup?

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/09/01/1233230/apple-now-relaying-all-facetime-calls-due-to-lost-patent-dispute

Er no, this was an unrelated glitch with Goldman 2 days *before* last weeks Nasdaq shutdown.

Er, that's exactly what is disussed in TFA:

"The process that Cocking developed, based on his discovery, is known as N-Fix. It involves covering seeds in a non-toxic coating that contains the bacterium. As a seed sprouts and the plant grows, the bacterium enters through its roots, and ultimately ends up in every cell of the plant. This means that every one of those cells is capable of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere – just like sugarcane does."

At the ISP where I work one of our ticketing systems actually has Rodents as a standard cause code.

I work for an ISP and recall, I think it was last year or maybe early this year, that one of our Atlanta data customers had 3 circuit down trouble tickets over the span of several months where the reason for outage ultimately turned out to be theft of telco cable. 3 times!!!

Actually there's nothing odd about cleaning a fiber connection at all and it is a very exacting process (see link below). Apparently exacting in this case just didn't include re-inserting the ends in the right holes.

Inspection and Cleaning Procedures for Fiber-Optic Connections
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk482/tk876/technologies_white_paper09186a0080254eba.shtml

...if you were only the recipient of these robocalls. For several days a few months ago I was the recipient of massive blowback from these calls. My number was one that a robocaller was programmed to spoof and I received dozens upon dozens of calls, some of them extremely angry. I finally ended up recording an explanatory message on my voice mail.

Funny google never saw a website for this supposed company and its 'datacenter,' it only appears as a listing in a couple online business directories with no real information. Nearly 50 customers out of service? As another poster suggested, I suspect this is one small potatoes colo/hosting reseller who had their rack of servers confiscated from a larger colo facility.