[DOCTOR WHO] I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. [/DOCTOR WHO]

Years back I worked for a company that was acquired and we were forced to go to Notes (from Outlook IIRC). I found Notes to be a very intelligent piece of software. Unfortunately, it wasn't a friendly kind of intelligence that helped you out. Instead, it seemed to be a malicious sort of intelligence that would make Notes get progressively harder to use the more you tried to be productive.

And just extending your calculations: 6,000 people employed around the clock at $10 per hour (or more people working shifts so you get 6,000 people working every hour for 24 hours a day-7 days a week) is $60,000 per hour or $1,440,000 per day or over $525 million per year.

Total Google revenues for 2012 were $46,039,000,000 so the "Review Uploaded YouTube Videos" department would cost Google 1% of it's revenue every year.

First of all, studies have been done. LOTS of studies. NONE found ANY link between vaccines and autism. Of course, the "vaccines cause autism" crowd either ignore these studies and continue claiming none have been done or change their explanation about how vaccines cause autism and then declare that no studies have checked on this. The latter approach is moving the goal posts and there is no arguing against that. Not that it's a valid argument, but that no matter how often you debunk the argument, they'll change one tiny aspect of it and require you to spend time and money debunking it all over again.

Also, as the parent of an autistic son, I feel personally qualified to say the following (partially quoting Penn and Teller): Even if vaccines caused autism - WHICH THEY DON'T - but even if they did, it would be FAR better to get your child vaccinated and risk autism than avoid autism and face the diseases that vaccines prevent. An autistic child is still a LIVE child. If your child encounters Whooping Cough or Measles, they stand a good chance of DYING. Too many children are dead because Whooping Cough, Measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases are making comebacks. Vaccines keep kids alive. I'm thankful that vaccines help keep my autistic son alive and I'll argue with anyone who claims that he's "ruined" because he's autistic and that he's better off having died.

Because this isn't just natural selection. If it just affected kids of those who didn't want to vaccinate, it might be "Natural Selection", but it affects people who CAN'T be vaccinated for valid reasons (allergies, immune system issues, or just plain too young).

For example, Person A decides they won't vaccinate because they think it's all a plot by Big Pharma. Their kids wind up carriers for measles. They cough on their hands and touch a supermarket shopping cart*. An hour later, you put your 4 month old baby in the shopping cart to go into the store. Congratulations! Your baby has been exposed to measles and there's nothing you could have done to stop it. Your baby might now die thanks to Person A - someone who you've never seen in your life.

* In case you say "well, I'd take precautions against shopping cart contamination", this could just as easily be a box on a shelf or something else that you or your baby would touch.

vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of mankind

And, unfortunately, this means they become a victim of their own success. People today (and I include myself in this) don't remember when polio or measles or smallpox ran rampant. They don't remember the fear of catching one of these or how serious it is. I've read enough accounts so that I understand intellectually, but I'll never know in a "living it day to day" way. Something for which I'm extremely thankful.

Sadly, some people, in ignorance, assume that these diseases were "basically like colds." You get the measles, stay home for a few days until the bumps disappear and you're good to go. They ignore all of the death or life-long disabilities these diseases brought with them. Next, they buy into the "vaccines are so risky" crowd's talk (vaccines have "toxins" in them. [scary voice]TOOOOOXXXXIIIINNNNNNSSSS!!!!!!{/scary voice]) and mentally increase the risk of the vaccines.

The end result is that these people decide not to vaccinate because they see the vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases when the reality is the exact opposite. In such a big way, mind you, that saying "the exact opposite" still feels like an understatement. And when large groups of these people make these faulty risk assessments, they increase the risk of not only them and their children, but of people who can't be vaccinated for valid reasons (too young, immune system issues, allergies, etc.).

I guarantee you that almost none of these anti-vax folks would be complaining about the MMR if measles was as rampant today as it was before the vaccine was introduced. The ones that would still be complaining would be shouted down by the crowds flocking to get the MMR.

I couldn't help but think that Tumblr could be recreated with a free copy of WordPress MultiSite and some plugin/theme work. If Yahoo took that path, the investment would have been a LOT less than $1.1 billion. Of course, they wouldn't have gotten the "eyeballs" already on Tumblr but, like you said, those Tumblr users might not stay Tumblr users and definitely can't be counted on suddenly becoming Yahoo users. Buying a currently hot (in terms of user usage but not in terms of profitability) company in the hopes that this will make your long-declining company hot never works. It just results in the "hot" company cooling down quickly. Kind of like how pouring one cup of boiling water on an iceberg cools the boiling water more than it melts the iceberg.

And even if we assume the best case scenario: Tumblr becomes "super profitable" and makes $100 million every year, it'll take 11 years just to pay off the $1.1 billion that Yahoo spent on it. 11 years is forever in the tech industry. Why, 11 years ago Yahoo! was a viable search engine just barely behind Google in market share!

Many other people have chimed in about how it isn't just insurance matters make it important to keep medical issues private. Here's an issue that's close to my heart: Asperger's/Autism. My son was diagnosed with Asperger's last year and, while I haven't been formally diagnosed (mainly because that would require spending money we don't have and wouldn't help my son or me), it's pretty clear I'm an Aspie too.

Now, towards the end of last year, there was that horrible shooting in Newtown. One of the first things that the press did was seize on one statement from the gunman's brother about how he thought the gunman had Asperger's. It was completely irrelevant to why he shot those people, but the media put them together because it made for a nice scare story. "Is that person with Asperger's next to you going to kill you? Tune in at 11 to find out!"

Needless to say, some panic erupted. People formed "kill Asperger's" groups on Facebook. One teen, known to have Asperger's, was assaulted in a store because he had his hands in his pockets. (He was using something that helps him stay calm in social situations. He didn't show any signs of having a weapon but they beat him up nonetheless.) Thankfully, the Asperger's/Autism community reacted quickly to get the message out that Asperger's had NOTHING to do with the shooting. Still, some people still think that the Newtown shooter did what he did because he was on the Autism Spectrum. Similar acts of violence/prejudice have happened in the past (the 80's and AIDS) and will likely happen in the future.

Now, my wife and I are pretty open about our son having Asperger's, but I don't want that to be public information. I don't want someone to go to MedicalMaps.Google.Com, search for "Asperger's" and get a map with markers - one of which is my son and where he lives. This should be up to my wife, my son, and I who we disclose it to. Not some big company who sees my son's (and my) medical information as a pathway to profit.

My wife got interested in Doctor Who after me and is catching up. We just watched Waters of Mars (re-watched for me). For the non-Whovians here, the Doctor finds himself at the first Mars colony in the near future where an infestation is spreading. Something in the water supply is turning people into water-spewing alien creatures. Even one drop of their water hitting you is enough to cause the change. The source of this was water from Mars that was isolated in a glacier for quite a long time.

So you'll excuse me if I don't feel just a little afraid. I hope they're properly containing this water. Then again, to quote the Doctor, "Water is patient. Water just waits. Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains. The whole of the world. Water always wins."

When I was in high school, I'd bring in beef tongue sandwiches which all my friends thought was gross*. Beef tongue is extremely tasty though.

* My friends said it was gross. Everyone else made crude high-schooler comments about me "eating tongue." And yet, I kept bringing in those tongue sandwiches. I was too stubborn to let people's rude comments dissuade me from something I liked.

That's what really interested me. It seems to apply to media as well as phones. Basically, it says that circumvention a DRM scheme isn't against the law if you aren't also breaking copyright. So if you rip a DVD that you legally own (e.g. purchased at a store) and store that rip on your home server for only you to use, you would be within the law. In addition, DVD ripping programs to help people do this would be legal. But ripping a DVD and uploading it to your favorite file sharing program/site would still be illegal (unless you had the copyright owner's permission).

Right in the summary, it is stated that a single app version will cost $19.99 a month. So if you just need Photoshop, you'll pay $19.99 each month instead of a one time fee of $599. This means you break even at the 30 month mark (a few months more if you pay for 25GB of Google Drive cloud storage to replicate Adobe's offering). This doesn't look too bad at first if you usually upgrade every 3 years, except that upgrading usually meant you'd get a discount on the new version. Instead of paying $599 every upgrade, you'd usually pay a lower amount. Now, if you buy Photoshop CS6, you need to pay the same amount every time you "upgrade."

In that case, it would take 24 months to break even. Adding in the 25GB of Google Drive cloud storage (at $2.49 a month) only adds 2 more months of equivalent Adobe cloud pricing.

So modifying the GP post:

26 months of Creative Cloud with 20 GB of cloud storage: $1,299.74
Infinity months of Creative Suite 6 plus 26 months of 25 GB Google Drive storage: $1,264.74

I'd also add that, with the $35 in savings, you could keep your 25GB Google Drive storage going for another 14 months.

There's also a $75 one-month-access fee that you can pay if you need the software every so often. So it looks like the people who upgrade constantly will win out, the people who only use it once every year will win out (not needing to lay out hundreds of dollars for a few uses), but the people who buy one version and use it for years won't.

So they claim that their cloud offering will save money because you won't need to spend money on a separate cloud storage service? Ok, let's suppose you were going to pay for a cloud storage service. I'll pick the one I use: Google Drive. (I'm guessing other providers will be competitive in pricing.) I use their free offering, but let's say I wanted 20GB. 25GB of Google Drive storage costs $2.49 a month. (Source.) Their $49.99 monthly fee could buy you 20 months of 25GB Google Drive.

Suppose you had an extra $49.99 that you were going to spend anyway. How much Google Drive could you get (instead of renting Adobe's software+20GB)? 1TB.

So, depending on how you look at it, Adobe's offering is either 20 times more expensive or 50 times more expensive than Google Drive. How is this saving the customer money again, Adobe??!!!