That probably also includes the lawyers for when a policy holder gets sued by either another insurance company, or an individual. Also, claim expenses, since apparently you can't do math accounts for 15.778% (5240/33210) of revenue (from claims), not 40%.

In any case, they didn't make money on the claims themselves as was stated. If you think that they have too much overhead, that may be a valid argument. Perhaps they could lay off some of their employees to lower it, close down some offices, etc. However, the ease in which I can get a hold of my agent, and the way claims are handled, is exactly why I personally use them. The last thing I want to do when I have a claim to file is to deal with paperwork, and runarounds delaying getting my stuff fixed/repaired and getting back to my life again. You, may choose another company who has less overhead, but more headaches when you have to deal with them for a reduced price. The choice is of course up to you.

I merely picked out one example of one insurance company (in this case, the numbers I gave was for the auto division of state farm), but the claim that they make a ton of profit is pure garbage.

Citation please. Here's mine: http://www.statefarm.com/aboutus/_pdf/2012_annual_report.pdf

2012 (in millions)
Premium Earned $33,210
Paid Claims $21,523
Claim Expenses $5,240
Service & Admin Fees $8,026
---
Underwriting Gain or Loss ($1,579)

So state farm, after paying out the claims, and overhead, lost $1.5 billion dollars in 2012. They made a profit because... "Investment Gain and Other Income" was $3,070, which covered the losses from paying out claims.

Gameboyhippo was correct, and your "theory" is false.

You do realize they said *point-to-point wireless could be used instead of expensive fibers in some rural broadband applications*, right? How many rural metropolises do you know of?

What part of "uncontrolled" did you not understand?

Please, if you have uncontrolled epilepsy, GET THE HELL OFF THE ROAD. Seriously.

I'm not sure what "industry" you are in, but I can assure you that the IT and programming sector is far from ruined. Unemployment in our industry is far below the average (slightly under 4%), compared to the 8-9% overall. I haven't met a contractor yet who has been out of work for more than 5 days at a time. When I am between contracts now, I typically don't even start looking until I've been out of my last contract for a couple weeks, just because I know that once I start, I'll be working again that week. In the past few years, I finished a contract, and was hired at my next one in less than 12 hours. The next one, it took 3 days because it was a large corporation. The next round, I looked 3 companies, set up interviews for all 3 the next day, and by the afternoon, I had 4 job offers for me (an old employer heard I was available and put in an offer as well).

If you can't get hired in the IT or programming fields today, you need to take a serious look as to why. More than likely (but not always), your skill set is terrible. And yes, there are a lot of terrible programmers out there, I've interviewed them. Those are the only ones left.

Hmmm... You know that's exactly what is in all government contracts too, right? You can't charge anyone less than what you charge the government for the same thing. Sounds kind of similar.

A valid concern. That accounts for 3.12% of my users. Add that up with 10.32% of my users who are running IE on XP, and it is still only 13.44%. That number will dwindle away quick enough though. It's been dropping at a fairly quick pace, however. Videos typically aren't absolutely necessary on my site, so if 13% can't see them, and they refuse to either upgrade their browser, or their OS, then that is their choice. It's a large enough chunk that I will leave the current system in place, but I will likely just encode for h.264, and if their browser doesn't support it, then I'll swap out the video tag for a flash player with videojs for now. I'll revisit it in a few months, and any new video going up will be h.264 only.

True, firefox for linux may not work, but you can always switch to Chrome. I get 0.47% of my traffic from linux, so the few that want to run firefox on it won't be able to view video. Oh well.

That was 2.5 years ago, and they still haven't dropped it. I suspect they won't, but they could. I'll deal with that (or users can complain to google if they want) when it happens.

Fortunately, I don't have any competitors worth mentioning, so that's not really a concern at this time, but I realize it might for quite a few web developers out there.

Oh, I agree iTunes is lousy. I hate it. It's the worst media player that I've found, and it's a major reason why when my contract is up, I will not be upgrading to the latest in the iPhone series.

Fortunately, I use Plex for all my mobile media needs, and it works exactly how I want it to. I like XBMC too, but since most of media consumption is via my mobile, I don't have much use for it personally. I just use plex on my phone to send video to my AppleTV.

That's great, however, according to my webstats, killing all videos except for h.264 will still cover nearly 100% of my traffic. We don't support IE 8 any longer, so those Windows XP users aren't supported anyway. They only accounted for 10.05% of the web traffic anyway, and while we don't block the site for them, we do have a banner that says their browser isn't supported. Many of those will have an AVC decoder on their system, but not all -- they can upgrade their OS, install Chrome Frame, or switch to another browser.

Not exactly true. You can drop files there yourself too. iTunes will pick up the file and put it into your library. It detects whether the file is a music file, tv show, or movie, then puts it into the library where you'd expect it to. Music files (typically) get moved into My Music\artist\album, tv shows get moved to Tv Shows\Show\Season, and movies get moved to My Movies. I'm not sure about pod casts, eBooks, etc, but I suspect they do the same thing.

Not enough marketshare to care about.

Look for the folder named "Automatically Add to iTunes", then drop a media file into it and see what happens.

Yeah, that doesn't work well either, and requires iTunes to be running anyhow.

And here I thought it was caused by clueless people spouting hot air.