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Honestly I would be fine with a simple we pay nothing until $X, then we pay everything. Somehow that does not seem to be available at all.
That seems completely backwards - you are pushing all of the routine care onto the insurer, and have no coverage at all for the catastrophic events. I would much rather have a typical HDHP - pays basically nothing until $X out of pocket, with that cost blunted by an HSA, and then it pays for everything.
What was the rational for this? Why would they continue on with such crap?
They've fallen for the sunk costs fallacy. If they were to change to something else, they'd be admitting that they made a poor decision in choosing Lotus Notes in the first place.
In my experience it is more that the soul sucking nature of Notes administers a thousand tiny disappointments every day, but it still gets the job done. And if the company is using Notes for applications beyond email/calendar, the implementation costs of a migration can run into the millions of dollars, even leaving out the software costs.
"Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software — and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality."
What is this third kind of software that is neither open source nor proprietary which is bringing down the average industry standard for software quality? Because if there is only open source and proprietary then they can't both be better than average. Or perhaps the programmers are from Lake Wobegon?
I had the same reaction, right down to the Lake Wobegon reference. Perhaps they are differentiating between software offered for sale versus tools internal to a business? To some extent that would also explain the difference in quality - cost to fix is much higher if you have shipped thousands of copies, versus telling the one consumer of a report in finance to ignore the one number that is wrong.
Anything over 100,000 euros was uninsured, just as anything over $250,000 is uninsured in the US. Those depositors were generally not "people in Cyprus" but rather "people in Russia with money in Cyprus".
And this makes the people who were subjected to government-authorized robberies sleep better at night...how exactly? When the government can arbitrarily decide to take your funds, does it really matter where thy put the dollar/euro limit at? This should terrify everyone.
Would you prefer that the bank went insolvent and people lost everything? Like it or not, when you deposit money in a bank you become a creditor of the bank, and when something goes bankrupt creditors lose money.
Bank insurance exists to increase confidence of the bank's creditors. Instead of a mad rush to be first in line and get your money out at the first sign of trouble, thereby precipitating a bank collapse, it says that you have no risk up to a certain limit. That makes a bank run much less likely in the first case.
If it is a publicly traded company, you can see the salary of the CEO and other highly compensated individual in the annual reports.
Salary of Congressmen is public knowledge (though not necessarily their outside income).
Chairman of the FED is a quasi public position, and I bet the salary is publicly disclosed.
Scientologists and lobbyists I can't help you with.
We've tried to replace the dollar with coins three times so far, and it's failed.
The problem is the size and shape of the old dollar coins. They're very close to quarters in size and weight. In our first attempt, the dollar coins were also silver like the quarters. So it was hard to quickly identify which coins are dollars and which are quarters.
In my mind, the big failure was that we didn't replace the dollar with coins, we added new dollar coins and kept the dollar bill in circulation. Inertia was enough to doom the changeover.
The benefits of the change mostly accrue to the government - coins last an order of magnitude longer, but aren't that much more expensive to produce. From the consumer perspective it is not obvious that one is preferable to the other, so why bother to switch?
Mass production of food just never ends well in general. The vegetables I eat now neither taste as good as those from 40 years ago nor do they even have the same nutrient value.
Don't forget that over the last 40 years your taste buds have been - we'll say changing, because that sounds better than deteriorating - so even identical foods today probably don't taste like they did 40 years ago.
Aging sucks, and your taste buds are not exempt.
The problem there are too many obvious patents out there, for cases most semi-competent developers would recreate when the issue comes across them. If the patent system ran correctly people wouldn't accidentally violate someone else's patent very often.
I am in complete agreement that there are many bad patents out there. But at the same time, many novel and non-obvious patents become completely obvious once you see them. If you see the solution and immediately know how to recreate it yourself, that does not says that the initial implementation of it was obvious.
There are no shortage of automated systems perfectically capable of (re)formatting code. For this reason personal choices with regards to tabstops, bracing, spacing and general layout simply does not matter.
Until source control systems work on semantics and not textual diffs, it is not as simple as that. If I get your code, reformat it to my style, change 2 lines and check it back in, I have completely polluted it as far as a diff goes.
If you want to have a rule that says all code gets run through a formatter prior to check-in, that would work, but it would mean that everyone would spend lots of time converting to and from the approved check in style.
Disclosure: I used to work for a company owned by Pearson.
$120 for a test is very much the reality of clinical testing. The research, norming and validation of the test are not cheap, and while I don't know anything about this particular test, instruments like this are normally developed and refined over multiple years of research. You are talking about lots of administrations in clinical settings, and follow ups to determine the eventual outcome of the patient. And research papers in peer reviewed journals to convince people in the industry that you have statistically valid results.
And any clinical test has a small market, since the number of people that can use it is relatively small. And usually getting paid by health insurance to boot.
It doesn't really even matter if they somehow manage to get this accepted and into the 3D printers, once the hardware is in the hands of the hacker security is a moot point. There is no such thing as fool-proof hardware security, and anyone who things they have it is probably either incompetent or a scam artist. Granted, something like this might deter the average 'user' from screwing around with the 3D printer, but the people who would really use these things to print illegal items are going to find a way around the security anyways.
I doubt anybody has any illusions that it is foolproof. Same as DRM in music/video/software isn't expected to stop everything. The intent is to put enough roadblocks in front of people that the average person doesn't bother to circumvent them. Total compliance isn't necessary. iTunes and Amazon sell MP3 tracks that could easily be found on line, but it is cheap enough and easy enough that people still buy from them. Consoles can be modded to play cracked games, but it is enough of a pain that most people don't bother.
It's kind of risky on Google's part, but if they succeed they'll break Microsoft's key stranglehold on the whole text editing market. Let's face it, it's ridiculous that such a basic piece of software as MS Office not only sells at the outrageous price they have it at, but is also considered mandatory by most computer users who use their computer for actual work.
Reducing Office suites to text editing is ridiculous. For most people in an office setting, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are utterly core technologies, and spending a few hundred dollars per seat is a complete non-factor for any medium to large business.
If Unix ran MS-Office, I that many businesses would find it easier to switch away from Windows but still keep Office.
My assumption is that an organization that doesn't have source control doesn't have a deployment process. So yes, he is doing shipping builds on his workstation. If you aren't checking code in, chances are you don't have a build machine either.
What you need to do is start using it, and ensure that everyone *else* who contributes uses it, too. That's a policy detail and needs someone to enforce it.
Bingo. Source control is an unalloyed good thing, but only if everyone is using it. All it takes is one influential holdout to bollix it up. Suppose that in an effort to get everything into a repository you do lots of work to ensure that the current production code is checked in. But a very senior, highly trusted developer has no interest in using it, so continues developing code from his personal workstation, never committing changes. Now he is on vacation, a bug pops up, someone else innocently goes to the repository, fixes and deploys the code, and loses a bunch of changes that the aforementioned highly respected engineer has already deployed. Customers are screaming, and the engineer blames the source control system (totally unfairly). Now the seed of doubt is planted in managements mind, and everybody is yelling at everybody else.
Source Control is an easy thing to sell to developers once you use it at all. But it only works if everybody is on board.
I agree with what you're saying, but the morons in TFS are actually talking about putting that beginner code into production!
Perhaps so that the non-coder gets to feel that special cold sweat that comes right as a deployment happens and you start to wonder about all the test cases that weren't in your test plan.
Or perhaps part of this is to give the non-coders an appreciation of how their testing and promotion process prevents buggy code from hitting production, and why changes can't be turned around in a day.
"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern technology. Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."