What happened was that Amazon expected more people to take advantage of the other Prime features besides free shipping. Instead, free shipping was by far the only thing people really used it for. Their streaming services don't have any of the things I want to watch, unfortunately, since the streaming rights to those shows were all gobbled up by the competitors.

Well, no, it's more like "being lent a copy of a bestselling novel each month at no extra cost." That's $10/month in value right there. I don't get to keep it, because it was borrowed, but I didn't pay for it to begin with. If I wanted it permanently I'd get a dead tree format instead.

I had that attitude, but so many of the local sellers are just gouging. I needed a 12 foot HDMI cable a while back. It was going to cost me $10 on Amazon, but I wanted it right now. I went to Best Buy, half a mile down the road. They wanted $40 for the same cable.

Instant gratification is not worth a $30 surcharge.

Another article on this, I agree with Dan's assessment - http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Oh heck, I have that problem as an adult too. Strict Workflow (formerly known as Strict Pomodoro) works wonders.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity."

My guess, after years of working with Samsung's poor-quality platform software and multiple runins with their utterly piss-poor configuration management processes (as in, the Korean divisions at Samsung Mobile don't seem to have any, as evidenced by numerous situations during the Superbrick fiasco):

Samsung probably put this into the RIL library to facilitate modem debugging. e.g. the modem can read/write to /efs/root/ in order to make it easier for a developer to track state changes of the modem or whatever. (Why do this instead of using whatever debugging functions are built into the modem such as maybe JTAG? This is probably for late-stage development where they wanted to test finishing touches on the modem using final hardware and the modem's debugging functions weren't physically available.)

Keep in mind that, based on the reverse engineering effort, Samsung *intended* this feature to only access files within /efs/root/ - the EFS partition is specifically reserved for device-specific state and calibration data (most notably the phone's IMEI is stored in the EFS partition, and with the exception of some miscellaneous other config data such as MAC addresses for wifi and BT, it's almost entirely for modem-related items. I may be wrong about the MAC data, I'm a bit rusty and haven't poked around at my EFS partitions in a long time.) It's only due to a screwup (lack of sanitization of escape sequences such as ../../ ) that someone can in theory access files outside of /efs/root

So at some point, Samsung probably removed the corresponding components on the baseband firmware side (no one has yet to confirm anything on the modem side that sends these commands, nor has anyone caught any of these commands being issued - the behavior of the library was verified by injecting extra commands with a kernel patch in the driver between the modem and the library), but someone forgot to remove them from the RIL library on the applications processor side. Forgetting to remove dead code and/or leaving epic security holes in place (remember that in late 2012, someone realized that Samsung left a world readable/writable device node that effectively mapped all system memory to that device file - allowing anyone to read or write any part of memory. For more, do a Google search for "exynos-abuse" ) is pretty typical for Samsung.

As to my experience here - I was one of the Cyanogenmod maintainers for the Exynos 4210 (I9100, I777, N7000) handset family, and also did some work on 4412 devices (primarily the Note 10.1 - GT-N8013) throughout 2012 and the first half of 2013. I'm 90% retired from working with Haxxinos these days and was (along with the majority of the rest of the Exynos maintainers) one of the people who left the project to start Omni after the Focal relicensing attempt fiasco.

An interesting question is - what architecture is the XMM626x's baseband processor? Is it custom or an ARM variant making it easier to analyze the baseband firmware itself? More than two years of working with that family of devices and I never personally looked in detail at what was running on the baseband side.

There are people who do study this very thing, but they're not well liked within even the education colleges because they come up with the same conclusion you did - the education system as-is isn't that great and requires radical change to be fixed. And money. Much, much more money to shrink classroom sizes and to provide proper materials for kids. Younger children learn best in groups of no more than a dozen. Older kids actually benefit from even smaller groups for some subjects (math), but larger groups for others (music.) Few school systems have the resources to try such an experimental approach, but those that do have pretty good results.

Teaching to the test isn't a bad thing as long as the tests themselves are actually well written. I've seen some of the standardized test questions today's high school students are expected to answer, not just in the SAT but in their graduation requirements, and they're just awful. Poorly worded questions with poorly worded answers.

Uh, no, I don't think I implied it at all since I followed up with "so you at least need an Internet connection." I also said it was trivially easy.

If you're hitting your maximum deductible every single year, you're probably using up far more medical care than you're paying in premiums AND out of pocket. The average healthy adult won't see any bills beyond their premium each month. Then your three year old falls off the monkey bars and breaks both legs and an arm, and $6700 to get everything fixed up becomes a bargain.

The absolute maximum yearly out of pocket allowed under the ACA is $6700 iirc. So your insurance company is required to cover 100% of any bills once you've hit that cap.

Anyone who was in the US military or was a dependent of the US military can tell you they did a pretty good job with Tricare. Healthcare was an invisible cost to me when I was a kid. If I was sick, I went to the doctor, no questions asked (and got a visit to my father who worked civil service in the Army hospital after he retired.)

They've been messing with the model due to budget cuts over the last few years, and I hear it's not as rosy as it used to be. But for the first 18 years of my life, I never realized that being sick could cost so much.

When that happens in the US you try to fill the prescription anyway and the pharmacy calls the doctor's office to get a "pre-authorization" - usually within two days. They don't do that in pharmacies in Canada?

The vast majority of bankruptcies in America were related to medical bills as recently as last year, even with people who had insurance.

Depending on where you go, a "routine" doctor's visit can range from $50 to $200. Still, it's much cheaper for both you and an insurance company to cover a once a year "wellness" visit and catch anything early on than it is for you to skip the yearly visit since it costs an extra $50, and then suddenly learn you've had a slow growing tumor in your ear and now you're going deaf.

$6K/year is about right for real health insurance. What you had previously was "junk insurance" - them paying for and covering the bare minimum. If you were diagnosed with leukemia, your HSA would have been wiped out in the first week and your insurance company would have dropped you as soon as it could legally get away with it. A course of leukemia is going to set them back a cool million bucks, so they'd do ANYTHING they could to retroactively decide you lied on your insurance application and they didn't have to do anything.