I'm the manager of a team of senior architects. I'm 35, all members of my team are older then I am. If you're good, noone cares how many gray hairs you have. If you suck, noone's gonna care how young you are.

Min

OK the case for me purchasing an account on one of the US vpn providers keeps getting stronger. 4.40*12=52.80. Witopia provides VPN at USD 36/yr, and allows me to use it for the general case of any US service that geolocks (Hulu, Pandora, and the list keeps getting longer)

Why would I give Last more money for effectively less service?

Min

Speaking as an IT manager, I'll be dancing in the street the day that the last app stops this.

If I had a penny for every time a user lost data because some app decided to be clever in the manner mentioned above and not save it in the users profile directory...

Truly, if you were writing a linux app would you expect this to work? It's the same thing. Your app needs to expect that it can write to the user's home directory and temp locations. Fini. Done. Need to write somewhere else, make sure you set up the proper permissions during install time, when you'll be running with privs to access those directories.

Then I know where the user's data will be and can plan backups accordingly, without playing scavenger hunt with however many hundreds of apps my users are using.

Min

70% is bang on, the (poorly worded) article was saying 47% of respondents got it within a margin of error (65%-75%), 15% got it right (70%).

As usual when you condense a page and a half article to 2 lines, it loses something :)

Min

As with any other time, if you want something encrypted do it yourself with an opensource product. If you trust someone else with your encryption, you can expect they won't care as much for your privacy as you would.

Google can feel free to mine my pseudo random porn :)

Min

That's appalling. In our case, they provided us with a set of forms, offered to leave the room and come back later so that we would have a chance to make our informed consent. The forms assured us that our medical confidentiality would be insured by the hospital, and that our names, or our baby's name would not be attached to the sample in any way. It laid out the risks (pretty much nil) and the mitigations (that if there was any question of safety of the procedure given complications in the delivery, etc, that the collection would be abandoned).

I walked away feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Min

Ah, in our case, the hospital does the collection at time of birth (assuming something isn't going on that requires their undivided attention), and then stores it until the folks from Children's pick it up.

Min

We just went through this. We discussed it with our doctor (who happened to also be the head of obstetricss) his take on it was that it wasn't worth the investment, given the small set of conditions it would help with.

We instead donated our daughter's cord blood to the local Children's hospital, where they will extract the stem cells for research purposes and if her blood matches anyone who currently needs it, it will go to them. Seemed more civic minded then putting the blood into a bank and placing a "reserved" sign on it.

Min

I'm glad you got lucky on the genetic lottery. and hope you continue to do so. My wife was born with a hole in her heart. Her parents declared bankruptcy because of it. Despite having military health care.

She married a Canadian, had a high risk pregnancy (because of her congenital heart defect) and developed preeclamcia (because she critical failed on that particular toss the medical dice).

Mom and baby are fine, and we're out of pocket 300$ for the private room we opted for.

I wish you a problem free and safe delivery, but if you do have one, have a thought for those who are not so lucky, for it could have been you.

Min

My US born wife lives with me in Canada. When she was living down in the states, she was a retail worker who made retail worker wages. Her health insurance through her employer cost her 500$/month.

Making some reasonable assumptions for hourly salary and assuming she was working a full 40 hrs (she usually didn't), that means she was paying 28% of her salary for health care.

Put another way, in Canada with the same income, she'd be paying 25% for her whole income tax load. Therefore her health insurance ALONE was costing her more then her entire income tax burden in Canada. (I made the assumption she was living in an expensive province, with the highest provincial tax rate, her taxes would be lower in most other provinces).

We just had our first daughter. The entire out of pocket cost was 300$, because we upgraded to a private room. My wife was pre-eclamptic, which meant they needed to induce. We spent 4 days in Labour and Delivery due to complications, with 24 hr specialist nursing care (they sat in our room most of the time, and were 15 seconds away when they weren't).

After 4 days of complications the doctors recommended a C-section (our choice to do it or not), we accepted their recommendation and my wife was C-sectioned. Our daughter had a touch of Jaundice, so they wheeled a light unit into our room and we spent another 4 days in the hospital.

My wife is of the opinion that even with good medical coverage in the states (like the package that I was offered when I looked for work down there), we'd be out of pocket probably 10K in co-pays for the whole experience (we were high risk, so there were about 10 ultrasounds, 4 cardiac exams, etc). Let me repeat that number again: 300$ out of pocket, and it would have been 0 if we hadn't decided on a private room for the last part of our stay (Labour and Delivery was private anyways, so those days don't count).

Now in my particular case, most years, yes, I probably am a net contributor to the medical system, given my salary. I'm OK with that, knowing that someone else who goes through what we went through will have the same care I and my wife did. Being proud of my country counts for something, and I'll pay for that feeling.

Min

Let's see, first I walk, then I take the bus, and then I take the subway, and then I take a streetcar, and then I walk :)

Min