[Technology catch-all thread]

False, Im in the technical field, I dont buy PC's from fliers. I've had 3 corporate procure Dell laptops that havent been able to stand up to the rigors of the media work that I do mostly because of the inherent security weaknesses of windows. Not only is the Mac OS 100 times more stable than Windows, but the Mac hardware is superior also. I know you are a hater of all things Apple because thats your stance on computers, but I'm not some noob who apparently buys crap because I have no idea what I'm doing.

 

I'll tell you what, next time you log into your online banking portal, take a minute to thank me for enhancing the security and your user experience, because there is an 80 percent chance that I am responsible for it.

 

I'd rather hear about your hardware experience. Software engineer does not equal hardware guy. Seriously, you could be a good hardware guy, but talking about software does not speak to it.

 

To me, laptops and mobile devices in general are a weaker area for anything PC. I think I have that viewpoint because once you buy them, it is hard to change out much of the hardware. So, other than memory, you are pretty much stuck with what you have.

 

Also, we all know that Macs generally do much better with with media work. PCs are your general workhorses that get things done at a good price. If I were to buy a laptop to do mainly media stuff, I'd go Mac. However, for my do everything type of computer, I'll build my own PC or go with a good laptop for a much cheaper price than any Mac.

 

I'm not a Mac hater. In fact, I'd love to have a Mac, but I can just never justify the price considering my PC knowledge in how to run/buy a solid system.

 

The iPad looks pretty sweet, but I just can't justify the price considering I have my own PCs that do everything the iPad does (and much more), albeit not as well with the media stuff.

[Hawks national anthem... Disrespectful?]

Gives me goosebumps when I'm there for it. Heck, I even turn up my stereo during that part before the games that I watch on TV.

[P90X]

Do you have engineered floor joists or solid 2X8, 2x10, etc... ?

 

If solid you can easily make a nice pull up bar for cheap by going to Home Depot Get some 3/4 or 1" galv steel pipe(whatever is comfortable for you) You'll want to span the joists so you're head is in betwen two joists when doing your pullup. I'm sure there's a ton of info online. My dad had a setup like this years ago. Good luck.

 

Yeah, I actually do. That would be a whole lot cheaper than buying some of the options that are out there. Thanks!

[P90X]

Any recommendations for a pullup bar for this? I'm looking to set up in my unfinished basement and can easily put something on the I-beams, but don't have a door frame to hang anything on.

[P90X]

Thinking about doing this. What all do you need? I have no workout stuff at home. So far I've seen:

Chair

Pullup bar

Yoga Mat

Hand Weights (Any Recommendations on this?)

Anything else?

[Will the White Sox anchor a new sports radio station in Chicago]

I can get them 300 miles away in Iowa (although just barely). I'd hate to lose that. Although, I'd find a different way to listen to the broadcasts.

[Frank Thomas retires]

The reason that I am a White Sox fan. HOF-bound!

[The environment thread]

Vancouver just finished the warmest January on record, and they're literally having to airlift in snow using a helicopter to prepare for the olympics.

 

I was talking to some guys from Toronto who were saying that they didn't have very much snow. I told them to send their snow budget surplus over our way

[Healthcare reform]

And, according to more than a few analysts, the House and Senate Health care bills would, through a number of economic mechanisms (penalties for high payments, encouraging cheaper options like estate planning/death panels, etc.), have exactly that effect, esp. 10+ years out. The only thing that would make the Senate bill stronger is a strong public option, or even better, allowing everyone to buy into Medicare.

Encouraging cheaper options on top of other things seems to be a good way to go. However, I disagree with the public option as that would just lead to government taking over healthcare (maybe at a slow pace but takeover nonetheless). And, we will just disagree in that I see that as a bad thing. Medicare is already paying at a lower rate than what regular insurance companies are and is a bit of the cause in the rise of insurance costs due to cost-shifting. So, adding more people to that would again lead to higher prices and lead again towards the path of government taking over everything (again I don't see that as good). Also, I'm not sure how that would really lower costs overall.

 

It's also worth noting this insurer's specific explanation for this rate increase:

This is of course exactly what some of us say is the inherent problem with a non-universal private system; there's a built-in death spiral. As costs go up, the healthy tend to leave the insurance pool, which pushes costs up even more. It's designed to break, and the end result is that no one except the very wealthy can afford insurance.

So, how would you make sure that you push in the healthy into the insurance pool? I took a look at my pretty low insurance payments and compared it to the fines I would pay in both bills and saw that I would spend less if I just went with the fines. The push is pretty weak, the healthy will leave.

[Healthcare reform]

INDIANAPOLIS – Health insurer WellPoint blames the Great Recession and rising medical costs for its planned 39 percent rate increase for some California customers. To President Barack Obama, however, it's Exhibit A in his campaign to revive the health care overhaul.

 

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who received the company's explanation in a letter Thursday, said "it remains difficult to understand" how premium increases of that size by can be justified when WellPoint Inc. reported a $2.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2009.

 

Yeah, not very good. The plans out there are still not attacking the issue though. Insurance companies are just the part that everyone sees because they deal with the patient payments directly. If nothing is done about unnecessary procedures and the rising costs of drugs and procedures, the patient payments will still go up and it doesn't matter whether the government or an insurance company is collecting.

[Healthcare reform]

Very good article put out recently on the Wall Street Journal that talks about the wasted chance we had with Healthcare Reform. I've seen a lot about the "30 million new customers" for insurance companies, but without effective ways to push people into the program, you will have the healthy opting out and paying a fine instead of paying for the more expensive insurance that they can jump into when they get sick. This has been done before in other parts of the country:

 

Wall Street Journal Article

Take those states in turn. "In Maine, where guaranteed issue went into effect in 1993, there were 11 carriers in the individual market, and now there are two: Us, and another company that would not be called in any circle an equivalent health insurance company." In Kentucky, 45 insurers fled the state, with WellPoint the last one standing, until the state started in 1998 to repeal most of these regulations.

 

Depending on the plan, WellPoint's monthly premium for a 20-year-old in Indianapolis, where the company is based, ranges from $53 to $202. But the same young adult looking for similar coverage in Albany would face costs anywhere between $832 and $1,047. Obviously health costs vary across the country, Mrs. Braly says, but these disparities are almost entirely due to New York's regulatory mandates. In a state with 19 million people, 88 New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 24—88!—have bought WellPoint's best-selling individual insurance product because insurance laws make it perfectly rational not to acquire costly coverage until people need it

 

 

[Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy]

Very righteous. My point was that these plans are coming out of ideas for stimulus. When people talk about relieving a burden on a business, bank or corporation (WHO ARE PEOPLE TOO/green) you will get the economic and the moral argument. And yet for this you only get the self-righteous I walked to school in the snow with 6 jobs and everyone else must be lazy i'm a hard worker crap. Who cares. In 5 years the people who graduate from college will be in thousands more debt than me. In just five years. The people who currently worked hard to graduate college and had to pay their way through, are in the worst job market in at least 30 years. With no signs of improving. But they should've realized that the banks were levereging 35:1 on a real estate market that was about to burst. Do you want to forever forgive people's debt? no. But when we are in a prolonged recession and people are thinking of ways to help, one thing that doesn't is immediately thinking of yourself as some 19th century rugged individualist because you have a damn car payment.

 

Gotcha, but I still don't see how this gets to the source of what you are seeing as the problem (college costing too much). All this does is shift the cost of the loans and education over to the government to pay for. Somebody has to pay for it. To me, it looks like you could make the same argument you are and advocate tax cuts for these same people so that they have more money to spend as a stimulus. But again, that does not hit the issue of the rise in college costs.

 

Even though I can see your point about this being a directed stimulus, I haven't seen anything that actually addresses the main issue. How about we hit whatever the root of the problem is and find ways to keep costs in check instead of throwing money that we don't have at it and watching the issue grow more and more?

[Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy]

The fact that the not going to college v. going to college is even being considered lets you know how much the system is broken. I say this b/c while college degrees earn more, that is becoming increasingly bogged down and unclear. The bachelors degree system is probably not the most efficient system, certainly not the best use of most's money, and incompatible with a large number who go there. Which makes it more insane that those with the language and math skills to get through to a for year, to reach their full potential, are asked to go into mountains of debt in order to get into a good program It's insane.

 

And it's funny how moral this argument is. The idea comes from the facts that we had to bail the banks out because then lending would freeze, the economy would come to a standstill, crippling depression. YOu can see where you benefit. For this, relieving thousands of the nations best educated from debt of a broken system, gets met as if they are dead beats and why should they get free. If these people were relieved of this student loan debt, these are the ones who could best use that money on capital for a small business, or let alone the fact that these are a whole bunch of single/18-34's who like to spend. But when this is suggested, everyone becomes defensive.

 

So, what other debts should we relieve them of? Mortgages? Car Loans? Credit Card payments? Anything else? After all, they do need money to take out a loan to start a small business. Should we relieve them of that cost too?

[Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy]

Perhaps you haven't noticed but there are tens of thousands of students, if not more, that graduated in the last 2 years with absolutely no hope to land a decent paying job any time soon.

 

Yes, I have noticed. There has been a switch recently. When my parents were growing up, it was all about graduating from high school. Then, it turned into you have to graduate from college to get a decent job (my age group). Now, it has switched to you need even higher education than that or you need to make sure you choose the correct area to go into. I think that we are now going to the days where you can't just go into anything that you want, or what you like. You may have to go into an area that you are not crazy about to land a good job. That seems to be what my grandparents grew up with. They didn't pick and choose where they went for a job, they were happy to have a job that paid the bills.

 

Now, honestly, I am a bit removed from the college grads these days. So, I don't know if they are choosing their majors based upon what is out there or if they are just following their interests. I'm not in that position, so I don't know. I could be completely off-base and would apologize if so. However, IMO, the answer should be a combination of letting people know that they can't just go into whatever they decide on a whim as well as finding ways to lower the cost of education. How does this in any way lower the cost of education?

[Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy]

what indication is showing that they are not being responsible?

 

 

Um, the whole not wanting to pay off your loans, or thinking that someone else needs to do it? When I get a loan, I make darn sure that I know what I am getting into. If things don't go the way that I plan, I work with the loan company to see what I can do. Not once did I go looking to pawn it off on someone else. This included a few times where I could not find a job. I was able to call up the loan company and they worked with me on it.

 

I still have a lot of loans from college. Sure it would be sweet if I suddenly didn't have to pay them off, but I would never try pushing for anything like that. They are my loans and my responsibility.

[Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy]

Can't get to the site but my thoughts are the same as the mortgage forgiveness, why should they benefit? I worked to put myself through school in a major I was not really fond of but it got me a good paying job and a nice career.

 

Exactly, I've heard of some of this and am pretty annoyed that I've been working hard and responsibly paying off my loans. Why should my taxes go to pay off someone else's loan who is not being responsible?

[Technology catch-all thread]

Well, for one, I explained why someone like myself would use it, and bmags has explained why it is better than a s***ty netbook. But if you want to keep on ignoring the pure genius in this thread, than so be it...

 

I was hoping for the ability of a netbook and an eReader combined with this, but was really disappointed.

 

My netbook and any e-Reader work much better than what this thing will do.

 

The netbook I have runs all of the apps I need including Office and iTunes. I can also connect to the Verizon 3G network to browse wherever and whenever I want and have any sort of a signal. I've got 250GBs of storage on it as well as card readers to throw my pictures from my digital camera on it. Oh, and it has a web cam on it. I didn't have to pay the $70 or whatever it will cost to add a web cam. Also, I can run more than 1 app at a time on the netbook. The only thing this has on a good netbook from what I can see is that it may do video better (even though it doesn't have a good output for it).

 

As far as an eReader, the screen is not as good for your eyes as the eReaders out there. Battery life is also lacking compared to eReaders. Kindles and Nooks last days on 1 charge. The iPad lasts 10 hours. Granted, a screen that enables really good video cannot last for days and will not have the technology that is good for the eyes when reading.

 

Count me as disappointed, but I think my expectations may have been way too high for this thing.

 

 

[Tim Tebow to appear in anti-abortion Super Bowl ad]

I have never made the argument that the money spent on the commercial would be better served going directly to whatever the particular cause may be. I trust that there are smarter people than I crunching the numbers and predicting which method will cause the most funds to be raised.

 

Gotcha, I was reading that argument elsewhere in this thread that it was a complete waste of money. Would you see it as inappropriate because it was a sober message in the middle of the "party time", or is that one ok because it is not a deep, personal decision? Just seeing if I can understand the delineation.

 

Personally, I think that positive messages of hope are good at any time. I think that we are focusing a lot on the decision here. But this affects more than those who are making that decision now. Maybe there is someone out there who has already made that decision that Tim's parents did and is in the midst of that pregnancy. If they are feeling beaten down a bit right now, it could be a great message to help lift them up to know that others are going through it or have gone through it. I know that has helped me in the past. Sure, you know that the superstar thing is probably not going to happen, but to see there is a good chance of things turning out alright and that you will make it through is encouraging. I'd take any platform to give that type of a message.

[Tim Tebow to appear in anti-abortion Super Bowl ad]

Tex, not a one person in here has come even close to suggesting that women should not have the right to speak out against abortion. What has been attacked by a few of us is the method of doing so. I can only speak for myself, but my sincere guess is that Soxy would support the message Mrs. Tebow and Tim want to share if they did it in a more responsible and more respectful way than in a television commercial.

 

In fact, it could be argued that your support of communicating such a message in this manner suggests you actually have less respect for the issue than those of us arguing it has no business being aired as a Super Bowl commercial.

 

Quick question, what would you say if there was a commercial about support for Haiti? Would that be considered a waste of money considering it could have all gone straight to help those people out?

[DIRECTV]

My DirectTV has a 30 sec jump ahead and 7 second jump back.

I hadn't seen that yet with the DirectTV DVRs that I have used. Good to know that they have it.

 

The Dish DVR is better but he on-line setting of the DVR is a cool feature.

You can do the online setting with DISH now too. I think that you are saying that DirectTV has that as well.

 

The equipment for DirectTv is also much cheaper than cable not sure about Dish.

Yeah, but you can usually get some great deals whichever one you pick if you are new.

 

Overall though, go with whichever vendor gives you the best package price.

Can't disagree with that.

[DIRECTV]

I'd actually say give me the DISH DVR any day of the week over what DirectTV has. Very cool to use. I like being able to jump forward 30 seconds and back 10 seconds to skip through all of the commercials instead of fast forwarding and trying to stop it at the right point. Also, getting to the recordings and moving around just seems so much more intuitive than what I have seen with DirectTV.

 

And as for quality of picture (from what I have heard), well that is all dependent on the TV that you have. Whether it is from DirectTV or DISH will not matter as the same data comes through from the different networks. So, since it is the same data, the presentation of that data (your TV) is the only thing that affects how you see it. So, right now I don't buy any type of picture quality argument unless you are just not getting a full signal.

 

My main thing was getting as many White Sox games without paying a ton. Out in Iowa I can easily get all games except for WCIU in HD. I don't like that DISH does not have the MLB Network or options for the full season, but I'm not sure I would shell out the money even if they did have them.

[Merry Christmas Soxtalkers!]

Merry Christmas all!

[Healthcare reform]

Rasmussen has a new article about the current healthcare reform and our favorite topic of different polls. Specifically, it says that a majority of people oppose the current version of the plan that is out there. Also, it talks about the public option and kind of gets at the point that people are confused on what a "public option" would do (like lead to some employers dropping existing coverage for it).

 

Rasmussen November 2 Article

 

Polling on the health care topic by many firms has created some confusion. In particular, polls on the “public option” show a wide variety of results. A recent poll in The Washington Post found that 57% support a government-run health insurance company to compete with private insurers, but Rasmussen Reports polling shows that support is very soft. In fact, people are strongly opposed to a public option if they think it could lead employers to drop the existing coverage they provide employees. The fact that results are so subject to change based upon minor differences in question wording suggests that voters do not have firm opinions on the public option.

 

It seems like there is widespread support for healthcare reform, just not the current version that is out on the table.

[Healthcare reform]

End their business? Not a chance. That is pure B.S., and it isn't even the reason they are lobbying.

 

But obviously, they'd rather that any public or base insurance option go through them instead of the government. Makes perfect sense, and THAT is why they are lobbying.

 

The main point I'm saying is that if something significantly was going to affect the way that you do something, you would and should be heavily involved in the solution. Why wouldn't they be spending money?

 

Edit: Removed thought about PO.

[Healthcare reform]

And its sort of funny, because its really only one part of the health care industry they are actually lobbying for - insurance companies. All the actual health professionals favor reform, and a public option.

 

Insurance companies favor reform as well, just not the type that will end their business. What would you spend for the survival of your industry or on something that heavily involves you? Would you just sit on the sidelines and watch?