... Does anyone among you know any way to configure Thunderbird 3.x so as to get the old Thunderbird 2.x on-the-fly message searching functionality back? Type in the search box and have the filter applied right there and then to the open folder? The improved-to-the-point-of-not-working search feature in Thunderbird 3.0 is driving me nuts.
Boston police threatened to arrest a traffic flagger at a construction site for doing her job, then later denied it had happened.
And we're expected to respect the police.
Leslie Fish, that is, pointing out what happens when you blindly extrapolate progressive ideals to the point of absurdity.
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libertarianhawk)
An investigative piece from Reuters discusses how health insurer Wellpoint, the largest umbrella health insurer in the United States, specifically targeted breast cancer victims and used any pretext, however flimsy, to cancel their insurance — and when it couldn't find a plausible excuse, it just made something up. Despite lawsuits charging illegal rescission of as many as 10,000 Anthem Blue Cross policyholders in California alone (two of which it has so far lost, paying $11 million in fines and $14 million in restitution), Wellpoint maintains it did nothing wrong. Wellpoint operates Blue Cross/Blue Shield programs nationwide, as well as other subsidiaries.
As reported in another article last month, Assurant Health, another carrier, similarly targeted HIV-positive policyholders for rescission. Assurant, like Wellpoint, used computer algorithms that automatically initiated a fraud investigation against any subscriber diagnised with HIV.
The investigation last year by the House Energy and Commerce Committee determined that WellPoint and two of the nation's other largest insurance companies -- UnitedHealth Group Inc and Assurant Health, part of Assurant Inc -- made at least $300 million by improperly rescinding more than 19,000 policyholders over one five-year period.
WellPoint itself profited by more than $128 million from the practice, and the committee suggested that the figure might be largely understated because the company refused to provide information about cancellations by several subsidiaries.
And from the second article,
The committee estimated that Assurant alone profited by more than $150 million between 2003 and 2007 from rescission.
When investigated by Congress, Wellpoint hid behind HIPAA as an excuse for refusal to provide information about patients. Assurant took various measures to cover its tracks, including destroying records and hiding the identities of persons who sat on rescission star-chambers.
One of the [few, IMHO] things the health care bill gets right is to ban the practice of rescission. What seems still in doubt is whether, once the actual regulations implementing the bill are written, they will have enough teeth to actually stop it.
An outfit called LensVector has a new twist on lenses. LensVector's solid-state lens uses a liquid-crystal electrorefractive device to adjust focus (and, in principle, magnification) with no moving parts, uses less power than a mechanical focusing system, and is totally silent.
According to C|Net, the CIA is interested (via their subsidiary/front In-Q-Tel). Yeah, I'll bet they are....
According to the Reg, DARPA is working on a conventional-warhead fractional-orbital bombardment system that can be fired from a Mk.41 vertical-launch tube. If the tech can be made to work (and the SM-3 Standard's existing capabilities argue that it probably can), the new ArcLight program (yes, they re-used the name) could theoretically enable the US to put a 100lb precision-guided warhead anywhere in the world on thirty minutes' notice.
The banks were gaming the regulators and investors alike – and they knew full well what they were doing.
Steven Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post about the ethical character of Wall Street, while the Guardian talks about the massive frauds underlying the global banking meltdown.