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Take a look at HIPAA transactions Transaction FAQ. Standard formats are already implemented. Trust me, I'm intimately familiar with these formats having coded several of these transactions personally for my company. While the idea is great, and the potential for reducing cost high, guess what? Providers (docs) have been very slow to move over to this standard. After all, its a huge expense, all they want is their claims paid. Now, open source practice management at the office, with HIPAA transaction support would be a lifesaver. The cost savings in elimating paperwork and proprietary standards from the Provider to HMO connection is enourmous. Currently most Providers are keying in data to a web form on WebMD and paying dearly for it (as well as the HMO's (payers)). Integrated with there office system... not at all.

I, like most of the /.ers in his country, didn't know what the new law meant. I decided to look it up out of curiousity...

Apparently, the law makes sure that workers keep their health insurance after they change jobs. It also is an attempt to standardize insurance transactions and privacy of health data.

Source: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/hipaa/

How do you manage to live off $10k? Where do you live? Do you live with your parents? Who pays rent? If you ARE living off $10k, you will turn into a capitalist slave--if you aren't one already. You will barely meet anything your whole life. I don't consider $10k to be sufficient to live off of. That's just barely above the poverty line .

No, only low skilled jobs which are easily portable to other countries.

What's to stop literally all other jobs (except those that require physical presence) from being lost? In any case, what exactly is a low skilled job? As far as I'm concerned, there is little difference between jobs. Why would only low skilled jobs move? Why can't someone else perform other jobs? Do you think Indians, Chinese, etc can't carry out skilled jobs?

There is no reason why a teacher cannot be outsourced. It is kind of difficult to do now because teachers are required to be in classrooms. However, it wouldn't surprise me if many classes are done through long-distance in the future. Once schools are privatized, watch out. (BTW, this is not to discourage you from becoming a teacher--just using an example).

I agree with you that programmers get paid too much. It is a view I have held for many years. I don't see why people get paid $50,000+ for routine maintenance, simple programming, etc. But that doesn't change my point.

Require OSHA to be followed with foreign workers.

I don't see how you are going to carry that out given that all trade agreements place business interests above workers. You already have difficulty enforcing worker regulations within one country. Doing it internationally is more difficult..

Sivaram Velauthapillai

When it comes to access to pols corps get more respect than small businesses who get more respect than the average individual. Hence they get better response such as government bailouts, which I'm pretty sure you business wouldn't have qualified for due to insufficient lobbying power. Your business probably could have qualified for a federal grant, but a single mother of 2 working 37 hours a week (a common cut-off so companies don't have to give benefits) for 8 bucks an hour (37*8*52=$15,392) couldn't qualify for handouts. This is not to say that the small businessperson isn't often between a rock and a hard place, but let's face it if we all called our senator at the same time - BillG gets right through, you can get through to high-level flunky and I get to leave a message for a low-level flunky to get back to me sometime.

[...]and there is no concrete evidence to support the claim that such experiements will result in these cures

Yes there is. Take for example multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease where your own body attacks the myelin sheath covering your nerves. As the disease progress this results in paralysis, severe pain, fatigue, loss of vision and many other symptoms that create a lot of suffering for those affected by the disease. There is currently no cure.

Here are some promising results from stem cell research that shows some of the potential for stem cell based therapies:

Curing paralysis in a a mouse model of MS

Stem cell transplants are being tried on humans as we speak.

"I heard an argument (BBC Radio4, "Moral Maze", ages ago) which claimed that paedophiles are 9 times more likely than a random selection to be homosexual, but I can't find anything else to back that up."

I'm surprised at this level of ignorance still exists today. I'm sorry to inform you that in fact, it's the reverse that's true. The FBI keeps statistics on just these sorts of things, and in fact 95% percent of child molestation cases are committed(bottom of page) by self-described heterosexuals. In fact homosexuals are no more likely(again, scroll to bottom of page) to abuse children than heterosexuals.

I can not help but also point out that your other argument:

"I find this parallel interesting. Homosexuality is arguably natural occurring but atypical (I choose those words carefully) - the same could be said for paedophiles. I would be surprised if they are a historically recent phenomena and they certainly make up a very small percentage of the population, yet their actions and desires are abhorent to the vast majority of us.

The same can be said of homosexuality 100 years ago."

-is also critically flawed.

You see, consensual homosexual acts cause harm to no one, while conversely, child molestation does indeed cause severe mental aguish and trauma to the victim.

You are citing a "consumer advocacy" site that just happens to be affiliated with a personal-injury/med-mal law firm? Did you even read the links at the bottom of the page?

I call BS on your BS, sir.

Here's a study from the Govt.

and a presentation from the American College of Surgeons

Personally, I'm just a physician who would like to be left alone so I can take care of my patients. I'm not a politico or lobbyiest, and I'd rather not have to deal with this nasty political fight. Unfortunately, it's become a matter of survival for some of us. Most doctors don't give a damn about politics... we're too busy; I don't know any physician who hasn't been dragged kicking and screaming into this mess.

The care provider can require the patient to consent to their information being shared only "for treatment, payment, and health care operations". There's no way the care provider can fall back on a consent to protect them if patient info gets out into the wild.

Any other transfer of the information for any purpose other than treatment or payment requires an authorization that explicitly says what info is being given out, to whom, why, and how the receiver will safeguard the info. For the most part, you can't refuse treatment if a patient won't sign an authorization form.

For more info, please click on answer number four in this list. (sorry, the actual answer has a giant php address and would probably time out...)

The law specifically states that any work that a healthcare organizations subcontracts out is to be held to the same standard. If the hospital did not insure that, then they are liable for both civil and criminal damages.

This is actually one of the great things about the law. If an organization tries to escape any clause by subcontracting out the work, they are still liable. In this case, it seems that they did not even have an agreement with the contractors, which would be even larger penalties.

As a final note, the hospital is already liable, because the woman sent patient records to the hospital via email. Unless the email was encrypted and only opened by the doctors giving care to the patients in record, then the hospital is liable. I expect the government will begin an investigation shortly, and the hospital will be fined within a year.

Mark Radulovich, CISSP, NSA/IAM

I couldn't help but notice that today was also the day that the HIPAA health privacy standards are supposed to be in place at all medical providers.

I got an email this morning from a hospital employee... and on the bottom was the infamous "hotbar" plug.

Hospitals are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which makes any use of spyware toolbars (such as hotbar or yahoo etc.) on systems that may be used to access private medical records illegal.

I got an email this morning from a hospital employee... and on the bottom was the infamous "hotbar" plug.

Hospitals are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which makes any use of spyware toolbars (such as hotbar or yahoo etc.) on systems that may be used to access private medical records illegal.

Then you won't mind your medical records becoming public information? It's being done right now. Minnesota (and elsewhere) wants to make all medical information available in a statewide database.

Hmmmm. Wouldn't that be in violation of HIPAA?

Igor

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was signed into law on August 21, 1996. This law includes important new protections for millions of working Americans and their families who have preexisting medical conditions or might suffer discrimination in health coverage based on a factor that relates to an individual's health. HIPAA's provisions amend Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) as well as the Internal Revenue Code and the Public Health Service Act and place requirements on employer-sponsored group health plans, insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). HIPAA includes changes that:

limit exclusions for preexisting conditions;

prohibit discrimination against employees and dependents based on their health status;

guarantee renewability and availability of health coverage to certain employers and individuals; and

protect many workers who lose health coverage by providing better access to individual health insurance coverage.

Here are some useful links:

HHS - Office for Civil Rights - HIPAA
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA.ORG
HIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996

The dissemination of medical information without the explicit permission of subject. I don't have a problem with tracking information about how social services are used; that's expected of any service to maintain reliability. However providing medical information to law enforcement violates even the most basic principles of the doctor/patient privilege.

Isn't financial data required to be protected by something equivelent to HIPPA?

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) mostly revolves around (suprise) health related personal information. Financial organizations need to pay attention to it for their own employee's information, and for any health-related organizations they provide services for, but it's not the biggest IT driver for financial companies.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 is more closely targeted on financial organizations. Also, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issues a lot of regulations that financial institutions need to pay close attention to. Insofar as Acxiom acts (acxts?) as a third-party vendor for financial institutions, they are also expected to meet those regulations when dealing with financial customer data.

If, as the first article states, "All of the information was encrypted," then they were probably not in violation of any of these rules or regulations. It sounds like all the guy did was pull encrypted files off a publicly accessible FTP dropoff point, probably after sniffing plaintext authentication credentials on the network. Stupid move by Acxiom, but not fatal; bad PR but no real impact.

We obviously need to push for similar requirements used to secure our medical information.

While some may argue that it will increase the cost of doing business, the leeches who profit from our personal info without our consent don't deserve our sympathy. There are many companies that buy and sell our personal info daily without our consent or knowledge.

Besides, having rules for security related to our personal info will create new jobs as existing systems are modified and business processes are reengineered. Perhaps even more jobs than HIPAA.

Perhaps an even better solution is to require our written consent before any company sells our personal info to another and the consent deemed non-transferable.

We obviously need to push for similar requirements used to secure our medical information.

While some may argue that it will increase the cost of doing business, the leeches who profit from our personal info without our consent don't deserve our sympathy. There are many companies that buy and sell our personal info daily without our consent or knowledge.

Besides, having rules for security related to our personal info will create new jobs as existing systems are modified and business processes are reengineered. Perhaps even more jobs than HIPAA.

Perhaps an even better solution is to require our written consent before any company sells our personal info to another and the consent deemed non-transferable.

designed to encourage electronic transactions and also required new safeguards to protect the security and confidentiality of health information. The final regulation covers health plans, health care clearinghouses, and those health care providers who conduct certain financial and administrative transactions (e.g., enrollment, billing and eligibility verification) electronically.

How does this affect HIPPA? http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
Patient Health Care information must be protected and hidden from the public. Yet this law would prevent this...
Can the CIA/NSA/SSA/NASA no longer encrypt data?

After April 16th of this year, the HIPAA standards will go into effect for health care orginanizations. It's a set of guidelines that outline billing, among other things. One of the big issues is patient privacy. Take a look around. It's pretty interesting. Networks are required to be locked down, or the HCO is subject to an XX,000 fine for each patient privacy violation. (I think it's 35K, but I'm not sure.)

Implications:

802.11b? Hohahahaha. Nice try. Not until there's a better implementation.
Backdoors? They're right out.

All of this is nice, in theory, and I'm sure that there will be HCO's that might try to cut corners, but this is an issue that is being pushed quite a bit with respect to the technical aspects of patient data storage and access. LET THE FINES BEGIN.

So far, 3 tech savvy docs have asked me to do a war-walk of their hospitals because they knew that they weren't going to pass muster come April, yet their administration (IT or otherwise) wasn't concerned. They simply wanted some proof that they could lay on the table, and I was one "of their techie friends." (yeah,yeah, perhaps a little risky) One was running their WiFi wide open (!!), and the other 2 were using WAP, but after an afternoon of sitting in a lobby, I got enough 'interesting' packets to yield the key. I hope it helped light a fire under someone who mattered.

Additional links:
Encryption / Internet Policy

More Internet stuff

After April 16th of this year, the HIPAA standards will go into effect for health care orginanizations. It's a set of guidelines that outline billing, among other things. One of the big issues is patient privacy. Take a look around. It's pretty interesting. Networks are required to be locked down, or the HCO is subject to an XX,000 fine for each patient privacy violation. (I think it's 35K, but I'm not sure.)

Implications:

802.11b? Hohahahaha. Nice try. Not until there's a better implementation.
Backdoors? They're right out.

All of this is nice, in theory, and I'm sure that there will be HCO's that might try to cut corners, but this is an issue that is being pushed quite a bit with respect to the technical aspects of patient data storage and access. LET THE FINES BEGIN.

So far, 3 tech savvy docs have asked me to do a war-walk of their hospitals because they knew that they weren't going to pass muster come April, yet their administration (IT or otherwise) wasn't concerned. They simply wanted some proof that they could lay on the table, and I was one "of their techie friends." (yeah,yeah, perhaps a little risky) One was running their WiFi wide open (!!), and the other 2 were using WAP, but after an afternoon of sitting in a lobby, I got enough 'interesting' packets to yield the key. I hope it helped light a fire under someone who mattered.

Additional links:
Encryption / Internet Policy

More Internet stuff

After April 16th of this year, the HIPAA standards will go into effect for health care orginanizations. It's a set of guidelines that outline billing, among other things. One of the big issues is patient privacy. Take a look around. It's pretty interesting. Networks are required to be locked down, or the HCO is subject to an XX,000 fine for each patient privacy violation. (I think it's 35K, but I'm not sure.)

Implications:

802.11b? Hohahahaha. Nice try. Not until there's a better implementation.
Backdoors? They're right out.

All of this is nice, in theory, and I'm sure that there will be HCO's that might try to cut corners, but this is an issue that is being pushed quite a bit with respect to the technical aspects of patient data storage and access. LET THE FINES BEGIN.

So far, 3 tech savvy docs have asked me to do a war-walk of their hospitals because they knew that they weren't going to pass muster come April, yet their administration (IT or otherwise) wasn't concerned. They simply wanted some proof that they could lay on the table, and I was one "of their techie friends." (yeah,yeah, perhaps a little risky) One was running their WiFi wide open (!!), and the other 2 were using WAP, but after an afternoon of sitting in a lobby, I got enough 'interesting' packets to yield the key. I hope it helped light a fire under someone who mattered.

Additional links:
Encryption / Internet Policy

More Internet stuff

After April 16th of this year, the HIPAA standards will go into effect for health care orginanizations. It's a set of guidelines that outline billing, among other things. One of the big issues is patient privacy. Take a look around. It's pretty interesting. Networks are required to be locked down, or the HCO is subject to an XX,000 fine for each patient privacy violation. (I think it's 35K, but I'm not sure.)

Implications:

802.11b? Hohahahaha. Nice try. Not until there's a better implementation.
Backdoors? They're right out.

All of this is nice, in theory, and I'm sure that there will be HCO's that might try to cut corners, but this is an issue that is being pushed quite a bit with respect to the technical aspects of patient data storage and access. LET THE FINES BEGIN.

So far, 3 tech savvy docs have asked me to do a war-walk of their hospitals because they knew that they weren't going to pass muster come April, yet their administration (IT or otherwise) wasn't concerned. They simply wanted some proof that they could lay on the table, and I was one "of their techie friends." (yeah,yeah, perhaps a little risky) One was running their WiFi wide open (!!), and the other 2 were using WAP, but after an afternoon of sitting in a lobby, I got enough 'interesting' packets to yield the key. I hope it helped light a fire under someone who mattered.

Additional links:
Encryption / Internet Policy

More Internet stuff

This is beyond the limits of my networking expertise, but does this mean it's possible for sensitive client or medical information to be passed in the padding?

If so, it seems that this would be a problem with HIPAA.

Granted, the extra bits of a 46 byte packet isn't much space, but then a social security number is only 9-characters.

The real guts of story might be that this will be a poster child for what can go wrong with centralized health care databases. In the long run, this might be a good thing to have happened.

Wait, it gets worse. Opened it with KWord. The only formats are bolds, centering, ?unicode?, and a few hyperlinks, that differ from normal html by only a few control characters which must only work for word. Why, oh why, would anyone use Word to publish something like that? Nothing different or useful was added by word. All word did was make it a little harder for me to read the thing presented.

I appreciate the effort, but please don't use Word. If you must use Word, save it as text or html. If word won't do that don't use word for things you want to share or cut and paste into another text editor that will do this. Remember that you yourself may not be able to read what you write in Word after the next "upgrade" and that most of your effort making the format just so will be wasted.

Go ahead and mod this guy down like he asked, he's confused as to what the truth is. The HIPAA legislation was passed in 1996, but the Final Rule version of the Privacy Rule was only promulgated this August, and only went into effect less than a week ago, which means it's definately not going to change again before the implementation date.

Up until then, anything could have changed in the Privacy Rule, otherwise known as a 12000 line set of government regulations.

The Security and Electronic Signature Rule is still in a proposal state. The Universal ID proposals are not really even being considered at this time and won't be until Democrats are back at the helm. The first proposed privacy rule was promulgated in 1998 and has gone through several substantial iterations. Just because Congress said, "do it," in 1996 doesn't mean this guy had any chance of getting started at that point. Maybe in 2001 he had a fair chance of getting the gist of the Privacy Rule, but he had no way of knowing what, if anything (or everything) would change until this August.

It only takes balls when you know what you're talking about - this isn't a set of tablets with 10 simple rules, Chuck.

You've never worked at a McD's before, have you? There's no way you can survive on the ammount of money they pay for any length of time. You'd make more on unemployment than you could actually make MANAGING a McD's, let alone working as crew. Let's look at the numbers :

52 weeks/year
x 30hr/wk (-very- unlikely they'll give you more)
x $6/hr
-------------
$9360

For your reference, the poverty guidlines in USia is at $8860/yr for a 1 person household.

Then they are in violation of the HIPPA Act and will get into beaucoups de trouble from Uncle Sam for not protecting confidential patient records from harm or prying eyes. The death will be only the beginning of theoretical University's problems.

I'm saying that it may be much more dangerous then a lot of us would like to believe.

Yeah, I mean, look at all the babyboomers...they are all braindead by now eh? All the ex hippies all got so brain damaged they became mentally ill and went homicidal and ... oh, no, that's right, they didn't. They became normal middle class drones...damn.

Jail has nothing to do with what's best for the criminal, it has to do with punishment for a crime.

Indeed. I'm saying: Pot smoking should not be a crime. The goal of criminalisation was to protect the public from becoming hopelessly addicted and incurably insane from that evil devil's weed. It was stupid and that mistake should be rectified. They stopped alcohol prohibition when they realised it was a lost cause. but for some reason they keep on with the pot laws as if they were a god-given holy law.

If we believe that the trafficking of a substance is dangerous, we want to deter that crime with a serious punishment.

Indeed. That is why I want the Monosodium Glutamate producers/dealers to get death sentences. Its addictive, it makes people sick, and it causes brain damage in rats (when injected in large doses).

But that doesn't justify the jail sentences for simple possesion. If the dealing is the crime, why is the buyer's life destroyed? (The pot doesn't destroy the pot head's life, the cops do.)
I know a few regular pot smokers (and a bunch of party pot smokers), I don't want their lives destroyed. I don't want them thrown in jail. They can smoke tobacco and drink beer all they want, but a joint could make the police destroy their life. That's not right!

If pot is not this substance, then ya, it's kind of rediculous and we should change the laws. I just personally haven't made up my mind yet.


I propose a very unscientific and dubious experiement: Go rent a heroin movie (Trainspotting or Requiem for a dream) and then a pot movie (Half Baked...can't think of another good one right now), and see if they deserve to be in the same category.

Here's a link that supports your "its bad for you" line of thought.
Here's what I think about it: DUH! Well, if you're smoking pot every day for years and you suddently stop and take a test, of COURSE you'll do bad! And of course students and yungins shouldn't smoke pot! These things (pot, booze, cigarettes) should only be used by grownups, and only when apropriate.
But when you're old enough to vote and go get killed to protect your country. You're also old enough to make your own choices about drinking or eating or smoking what you want. If the governments don't want you too, they should educate you (without lies) and give you resources to help you get back on their idea of the right track. Not destroy you if you use your free will to do things they don't agree to.

Hey, I wouldn't even mind if they kept the dealing laws, because it is possible (if rare) to be addicted to pot, and so anyone who's dealing in it has an incentive to encourage abuse and addiction, but responsible users don't need to be marginalised for their choices.

Last week I was told I am now on my department's HIPAA committee. Since I figured I should know what's going on, I hit Google and went here to read (and print) the actual act.

From what I understand, HIPAA only requires reasonable precautions. Depending on how anal your compliance officer is (if you have one), this may or may not be a problem. I work for a group that owns three hospitals, one of them a teaching hospital, and our compliace officer is a lawyer, so she knows her stuff. In a meeting to all staff we were told to use "reasonable precautions". You don't have to be paranoid, just use some common sense.

Good luck with it.

Just wait for the HIPAA security regs to kick in.

[Posting as AC because I'm not a corporate spokesmodel. But if you really want to figure out who
I am, you'll know. I just won't admit to it.]

The privacy provisions of the federal law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), apply to health information created or maintained by health care providers who engage in certain electronic transactions, health plans, and health care clearinghouses.

In HIPAA, Congress provided penalties for covered entities that misuse personal health information.

• Civil penalties. Health plans, providers and clearinghouses that violate these standards will be subject to civil liability. Civil money penalties are $100 per violation, up to $25,000 per year for each requirement or prohibition violated.
• Criminal penalties. Congress also established criminal penalties for certain actions such as knowingly obtaining protected health information in violation of the law. Criminal penalties are up to $50,000 and one year in prison for certain offenses; up to $100,000 and up to five years in prison if the offenses are committed under "false pretenses"; and up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison if the offenses are committed with the intent to sell, transfer or use protected health information for commercial advantage, personal gain or malicious harm.

"there are significant amount of people in the industrialized world who live significantly below the poverty line, and are at real risk of starvation."

Define please "significant" and "poverty line."

I'll help - and I'm not here to agree or disagree with you, just to provide real links.

First, "significant." Here's a link to the Food Research and Action Center and some hunger and poverty stats. If 3% is "significant" to you, then 3% of US households experience hunger. There is more information on the site that can either be used for your argument or against it. One line that struck me, "While starvation seldom occurs in this country, children and adults do go hungry and chronic mild undernutrition does occur when financial resources are low."

That's "chronic mild undernutrition." To me, that is not "risk of starvation," but your interpretation of the damn lies...I mean statistics...may vary.

Now, "poverty line." Did you know that the U.S. poverty level changes year to year, family to family and is different for 2 out of 50 states? And it can be as low as around $8,000 per year or as high as $30,000 per year, depending upon family size. Which is scary, because according to that chart, I only make twice the poverty level for my family size.

Here's the deal. We hear a lot of buzzwords these days and we hear broad generalizations like "significant" and "real risk." And much of what is presented to us on the evening news is pre-digested and edited down to 3 minute tid-bits.

And in the end, we find that we're simply not that poor in industrialized nations. We find that the people who need resources aren't getting them because of lack of education or because those resources are otherwised blocked by outside sources (poverty and starvation in a war zone.) Not because the resources themselves aren't available.

Now, about prices going up...is that the word of an economist or just a thought from someone who buys a loaf of Wonder every couple of weeks? And how much is "up?" 3%? 4%? 50%? What if the price of a loaf of bread does go up 50% because they're using grain for fuel? Will some people stop buying bread? (At $3 for a loaf of bread, I'd stop buying or cut back.) *Then* what happens to the price? Hmmm..

Things to think about. The simplistic stuff you read on the CNN homepage doesn't nearly cover the real world.

Biological attacks are (at least on current level) probably the most highly overrated threats of them all, though.

While that may possibly be the case, there are a couple of points that also need to be mentioned:

• It not only includes risky feed-back property of nuclear stuff (you think your disease will stay in enemy territory for long?

  True, and this is the reason why biological warfare didn't become something that was used in the battlefield. There's not much use for a weapon that not only kills the enemy but also your own troops (while that holds also applies to "conventional weapons" the ill-effects of friendly fire in this case could be far greater). But it's most likely that the threat the security experts (who themselves have all held government positions) were talking about is internal, rather than external. It's much harder to launch an attack across borders if what you're looking for is stealth (which an essential element in biological attacks). And if the attack is internal, you are more likely to be dealing with extremists who do not care about friendly casualties (commonly referred to as "collatoral damage") because they tend to act under a higher cause (God, Allah, freedom etc).

• and either slow-incubating ineffective (low lethality) aspects (like HIV) or fast and kind of effective disease that quickly runs out of steam (Ebola).

  This is also true, and explains why the casualties of natural outbreaks of Ebola are low (because the virus quickly runs out of steam) and that projected casualties of HIV/AIDS will be high (because the long incubation period assists in infection). But what the exercise seeks to demonstrate is not that the virus itself will be particularly effective, but that the vulnerabilities of such a large society will amplify the effectiveness into "doomsday" status. A large society would have many problems dealing with a bioterrorist attack. The slow reaction time of the public health system (because it would take time for a noticeable pattern of infection to emerge and to be classified as an outbreak) and the widespread panic created by public awareness of the attack, which further creates a "surge" in demand for vaccines are cures that the health system is not prepared for.

If anyone is interested in further information regarding the topic of bioterrorism, then there are sites by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Self Bias Resistor

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

This site has the rate at 18%.

This one has it at 33%.

Another says 35% of women are sexually abused as children.

This one (currently down, check Google cache) gives the magic 25%, listing Mary Koss, et al., A Criminalogical Study, 1990 as the reference.

HealthCentral says 50+% of women have been physically assaulted and 1 in 5 raped, citing the HHS/DoJ survey from the first link.

So... not just a concoction of my imagination, not just more bullshit to prop up my thesis... sadly, it's true.