Slashdot Mirror
Why the Fax Machine Refuses To Die
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia waxes befuddled on the ongoing existence of the fax machine. 'Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That's just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles,' Venezia writes. 'If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"
Here in Norway, all medical records are centralized and on a separate secure network. Of course, we don't worry about things like payment and insurance systems because all of our medical costs are paid for by the government. We only pay tiny symbolic doctors fees which are designed to keep us from going to the doctor 100 times a week.
When you live in a 3rd world country like the U.S. (been to Alabama and the shit holes in Mexico, the difference being people in Alabama have color TV and glass or screen in the windows of their trailer holes and in Mexico, the houses are made of clay and the people who live in them work for a living or starve... no welfare), you complain about anything like centralized medical databases and socialized medicine because you would rather live in fear of all your neighbors then to improve their quality of living enough to reduce the risks.
But in alternative circumstances, non-medical, fax machines should have died a long time ago.