I was sort of assuming, when they mentioned in-the-field access to the system, they were going to develop some kind of iPhone app, like the stuff mentioned the other day.
So you're saying you don't want them to have backups of their systems?
Not being a facebook user I would find it amusing if a meteor took out their data center today and the site can't be restored on account of the ToS not allowing them to keep backups.
As in many cases with updated contracts (not even sure a ToS counts as a real contract), this is mostly just the paper being adjusted to reflect reality.
In addition to all the other reasons already outlined, it's because TV stations broadcast in the tens of thousands of watts--their electric bills are unbelievably high. To do both analog and digital side-by-side would bankrupt many many stations.
$100billion? There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases. But most of those databases are already manned by DBAs.
Nonsense. There are thousands of hospitals alone and perhaps they all have single-system record keeping, but I doubt it. To take a famous example, the Cleveland Clinic is local to me, they employ about 800 IT staff; I know for a fact they have a cadre of Oracle DBAs as well as a team of SQL Server DBAs. I also know for a fact they have 200+ production databases throughout their organization--most of which contain patient records of some sort.
However my family doctor employs 0 IT staff. She uses commercial off-the-shelf software to manage her records, having gone digital a couple years ago. Yes, there's a database in there somewhere, but no DBA. And she still has tens of thousands of paper folders with paper records in them and no plan to digitize them--and don't forget this plan requires such records to be digitized. The logistics of doing such a thing for tens of thousands of single-doctor practices nationwide are staggering.
Again, I think it's a great project and we'd get way more than $100B back out of it in a generation, but if anything they underestimate the size of the project. I'm not saying it's complex, it's just huge and labor intensive.
Because they don't have any notion of interoperability and because an individual practitioner (or hospital, for that matter) won't realize any direct cost savings.
But interconnected health systems are key to patient well-being and cross-the-board cost savings. Health care specialists are great for fixing localized problems, but if my cardiologist and my dentist don't talk about my prolapsed mitrial valve, I can get an infection and drop dead sometime between having a mouth full of cotton and spitting into the little sink you can never quite reach from the chair. (OK, maybe not that fast but you get the point I hope.)
This is a big idea initiative that can benefit our society so greatly in so many ways it's staggering (consider the medical research possibilities of mining such a database, not to mention the possibility of genuine customer care). This is the kind of thing that government has to do because private industry has no motivation.
The problem is that precious few people around here (including me) would want to get involved doing technical work for the government. I have a feeling it won't be as easy or as cheap as they seem to think, even though at its heart it's a really easy (if labor-intensive) project, because a lot of the high-grade nerds can't stand the way government does things.
I used to work for a software company that provided automated telephone operator software. Among their clients was a small local phone company that provided pay phones to the SCDC for use in prison. Well, I shouldn't say "pay phones" exactly, they provided the ruggedized husks of pay phones without coin boxen and with the coin acceptors removed or welded shut. This was because the only kind of call allowed in prison is an outbound collect call of 5 minutes' duration.
In theory.
The prisoners would do an unbelievably competent phreaking job and we had to patch the software that controlled these phones every three to six months on account of new ways the prisoners would find to get around the calling restrictions. My favorite was where the prisoner would say something incoherent when prompted for a name that the phone switch would present to the call recipient. After a few tries they would often get someone gullible to accept the charges, and then they would somehow get this random person to set up a 3-way call with the person the prisoner really wanted to talk to, and have the whole thing billed to the random person's phone.
Way back in the day, they used to use live human operators to set up the collect calls. The humans were slightly easier to take advantage of than the automated system that replaced them, and more likely to sue their employer for subjecting them to phone conversations with prisoners.
Birds use wind whenever possible to save their own energy. Altamont Pass is a migratory choke point in part because of the reliable high wind. Here in Ohio the prevailing winds are actually northeasterly in the fall and winter and from the southwest in the spring and summer. The fall winds help push the migratory birds south and the spring winds help them get north again.
Why wouldn't Toshiba just under-rate the batteries- effectively making 90% = 100%?
AC: The charges all go to 100%. Look, right across the board, 100%, 100%, 100% and... WmLGann: Oh, I see. And most batteries go up to 90%? AC: Exactly. WmLGann: Does that mean it's more powerful? Does it deliver any more current? AC: Well, it's 10% more, isn't it? It's not 90%. You see, most blokes, you know, will be watching porn at 90% charge. You're on 90% here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 90% on your charge. Where can you go from there? Where? WmLGann: I don't know. AC: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? WmLGann: Charge it up to 100%. AC: 100%. Exactly. 10% more. WmLGann: Why don't you just make 90% the full charge and make 90 be the top number and make that a little more? AC:... AC: These go to 100%.
Seems counterintuitive to me. An object traveling from Titan to Earth would be falling into the Sun's gravity well. Some energy would be required to get the object out of the neighborhood of Saturn but the bulk of the acceleration to 29.7 km/s could occur naturally by falling, no?
Not that it would be anything but silly to import methane from ~1 billion miles away.
I thought I read that the first ice that was uncovered sublimated over night. In fact I recall that was what made the scientists sure that the white rocks were ice. I would think that shavings made by a rasp (rather, a 5-figure space age rasp-like device developed by a subcontractor that wasn't Craftsman or Snap-on) would sublimate rather quickly.
What am I missing?
The Dems don't actively oppose some of these abuses (e.g. politicizing the intelligence apparatus, politicizing the Justice Dept., rendition, warrantless wiretapping, etc., etc.) because they're looking forward to this coming January, when (odds are) they will have both houses of Congress and the White House in their control. They don't want to legislate away any powers that they might make use of in the coming four (or eight) years. I think our only hope of a restoration of some of our recently abrogated civil rights is if lots of test cases make it to the Supreme Court. SCotUS is now sufficiently conservative, and will be for some time, that maybe they'll start striking down some bad laws just to spite the other two (soon to be Democratic-controlled) branches of government.
We need more serious political parties, less winner-take-all elections, and more niche representation.
Do you partake of news materials at all? Have you ever?
Let's see...
Drought: Northern Georgia USA has been out of fresh water for months. Their current drought surpasses any on record for the area--don't know what tree rings etc. might say, but that's the historic record. The areas to the north and east, in the Carolinas have also experienced severe drought in the last decade. Eastern Texas has as well. Lake Mead in Nevada/Arizona, the lake behind Hoover Dam, is something like 9 feet low; if you've flown over it lately it's like looking at a half-empty bath tub with a big ring around it where the water level used to be. Droughts in the Horn of Africa have been so long-standing and well-publicized you should be embarrassed to have brought it up.
Famine: Famine is usually a human issue not an environmental issue, thanks to modern global food distribution channels. If nobody in Georgia can grow food, it won't lead to starvation because food can be trucked in from elsewhere. That said, there are still places in the world without much of a food distribution infrastructure. Again in the Horn of Africa it's practically impossible to deliver food from outside the area, and now impossible to grow it there, so people have been starving there for 20 years.
Flood: Great Britain, Central Europe and the Upper Midwestern USA have all experienced "500-year" floods within the last decade. However, once again (as always with climate change discussions) someone has managed to confuse "weather" with "climate." A flood, caused by a few days of heavy rain, is weather. A drought, caused by months or years of low precipitation, is climate. That said, three extremely severe floods in three far-flung areas in such a short time gives me pause.
Could just be the beer talking but I agree that "self-esteem" by itself is not a bad thing. It's the fatuous attempts to bolster it that wreak havoc.
Kids are a lot smarter than adults usually think. The research indicates that by age seven, they see through the constant brown-nosing by adults and the cases full of "participation" trophies. The kids conclude that either the adults can't evaluate their performance or don't care how well they do, or both. By obsessively elevating the dolts and laggards to spare their feelings, we create a disincentive for anyone to excel.
Essentially I agree with you but I think the issue is perhaps more pernicious and complex. Consider that by telling someone "you're smart" no matter what, one artificially creates a sort of "common denominator" in the praise-to-performance ratio. So when one steps on one's genitals but is told, "it's okay, you're smart", one then reasons that extra effort is unnecessary because the reward will come regardless of the outcome. We humans are inherently lazy, I guess, expending the least effort needed to obtain the reward. Kids, for whom testing boundaries is perhaps the number one occupation, will naturally try expending a little less effort each time just to see if they still get rewarded.
It reinforces my thinking that, as a father, I have a duty to be a dick from time to time. I only risk them being in therapy in 30 years if I fail to expend the effort to honestly evaluate my children and only to give praise where praise is due. Like any other relationship, the parent-child relationship is a lot of work. Good.
You mean I'm not smart just because a bunch of people told me so? Who knew?
New York Magazine published a pretty good article about how actively boosting a child's self-esteem often has the opposite effect to what a well-meaning adult intends.
The 5000 foot view is that in 1969 a guy named Nathaniel Braden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem a wildly popular book among academicians, whose whole point was that self-esteem is the single most important personality trait. True or not, his conclusions spawned the next 38 years of effort to boost self-esteem, particularly among "low social status" (read "poor and minority") children.
Many years later, Prof. Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve U, then a leading member of the self-esteem movement (as a CWRU alumn, I remember reading his abstracts at the time and thinking it was all ridiculous--yay me!) did a massive review of the research. He found something like 15000 research articles on the matter. His team began their review by establishing academic standards and throwing out articles that didn't meet them.
They ended up with 200 articles out of 15,000 that could be considered academic research quality. Whoops.
Of the 200 valid articles they soon realized that most either failed to establish the efficacy of self-esteem boosters or denied it outright. Double whoops.
Baumeister became a convert and now preaches the evils of vacuous self-esteem bolstering.
Then came Carol Dweck, whose 10 years of experiments in NYC public schools pretty much killed the "science" of self-esteem dead, dead, dead. FWIW, my wife, a public school teacher when she's not birthin' babies, is a huge fan of Ms. Dweck.
That said, old habits die hard and to this day we still have identical trophies for every kid on the soccer team, and we don't tell them whether they won or not.
Slashdotter parents, RTFA, Google all the names in it, read the research. You'll be convinced, too, and moreso than if you stuck to SciAm.
I love how everyone automatically assumes Capitol didn't immediately cut a check because they're EVIL.
They didn't immediately cut a check because that's standard procedure in this kind of situation. Why should they lose the interest on the better part of $100k? It would be a disservice to their stockholders to part with that money before they absolutely have to.
Regardless how they got to the point of owing the money (which, if not EVIL was at best unkind) it's bad business to pay your bills before they're due. In case of a court judgment, the bill isn't due until the court gives you the option of either writing a check or handing over your stuff--there isn't a time limit for paying, believe it or not.
Therefore there is an incentive for the creditor is to go to the court immediately and force the issue. Most creditors don't do that, either out of (perhaps misguided) nicety or because they're naive. In this case it sounds like the creditor 1) gave Capitol a month to pay of their own accord, then 2) sent a friendly email reminder, then 3) went to the court. It was nice of them to go through steps 1 and 2 first--it shows they're better people than the RIAA hacks, a Good Thing in what amounts to a publicity war between RIAA and music buyers/downloaders--but it wasn't necessary.
I've had to go through this exact process myself, only I added step 2a: send a much less friendly reminder via registered mail.
All my attempts to collect were ignored until I sent the county Sheriff to the loser's place of business with a subpoena for a listing of all their physical assets and all their bank information. Lo! and behold, I got a check within a couple days. Not because there was any real danger of their building being seized but because Johnny Law sent over an armed guy in uniform who parked a squad car in front of the building and then paraded around in front of all their employees (and any visitors who happened to be around) with a bunch of paperwork that made it clear they were in some kind of trouble. Embarrassment gets them every time.
Slashdot Mirror
...and it's the coder's best friend.
I was sort of assuming, when they mentioned in-the-field access to the system, they were going to develop some kind of iPhone app, like the stuff mentioned the other day.
So you're saying you don't want them to have backups of their systems?
Not being a facebook user I would find it amusing if a meteor took out their data center today and the site can't be restored on account of the ToS not allowing them to keep backups.
As in many cases with updated contracts (not even sure a ToS counts as a real contract), this is mostly just the paper being adjusted to reflect reality.
In addition to all the other reasons already outlined, it's because TV stations broadcast in the tens of thousands of watts--their electric bills are unbelievably high. To do both analog and digital side-by-side would bankrupt many many stations.
Just heard an interview with the photographer on NPR. It's semi-off-topic in that it doesn't have to do with the medium used for photographs but still an interesting piece I think. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99353598
$100billion? There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases. But most of those databases are already manned by DBAs.
Nonsense. There are thousands of hospitals alone and perhaps they all have single-system record keeping, but I doubt it. To take a famous example, the Cleveland Clinic is local to me, they employ about 800 IT staff; I know for a fact they have a cadre of Oracle DBAs as well as a team of SQL Server DBAs. I also know for a fact they have 200+ production databases throughout their organization--most of which contain patient records of some sort.
However my family doctor employs 0 IT staff. She uses commercial off-the-shelf software to manage her records, having gone digital a couple years ago. Yes, there's a database in there somewhere, but no DBA. And she still has tens of thousands of paper folders with paper records in them and no plan to digitize them--and don't forget this plan requires such records to be digitized. The logistics of doing such a thing for tens of thousands of single-doctor practices nationwide are staggering.
Again, I think it's a great project and we'd get way more than $100B back out of it in a generation, but if anything they underestimate the size of the project. I'm not saying it's complex, it's just huge and labor intensive.
Because they don't have any notion of interoperability and because an individual practitioner (or hospital, for that matter) won't realize any direct cost savings.
But interconnected health systems are key to patient well-being and cross-the-board cost savings. Health care specialists are great for fixing localized problems, but if my cardiologist and my dentist don't talk about my prolapsed mitrial valve, I can get an infection and drop dead sometime between having a mouth full of cotton and spitting into the little sink you can never quite reach from the chair. (OK, maybe not that fast but you get the point I hope.)
This is a big idea initiative that can benefit our society so greatly in so many ways it's staggering (consider the medical research possibilities of mining such a database, not to mention the possibility of genuine customer care). This is the kind of thing that government has to do because private industry has no motivation.
The problem is that precious few people around here (including me) would want to get involved doing technical work for the government. I have a feeling it won't be as easy or as cheap as they seem to think, even though at its heart it's a really easy (if labor-intensive) project, because a lot of the high-grade nerds can't stand the way government does things.
I used to work for a software company that provided automated telephone operator software. Among their clients was a small local phone company that provided pay phones to the SCDC for use in prison. Well, I shouldn't say "pay phones" exactly, they provided the ruggedized husks of pay phones without coin boxen and with the coin acceptors removed or welded shut. This was because the only kind of call allowed in prison is an outbound collect call of 5 minutes' duration. In theory. The prisoners would do an unbelievably competent phreaking job and we had to patch the software that controlled these phones every three to six months on account of new ways the prisoners would find to get around the calling restrictions. My favorite was where the prisoner would say something incoherent when prompted for a name that the phone switch would present to the call recipient. After a few tries they would often get someone gullible to accept the charges, and then they would somehow get this random person to set up a 3-way call with the person the prisoner really wanted to talk to, and have the whole thing billed to the random person's phone. Way back in the day, they used to use live human operators to set up the collect calls. The humans were slightly easier to take advantage of than the automated system that replaced them, and more likely to sue their employer for subjecting them to phone conversations with prisoners.
Birds use wind whenever possible to save their own energy. Altamont Pass is a migratory choke point in part because of the reliable high wind. Here in Ohio the prevailing winds are actually northeasterly in the fall and winter and from the southwest in the spring and summer. The fall winds help push the migratory birds south and the spring winds help them get north again.
Why wouldn't Toshiba just under-rate the batteries- effectively making 90% = 100%?
AC: The charges all go to 100%. Look, right across the board, 100%, 100%, 100% and... ...
WmLGann: Oh, I see. And most batteries go up to 90%?
AC: Exactly.
WmLGann: Does that mean it's more powerful? Does it deliver any more current?
AC: Well, it's 10% more, isn't it? It's not 90%. You see, most blokes, you know, will be watching porn at 90% charge. You're on 90% here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 90% on your charge. Where can you go from there? Where?
WmLGann: I don't know.
AC: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
WmLGann: Charge it up to 100%.
AC: 100%. Exactly. 10% more.
WmLGann: Why don't you just make 90% the full charge and make 90 be the top number and make that a little more?
AC:
AC: These go to 100%.
Seems counterintuitive to me. An object traveling from Titan to Earth would be falling into the Sun's gravity well. Some energy would be required to get the object out of the neighborhood of Saturn but the bulk of the acceleration to 29.7 km/s could occur naturally by falling, no? Not that it would be anything but silly to import methane from ~1 billion miles away.
I thought I read that the first ice that was uncovered sublimated over night. In fact I recall that was what made the scientists sure that the white rocks were ice. I would think that shavings made by a rasp (rather, a 5-figure space age rasp-like device developed by a subcontractor that wasn't Craftsman or Snap-on) would sublimate rather quickly. What am I missing?
We need more serious political parties, less winner-take-all elections, and more niche representation.
Do you partake of news materials at all? Have you ever?
Let's see...
Drought: Northern Georgia USA has been out of fresh water for months. Their current drought surpasses any on record for the area--don't know what tree rings etc. might say, but that's the historic record. The areas to the north and east, in the Carolinas have also experienced severe drought in the last decade. Eastern Texas has as well. Lake Mead in Nevada/Arizona, the lake behind Hoover Dam, is something like 9 feet low; if you've flown over it lately it's like looking at a half-empty bath tub with a big ring around it where the water level used to be. Droughts in the Horn of Africa have been so long-standing and well-publicized you should be embarrassed to have brought it up.
Famine: Famine is usually a human issue not an environmental issue, thanks to modern global food distribution channels. If nobody in Georgia can grow food, it won't lead to starvation because food can be trucked in from elsewhere. That said, there are still places in the world without much of a food distribution infrastructure. Again in the Horn of Africa it's practically impossible to deliver food from outside the area, and now impossible to grow it there, so people have been starving there for 20 years.
Flood: Great Britain, Central Europe and the Upper Midwestern USA have all experienced "500-year" floods within the last decade. However, once again (as always with climate change discussions) someone has managed to confuse "weather" with "climate." A flood, caused by a few days of heavy rain, is weather. A drought, caused by months or years of low precipitation, is climate. That said, three extremely severe floods in three far-flung areas in such a short time gives me pause.
Thanks for the typo correction.
Could just be the beer talking but I agree that "self-esteem" by itself is not a bad thing. It's the fatuous attempts to bolster it that wreak havoc.
Kids are a lot smarter than adults usually think. The research indicates that by age seven, they see through the constant brown-nosing by adults and the cases full of "participation" trophies. The kids conclude that either the adults can't evaluate their performance or don't care how well they do, or both. By obsessively elevating the dolts and laggards to spare their feelings, we create a disincentive for anyone to excel.
Essentially I agree with you but I think the issue is perhaps more pernicious and complex. Consider that by telling someone "you're smart" no matter what, one artificially creates a sort of "common denominator" in the praise-to-performance ratio. So when one steps on one's genitals but is told, "it's okay, you're smart", one then reasons that extra effort is unnecessary because the reward will come regardless of the outcome. We humans are inherently lazy, I guess, expending the least effort needed to obtain the reward. Kids, for whom testing boundaries is perhaps the number one occupation, will naturally try expending a little less effort each time just to see if they still get rewarded.
It reinforces my thinking that, as a father, I have a duty to be a dick from time to time. I only risk them being in therapy in 30 years if I fail to expend the effort to honestly evaluate my children and only to give praise where praise is due. Like any other relationship, the parent-child relationship is a lot of work. Good.
You mean I'm not smart just because a bunch of people told me so? Who knew?
New York Magazine published a pretty good article about how actively boosting a child's self-esteem often has the opposite effect to what a well-meaning adult intends.
The 5000 foot view is that in 1969 a guy named Nathaniel Braden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem a wildly popular book among academicians, whose whole point was that self-esteem is the single most important personality trait. True or not, his conclusions spawned the next 38 years of effort to boost self-esteem, particularly among "low social status" (read "poor and minority") children.
Many years later, Prof. Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve U, then a leading member of the self-esteem movement (as a CWRU alumn, I remember reading his abstracts at the time and thinking it was all ridiculous--yay me!) did a massive review of the research. He found something like 15000 research articles on the matter. His team began their review by establishing academic standards and throwing out articles that didn't meet them.
They ended up with 200 articles out of 15,000 that could be considered academic research quality. Whoops.
Of the 200 valid articles they soon realized that most either failed to establish the efficacy of self-esteem boosters or denied it outright. Double whoops.
Baumeister became a convert and now preaches the evils of vacuous self-esteem bolstering.
Then came Carol Dweck, whose 10 years of experiments in NYC public schools pretty much killed the "science" of self-esteem dead, dead, dead. FWIW, my wife, a public school teacher when she's not birthin' babies, is a huge fan of Ms. Dweck.
That said, old habits die hard and to this day we still have identical trophies for every kid on the soccer team, and we don't tell them whether they won or not.
Slashdotter parents, RTFA, Google all the names in it, read the research. You'll be convinced, too, and moreso than if you stuck to SciAm.
Not automatically. The court will order someone to collect, but you have to ask.
They didn't immediately cut a check because that's standard procedure in this kind of situation. Why should they lose the interest on the better part of $100k? It would be a disservice to their stockholders to part with that money before they absolutely have to.
Regardless how they got to the point of owing the money (which, if not EVIL was at best unkind) it's bad business to pay your bills before they're due. In case of a court judgment, the bill isn't due until the court gives you the option of either writing a check or handing over your stuff--there isn't a time limit for paying, believe it or not.
Therefore there is an incentive for the creditor is to go to the court immediately and force the issue. Most creditors don't do that, either out of (perhaps misguided) nicety or because they're naive. In this case it sounds like the creditor 1) gave Capitol a month to pay of their own accord, then 2) sent a friendly email reminder, then 3) went to the court. It was nice of them to go through steps 1 and 2 first--it shows they're better people than the RIAA hacks, a Good Thing in what amounts to a publicity war between RIAA and music buyers/downloaders--but it wasn't necessary.
I've had to go through this exact process myself, only I added step 2a: send a much less friendly reminder via registered mail.
All my attempts to collect were ignored until I sent the county Sheriff to the loser's place of business with a subpoena for a listing of all their physical assets and all their bank information. Lo! and behold, I got a check within a couple days. Not because there was any real danger of their building being seized but because Johnny Law sent over an armed guy in uniform who parked a squad car in front of the building and then paraded around in front of all their employees (and any visitors who happened to be around) with a bunch of paperwork that made it clear they were in some kind of trouble. Embarrassment gets them every time.
Many states allow the creditor to collect interest as well. I don't know about California but in Ohio it's 10% per year.