Basically? Not perfect, perhaps, but essentially correct? And most of the people here, who weren't in the courtroom to see and hear it all, and weren't part of the deliberations got it wrong? I'm shocked.
Minimum wage in the US (Federal) won't be $7.25 until next year. At it's inception in the early 70's, it wasn't indexed to inflation. If it had been, it'd be over $12 an hour. Some states set theirs higher than the federal and one or two are already a bit over $8. And on a "real" job, there are taxes - social security, medicare, workers comp, etc. come out of it. If you're paying someone $10 an hour, cash, they're essentially getting the equivalent of $15 or more on an over the table job. No benefits, which sucks, but if it's a part-time thing (like babysitting) someone's using to make ends meet or make a little extra money, it's not a bad deal.
Sure, paying someone under the table isn't legal, but for small stuff it happens all the time.
Evil? Really? Evil? Compared to, what, Blackwater, or other mercenaries / security contractors operating in that sphere? Or oil companies that are getting the cops in countries like Nigeria to "get rid of" local troublemakers? Or what ITT reportedly did in Chile to support the coup in 1973? Really? Microsoft? Evil? Gosh. I didn't realize that commercial software actually lead to rape, murder, pollution, infanticide, etc. As far as "evil" corporate behavior goes, Microsoft looks like a bunch of Boy Scouts. Do you really think a potentially life-destroying drug addiction is a valid comparison?
So the world was denied a large market share for WordPerfect or whatever. Big deal (and I say that as a former WordPerect user). There's not one truly serious issue facing the world today that would be different if Microsoft hadn't taken down a bunch of competitors. There's no worldwide utopia that would have occurred in the absence of a Microsoft monopoly on operating systems. We'd still have war, disease, famine, genocide, terrorism, pollution, halitosis, etc. And let's not forget that RMS would dislike WordPerfect just as much as Microsoft Word. They're SELLING software. Microsoft's practices should have been dealt with before they were, but it didn't happen that way. Ranting about it just sounds goofy at this point. And people could have decided to make the non-Wal-Mart choice and continued to buy WordPerfect. Most people want goods cheap, and they don't want to have to think about it. WordPerfect failed on both - didn't come with the computer and you had to decide to go buy it. Free Software often fails on the second. You have to decide to use it. And for people, even in developed countries, who are just trying to get through their daily lives, they don't really care what software they're using. Beyond Mac vs. PC, they're not even aware of it.
If Bill Gates now wants to spread around money to deal with disease and famine around the world, great. It's more than a lot of other wealthy people have done. I may not entirely approve of how he made the money, but it's not like he was an international weapons dealer, and he's trying to do something good for some folks who can't count on help from the US Government or their own governments. Stallman may not like everything that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests their money in, but the fact is that they expect to have the foundation expend 100% of its money over a period of time. MIT invests in a lot of companies that are questionable for a lot of reasons as well. Of course, the fact that RMS himself has benefited from wealthy organizations or benefactors who may not have always done the politically correct thing is something we're all supposed to ignore.
Gosh, you know, maybe I'm just wrong - if only the entire world had switched to Free Software fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have international terrorism, we'd all have plenty to eat, AIDS would have been cured and - even more importantly - no DRM! Gosh. If there wasn't DRM, all of those folks addicted to meth, crack and heroin obviously would have had job opportunities and perfect drug treatment.
And that's why RMS, while certainly a philosopher and an activist, also has a narrow focus that makes his opinion a little less valuable when he wanders outside of his core area of expertise. If he actually thinks the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a net negative for these countries, he needs to work on his sense of perspective. Sure, free software can help (for example, free hospital/clinic management software would be a big plus for a lot of places), but if you're worried about getting gunned down or whether your government is even allowing food shipments to your part of the country (hey, shout out to Burma and Sudan!), the software thing seems a bit lower on the priority list.
The rules changed about a year and a half ago, if I remember correctly - new Federal rules for civil procedures were put in place for discovery of electronic records. You can't bury them in paper - you're supposed to give them electronic copies of electronic records (unless they ask otherwise), and you need to give them the data in a format that they can read. Document metadata (Word edit histories, for example) can't be stripped out, etc.
It depends on the kind of applications you're running. Google is something of a singular case. A lot of businesses need to run a lot of small servers for dissimilar applications, not similar ones. If you're talking about business apps that don't play well together on a single server and you virtualize them, you can get a pair of 8-core servers (something like an HP Proliant DL380 G5) with an extra NIC, fibre channel HBA and 32 GB of RAM, plus local SAS drives.
You can easily run a dozen large VMs on one of those with room to spare (assuming some of them have 2GB or 3GB of RAM allocated to them). If you limit it to ten per box, that's twenty VMs, and you can migrate servers between them or fail them over in case of a fault. Those DL380's (if you have dynamic power savings turned on) can average under 400 watts of power draw each - so 40 watts per server. In our environment, we've got 5 hosts running a ton of VMs, some of which don't have to fail over (layer 4-7 switch, also a VM), so we're getting closer to 25 or 30 watts per VM. We'd have the SAN array anyway for our primary data storage, so that wasn't much of an extra. We're using fewer data center network ports, and few fibre channel ports. We've actually been able to triple the number of "servers" we're running while actually bringing energy use down as we've retired more older servers and replaced them with VMs. And it's been a net increase in fault tolerance as well.
Humming and tapping fingers / pens a lot is good too. The more tuneless the humming, the better. Occasionally, whistle a couple of notes out of tune. Then hum some more. Also, if you've got an environment where you might round a group of people up to go to lunch, start about 10 or 15 minutes earlier than usual.
Data centers themselves are actually (somewhat) easy to figure out - and to figure out how to conserve power, at least to some extent. Nobody's going to do unless they were planning to anyway, or have a financial motive. But at least it's a central location, you can identify where the power is going, etc. It's going to happen over time as the cost of energy goes up, more than likely. One major reason for inefficient data centers is actually a lack of money - you don't get the budget to rip and replace, so you have to keep tacking things on.
So the EPA likes it because it's tractable. But in many organizations, most IT-related energy use is actually at the edge - factoring in thousands of computers, monitors, printers, edge switches, wireless access points, VOIP phones or digital handsets (a simple analog phone on-hook uses almost no power), etc. Dozens of computers in an open office area adds a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. And as more and more equipment runs uses Ethernet and TCP/IP, you need more and more network switch ports, often delivering PoE. I think a lot of organizations are going to end up pointing fingers at their IT departments because they can identify the cost, and it's easier to blame one group in one location than to face the fact that everyone's incremental usage adds up to significant numbers.
The problem isn't the scientists, it's convincing industry and government that they have to give a damn. And you have to start at square one each time.
You know what? It isn't quality, it's the fact that they're almost entirely disconnected from the kinds of IT environments you find in American or European companies, agencies, schools, etc. They're working on products to spec, and they've never even seen the environment that the products are working in. So they aren't going to go to their manager, or to the product manager and say "hey, guys, if we do it this way, it's not going to work for customers in XYZ industry - they're relying on a feature in the old version". Or they just don't get how much a product may have to scale - you might be supporting tens of thousands of users with a particular application in a large company or university. They just don't know, and there's no way a specification is going to cover everything required. With the right experience they'd "get it", but that just doesn't happen until it's too late. So a lot of the software doesn't work well, and you waste a huge amount of time working around limitations. I've seen products from vendors "redesigned" by offshore teams who end up having to learn the same painful lessons the original group learned years earlier, running the customer through another round of crap. You're also losing a huge amount of institutional memory in places where this happens, and it matters. If you're supporting customers who have been using a product for 5+ years, when you're planning a new version it's a good idea to know why it works the way it works today. That's often being lost.
Well, they'd really like a zombie army made of our reanimated dead, but until then, they're going to have to settle for our computers. On the plus side (for the Air Force), they'll still need the living as pilots, though. In testing, the zombies really didn't have the reflexes needed for piloting aircraft.
Yeah, ATI seems to be a bit slow to the gate on a driver update that'll fix this. If you've got the 8.4 set (I think), everything works but rotation. I upgraded my home system (built) to the Catalyst 8.4 set prior to the SP3 upgrade, and it went OK - but I'm not using rotation.
You can do it - if you make sure that you're building an install image with the correct OEM drivers on board, booting with the generic HAL, etc. It sounds like HP isn't doing what they'd need to do to build a actual "universal" image. Hardly surprising - back when we used to buy HP where I work, HP was of little help preparing a custom system image for 500+ identical business computers. They just weren't set up to deal with it - we had to send an employee to HP. Contrast that with IBM/Lenovo - they actually know how to do this.
On point 3 - I heard an interview on a show called "On The Media" that is on public radio here in the US. One of the hosts (Bob Garfield) asked the Canadian woman he was interviewing (I think she was a law student?) if it had occurred to her that by bringing the complaint against McLean's she was providing ammunition to those making the claim that Muslims would use the tools of the West to take over the West. She seemed genuinely surprised at the notion, like it hadn't occurred to her that it could be seen that way. I thought it showed a certain naiveté. And yes, I'm a citizen of the United States, and our law is different in this regard. However, in western countries, the notion of a "free press" historically meant that you can set up your own press, not use or co-opt someone else's.
Frankly, I think freedom of expression, freedom of (or from) religion and full equality under the law (gender equality, anyone?) are about as fundamental as you get. And if the West isn't willing to stand up and actually say that those are bedrock principles that we won't compromise on, and that it's actually better (and I do believe it is), then we're completely screwed. The minimum price you ought to pay for the fruits of freedom is the occasional bruised ego, or hurt feelings or sharp word. Tough. You answer the person back, you use reason, to tell them why they're wrong, why you were offended. What was more horrifying - an offensive Danish editorial cartoon, or an international reaction including threats and violence designed to intimidate? The dialog then moves in the direction of Mr. Steyn and those like him - "See? There they go again!"
Yes, and current French law would actually have made it difficult - if not impossible - for French photographers such as Cartier-Bresson to practice their art, no? What about Doisneau and Ronis? Boubet? It seems like an entire period of French public life is going to be recorded but not published or displayed the way much of the 20th century was - due to fear of lawsuits. There are limits in the US, but generally anything that is taken in public, and is for editorial purposes (including artistic) is legal - commercial use (like advertising) requires a release. Sure, France can pass any law - but it's unfortunate that something like French street photography - which has had a particularly lyric quality to it - should be limited now. I would have enjoyed seeing what that tradition, reinvented with today's technology, might've been able to show. Bringing that humanist tradition to bear on the spontaneous moments of everyday public life would be especially welcome in today's world. I guess future generations will have to settle for mass-media portrayals of today's life, and news coverage of spectacle and tragedy. That's ok, if it's actually what the people of France want. It seems like something is being lost, though.
So far, no real issues. Also, no real compatibility problems, even with software that isn't "supported" under SP3. There may be issues with specific hardware, but it's not like Apple hasn't had issues (Panther upgrade wiping out external firewire drives ring a bell with anyone?). Yes, I'm sure that some computers - of all of the Windows XP systems that have shipped during the last (almost) 7 years - are going to have problems. And depending on who used earlier betas and release candidates, some hardware hasn't been tested yet. Sure, if you've got a configuration issue, a certain device driver version, etc. you might hit a problem nobody has run into before. If you're not willing to put up with something going wrong, don't rush to install a service pack for any piece of software, unless it addresses a problem you're seeing or a potential security vulnerability. Even if the vendor offers it to you.
Why? People have an unfailing ability to know which one of their friends and acquaintances they can trust. Just ask the folks from the former East Germany!
Of course, derivative, unofficial "guides" to books, series, etc. have been allowed for years, even in the face of legal action. How many unofficial Star Trek reference books have there been? Tolkien? Babylon 5? Buffy? Not even the lousy fanfic (or, as I like to call it, "fanfic"), but episode guides, plot outlines, character names, etc. That's pretty clearly allowed. The question is whether this went over the line. Even if it did, it would have to be in a very specific way, wouldn't it? However, it seems like she's attacking the entire concept of an unofficial reference to a copyrighted work.
Ok, so, let's say you've got a regulatory requirement to keep certain records for a long time (medical records are a good example of this). And you've got to guarantee that you can recover them no matter what. Even if the hospital is reduced to a smoking crater, or the actual company that made the backup software (or encryption software) went out of business 20 years ago. You could have a problem with conflicting regulations. You also have to factor in everything that could go wrong with the encryption system (either hardware or software based) as part of your disaster recovery plan. That's fine in the sort term, but ten years out, 20 years out, that's difficult. I'm not saying they shouldn't try, I'm just saying (having had to even worry about this a little, as well as talking to folks who have worked in healthcare) that it's not always as easy as you'd think, due to technical, budget and regulatory reasons. One way around this, of course, is to treat archiving / records retention as a different problem than backups / disaster recovery (which it is) and make sure you're using the right tool for the job. A lot of legacy systems make that split more difficult. Laptops, I agree, there's not really an excuse.
Yes, in fact, you can. I know of one data destruction company in NJ that will work with Dunbar Armored and can transport stuff from most areas to their facility. However, that type of transportation could be well beyond the budget of many organizations.
You're not really the customer for this if you're thinking retail. Sure, it's a patch set for end-users, but the main target is corporate / volume license customers (for example, higher ed) customers who want updated media, drivers, etc. and don't want to move to Vista yet. They're still going to be able to get and use XP (downgrade rights) via their license agreement, and many will probably use XP for another couple of years.
The product activation upgrade doesn't have any effect on patching existing systems - it's for slipstreamed media. Basically adds the feature to add the license key and activate (WGA) after installation instead of being prompted for it in the middle of the installation. They're not backporting the whole Vista activation / KMS / etc scheme to XP. If they did, their corporate customers would go nuts. Nobody wants to have to re-engineer XP deployment techniques at this point. And a bunch of corporate customers will be using XP for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically? Not perfect, perhaps, but essentially correct? And most of the people here, who weren't in the courtroom to see and hear it all, and weren't part of the deliberations got it wrong? I'm shocked.
when I first saw the headline about Sun's "Wonderland", I immediately thought of this . . .
http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/ABNF/sun_microsystems.htm
Minimum wage in the US (Federal) won't be $7.25 until next year. At it's inception in the early 70's, it wasn't indexed to inflation. If it had been, it'd be over $12 an hour. Some states set theirs higher than the federal and one or two are already a bit over $8. And on a "real" job, there are taxes - social security, medicare, workers comp, etc. come out of it. If you're paying someone $10 an hour, cash, they're essentially getting the equivalent of $15 or more on an over the table job. No benefits, which sucks, but if it's a part-time thing (like babysitting) someone's using to make ends meet or make a little extra money, it's not a bad deal.
Sure, paying someone under the table isn't legal, but for small stuff it happens all the time.
Evil? Really? Evil? Compared to, what, Blackwater, or other mercenaries / security contractors operating in that sphere? Or oil companies that are getting the cops in countries like Nigeria to "get rid of" local troublemakers? Or what ITT reportedly did in Chile to support the coup in 1973? Really? Microsoft? Evil? Gosh. I didn't realize that commercial software actually lead to rape, murder, pollution, infanticide, etc. As far as "evil" corporate behavior goes, Microsoft looks like a bunch of Boy Scouts. Do you really think a potentially life-destroying drug addiction is a valid comparison?
So the world was denied a large market share for WordPerfect or whatever. Big deal (and I say that as a former WordPerect user). There's not one truly serious issue facing the world today that would be different if Microsoft hadn't taken down a bunch of competitors. There's no worldwide utopia that would have occurred in the absence of a Microsoft monopoly on operating systems. We'd still have war, disease, famine, genocide, terrorism, pollution, halitosis, etc. And let's not forget that RMS would dislike WordPerfect just as much as Microsoft Word. They're SELLING software. Microsoft's practices should have been dealt with before they were, but it didn't happen that way. Ranting about it just sounds goofy at this point. And people could have decided to make the non-Wal-Mart choice and continued to buy WordPerfect. Most people want goods cheap, and they don't want to have to think about it. WordPerfect failed on both - didn't come with the computer and you had to decide to go buy it. Free Software often fails on the second. You have to decide to use it. And for people, even in developed countries, who are just trying to get through their daily lives, they don't really care what software they're using. Beyond Mac vs. PC, they're not even aware of it.
If Bill Gates now wants to spread around money to deal with disease and famine around the world, great. It's more than a lot of other wealthy people have done. I may not entirely approve of how he made the money, but it's not like he was an international weapons dealer, and he's trying to do something good for some folks who can't count on help from the US Government or their own governments. Stallman may not like everything that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests their money in, but the fact is that they expect to have the foundation expend 100% of its money over a period of time. MIT invests in a lot of companies that are questionable for a lot of reasons as well. Of course, the fact that RMS himself has benefited from wealthy organizations or benefactors who may not have always done the politically correct thing is something we're all supposed to ignore.
Gosh, you know, maybe I'm just wrong - if only the entire world had switched to Free Software fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have international terrorism, we'd all have plenty to eat, AIDS would have been cured and - even more importantly - no DRM! Gosh. If there wasn't DRM, all of those folks addicted to meth, crack and heroin obviously would have had job opportunities and perfect drug treatment.
And that's why RMS, while certainly a philosopher and an activist, also has a narrow focus that makes his opinion a little less valuable when he wanders outside of his core area of expertise. If he actually thinks the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a net negative for these countries, he needs to work on his sense of perspective. Sure, free software can help (for example, free hospital/clinic management software would be a big plus for a lot of places), but if you're worried about getting gunned down or whether your government is even allowing food shipments to your part of the country (hey, shout out to Burma and Sudan!), the software thing seems a bit lower on the priority list.
The rules changed about a year and a half ago, if I remember correctly - new Federal rules for civil procedures were put in place for discovery of electronic records. You can't bury them in paper - you're supposed to give them electronic copies of electronic records (unless they ask otherwise), and you need to give them the data in a format that they can read. Document metadata (Word edit histories, for example) can't be stripped out, etc.
When he gets up there and realizes that he can't make the world move in any direction he wants like he can using Google Earth.
You can easily run a dozen large VMs on one of those with room to spare (assuming some of them have 2GB or 3GB of RAM allocated to them). If you limit it to ten per box, that's twenty VMs, and you can migrate servers between them or fail them over in case of a fault. Those DL380's (if you have dynamic power savings turned on) can average under 400 watts of power draw each - so 40 watts per server. In our environment, we've got 5 hosts running a ton of VMs, some of which don't have to fail over (layer 4-7 switch, also a VM), so we're getting closer to 25 or 30 watts per VM. We'd have the SAN array anyway for our primary data storage, so that wasn't much of an extra. We're using fewer data center network ports, and few fibre channel ports. We've actually been able to triple the number of "servers" we're running while actually bringing energy use down as we've retired more older servers and replaced them with VMs. And it's been a net increase in fault tolerance as well.
Humming and tapping fingers / pens a lot is good too. The more tuneless the humming, the better. Occasionally, whistle a couple of notes out of tune. Then hum some more. Also, if you've got an environment where you might round a group of people up to go to lunch, start about 10 or 15 minutes earlier than usual.
So the EPA likes it because it's tractable. But in many organizations, most IT-related energy use is actually at the edge - factoring in thousands of computers, monitors, printers, edge switches, wireless access points, VOIP phones or digital handsets (a simple analog phone on-hook uses almost no power), etc. Dozens of computers in an open office area adds a significant amount of heat that has to be removed. And as more and more equipment runs uses Ethernet and TCP/IP, you need more and more network switch ports, often delivering PoE. I think a lot of organizations are going to end up pointing fingers at their IT departments because they can identify the cost, and it's easier to blame one group in one location than to face the fact that everyone's incremental usage adds up to significant numbers.
The problem isn't the scientists, it's convincing industry and government that they have to give a damn. And you have to start at square one each time.
He's over there.
SPLITTER!
You know what? It isn't quality, it's the fact that they're almost entirely disconnected from the kinds of IT environments you find in American or European companies, agencies, schools, etc. They're working on products to spec, and they've never even seen the environment that the products are working in. So they aren't going to go to their manager, or to the product manager and say "hey, guys, if we do it this way, it's not going to work for customers in XYZ industry - they're relying on a feature in the old version". Or they just don't get how much a product may have to scale - you might be supporting tens of thousands of users with a particular application in a large company or university. They just don't know, and there's no way a specification is going to cover everything required. With the right experience they'd "get it", but that just doesn't happen until it's too late. So a lot of the software doesn't work well, and you waste a huge amount of time working around limitations. I've seen products from vendors "redesigned" by offshore teams who end up having to learn the same painful lessons the original group learned years earlier, running the customer through another round of crap. You're also losing a huge amount of institutional memory in places where this happens, and it matters. If you're supporting customers who have been using a product for 5+ years, when you're planning a new version it's a good idea to know why it works the way it works today. That's often being lost.
Well, they'd really like a zombie army made of our reanimated dead, but until then, they're going to have to settle for our computers. On the plus side (for the Air Force), they'll still need the living as pilots, though. In testing, the zombies really didn't have the reflexes needed for piloting aircraft.
Yeah, ATI seems to be a bit slow to the gate on a driver update that'll fix this. If you've got the 8.4 set (I think), everything works but rotation. I upgraded my home system (built) to the Catalyst 8.4 set prior to the SP3 upgrade, and it went OK - but I'm not using rotation.
You can do it - if you make sure that you're building an install image with the correct OEM drivers on board, booting with the generic HAL, etc. It sounds like HP isn't doing what they'd need to do to build a actual "universal" image. Hardly surprising - back when we used to buy HP where I work, HP was of little help preparing a custom system image for 500+ identical business computers. They just weren't set up to deal with it - we had to send an employee to HP. Contrast that with IBM/Lenovo - they actually know how to do this.
Frankly, I think freedom of expression, freedom of (or from) religion and full equality under the law (gender equality, anyone?) are about as fundamental as you get. And if the West isn't willing to stand up and actually say that those are bedrock principles that we won't compromise on, and that it's actually better (and I do believe it is), then we're completely screwed. The minimum price you ought to pay for the fruits of freedom is the occasional bruised ego, or hurt feelings or sharp word. Tough. You answer the person back, you use reason, to tell them why they're wrong, why you were offended. What was more horrifying - an offensive Danish editorial cartoon, or an international reaction including threats and violence designed to intimidate? The dialog then moves in the direction of Mr. Steyn and those like him - "See? There they go again!"
Yes, and current French law would actually have made it difficult - if not impossible - for French photographers such as Cartier-Bresson to practice their art, no? What about Doisneau and Ronis? Boubet? It seems like an entire period of French public life is going to be recorded but not published or displayed the way much of the 20th century was - due to fear of lawsuits. There are limits in the US, but generally anything that is taken in public, and is for editorial purposes (including artistic) is legal - commercial use (like advertising) requires a release. Sure, France can pass any law - but it's unfortunate that something like French street photography - which has had a particularly lyric quality to it - should be limited now. I would have enjoyed seeing what that tradition, reinvented with today's technology, might've been able to show. Bringing that humanist tradition to bear on the spontaneous moments of everyday public life would be especially welcome in today's world. I guess future generations will have to settle for mass-media portrayals of today's life, and news coverage of spectacle and tragedy. That's ok, if it's actually what the people of France want. It seems like something is being lost, though.
So far, no real issues. Also, no real compatibility problems, even with software that isn't "supported" under SP3. There may be issues with specific hardware, but it's not like Apple hasn't had issues (Panther upgrade wiping out external firewire drives ring a bell with anyone?). Yes, I'm sure that some computers - of all of the Windows XP systems that have shipped during the last (almost) 7 years - are going to have problems. And depending on who used earlier betas and release candidates, some hardware hasn't been tested yet. Sure, if you've got a configuration issue, a certain device driver version, etc. you might hit a problem nobody has run into before. If you're not willing to put up with something going wrong, don't rush to install a service pack for any piece of software, unless it addresses a problem you're seeing or a potential security vulnerability. Even if the vendor offers it to you.
Why? People have an unfailing ability to know which one of their friends and acquaintances they can trust. Just ask the folks from the former East Germany!
Of course, derivative, unofficial "guides" to books, series, etc. have been allowed for years, even in the face of legal action. How many unofficial Star Trek reference books have there been? Tolkien? Babylon 5? Buffy? Not even the lousy fanfic (or, as I like to call it, "fanfic"), but episode guides, plot outlines, character names, etc. That's pretty clearly allowed. The question is whether this went over the line. Even if it did, it would have to be in a very specific way, wouldn't it? However, it seems like she's attacking the entire concept of an unofficial reference to a copyrighted work.
No, there's a difference between an appointment and a hire. Examiners are hired, not appointed, if I'm not mistaken.
Ok, so, let's say you've got a regulatory requirement to keep certain records for a long time (medical records are a good example of this). And you've got to guarantee that you can recover them no matter what. Even if the hospital is reduced to a smoking crater, or the actual company that made the backup software (or encryption software) went out of business 20 years ago. You could have a problem with conflicting regulations. You also have to factor in everything that could go wrong with the encryption system (either hardware or software based) as part of your disaster recovery plan. That's fine in the sort term, but ten years out, 20 years out, that's difficult. I'm not saying they shouldn't try, I'm just saying (having had to even worry about this a little, as well as talking to folks who have worked in healthcare) that it's not always as easy as you'd think, due to technical, budget and regulatory reasons. One way around this, of course, is to treat archiving / records retention as a different problem than backups / disaster recovery (which it is) and make sure you're using the right tool for the job. A lot of legacy systems make that split more difficult. Laptops, I agree, there's not really an excuse.
Yes, in fact, you can. I know of one data destruction company in NJ that will work with Dunbar Armored and can transport stuff from most areas to their facility. However, that type of transportation could be well beyond the budget of many organizations.
You're not really the customer for this if you're thinking retail. Sure, it's a patch set for end-users, but the main target is corporate / volume license customers (for example, higher ed) customers who want updated media, drivers, etc. and don't want to move to Vista yet. They're still going to be able to get and use XP (downgrade rights) via their license agreement, and many will probably use XP for another couple of years.
The product activation upgrade doesn't have any effect on patching existing systems - it's for slipstreamed media. Basically adds the feature to add the license key and activate (WGA) after installation instead of being prompted for it in the middle of the installation. They're not backporting the whole Vista activation / KMS / etc scheme to XP. If they did, their corporate customers would go nuts. Nobody wants to have to re-engineer XP deployment techniques at this point. And a bunch of corporate customers will be using XP for a while.