The problem is that that Kickstarter is really nothing more than distributed venture capital. Except that normal venture capital gives you a share of the company or future profits. That two-way exchange makes it clear what you are getting for your money - part ownership of the company. As a part-owner/investor, you're fully aware of the risk that comes with it - you know you could lose all your money and have nothing to show for it if the company should fail.
Kickstarter is explicitly not a VC platform. A kickstarter pledge isn't an investment, it's a gift. The "thank you rewards" are the equivalent of the tote bag you get for pledging to PBS. Kickstarter was started as an alternative to fund projects that couldn't get funding through traditional avenues of grants, patronage, or VC. This was a way to get the $50k for your student film without maxing your parents' credit cards.
Free speech applies to your interactions with the government - it does not apply to a private company.
Who says that?
The first amendment says that. It prohibits the government from restraining speech or establishing a state religion ("..the government shall make no law..."). To the extent that other non-state actors are forced to respect the 1st amendment, it's usually because they are acting as agents of the government because a law delegates regulatory authority to them or because they are accepting public money to perform a service.
Free speech applies to private universities. Private universities usually have free speech, because college teachers demanded it and organized to get it.
Many if not most universities accept government subsidies, to a certain extent they are government actors and may have part of their funding tied to respecting civil rights.
Free speech applies to private organizations. If I join a union, I should have free speech to criticize that union.
Free speech is a right and principle. It applies everywhere. We should have free speech everywhere. We don't always have it. You only get free speech if you fight for it.
And all of these organizations have the right to respond in any legal manner they want to in response to your speech. The union might kick you out (or not, there are a lot of other laws and regulations covering union behavior). Your employer might fire you if they don't like what you have to say. Google is free to decline to do business with you if they don't like the message of your ad.
You might have free speech, but no one is obligated to facilitate the distribution of your speech unless they are operating as a common carrier (e.g. the phone company).
And yet, the federal government makes loans to grad students in the 6% to 7% range. A failing tech company with a billionaire owner gets low interest loans because of the potential for the future, but low and middle income grad students, who really are the future get high rate loans.
To be fair, these are unsecured loans. Yes, the rate is higher than the ~4% you would get for a mortgage, but it's better than the 18% you would pay on a credit card and on par with the rate you pay on a car loan. The crazy part is that you are barred from refinancing your student debt.
In the US, there are two overriding issues with the EHR - getting a bill out and getting a bill out.
There's a distinction here that is being missed between a Electronic Health Record (EHR) and a Practice Management System (PMS). The PMS usually handles scheduling, billing, claims, remittances, and maybe registration -- the business side of healthcare. The EHR holds the patient's actual clinical data. These systems can and should talk to each other: the EMR will need the ADT (Admit/Discharge/Transfer) feed from the PMS and the PMS will need the procedure codes to bill for from the EHR. However, the PMS is not a health record and shouldn't be used as one. You can't get a proper continuity of care record out of a financial tool and likewise will have a hard time doing billing with a clinical tool: they're specialized for different use cases.
Unless you are at family practice, the docs don't usually mess around in the practice management software: it's more of a tool for the front desk and accountants. On the PMS side we've had pretty good standardization of formats dues to HIPAA. The government had a pretty good lever here to force compliance: Medicare. When HIPAA went into effect, CMS set a deadline that sometime in 2004 (IIRC) they would no longer accept non-X12 claims. Since Medicare/caid are such a huge part of everyone's revenue stream, everyone had a real motivation to comply. This worked so well that when I left my previous job in 2012, our claims clearinghouse division was actually shrinking because the software to connect directly to insurers had become a commodity feature in most practice management systems.
There is, as far as I know, no equivalent government body that everyone interacts with for clinical data that could force a similar standardization across EHR vendors. I know where I worked we tried to support the IHE profiles as much as we could, but I don't know how wide-spread that behavior is.
Sorry for double posting, but one other thing to note is this...behind all the whizzy new web interface screens, many EHR systems are based on some of the oldest, creakiest standards imaginable, including a programming language-and-database combo called MUMPS. Look it up - it's positively ancient, and it should be obvious why they have trouble finding people willing to specialize in writing code for it.
When I first started in the healthcare industry almost in 1997 as an intern, my first job was writing MUMPS interface routines to extract referral data for a web interface. The system in question was running on a VAX/VMS cluster and ran a major midewestern HMO's operations.
The funny thing is when NoSQL became a buzzword a few years ago, thanks to my exposure to MUMPS, I instantly recognized it for what it was: 70's-era hierarchical database technology, repackaged for a new generation.
That's just for clinical data. There are a whole other set of standard for financial/claims records (X12) and pharmacy records/scripts (NCPDP).
The problem is that medical data is pretty complicated and often the context of the document is as important as the content. You almost always have to massage documents coming in even if they are ostensibly formatted to a standard you consume. You have to normalize units, make sure all the fields are part of the subset of the standard your system supports, etc.
And that doesn't even begin to get into tracking patient consent, tracking identity across multiple orgs, depts, and visits (MPI,PIX/PDQ), plus access restrictions and emergency access exceptions.
It would be awesome if this could be part of a men's liberation movement, like how women were liberated in the 60s when the pill became available.
Was it the pill that led to women's liberation? Or was it penicillin? The pill allows women to have sex without getting pregnant. Penicillin allowed people to have sex without getting diseases. AIDS has somewhat rolled that back.
Before HIV, there was still always Herpes, Hepatitis, HPV.... e.g. anything viral. People were just more ignorant of STDs 50 years ago, but that doesn't meant they still weren't getting them. You're still going to want a condom on the first date no matter how many new types of contraception get invented.
Version Numbers in general are outdated for application. The line between a Major and Minor version is huge. We have been on Mac OS X (10) for 14 years. with have been getting point updates over the time. Microsoft during that time has had 4 Major updates (That is with the insane longevity of XP).
It depends on what you are talking about. The internal version number for Windows 7 is 6.1.x (Windows 8.1 is v6.3). So if we are going by marketing-driven release numbers, then there have been 6 or so major Windows NT release since 1996 (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8). However, if you go by the engineering version number there have been just 2: Window 2000 was NT v5.0 and Windows Vista was NT v6.0.
How about putting in place policies that incentivize people to live near their workplaces, don't have to drive to go to a shopping mall, reduce the need for long-distance business travel, etc. Not only would that improve "traffic", but actually make people's lives easier and better as a bonus. Worth a thought, eh?
Except there is no long-term employment stability anymore. I am not going to uproot my family, sell my house, have my kids change schools, and spend thousands of dollars to move every time I change jobs just so I can live within a car-free commuting distance of my work place. I live very close to the T in Boston and I used to have a nice 30-minute commute downtown. That job evaporated and my new place in Cambridge, which is two trains and one bus transfer away by public transit. This is over 90 minutes each way. Or I could drive 30 minutes, which is what I do.
Most GPs aren't scientists. They are basically "meat mechanics". They learn the best practices in their field when they go to school and if they are good they keep up with changes to practices. But they are people too and are still susceptible to falling prey to fads and superstition even if their education provides them some resistance.
I think the basic problem is that getting rid of them would require an act of Congress. That's a place filled with old guys who fondly remember using pennies to pay for bottled cokes back in the '50's.
Hey, as recently as the 80's when I was a kid, you could still buy penny candy in the literal sense (e.g. $0.01 = 1 Swedish Fish). I don't know if that's true anywhere anymore though.
And a little advice to Valve, next time have developers familiar with Linux working on your Linux client. That/* is how a Windows developer would write the command to delete a directory if they simply looked up the equivalent command for Linux.
A competent Windows developer would probably just write: if exist "%STEAMROOT%" rmdir/Q/S "%STEAMROOT%" no dangerous glob needed.
It kind of floors me that they aren't doing some kind of check that the directory tree they are about to delete actually looks like a Steam install before deleting it. e.g. check that ClientRegistry.blob file or SteamApps directory exists under $STEAMHOME.
How does the FDA draw the line between 'must be approved' and 'not our problem' for devices that connect to a greater or lesser degree to other equipment?
I can only speak to IT software since I am a software developer, but I worked for many years in the field writing both practice management (scheduling, claims processing, etc) and clinical (IHEs, patient records, RX) software. The way it worked at the time is that you basically told the FDA if you wanted to be regulated. i.e. it was up to the company to say: yes, this software constitutes a medical device and should be regulated.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that cannabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
By that measure, so is alcohol, or any number of other drugs that are sold over the counter. Yes it should be age restricted, but the point is that it is not any more dangerous than plenty of other substances that are legal. It's certainly less dangerous than cigarettes.
We regret the inconvenience. The move that was to replace the move that has been yanked, has been yanked. Those responsible for sacking the ones responsible for yanking the movie to replace the yanked movie wish you to know that they have been sacked.
It is now cost effective for governments to micromanage EVERYONE'S life.
The cameras may be next-to-free, but the cost to review their video and type up laborious transcripts isn't...yet.
Yes, but if they have hundreds of hours of tape on everyone, then whenever a government official wants to compel you to do something, all they have to do is threaten to laboriously review your tapes.
Don't challenge this eminent domain taking, or else we'll review your tapes. Don't fight this speeding ticket, don't attend that protest, don't report that dirty cop, etc.
Government forcing medical procedures on anyone is really not something we want, especially since government won't take responsibility for the (admittedly unlikely) consequences of a bad result.
If you are a US citizen, I don't think you could get out of producing a document the court ordered you to supply by airmailing it to a confederate in another country. Similarly, if the data in question are related to Microsoft's US operations, then MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US, should be required to produce them.
Why would Sony have employee medical records? Not likely legal if in the USA.
It's not unheard of for employers to be self-insured, in which case the employer is itself a HIPAA covered entity. This might be true even if a third party like Blue Cross administers the plan.
fair enough, I should have been more specific. Anything with pseudoephrine has been behind the counter for years. I'm talking about a lot of stores now have a blanket policy on any cold medicine regardless of ingredients
but I stand my my point regardless if you can make meth with it. How about instead of regulating things that could potentially be used to make bad things, we simply go after people who actually DO bad things. Stop inconveniencing the majority because of a very VERY small minority
Many cough formulas contain dextromethorphan, a mild dissociative that can be abused recreationally. When they check IDs for over-the-counter stuff, they're probably trying to screen out robotripping teenagers, not people cooking meth.
Actually naming the project here would help draw attention to it
It also might get them fired. It sounds like the author still works for the company. Posting negatively about your employer in a public forum is a good way to draw unwanted attention to yourself as well.
For starters, Ebola apparently has a 70% mortality rate. Additionally, Ebola kills people who are otherwise perfectly healthy. The flu does not.
Some flus are absolutely more deadly for healthy people. Part of what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly was that it could induce a cytokine storm resulting in multiple organ failure. Since the release of cytokines is an inflammatory immune response, the better your immune system the worse off you are. Thus a young, fit person with a healthy immune system is more at risk than an infant with a undeveloped immune system, or an elderly person with a failing one.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that that Kickstarter is really nothing more than distributed venture capital. Except that normal venture capital gives you a share of the company or future profits. That two-way exchange makes it clear what you are getting for your money - part ownership of the company. As a part-owner/investor, you're fully aware of the risk that comes with it - you know you could lose all your money and have nothing to show for it if the company should fail.
Kickstarter is explicitly not a VC platform. A kickstarter pledge isn't an investment, it's a gift. The "thank you rewards" are the equivalent of the tote bag you get for pledging to PBS. Kickstarter was started as an alternative to fund projects that couldn't get funding through traditional avenues of grants, patronage, or VC. This was a way to get the $50k for your student film without maxing your parents' credit cards.
Free speech applies to your interactions with the government - it does not apply to a private company.
Who says that?
The first amendment says that. It prohibits the government from restraining speech or establishing a state religion ("..the government shall make no law..."). To the extent that other non-state actors are forced to respect the 1st amendment, it's usually because they are acting as agents of the government because a law delegates regulatory authority to them or because they are accepting public money to perform a service.
Free speech applies to private universities. Private universities usually have free speech, because college teachers demanded it and organized to get it.
Many if not most universities accept government subsidies, to a certain extent they are government actors and may have part of their funding tied to respecting civil rights.
Free speech applies to private organizations. If I join a union, I should have free speech to criticize that union.
Free speech is a right and principle. It applies everywhere. We should have free speech everywhere. We don't always have it. You only get free speech if you fight for it.
And all of these organizations have the right to respond in any legal manner they want to in response to your speech. The union might kick you out (or not, there are a lot of other laws and regulations covering union behavior). Your employer might fire you if they don't like what you have to say. Google is free to decline to do business with you if they don't like the message of your ad.
You might have free speech, but no one is obligated to facilitate the distribution of your speech unless they are operating as a common carrier (e.g. the phone company).
To be fair, these are unsecured loans. Yes, the rate is higher than the ~4% you would get for a mortgage, but it's better than the 18% you would pay on a credit card and on par with the rate you pay on a car loan. The crazy part is that you are barred from refinancing your student debt.
I think you might be cherry-picking neighborhoods. You can get into a single family in Boston for under $500k if you are patient.
In the US, there are two overriding issues with the EHR - getting a bill out and getting a bill out.
There's a distinction here that is being missed between a Electronic Health Record (EHR) and a Practice Management System (PMS). The PMS usually handles scheduling, billing, claims, remittances, and maybe registration -- the business side of healthcare. The EHR holds the patient's actual clinical data. These systems can and should talk to each other: the EMR will need the ADT (Admit/Discharge/Transfer) feed from the PMS and the PMS will need the procedure codes to bill for from the EHR. However, the PMS is not a health record and shouldn't be used as one. You can't get a proper continuity of care record out of a financial tool and likewise will have a hard time doing billing with a clinical tool: they're specialized for different use cases.
Unless you are at family practice, the docs don't usually mess around in the practice management software: it's more of a tool for the front desk and accountants. On the PMS side we've had pretty good standardization of formats dues to HIPAA. The government had a pretty good lever here to force compliance: Medicare. When HIPAA went into effect, CMS set a deadline that sometime in 2004 (IIRC) they would no longer accept non-X12 claims. Since Medicare/caid are such a huge part of everyone's revenue stream, everyone had a real motivation to comply. This worked so well that when I left my previous job in 2012, our claims clearinghouse division was actually shrinking because the software to connect directly to insurers had become a commodity feature in most practice management systems.
There is, as far as I know, no equivalent government body that everyone interacts with for clinical data that could force a similar standardization across EHR vendors. I know where I worked we tried to support the IHE profiles as much as we could, but I don't know how wide-spread that behavior is.
Sorry for double posting, but one other thing to note is this...behind all the whizzy new web interface screens, many EHR systems are based on some of the oldest, creakiest standards imaginable, including a programming language-and-database combo called MUMPS. Look it up - it's positively ancient, and it should be obvious why they have trouble finding people willing to specialize in writing code for it.
When I first started in the healthcare industry almost in 1997 as an intern, my first job was writing MUMPS interface routines to extract referral data for a web interface. The system in question was running on a VAX/VMS cluster and ran a major midewestern HMO's operations.
The funny thing is when NoSQL became a buzzword a few years ago, thanks to my exposure to MUMPS, I instantly recognized it for what it was: 70's-era hierarchical database technology, repackaged for a new generation.
There are already industry standards for EMR
Common Document Architecture (CDA) - provides formats for the interchange of data built on the OASIS schema.
Integrating Healthcare in the Enterprise - defines profiles for implementing technologies in an interoperable manner.
Open eHealth - open source baseline implementation of the above.
That's just for clinical data. There are a whole other set of standard for financial/claims records (X12) and pharmacy records/scripts (NCPDP).
The problem is that medical data is pretty complicated and often the context of the document is as important as the content. You almost always have to massage documents coming in even if they are ostensibly formatted to a standard you consume. You have to normalize units, make sure all the fields are part of the subset of the standard your system supports, etc.
And that doesn't even begin to get into tracking patient consent, tracking identity across multiple orgs, depts, and visits (MPI,PIX/PDQ), plus access restrictions and emergency access exceptions.
It would be awesome if this could be part of a men's liberation movement, like how women were liberated in the 60s when the pill became available.
Was it the pill that led to women's liberation? Or was it penicillin? The pill allows women to have sex without getting pregnant. Penicillin allowed people to have sex without getting diseases. AIDS has somewhat rolled that back.
Before HIV, there was still always Herpes, Hepatitis, HPV.... e.g. anything viral. People were just more ignorant of STDs 50 years ago, but that doesn't meant they still weren't getting them. You're still going to want a condom on the first date no matter how many new types of contraception get invented.
Version Numbers in general are outdated for application. The line between a Major and Minor version is huge.
We have been on Mac OS X (10) for 14 years. with have been getting point updates over the time.
Microsoft during that time has had 4 Major updates (That is with the insane longevity of XP).
It depends on what you are talking about. The internal version number for Windows 7 is 6.1.x (Windows 8.1 is v6.3). So if we are going by marketing-driven release numbers, then there have been 6 or so major Windows NT release since 1996 (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8). However, if you go by the engineering version number there have been just 2: Window 2000 was NT v5.0 and Windows Vista was NT v6.0.
How about putting in place policies that incentivize people to live near their workplaces, don't have to drive to go to a shopping mall, reduce the need for long-distance business travel, etc. Not only would that improve "traffic", but actually make people's lives easier and better as a bonus. Worth a thought, eh?
Except there is no long-term employment stability anymore. I am not going to uproot my family, sell my house, have my kids change schools, and spend thousands of dollars to move every time I change jobs just so I can live within a car-free commuting distance of my work place. I live very close to the T in Boston and I used to have a nice 30-minute commute downtown. That job evaporated and my new place in Cambridge, which is two trains and one bus transfer away by public transit. This is over 90 minutes each way. Or I could drive 30 minutes, which is what I do.
Most GPs aren't scientists. They are basically "meat mechanics". They learn the best practices in their field when they go to school and if they are good they keep up with changes to practices. But they are people too and are still susceptible to falling prey to fads and superstition even if their education provides them some resistance.
I think the basic problem is that getting rid of them would require an act of Congress. That's a place filled with old guys who fondly remember using pennies to pay for bottled cokes back in the '50's.
Hey, as recently as the 80's when I was a kid, you could still buy penny candy in the literal sense (e.g. $0.01 = 1 Swedish Fish). I don't know if that's true anywhere anymore though.
And a little advice to Valve, next time have developers familiar with Linux working on your Linux client. That /* is how a Windows developer would write the command to delete a directory if they simply looked up the equivalent command for Linux.
A competent Windows developer would probably just write: /Q /S "%STEAMROOT%"
if exist "%STEAMROOT%" rmdir
no dangerous glob needed.
It kind of floors me that they aren't doing some kind of check that the directory tree they are about to delete actually looks like a Steam install before deleting it. e.g. check that ClientRegistry.blob file or SteamApps directory exists under $STEAMHOME.
I can only speak to IT software since I am a software developer, but I worked for many years in the field writing both practice management (scheduling, claims processing, etc) and clinical (IHEs, patient records, RX) software. The way it worked at the time is that you basically told the FDA if you wanted to be regulated. i.e. it was up to the company to say: yes, this software constitutes a medical device and should be regulated.
See user name.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that cannabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
By that measure, so is alcohol, or any number of other drugs that are sold over the counter. Yes it should be age restricted, but the point is that it is not any more dangerous than plenty of other substances that are legal. It's certainly less dangerous than cigarettes.
We regret the inconvenience. The move that was to replace the move that has been yanked, has been yanked. Those responsible for sacking the ones responsible for yanking the movie to replace the yanked movie wish you to know that they have been sacked.
And so are spell-checkers.
Just what are you allusioning to?
It is now cost effective for governments to micromanage EVERYONE'S life.
The cameras may be next-to-free, but the cost to review their video and type up laborious transcripts isn't...yet.
Yes, but if they have hundreds of hours of tape on everyone, then whenever a government official wants to compel you to do something, all they have to do is threaten to laboriously review your tapes.
Don't challenge this eminent domain taking, or else we'll review your tapes. Don't fight this speeding ticket, don't attend that protest, don't report that dirty cop, etc.
Government forcing medical procedures on anyone is really not something we want, especially since government won't take responsibility for the (admittedly unlikely) consequences of a bad result.
You mean take responsibility by compensating (the very few) people who are legitimately harmed by a vaccine reaction: National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
If you are a US citizen, I don't think you could get out of producing a document the court ordered you to supply by airmailing it to a confederate in another country. Similarly, if the data in question are related to Microsoft's US operations, then MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US, should be required to produce them.
Why would Sony have employee medical records? Not likely legal if in the USA.
It's not unheard of for employers to be self-insured, in which case the employer is itself a HIPAA covered entity. This might be true even if a third party like Blue Cross administers the plan.
fair enough, I should have been more specific. Anything with pseudoephrine has been behind the counter for years. I'm talking about a lot of stores now have a blanket policy on any cold medicine regardless of ingredients
but I stand my my point regardless if you can make meth with it. How about instead of regulating things that could potentially be used to make bad things, we simply go after people who actually DO bad things. Stop inconveniencing the majority because of a very VERY small minority
Many cough formulas contain dextromethorphan, a mild dissociative that can be abused recreationally. When they check IDs for over-the-counter stuff, they're probably trying to screen out robotripping teenagers, not people cooking meth.
+1
Actually naming the project here would help draw attention to it
It also might get them fired. It sounds like the author still works for the company. Posting negatively about your employer in a public forum is a good way to draw unwanted attention to yourself as well.
Can we please stop comparing Ebola to the flu?
For starters, Ebola apparently has a 70% mortality rate. Additionally, Ebola kills people who are otherwise perfectly healthy. The flu does not.
Some flus are absolutely more deadly for healthy people. Part of what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly was that it could induce a cytokine storm resulting in multiple organ failure. Since the release of cytokines is an inflammatory immune response, the better your immune system the worse off you are. Thus a young, fit person with a healthy immune system is more at risk than an infant with a undeveloped immune system, or an elderly person with a failing one.