An addendum to the pharmaceutical patent suggestion: After the 17-year patent expires, the compound and its "obvious" derivatives, e.g., those product tweaks that could have been anticipated when the original patent was issued, should never be the grounds for a new patent. NEW! IMPROVED: timed release. NEW! IMPROVED: combine with an OTC pain killer like acetaminophen. These are shams to keep the original patent cash cow alive and prevent the drug's emergence as a cheaper generic version. A blatant ripoff that needs to be stopped.
Just so. If there was a standard for medical records storage, as there is for electronic billing for medical services, it would provide a much greater incentive to join the pool. As it is, installing a medical records system from the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Medical Records and Storm Door Company (credit: Bob Newhart) might get your medical practice an electronic records system, but interchange with the hospital you admit your patients to? So sorry, just fax us the hard copy and we'll re-enter the data here.
I once asked the CIO of a major medical facility (top 10 in the nation in many treatment areas) why credit cards from ANY issuer will work in EVERY little swiper in the world (some but not egregious exaggeration) but medical records from his facility had to be printed and transferred via sneaker-net whenever a patient moved across town to a different hospital. His answer: The Fed insisted on standards for credit cards, and healthcare doesn't have a Fed. Realmolo has it right - but the benefits to patient care of a standard system are not adding to anyone's profit, so are ignored. And the patchwork we have today offers scant prospects for improvement to a small, or medium practice. Hence old systems abound, and paper systems still flourish, as they're "good enough".
The lingua franca in international air travel is English, so international pilots and all air traffic controllers at international airports must learn English. (See this reference. Maybe we ought to let each airport direct traffic in their own language as well?
Actually, I suppose if you adopted pure gold as the national currency, as Ayn Rand advocated, you really could shut down the Fed. So when you start running low on funds, you could mug someone with gold teeth instead of robbing convenience stores!
Their rhetoric even sounds like Ayn Rand's tirades in Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and elsewhere. This is logical since Ayn Rand is their idolized ideological forebear.
Let private industry do whatever they want to the Internet. Smart people and the corporations they heroically work for have made the Internet what it is today. So let the Verizons, the Comcasts, the Cox's, the Rogers' and the Telus' of the world give priority routing of their ad-laden drivel over what some of the customers of these paragons of individualist virtue would like to do, which is to communicate, to learn and and to chose their entertainment from wherever it suits them.
And if our corporate overlords who provide us with their extravagant priced "pipes" wish for us to have no access outside their hallowed walls, what then? What choices do 99% of us have? Zip. Someone said the Pauls are our friends? Not in this lifetime!
That was Bill Gates' avowed corporate strategy. I remember reading about a Gates interview in a 1990-something issue of Computerworld (I looked for the article but couldn't find it online) in which he said words to the effect that "I can't think of a worse reason to release new software than to fix bugs. People want features, not bug fixes." I was stunned by this (trying to run a 120-person IT shop on Win95) and reading it, I came to understand why MS products are always buggy and always different. "This changes everything" was corporate policy! It always seemed intuitively obvious that if a UI is a little messed up, you tweak and tune it. You don't toss it out and start afresh, thus pulling the rug out from under your installed base.
You might want to watch the stereotyping. I'm the (volunteer) webmaster for a fairly affluent community of 2,000 or so mostly retired people. We require registration for our website to keep community information away from outsiders like Google and spammers. I personally approve each registration after verifying residence status. At the moment we have about half our community registered; around 250 are on the site weekly, another 100 or so lees frequently, and another 200 occasionally. My site does make provisions for vision-impaired people, but is pretty attractive for all. It's dynamic (changes a few times a week), and has lots of AJAX pages like directory lookups, bulletin board search etc.. We do have our share of problems, many related to lack of computer skills and knowledge, e.g., when users "can't login" or "can't find xyz page". With patience and some hand-holding, our users mostly find what they want with little hassle. So I submit that at least from my N=1 sample, you might find the computer usage among older demographic follows income and education as much as age.
Oh - I'll be 73 in July.
In 2004 I got fed up with the commercials, the repeats, the mindless blather and the realization that sitting in front of a TV was a consummate waste of time. It wasn't entertaining - one rarely sees "entertainment" of any value. It wasn't informative - "if it bleeds, it leads" being the editorial policy of "news" programs. The movies were limited in availability, always way behind the current theater showings, and rarely good enough to sit through.
I gave my TV to a shelter for women, canceled cable service (satellite, actually) entirely, renewed my library card and rediscovered the unlimited world of books. It felt like my IQ increased by 20 points within weeks. I suddenly had a lot of time to be with friends, read, and take my dog for long walks. I could go to bed when I got ready, not "having to" finish a 10pm show or the 11pm news. I was able to approach purchasing decisions without the "help" of TV ads. I was able to decide whom to vote for without hearing attack ads for months before an election. (Money in politics? Meh.) How liberating!
If anyone wants their life back, they ought to think carefully about how many hours they spend in front of the box being immersed in pseudo-entertainment and plied with propaganda about products, services and politicians. Think carefully, too, about whether they really like being the lowest common denominator to whom most TV "content" is pitched. And think of how much richer life could be with all those hours devoted to something else.
I have tried to read a couple of science-type books on my Kindle. I find when you have to back-reference a previous page containing an equation or diagram that's important to what follows in the book, you often need to refer back to a previous page. On a Kindle this process is complex, irksome, disruptive and slow. There is nothing (yet?) on a Kindle that will replace little slips of paper (or - horrors - dog-ears) used as bookmarks for important predecessor material.
In days of old, running "big iron" from Control Data and Cray, the worst days of system instability were those following "preventive maintenance". Plus ca change....
Your selection of "pioneers" reminds me of an "American boy band": New Kids on the Block. Seymour Cray, Danny Hillis, Steve Wallach and many others in the 1970s-90s were the real "pioneers".
Get off my grass!
Slashdot Mirror
Just what we need: another quick, mindless way to increase our credit card debt!
An addendum to the pharmaceutical patent suggestion: After the 17-year patent expires, the compound and its "obvious" derivatives, e.g., those product tweaks that could have been anticipated when the original patent was issued, should never be the grounds for a new patent. NEW! IMPROVED: timed release. NEW! IMPROVED: combine with an OTC pain killer like acetaminophen. These are shams to keep the original patent cash cow alive and prevent the drug's emergence as a cheaper generic version. A blatant ripoff that needs to be stopped.
Just so. If there was a standard for medical records storage, as there is for electronic billing for medical services, it would provide a much greater incentive to join the pool. As it is, installing a medical records system from the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Medical Records and Storm Door Company (credit: Bob Newhart) might get your medical practice an electronic records system, but interchange with the hospital you admit your patients to? So sorry, just fax us the hard copy and we'll re-enter the data here.
I once asked the CIO of a major medical facility (top 10 in the nation in many treatment areas) why credit cards from ANY issuer will work in EVERY little swiper in the world (some but not egregious exaggeration) but medical records from his facility had to be printed and transferred via sneaker-net whenever a patient moved across town to a different hospital. His answer: The Fed insisted on standards for credit cards, and healthcare doesn't have a Fed. Realmolo has it right - but the benefits to patient care of a standard system are not adding to anyone's profit, so are ignored. And the patchwork we have today offers scant prospects for improvement to a small, or medium practice. Hence old systems abound, and paper systems still flourish, as they're "good enough".
The tablet thing has worked out well for Ballmer and Windows 8, hasn't it?
Well, they are doing an effective job at keeping the Confederacy alive!
Webmaster adept with HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP and MySQL and lovin' it!
'Nuff said.
Clearly this is all Al Gore's fault!
Ridiculously uninformed: http://thechive.com/2012/07/09/a-little-redneck-innovation-is-just-what-we-need-30-photos/
The lingua franca in international air travel is English, so international pilots and all air traffic controllers at international airports must learn English. (See this reference. Maybe we ought to let each airport direct traffic in their own language as well?
Get over it!
Should be called Babelscript as it reduces comprehension. (See Tower of Babel.) Like APL, a write-only language.
HIPAA rules only apply to "covered entities": payers, providers and clearinghouses. DHS is none of these, so HIPAA doe not apply here.
Actually, I suppose if you adopted pure gold as the national currency, as Ayn Rand advocated, you really could shut down the Fed. So when you start running low on funds, you could mug someone with gold teeth instead of robbing convenience stores!
Their rhetoric even sounds like Ayn Rand's tirades in Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and elsewhere. This is logical since Ayn Rand is their idolized ideological forebear.
Let private industry do whatever they want to the Internet. Smart people and the corporations they heroically work for have made the Internet what it is today. So let the Verizons, the Comcasts, the Cox's, the Rogers' and the Telus' of the world give priority routing of their ad-laden drivel over what some of the customers of these paragons of individualist virtue would like to do, which is to communicate, to learn and and to chose their entertainment from wherever it suits them.
And if our corporate overlords who provide us with their extravagant priced "pipes" wish for us to have no access outside their hallowed walls, what then? What choices do 99% of us have? Zip. Someone said the Pauls are our friends? Not in this lifetime!
That was Bill Gates' avowed corporate strategy. I remember reading about a Gates interview in a 1990-something issue of Computerworld (I looked for the article but couldn't find it online) in which he said words to the effect that "I can't think of a worse reason to release new software than to fix bugs. People want features, not bug fixes." I was stunned by this (trying to run a 120-person IT shop on Win95) and reading it, I came to understand why MS products are always buggy and always different. "This changes everything" was corporate policy! It always seemed intuitively obvious that if a UI is a little messed up, you tweak and tune it. You don't toss it out and start afresh, thus pulling the rug out from under your installed base.
LinkedIn were known to be sleazeballs. Now they're known as incompetent sleazeballs.
Maybe some of you haven't seen this uber-geek way to get the charcoal started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sab2Ltm1WcM
You might want to watch the stereotyping. I'm the (volunteer) webmaster for a fairly affluent community of 2,000 or so mostly retired people. We require registration for our website to keep community information away from outsiders like Google and spammers. I personally approve each registration after verifying residence status. At the moment we have about half our community registered; around 250 are on the site weekly, another 100 or so lees frequently, and another 200 occasionally. My site does make provisions for vision-impaired people, but is pretty attractive for all. It's dynamic (changes a few times a week), and has lots of AJAX pages like directory lookups, bulletin board search etc.. We do have our share of problems, many related to lack of computer skills and knowledge, e.g., when users "can't login" or "can't find xyz page". With patience and some hand-holding, our users mostly find what they want with little hassle. So I submit that at least from my N=1 sample, you might find the computer usage among older demographic follows income and education as much as age. Oh - I'll be 73 in July.
In 2004 I got fed up with the commercials, the repeats, the mindless blather and the realization that sitting in front of a TV was a consummate waste of time. It wasn't entertaining - one rarely sees "entertainment" of any value. It wasn't informative - "if it bleeds, it leads" being the editorial policy of "news" programs. The movies were limited in availability, always way behind the current theater showings, and rarely good enough to sit through. I gave my TV to a shelter for women, canceled cable service (satellite, actually) entirely, renewed my library card and rediscovered the unlimited world of books. It felt like my IQ increased by 20 points within weeks. I suddenly had a lot of time to be with friends, read, and take my dog for long walks. I could go to bed when I got ready, not "having to" finish a 10pm show or the 11pm news. I was able to approach purchasing decisions without the "help" of TV ads. I was able to decide whom to vote for without hearing attack ads for months before an election. (Money in politics? Meh.) How liberating! If anyone wants their life back, they ought to think carefully about how many hours they spend in front of the box being immersed in pseudo-entertainment and plied with propaganda about products, services and politicians. Think carefully, too, about whether they really like being the lowest common denominator to whom most TV "content" is pitched. And think of how much richer life could be with all those hours devoted to something else.
Sounds like there's a potential for a startup business!
I have tried to read a couple of science-type books on my Kindle. I find when you have to back-reference a previous page containing an equation or diagram that's important to what follows in the book, you often need to refer back to a previous page. On a Kindle this process is complex, irksome, disruptive and slow. There is nothing (yet?) on a Kindle that will replace little slips of paper (or - horrors - dog-ears) used as bookmarks for important predecessor material.
In days of old, running "big iron" from Control Data and Cray, the worst days of system instability were those following "preventive maintenance". Plus ca change....
Your selection of "pioneers" reminds me of an "American boy band": New Kids on the Block. Seymour Cray, Danny Hillis, Steve Wallach and many others in the 1970s-90s were the real "pioneers". Get off my grass!
... On the other hand China makes nothing the US can not produce domestically....
Did we forget rare earth elements, essential to the technology we hold so dear and rely upon so completely??
Might that community be hosting a Christian madrasa?