Currently they are moving away from this. The issue has not been so much the thinking that antibiotics will help any particular case but rather the fear that a bacterial ear infection if left untreated could result in hearing loss.
One serious problem with antibiotics (yeah, you need them when you need them) is that they kill harmless bacteria as well, and these harmless bacteria among other things compete with harmful ones. So it's as if you spray roundup over a field and are surprised that weeds grow back faster than crops. The weeds are, of course, pioneer species and so of course they grow back faster.
So the immune system doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's important to cultivate a healthy microbial ecosystem around us which is sufficiently diverse that the bad bugs can't overrun everything as easily.
Just adding to that last comment. One of the big issues with antibiotics is that they often target harmless bacteria as well as bad ones. This means impoverished microbial biodiversity, which means it is easier to get infected again with something else. And so one intervention leads to another.
I agree with your points about the immune system and sanitizing everything. I would go further and say I enjoy beef tartare, sashimi, and good old fashioned home-made eggnog, plus a few scandinavian desserts with raw eggs.
I would however like to point out that with simple care, most bacterial infections can be treated without antibiotics. The last few times I have had skin infections, I have used sterilized kitchen knives to lance the infection and hot salt water to draw fluids, etc, out, and I got better at least as fast as I would have with antibiotics. I also travel a LOT and have had E coli and possibly even a mild case of cholera. None of these need to be treated with antibiotics either (with cholera the key concern is hydration, and with any diarrhea I have found the key is to go off all foods for a while to let one's immune system get a grip on what's in the digestive tract.
We use antibiotics a lot when we don't really have to, because we believe in modern medicine and all of that, and because it's easier than teaching people to soak infected fingers in hot salt water.
The last few times I have had bacterial infections, I have dealt with them without antibiotics. Just lancing with a sterilized blade and soaking in hot salt water. Works a lot of the time, actually.
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years. That's not a serious concern. There are however a few serious concerns:
1) Some bugs like E coli and Salmonella sps can be hosted in animals or humans. Antibiotic resistance they pick up in animals will be a factor when the human gets sick.
2) Some bugs are known to swap DNA. This means that antibiotic resistance in a harmless bug could turn up in a harmful one later.
3) Bugs which are harmless today could jump species and become harmful tomorrow.
4) Environmental pollution around concentrated animal feeding operations could lead to antibiotic resistance in soil-borne bacteria.
Now, in the US, there is supposed to be a clear separation between classes of antibiotics used on animals and those used on people, although this is more porous than we might like to think. There are however no guarantees that other countries have the exact same divisions. Moreover even assuming that this is the case, it deprives us humans of the effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics which might prove useful in the future.
I always suggest a month and a half-worth of incremental backups on the finance database for this reason. If you don't notice it on month close, you have bigger issues than your backups and those issues start with the accounting department and whatever controls you have on your db (i.e. you shouldnt be letting deletes occur on the finance db anyway, so if it happens and it's not the dba who should be able to catch it.... then you have tremendous problems organizationally).
If it is old historical data, sure you might not notice it. In which case you might have to add some GL adjustments to summarize. But that's also a pretty minor case. The ones you really worry about is where current data is deleted.
The worst though (and the case I saw once) was the backup job that ran locally every night quite reliably. This was a personal backup solution for a laptop but theoretically the same can happen anywhere else.
Anyway, the hard drive crashed (head crash). Restored from backup to a new hard drive. The one file that was absolutely 100% critical had not been backed up. All the moderately important stuff had been, but this one file (I believe it was a masters thesis in progress or something) had not been.
Disk gets shipped off for a few thousand dollars of disassembly-level recovery.....
Also consider that up until recently there were classes of illnesses where antibiotics were defensively prescribed, such as in the case of ear aches, not because they were likely to do good in any particular case, but because the doctor feared malpractice suits if it was bacterial and happened to be the rare case that lead to hearing loss.
Also I don't think we *know* what sorts of antibiotic resistance may be created in other countries through this practice. Consider simply that there are bugs that can use livestock and humans as hosts, and our insistence on routine feed of antibiotics to animals should be quite frightening.
It's based on the idea, seen in insects with pesticide use, that if you kill x percentage of insects, some may survive and their offspring may have a much higher level of tolerance, meaning more pesticides are needed to kill the insects. No doubt this happens with bacteria too and is *a* cause of antibiotic resistance.
Consider that livestock may be given antibiotics, and they may have bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella sps which can make humans ill. This represents an additional vector not generally covered in analysis.
However there may be several other big issues that are not currently included in the analysis. Many species of bacteria are known to assimilate genetic material from other bacteria even from other genuses. This means that there is a possibility that antibiotic resistance can spread between bacterial species as a result of hospital waste, causing a form of genetic pollution.
Nature is fundamentally more complex than we can model. Any sufficiently complex model would be nature itself.
However, the rise of superbugs is fascinating to watch.
There is no way I would let my kids get the smallpox vaccine given the current state of the illness. Heck, during the swine flu outbreak only one of the four of us got a vaccine for the swine flu.
Look, some vaccines are important for public health. Smallpox at present isn't one of them. Just because some vaccines are good doesn't mean that more are necessarily better.
I think Bush took the "Can't be worse than Clinton" challenge and the jury is still out as to whether or not he failed but it is certainly not for lack of trying. Clinton took the "Can't be worse than Reagan" challenge and the jury is still out on that one. On one hand there was Waco. On the other hand, Reagan set up Waco with the drug exception to Posse Comitatus, and Clinton's attempt to get a terrorism exception through failed.
Yes, but inquiring minds want to know what empirical data supports the idea that it is effective as a cure. I mean, I would think you'd want to go to a place where the disease was endemic and run double blind studies.... Otherwise sounds like snake oil to me.
I would agree about Paul. It's also important to note that what Adam Smith was shooting for in laissez faire capitalism was an end to the perpetual incestuous relationship between big business and big government. These seem to symbiotic relationship to eachother and a parasitic relationship to the rest of us. A few big businesses are easier to regulate than a larger number of smaller businesses, for example, and they also have an easier time gaining the ear of those in power.
The problem though is that truly free markets don't happen with a government just being there to enforce contractual rights--- that is a recipe for disaster. They are cultivated, or they exist because of a *lack* of enforcement of contractual and other legal rights. So the government can either entirely stay out or the government can wade in substantially. There is no middle road as the Libertarians pretend there to be.
Paul's solutions would take us in the wrong direction, privileging corporations ahead of natural persons. We should go the other way, abolishing the personal income tax, and drastically increasing the corporate income tax (at least doubling the marginal rate). We should also pass laws, in line with the spirit of the US Constitution which would state that businesses which only do business within the confines of one state are exempt from all federal business regulations. I would also prefer see a law which would state that self-employed persons would be exempt as well, provided that such an exemption didn't violate a strong public interest that the second party's state had in the matter.
Our economy can never be healthy when both parties are primarily interested in growing big businesses.
The UK government, however, spends about as much per capita regarding health care as the US government does. So spending is not the issue here. We pay another large chunk out or our pockets.
The issue is a balance of power between consumers in some form and government-chartered monopolies. The UK has a political advantage because they didn't charter the monopolies and therefore can more easily stand up to big pharma and say "if you sell here, you must supply at a specific cost."
I don't like this solution. I think a better one is to say "if we are going to grant you a patent you MUST license it to all who want a license for no more than 10% of the wholesale cost of the finished product."
Problem solved. Costs come down because instead of a monopoly now you have a competitive marketplace.
First, our health care system is broken, and secondly the health care law does absolutely nothing to address root causes.
If we really wanted to decrease costs to health care we'd do two things: 1) We'd pass a law requiring compulsatory licensing for medical-related patents at no more than 10% gross wholesale prices. 2) We'd charter medical guilds which would compete with the AMA and merge control over training and professional discipline with collective malpractice liability (i.e. the guild would serve as a med mal insurance plan and a mini-AMA all in one, but would exist in a marketplace with other similar organizations).
As it is, all the Democrats are really interested in doing (as were the Republicans when they proposed the same thing) are pushing Americans to pay big bucks to pay for products supplied by government-chartered monopolies.
Gaming is the reasing I actually stick with Linux. Everytime I was gaming, I realized that I wasted my time instead of doing something productive. With non Win/Mac-OSes I'm very limted with this and won't be tempted.
As opposed to spending time on Slashdot, no doubt;-)
It favors those who pay more. That's the whole problem that net neutrality is against.
Essentially, it promotes monopolies by ensuring that big, established companies can degrade the (relative) quality of competing services by smaller companies, who can't afford to pay for the privilege.
There's a big problem here. A lot of Net Neutrality proponents I have talked to see this as a way to protect VOIP. However in reality, if you can't guarantee quality of service, I don't see how you can reliably converge networks (also assuming Network Neutrality only applies on IP and higher levels, then it wouldn't affect MPLS backbones which could offer QoS guarantees to a circuit-switched client network (PSTN) while refusing to offer them to a packet switched IP-based network.
So where does that leave voice services? Not over the standard IP networ, that's for sure.
This is a major reason I am opposed to network neutrality. I think you'd get more mileage by requiring behavioral solutions to behavioral problems (i.e. better antitrust laws) than you get by technology mandates/bans (network neutrality laws).
I spend a heck of a lot of time in gterm using VIM. I do this because when you are talking to your computer (i.e. telling it what to do) GUI's quite frankly suck. GUI's are great for the computer giving you feedback, but the complexity of commands you can give the computer in a GUI go way down.
For example, suppose I want to tell my text editor:
Go to line 364. Then delete the next 74 lines of text. Then remove the next 10 # signs you see. Now, repeat that last step on line 42 on the next file and line 576 of the next file. Can you do this in a GUI? Yes. Is it easier (and less error prone) to specify this with a keyboard? Absolutely.:364[enter] d73[down] and so forth
In general if you need the power (because you work with large numbers of large text files, whether you are an author, a programmer, or the like), VIM rules. If you don't....
I get the impression that people complaining about VIM being CLI-based are the same people who complain about structured document generation for LaTeX, whether via LyX or the like.........
Re:Emacs vs VIM: Who cares?
on
Vim Turns 20
·
· Score: 1
The thing is,"new users" usually don't NEED vim or emacs. They can use gedit, an the like.
Now, "new software programmers," and "anyone else who needs to work with large numbers of very big text files....."
Yeah in those latter categories, the vi derivatives and EMACS are the only real choices, and I'd recommend VIM in a heartbeat over the lot. Yes it has a learning curve but the payoff is pretty quick when you are working in areas where you need the power.
1) the Little Ice Age began around the 11th century. Unless Columbus's ships were also time machines...... 2) There is no reason to see these patterns of warming and cooling as global phenomena.
What's going on here is that climate scientists are seeing a hammer of green house gas concentrations and noticing that everything looks like a nail. This is reason enough to maintain a little skepticism regarding even artificial global warming views today (though on the balance I think AGW is probably real, anyone who looks at what the evidence actually is will notice we don't have a long or comprehensive enough record to say anything for certain).
Every now and again I see theories purporting to prove that some event or another caused cooling due to reduced greenhouse gas concentrations Often you want to ask them if they think the medieval warming period (when Europe was even warmer than today, and so was much of North America) was a global phenomenon. There is no reason to think it is. End of story. So it is unlikely we are really dealing with *global* warming or cooling in these eras, but rather major climate shifts.
There are some things that are just embarrassing though. This is one of them. The F22's avionics systems crashing due to crossing the international date line is another. It raises serious questions about how much we trust our armed forces to properly handle security.
I used to think that the stuxnet virus had a few oversights that were well beyond the incompetence level of the US government (the P2P update feature with hard-coded password being one) but this sort of thing suggests that in fact, when it comes to technology, the US government has no competition in the field of incompetence.
I think you are taking things to an extreme nobody even in the Middle Ages would have agreed with.
The points I make here are about control of your own data. This is an important point. If your internet connection goes down, that's bad. But if you lose your data permanently this is often something that can easily make a business go under, not to mention cause legal problems when filing for taxes, etc. If you control your data, you control your business. How you reach that data is secondary. If you are running a PostgreSQL server on Amazon's cloud but taking nightly backups onto your site, that's one thing. If you are trusting your data to Cloud Apps R Us and have no direct access to backups, that's bad news.
Additionally in many cases, there could be additional issues. Consider the case of credit card data, for example, and PCI-DSS compliance.....
I am not saying not to use cloud computing. I am saying to stay in control of your data. One of my customers, for example, runs their web servers for business apps in Amazon's cloud and then connects from there back to database servers running in their own network. I see this as reasonably responsible. If Amazon decides to screw them, they could deploy inhouse quickly and with no data loss.
Often asking the questions is more important than pontificating answers.
But also take into account the fact that a lot of laws are really quite vague and it isn't clear even after you have been arrested whether your conduct violated the law or not (for example, look at Lori Drew)....
This is true. But it makes you wonder how many are wrongly convicted. I suspect the number of innocent in prison is quite a bit higher than we'd like to think.
In terrorism investigations you also have the problem today of Randy Weaver-style entrapment. I presume this was not present in the anthax case, but it's hard to rule it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently they are moving away from this. The issue has not been so much the thinking that antibiotics will help any particular case but rather the fear that a bacterial ear infection if left untreated could result in hearing loss.
One serious problem with antibiotics (yeah, you need them when you need them) is that they kill harmless bacteria as well, and these harmless bacteria among other things compete with harmful ones. So it's as if you spray roundup over a field and are surprised that weeds grow back faster than crops. The weeds are, of course, pioneer species and so of course they grow back faster.
So the immune system doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's important to cultivate a healthy microbial ecosystem around us which is sufficiently diverse that the bad bugs can't overrun everything as easily.
Just adding to that last comment. One of the big issues with antibiotics is that they often target harmless bacteria as well as bad ones. This means impoverished microbial biodiversity, which means it is easier to get infected again with something else. And so one intervention leads to another.
I agree with your points about the immune system and sanitizing everything. I would go further and say I enjoy beef tartare, sashimi, and good old fashioned home-made eggnog, plus a few scandinavian desserts with raw eggs.
I would however like to point out that with simple care, most bacterial infections can be treated without antibiotics. The last few times I have had skin infections, I have used sterilized kitchen knives to lance the infection and hot salt water to draw fluids, etc, out, and I got better at least as fast as I would have with antibiotics. I also travel a LOT and have had E coli and possibly even a mild case of cholera. None of these need to be treated with antibiotics either (with cholera the key concern is hydration, and with any diarrhea I have found the key is to go off all foods for a while to let one's immune system get a grip on what's in the digestive tract.
We use antibiotics a lot when we don't really have to, because we believe in modern medicine and all of that, and because it's easier than teaching people to soak infected fingers in hot salt water.
The last few times I have had bacterial infections, I have dealt with them without antibiotics. Just lancing with a sterilized blade and soaking in hot salt water. Works a lot of the time, actually.
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years. That's not a serious concern. There are however a few serious concerns:
1) Some bugs like E coli and Salmonella sps can be hosted in animals or humans. Antibiotic resistance they pick up in animals will be a factor when the human gets sick.
2) Some bugs are known to swap DNA. This means that antibiotic resistance in a harmless bug could turn up in a harmful one later.
3) Bugs which are harmless today could jump species and become harmful tomorrow.
4) Environmental pollution around concentrated animal feeding operations could lead to antibiotic resistance in soil-borne bacteria.
Now, in the US, there is supposed to be a clear separation between classes of antibiotics used on animals and those used on people, although this is more porous than we might like to think. There are however no guarantees that other countries have the exact same divisions. Moreover even assuming that this is the case, it deprives us humans of the effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics which might prove useful in the future.
I always suggest a month and a half-worth of incremental backups on the finance database for this reason. If you don't notice it on month close, you have bigger issues than your backups and those issues start with the accounting department and whatever controls you have on your db (i.e. you shouldnt be letting deletes occur on the finance db anyway, so if it happens and it's not the dba who should be able to catch it.... then you have tremendous problems organizationally).
If it is old historical data, sure you might not notice it. In which case you might have to add some GL adjustments to summarize. But that's also a pretty minor case. The ones you really worry about is where current data is deleted.
The worst though (and the case I saw once) was the backup job that ran locally every night quite reliably. This was a personal backup solution for a laptop but theoretically the same can happen anywhere else.
Anyway, the hard drive crashed (head crash). Restored from backup to a new hard drive. The one file that was absolutely 100% critical had not been backed up. All the moderately important stuff had been, but this one file (I believe it was a masters thesis in progress or something) had not been.
Disk gets shipped off for a few thousand dollars of disassembly-level recovery.....
Also consider that up until recently there were classes of illnesses where antibiotics were defensively prescribed, such as in the case of ear aches, not because they were likely to do good in any particular case, but because the doctor feared malpractice suits if it was bacterial and happened to be the rare case that lead to hearing loss.
Also I don't think we *know* what sorts of antibiotic resistance may be created in other countries through this practice. Consider simply that there are bugs that can use livestock and humans as hosts, and our insistence on routine feed of antibiotics to animals should be quite frightening.
oversimplified.
It's based on the idea, seen in insects with pesticide use, that if you kill x percentage of insects, some may survive and their offspring may have a much higher level of tolerance, meaning more pesticides are needed to kill the insects. No doubt this happens with bacteria too and is *a* cause of antibiotic resistance.
Consider that livestock may be given antibiotics, and they may have bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella sps which can make humans ill. This represents an additional vector not generally covered in analysis.
However there may be several other big issues that are not currently included in the analysis. Many species of bacteria are known to assimilate genetic material from other bacteria even from other genuses. This means that there is a possibility that antibiotic resistance can spread between bacterial species as a result of hospital waste, causing a form of genetic pollution.
Nature is fundamentally more complex than we can model. Any sufficiently complex model would be nature itself.
However, the rise of superbugs is fascinating to watch.
There is no way I would let my kids get the smallpox vaccine given the current state of the illness. Heck, during the swine flu outbreak only one of the four of us got a vaccine for the swine flu.
Look, some vaccines are important for public health. Smallpox at present isn't one of them. Just because some vaccines are good doesn't mean that more are necessarily better.
Pretty much.
I think Bush took the "Can't be worse than Clinton" challenge and the jury is still out as to whether or not he failed but it is certainly not for lack of trying. Clinton took the "Can't be worse than Reagan" challenge and the jury is still out on that one. On one hand there was Waco. On the other hand, Reagan set up Waco with the drug exception to Posse Comitatus, and Clinton's attempt to get a terrorism exception through failed.
Yes, but inquiring minds want to know what empirical data supports the idea that it is effective as a cure. I mean, I would think you'd want to go to a place where the disease was endemic and run double blind studies.... Otherwise sounds like snake oil to me.
I would agree about Paul. It's also important to note that what Adam Smith was shooting for in laissez faire capitalism was an end to the perpetual incestuous relationship between big business and big government. These seem to symbiotic relationship to eachother and a parasitic relationship to the rest of us. A few big businesses are easier to regulate than a larger number of smaller businesses, for example, and they also have an easier time gaining the ear of those in power.
The problem though is that truly free markets don't happen with a government just being there to enforce contractual rights--- that is a recipe for disaster. They are cultivated, or they exist because of a *lack* of enforcement of contractual and other legal rights. So the government can either entirely stay out or the government can wade in substantially. There is no middle road as the Libertarians pretend there to be.
Paul's solutions would take us in the wrong direction, privileging corporations ahead of natural persons. We should go the other way, abolishing the personal income tax, and drastically increasing the corporate income tax (at least doubling the marginal rate). We should also pass laws, in line with the spirit of the US Constitution which would state that businesses which only do business within the confines of one state are exempt from all federal business regulations. I would also prefer see a law which would state that self-employed persons would be exempt as well, provided that such an exemption didn't violate a strong public interest that the second party's state had in the matter.
Our economy can never be healthy when both parties are primarily interested in growing big businesses.
The UK government, however, spends about as much per capita regarding health care as the US government does. So spending is not the issue here. We pay another large chunk out or our pockets.
The issue is a balance of power between consumers in some form and government-chartered monopolies. The UK has a political advantage because they didn't charter the monopolies and therefore can more easily stand up to big pharma and say "if you sell here, you must supply at a specific cost."
I don't like this solution. I think a better one is to say "if we are going to grant you a patent you MUST license it to all who want a license for no more than 10% of the wholesale cost of the finished product."
Problem solved. Costs come down because instead of a monopoly now you have a competitive marketplace.
First, our health care system is broken, and secondly the health care law does absolutely nothing to address root causes.
If we really wanted to decrease costs to health care we'd do two things:
1) We'd pass a law requiring compulsatory licensing for medical-related patents at no more than 10% gross wholesale prices.
2) We'd charter medical guilds which would compete with the AMA and merge control over training and professional discipline with collective malpractice liability (i.e. the guild would serve as a med mal insurance plan and a mini-AMA all in one, but would exist in a marketplace with other similar organizations).
As it is, all the Democrats are really interested in doing (as were the Republicans when they proposed the same thing) are pushing Americans to pay big bucks to pay for products supplied by government-chartered monopolies.
Gaming is the reasing I actually stick with Linux. Everytime I was gaming, I realized that I wasted my time instead of doing something productive. With non Win/Mac-OSes I'm very limted with this and won't be tempted.
As opposed to spending time on Slashdot, no doubt ;-)
It favors those who pay more. That's the whole problem that net neutrality is against.
Essentially, it promotes monopolies by ensuring that big, established companies can degrade the (relative) quality of competing services by smaller companies, who can't afford to pay for the privilege.
There's a big problem here. A lot of Net Neutrality proponents I have talked to see this as a way to protect VOIP. However in reality, if you can't guarantee quality of service, I don't see how you can reliably converge networks (also assuming Network Neutrality only applies on IP and higher levels, then it wouldn't affect MPLS backbones which could offer QoS guarantees to a circuit-switched client network (PSTN) while refusing to offer them to a packet switched IP-based network.
So where does that leave voice services? Not over the standard IP networ, that's for sure.
This is a major reason I am opposed to network neutrality. I think you'd get more mileage by requiring behavioral solutions to behavioral problems (i.e. better antitrust laws) than you get by technology mandates/bans (network neutrality laws).
I spend a heck of a lot of time in gterm using VIM. I do this because when you are talking to your computer (i.e. telling it what to do) GUI's quite frankly suck. GUI's are great for the computer giving you feedback, but the complexity of commands you can give the computer in a GUI go way down.
For example, suppose I want to tell my text editor:
Go to line 364. Then delete the next 74 lines of text. Then remove the next 10 # signs you see. Now, repeat that last step on line 42 on the next file and line 576 of the next file. Can you do this in a GUI? Yes. Is it easier (and less error prone) to specify this with a keyboard? Absolutely. :364[enter]
d73[down]
and so forth
In general if you need the power (because you work with large numbers of large text files, whether you are an author, a programmer, or the like), VIM rules. If you don't....
I get the impression that people complaining about VIM being CLI-based are the same people who complain about structured document generation for LaTeX, whether via LyX or the like.........
The thing is,"new users" usually don't NEED vim or emacs. They can use gedit, an the like.
Now, "new software programmers," and "anyone else who needs to work with large numbers of very big text files....."
Yeah in those latter categories, the vi derivatives and EMACS are the only real choices, and I'd recommend VIM in a heartbeat over the lot. Yes it has a learning curve but the payoff is pretty quick when you are working in areas where you need the power.
Here's why:
1) the Little Ice Age began around the 11th century. Unless Columbus's ships were also time machines......
2) There is no reason to see these patterns of warming and cooling as global phenomena.
What's going on here is that climate scientists are seeing a hammer of green house gas concentrations and noticing that everything looks like a nail. This is reason enough to maintain a little skepticism regarding even artificial global warming views today (though on the balance I think AGW is probably real, anyone who looks at what the evidence actually is will notice we don't have a long or comprehensive enough record to say anything for certain).
Every now and again I see theories purporting to prove that some event or another caused cooling due to reduced greenhouse gas concentrations Often you want to ask them if they think the medieval warming period (when Europe was even warmer than today, and so was much of North America) was a global phenomenon. There is no reason to think it is. End of story. So it is unlikely we are really dealing with *global* warming or cooling in these eras, but rather major climate shifts.
There are some things that are just embarrassing though. This is one of them. The F22's avionics systems crashing due to crossing the international date line is another. It raises serious questions about how much we trust our armed forces to properly handle security.
I used to think that the stuxnet virus had a few oversights that were well beyond the incompetence level of the US government (the P2P update feature with hard-coded password being one) but this sort of thing suggests that in fact, when it comes to technology, the US government has no competition in the field of incompetence.
I think you are taking things to an extreme nobody even in the Middle Ages would have agreed with.
The points I make here are about control of your own data. This is an important point. If your internet connection goes down, that's bad. But if you lose your data permanently this is often something that can easily make a business go under, not to mention cause legal problems when filing for taxes, etc. If you control your data, you control your business. How you reach that data is secondary. If you are running a PostgreSQL server on Amazon's cloud but taking nightly backups onto your site, that's one thing. If you are trusting your data to Cloud Apps R Us and have no direct access to backups, that's bad news.
Additionally in many cases, there could be additional issues. Consider the case of credit card data, for example, and PCI-DSS compliance.....
I am not saying not to use cloud computing. I am saying to stay in control of your data. One of my customers, for example, runs their web servers for business apps in Amazon's cloud and then connects from there back to database servers running in their own network. I see this as reasonably responsible. If Amazon decides to screw them, they could deploy inhouse quickly and with no data loss.
Often asking the questions is more important than pontificating answers.
That number too.
But also take into account the fact that a lot of laws are really quite vague and it isn't clear even after you have been arrested whether your conduct violated the law or not (for example, look at Lori Drew)....
This is true. But it makes you wonder how many are wrongly convicted. I suspect the number of innocent in prison is quite a bit higher than we'd like to think.
In terrorism investigations you also have the problem today of Randy Weaver-style entrapment. I presume this was not present in the anthax case, but it's hard to rule it out.