"exfiltrate" ??? We've got sum miltary lingo here!
Is this some interesting "in house"/"in country" propaganda being dropped into the USA by our own military's psych ops teams? Who uses a word like "exfiltrate" so often?
Exfiltrate defined as 1. (military) To withdraw troops surreptitiously from a dangerous position [on wiktionary]
Extraction (military) redirected from exfiltrated: In military tactics, extraction (also exfiltration or exfil), is the process of removing personnel when it is considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of a hostile environment and taken to a secure area.
So is this a "poseur" pretending to use military lingo and add an air of "military intrigue" and "international espionage" to the story, or is it a pretense of a "slip of the tongue" so that people think some military type accidentally let some patois and lingo slip through that identifies the authenticity of this,mein Mann, give this Shizz some street cred in the Hizzouse !!
It's a false flag play on the field! We've got a false flag play on the field! Are there two or three levels of misdirection involved? Place your bets, gentle-people-and-citizens!
Well, at least they didn't "lower" another country! "Highering" another country to do that work isn't always necessary. Since there are supposedly laws preventing the C.I.A. and N.S.A. from spying on our own countrymen, countrywomen, country-boys-and-girls-and-cats-and-dogs, supposedly there is a "gentleman's agreement" between the brits, israelis, and ourselves to trade info gathered on one-anothers' countrymen [damn those gendered nouns sneak in a lot in english] with the "rival" spy agencies, so that the data gathering is still done with supposedly clean hands. Allegedly. O-m-g, they're tracking what I type...
Re:The signaling aspect is more important
The Betteridge answer to the question is of course "No". The correct answer is "Yes." The signaling aspect definitely seems true to me. If a company can make you feel more valued by meeting your needs, even a trivial one like having the right flavor or brand of orange soda for you while you work, then that is one less thing that the worker needs to be distracted by.
Need chocolate? There it is. Need orange fizzy-pop? There it is! Need Monster Energy Drink? Thar she is! Need a pop-tart break? Toaster and pastries already in the cabinet! Seriously, the mental aspect of having snacks available as soon as I get home, or even the ability to request a PBJ while I'm in the middle of my homework reading is amazing! Maybe instead of just snacks, they need to provide a snack "concierge", who double checks on snacks and keeps the fridge and pantry well stocked at work.
A worker who does not have to waste time searching for a snack, or fishing for loose change in their pocket for the vending machine, is a worker who's got a few extra minutes or quarter-hours to keep working and stay in the zone.
If the company can't afford a relatively "cheap" perk like small-scale snacks around, then that is indeed a signal that they either don't care about keeping the employees satisfied and at tip-top capability, or that the manager's being screwed over on the numbers and the budget and some big shit is about to hit the fan. Am I reading that correctly?
Thanks for the reply and the link to the law. Strange that laws are promulgated in Microsoft Word ('.doc ') document format, rather than an open format such as plain ASCII text files or HTML markup files.
The relevant section appears to be "Section 35"
Section 35. Remuneration for Reprographic Reproduction of Works
(1) Natural persons shall be permitted to reprographically reproduce published works, except for sheet music, for personal use without direct or indirect commercial purpose without the permission of the author. Persons who have in their ownership or possession the equipment intended for reprographic reproduction and who ensure the availability of such reproduction to natural persons for a fee or free of charge shall be allowed to reprographically reproduce works for the benefit of and for the personal use of a natural person. Authors and publishers are entitled to receive a fair compensation for reprographic reproduction. [emphasis mine at this last sentence]
So it would appear that if the teacher had provided access to the students to make their own copies, everything would have been kosher (or the latvian equivalent of kosher) except for the payment of a fee. It only says that personal copies may be made without permission. It does not state that those personal copies can be made "free of cost".
Also, the preamble to the document says that the translation is provided merely as a courtesy and only the original Latvian text constitutes the actual law. I also did a text search for the word "fair", and found that it only exists in conjunction with two words:
"fair compensation" occurs 4 times ..."remunerations are fair" occurs once
"unfair earnings" occurs once
and "fair use" never occurs at all.
so it would appear that the concept of "fair use" is not at all addressed by the Latvian law in the format you pointed out to me, at least in the English translation of it.
That's a very good point. Someone in Latvia or with knowledge of Latvian law would have to clue us in. I'm sure there's quite a few someones on/. who could tell us. Calling all Latvian programmers (or lawyers, or college students who might know...) !!!
"Fortress of unassailability called SCADA and other embedded OSes"?? You're being sarcastic, right? I think you know that you are.
But "we'll have malware researchers because malware is lucrative enough to always be there" does not catch all of the reasons. What about Stuxnet ??? Stuxnet was made to be the governmental motive (of Israel and the USA) state-sponsored disruption of SCADA hardware with one particular type of facility in mind: centrifuges in the service of uranium enrichment. So profitability and money-making was not the motive there. The motive appears to have been state-sponsored disruption of another state's actions, and also appeared to be the first rootkit pointed against PLCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller>programmable logic controller).
Thanks for that link. I had not read that. Of course I understand that out of many audits of personal situations, there must be more than zero individuals who have won against the IRS, so I did not mean that individuals have not won against the IRS. But I was under the mistaken impression that the IRS always won again large groups and institutions. I can't find the link from the Union-Tribune (San Diego) that I read. I think it was about two years ago. But considering that your link is from 2009, that 2010-2011 SD-UT article was definitely wrong. Thanks for correcting my misimpression!
If it takes that level of psychopathy and money and criminal activity in order to successfully fight against the IRS, what odds does a company with legitimate meritorious claims against the IRS have? None?:>(
So it would seem that taxes, like laws, are for little people. Whereas writing the specs for the laws and the taxes, well that's for the corporations (which are people!) and for the special 1% big people. Well, no one said life was going to be fair, did they?:>)
re: the war on child porn : have you noticed how lately a lot of the child pornography arrests state that the DHS was involved in the arrest? What is the Department of Homeland Security doing involved in child pornography cases? Is that a weird extension of their range of authority, or was that always part of their function?
re: the war on drugs : have you noticed all of the weird highways stops, oh 50 to 100 miles inland away from the actual border, manned by the border patrol? There's one near the San Onofre plant north of San Diego at about the level of Camp Pendleton on your drive up from San Diego to Los Angeles on the 5.
re: the war on sex crimes: there've been cases in san diego of teenagers being charged with sex crimes and child pornography for "sexting" or taking nude pictures of themselves on their cell phones. Current idiots actually believe that "snapchat" is ephemeral and that the pictures disappear! Such silliness.
Anyway, all of these wars just seem like convenient excuses for power grabs by the authorities. Like notice how policemen can run around in masks thesedays for warrant busts, and that undercover police hide their facial features in court cases so that they don't get identified. Somehow, even though the excuse of "but their identification would ruin their further use/utility in the police department" almost seems sensible, it sure seems wrong to not be able to have your accusers openly testify in open court...
Haha. It would have been funny (or funnier) if this guy had come up with the acronym FRAM for this project and then called the page (or overall project) FRAM-Boise , perhaps:
Facilitated
Raspberry.Pi
Architectural
Messaging
since he says in his pdf document that " My research is currently focused on developing a novel da
ta sharing system for
wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data. In the process
of developing this system it became clear that perhaps the most expedient way to test many of the
ideas was to create a distributed simulation rather than developing directly on the final target embedded
hardware."
Right, but a "vastly superior computing solution" for CFD or linear equations is one thing. Trying to simulate network communications activity for 32 or 33 nodes on a single compute node is probably slower than actually trying out the algorithms on dedicated hardware that instantiates an actual hardware network. Thus, for a project that tries out different networking and communications algorithms, a 3 times more expensive by your calculations might actually end up being 10 times less expensive, especially considering the locking and interprocess communications required in a multi-threaded simulation on a single compute node vs. actually running it on real hardware with 32 nodes and an ethernet network linking the 32 nodes. .
Especially considering that this system is going to be used for wireless communications protocols, the real hardware solution is IMHO the better way to go.
it looks like the purpose behind this project is to have an "always available" (to this Ph.D. student) 32-node cluster that is dedicated to doing the work which this dissertation student needs to perform in order to complete his Ph.D., and it makes sense to be able to do this for the cost of a single Xeon node in a larger beowulf cluster. .
This lets him escape the externalities which might impinge on his getting his own work done, like the big bad Beowulf cluster not being up or available when he needs it, or it being prioritized for someone else's project (say a professor who has tenure and more funding available). Those sorts of shenanigans would delay his work. So a 1/3rd speed cluster that's always available for your own project is a helluva good deal at 1/32 the cost of the big bad beowuilf cluster, eh? At least I think so!
With a name like that (RPiCluster), perhaps it ought to be situated at the R.P.I. in Troy, New York? Though for that nomenclature geographicalocalization, the Republican Party of Iowa has as much claim to RPI as these others do.
I like the justification pointed out by the builder of this RPi.Cluster:
The RPi platform has to be one of the cheapest ways to create a
cluster of 32 nodes. The cost for an RPi with an 8GB SD card is ~$45. For comparison, each node in
the Onyx cluster was somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500. So, for near the price of one PC-based
node, we can create a 32 node Raspberry Pi cluster!
[from the pdf file at http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/files/2013/05/Rasp.-Pi.pdf ]
So the summary of the informal document is that it's cheaper to build a 32-node Rasp.-Pi cluster than to purchase even a single node of the 32-node Beowulf cluster that may or may not be available to you. And if you want to get your Ph.D. work done, I must agree that it sounds better to not be dependent upon the whims and follies of others' benevolence in having external hardware clusters available for your use. Bravo, Joshua Kiepert, I like your "informal writeup". Best wishes on your work!
Huzzah! Yes, indeed, all Hail Debian, the basis of these all! It is sad that so much bounds forth from these springs yet so few are aware of the source of these precious waters!!! As I said earlier, to one who dared mock Debian's utility:
Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing.
Again, I say to thee, all Hail Deb-Ian ! (also, have you ever seen the canadian cartoon "Being Ian" ? )
You'd think that after too many of those calls (and wouldn't the second or third verifiably false call have been too many?), the police might consider arresting her for filing a false police report or for misuse of the "911" emergency response system!
Even the NYTimes points out how the drug companies abuse their access to health care and prescription records:
"Pills Tracked From Doctor to Patient to Aid Drug Marketing" in today's (2013-may-17) New York Times. .
Here are some of the sad reasons that people have for wanting to look at your private health records:
1 - marketing: what can we sell to you? what disease do you have? what products will you need? will you buy more incontinence diapers? will you need special dietary restrictions, thus special types of food or vitamins? are you getting fatter and needing bigger clothes?
2 - risk analysis: what can we charge you more for in terms of insurance or job benefits? are you a smoker? did you already have miscarriages? did your momma miscarry? did your daddy have cancer? did you third cousin on your mother's side have tuberculosis? have you asked for an HIV test? are you a drug user? do you drink a lot? All of these would affect your life insurance costs and your health insurance costs and may even affect your credit worthiness... If you suddenly find out you have cancer, are you going to go on a purchasing binge knowing that you won't have to pay anything off? do they need to cut off your credit?
3 - associate analysis - do your partners/family members need to be sold things or marked as higher risk? is your daughter pregnant? is your grandmother dying? is half your family pregnant and the other half dying? (M*A*S*H episode recently, about Klinger always trying to get a visit to go home...)
4 - should you car insurance rates go up? were you diagnosed with diabetes, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, narcolepsy, fainting spells, heart disorders or attacks? stuff that could make you a risky driver or at risk of losing consciousness or driving recklessly means that they've got a reason for raising your rates!
5 - should they hire you? will the company's insurance rates go up if they hire you? do you have a disease? does your wife? your kids? are they likely to get sicker? is your wife pregnant? are you or other household members smokers or drinkers or drug users (all of whom become costly for insurance for small and large companies!)
6 - are you not one of us? pure unadulterated prejudice can rear its head! your abortion example for the employee, or their wife, or their daughter having an abortion, or even being raped? how dare they allow themselves to be raped! Do they have diseases that show they're unclean? VD? pregancies? miscarriages? drug use? a history of obesity? a history of mental illness, depression, suicide attempts? how else can we discriminate? :>(
I agree with you. There ought not be any reason that anyone other than your doctors, nurses, hospitals, physical therapists, x-rays techs, pharmacists, etc., really needs to know your medical health records... yet somehow the insurance people and HR at your work get to know all about it as the bills flow through...
Exactly. Definitely talking his own book. Especially after failing miserably at having Google Health take hold at all, either amongst patients or amongst doctors, or hospitals, or even insurance providers. Google Health dropped with an empty thud as loud as Microsoft's Zune. Google never figured out how to make money off of it, even though it figured out it could avoid HIPAA restrictions by having people voluntarily enroll in it and freakin' voluntarily give up their privacy. .
An idiot with a vested interest in invading our privacy tells us "we worry too much about medical privacy". No thanks, I don't care to hear the rest of his opinion or even an attempt at an explanation for why he holds that position. He's just "talking his own book", mate.
dude, it looks like you're exerting a lot of effort into your own "Two Minutes Hate". I actually made a real point, and instead of replying to the point about agency and intent, you seem lost and confused and circling back to hating on with ramblings about "Two Minute Hate". Why don't you take the same amount of time and effort into actually responding to my point, which I remind you (in case you've lost focus and attention in the last two sentences, you seem to do that...) is about "agency" and "intent". Did the company's hiring of an outside contractor to fulfill purpose X mean that the contractor took on the role of "actor" and "agent" for the original corporation. If you'd rather rant, go ahead, but I won't bother responding to non-on-point commentary. .
A tu salud! ( bodily and mentally, whichever you may need more );>)
The fastest growing items are almost always those with the smallest quantity: i.e. the percentage rate of growth from 1 user to 2 users is 100% growth, whereas the percentage rate of growth from 10 users to 11 users is 10%, and the %age growth from 100 users to 101 users is 1%. ;>p So don't throw your "fastest growing phone OS right now" at me right now! You're just admitting that MS is at the fucking bottom right now. (warning, results may not apply to a stable market with equally aged competitors, your results may vary, your mileage is worse with six fat friends in the back seat of your car on a Roberto's tacos run, etc.)
random neuron firing after the "corporate personhood" comment reminded me of Bain. Not " hatin' "; 'twas just a mere memory and recollection. But seriously, discuss the concept of agency and whether or not a corporate person can disavow "intent" through the hiring of an "agent" as their actor. That's the crux of my comment; don't get sidetracked by my random neuron firings!
intent? What about "agency"? They hired a company to do some work for them: they effectively made this other company and that other company's workers their "agent" to get that work done. So why should the original company be indemnified from the wrong-doing performed by their agents on their behalf? Do they have a contract saying "do work X, but if you do it wrong or illegally, you are fully to blame and we shall be held harmless"?? Because if they don't have such a contract, did they possibly induce someone into copyright infringement on their behalf? . Oh, right, that's the whole point of "corporate" personhood: if there's profit, "it's all my responsibility and my profit"; if there's any liability, "screw that, I'm out of here and not responsible at all!" !! That's the mantra of Bain Capital too, isn't it? . ;>) cynical, and proud of being cynical.
re:...does not just say "I am a teenage girl and as such more worried about what others think... :>(
as an aside comment, not all teenage girls are worried about what others think! As to wearing a watch, my parents don't even wear one, though my dad says he did when he was younger. Watches seem to be a grandparent generation thing to those of us still in school. Cell phones have time on them, and the class bells ring to let you know time's passing and that it's time to wake up and move on to the next partition of hell / classes / lunch-room mania !;>)
Slashdot Mirror
"exfiltrate" ??? We've got sum miltary lingo here!
Is this some interesting "in house"/"in country" propaganda being dropped into the USA by our own military's psych ops teams? Who uses a word like "exfiltrate" so often?
Exfiltrate defined as 1. (military) To withdraw troops surreptitiously from a dangerous position [on wiktionary]
Extraction (military) redirected from exfiltrated: In military tactics, extraction (also exfiltration or exfil), is the process of removing personnel when it is considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of a hostile environment and taken to a secure area.
So is this a "poseur" pretending to use military lingo and add an air of "military intrigue" and "international espionage" to the story, or is it a pretense of a "slip of the tongue" so that people think some military type accidentally let some patois and lingo slip through that identifies the authenticity of this,mein Mann, give this Shizz some street cred in the Hizzouse !!
It's a false flag play on the field! We've got a false flag play on the field! Are there two or three levels of misdirection involved? Place your bets, gentle-people-and-citizens!
Well, at least they didn't "lower" another country! "Highering" another country to do that work isn't always necessary. Since there are supposedly laws preventing the C.I.A. and N.S.A. from spying on our own countrymen, countrywomen, country-boys-and-girls-and-cats-and-dogs, supposedly there is a "gentleman's agreement" between the brits, israelis, and ourselves to trade info gathered on one-anothers' countrymen [damn those gendered nouns sneak in a lot in english] with the "rival" spy agencies, so that the data gathering is still done with supposedly clean hands. Allegedly. O-m-g, they're tracking what I type...
Re:The signaling aspect is more important The Betteridge answer to the question is of course "No". The correct answer is "Yes." The signaling aspect definitely seems true to me. If a company can make you feel more valued by meeting your needs, even a trivial one like having the right flavor or brand of orange soda for you while you work, then that is one less thing that the worker needs to be distracted by. Need chocolate? There it is. Need orange fizzy-pop? There it is! Need Monster Energy Drink? Thar she is! Need a pop-tart break? Toaster and pastries already in the cabinet! Seriously, the mental aspect of having snacks available as soon as I get home, or even the ability to request a PBJ while I'm in the middle of my homework reading is amazing! Maybe instead of just snacks, they need to provide a snack "concierge", who double checks on snacks and keeps the fridge and pantry well stocked at work. A worker who does not have to waste time searching for a snack, or fishing for loose change in their pocket for the vending machine, is a worker who's got a few extra minutes or quarter-hours to keep working and stay in the zone. If the company can't afford a relatively "cheap" perk like small-scale snacks around, then that is indeed a signal that they either don't care about keeping the employees satisfied and at tip-top capability, or that the manager's being screwed over on the numbers and the budget and some big shit is about to hit the fan. Am I reading that correctly?
So it would appear that if the teacher had provided access to the students to make their own copies, everything would have been kosher (or the latvian equivalent of kosher) except for the payment of a fee. It only says that personal copies may be made without permission. It does not state that those personal copies can be made "free of cost". Also, the preamble to the document says that the translation is provided merely as a courtesy and only the original Latvian text constitutes the actual law. I also did a text search for the word "fair", and found that it only exists in conjunction with two words:
"fair compensation" occurs 4 times"unfair earnings" occurs once
and "fair use" never occurs at all.
so it would appear that the concept of "fair use" is not at all addressed by the Latvian law in the format you pointed out to me, at least in the English translation of it.
Re: Do they even have fair use in Latvia?
That's a very good point. Someone in Latvia or with knowledge of Latvian law would have to clue us in. I'm sure there's quite a few someones on /. who could tell us. Calling all Latvian programmers (or lawyers, or college students who might know...) !!!
"Fortress of unassailability called SCADA and other embedded OSes"?? You're being sarcastic, right? I think you know that you are.
But "we'll have malware researchers because malware is lucrative enough to always be there" does not catch all of the reasons. What about Stuxnet ???
Stuxnet was made to be the governmental motive (of Israel and the USA) state-sponsored disruption of SCADA hardware with one particular type of facility in mind: centrifuges in the service of uranium enrichment. So profitability and money-making was not the motive there. The motive appears to have been state-sponsored disruption of another state's actions, and also appeared to be the first rootkit pointed against PLCs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller>programmable logic controller).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA#Security_issues
Thanks for that link. I had not read that. Of course I understand that out of many audits of personal situations, there must be more than zero individuals who have won against the IRS, so I did not mean that individuals have not won against the IRS. But I was under the mistaken impression that the IRS always won again large groups and institutions. I can't find the link from the Union-Tribune (San Diego) that I read. I think it was about two years ago. But considering that your link is from 2009, that 2010-2011 SD-UT article was definitely wrong. Thanks for correcting my misimpression!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White : the theft of private and privileged documents from the IRS offices and from other governmental agencies
even Wikipedia thinks that CoS plays dirty and doesn't play fair
If it takes that level of psychopathy and money and criminal activity in order to successfully fight against the IRS, what odds does a company with legitimate meritorious claims against the IRS have? None? :>(
a graphing calculator these days... is as good as a computer, just without the internet access. that's a strange point.
So it would seem that taxes, like laws, are for little people. Whereas writing the specs for the laws and the taxes, well that's for the corporations (which are people!) and for the special 1% big people. Well, no one said life was going to be fair, did they? :>)
re: the war on child porn : have you noticed how lately a lot of the child pornography arrests state that the DHS was involved in the arrest? What is the Department of Homeland Security doing involved in child pornography cases? Is that a weird extension of their range of authority, or was that always part of their function?
re: the war on drugs : have you noticed all of the weird highways stops, oh 50 to 100 miles inland away from the actual border, manned by the border patrol? There's one near the San Onofre plant north of San Diego at about the level of Camp Pendleton on your drive up from San Diego to Los Angeles on the 5.
re: the war on sex crimes: there've been cases in san diego of teenagers being charged with sex crimes and child pornography for "sexting" or taking nude pictures of themselves on their cell phones. Current idiots actually believe that "snapchat" is ephemeral and that the pictures disappear! Such silliness.
Anyway, all of these wars just seem like convenient excuses for power grabs by the authorities. Like notice how policemen can run around in masks thesedays for warrant busts, and that undercover police hide their facial features in court cases so that they don't get identified. Somehow, even though the excuse of "but their identification would ruin their further use/utility in the police department" almost seems sensible, it sure seems wrong to not be able to have your accusers openly testify in open court...
Abuse of power? And people put up with it, sadly.
Raspberry.Pi
Architectural
Messaging
since he says in his pdf document that " My research is currently focused on developing a novel da ta sharing system for wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data. In the process of developing this system it became clear that perhaps the most expedient way to test many of the ideas was to create a distributed simulation rather than developing directly on the final target embedded hardware."
Right, but a "vastly superior computing solution" for CFD or linear equations is one thing. Trying to simulate network communications activity for 32 or 33 nodes on a single compute node is probably slower than actually trying out the algorithms on dedicated hardware that instantiates an actual hardware network. Thus, for a project that tries out different networking and communications algorithms, a 3 times more expensive by your calculations might actually end up being 10 times less expensive, especially considering the locking and interprocess communications required in a multi-threaded simulation on a single compute node vs. actually running it on real hardware with 32 nodes and an ethernet network linking the 32 nodes.
.
Especially considering that this system is going to be used for wireless communications protocols, the real hardware solution is IMHO the better way to go.
it looks like the purpose behind this project is to have an "always available" (to this Ph.D. student) 32-node cluster that is dedicated to doing the work which this dissertation student needs to perform in order to complete his Ph.D., and it makes sense to be able to do this for the cost of a single Xeon node in a larger beowulf cluster.
.
This lets him escape the externalities which might impinge on his getting his own work done, like the big bad Beowulf cluster not being up or available when he needs it, or it being prioritized for someone else's project (say a professor who has tenure and more funding available). Those sorts of shenanigans would delay his work. So a 1/3rd speed cluster that's always available for your own project is a helluva good deal at 1/32 the cost of the big bad beowuilf cluster, eh? At least I think so!
So the summary of the informal document is that it's cheaper to build a 32-node Rasp.-Pi cluster than to purchase even a single node of the 32-node Beowulf cluster that may or may not be available to you. And if you want to get your Ph.D. work done, I must agree that it sounds better to not be dependent upon the whims and follies of others' benevolence in having external hardware clusters available for your use. Bravo, Joshua Kiepert, I like your "informal writeup". Best wishes on your work!
Re: All hail to Debian. :-)
Huzzah! Yes, indeed, all Hail Debian, the basis of these all! It is sad that so much bounds forth from these springs yet so few are aware of the source of these precious waters!!! As I said earlier, to one who dared mock Debian's utility:
Debian has stayed being what it has always been. It's just being used more as the foundation that supports the work of the facade builders and marketers that put a pretty face (or not-so-pretty Tammy Faye Baker clown-makeup face, if you want Gnome 3, imho) on top of all that and market it as if they made the whole thing.
Again, I say to thee, all Hail Deb-Ian ! (also, have you ever seen the canadian cartoon "Being Ian" ? )
You'd think that after too many of those calls (and wouldn't the second or third verifiably false call have been too many?), the police might consider arresting her for filing a false police report or for misuse of the "911" emergency response system!
Even the NYTimes points out how the drug companies abuse their access to health care and prescription records: "Pills Tracked From Doctor to Patient to Aid Drug Marketing" in today's (2013-may-17) New York Times.
.
Here are some of the sad reasons that people have for wanting to look at your private health records:
1 - marketing: what can we sell to you? what disease do you have? what products will you need? will you buy more incontinence diapers? will you need special dietary restrictions, thus special types of food or vitamins? are you getting fatter and needing bigger clothes?
2 - risk analysis: what can we charge you more for in terms of insurance or job benefits? are you a smoker? did you already have miscarriages? did your momma miscarry? did your daddy have cancer? did you third cousin on your mother's side have tuberculosis? have you asked for an HIV test? are you a drug user? do you drink a lot? All of these would affect your life insurance costs and your health insurance costs and may even affect your credit worthiness... If you suddenly find out you have cancer, are you going to go on a purchasing binge knowing that you won't have to pay anything off? do they need to cut off your credit?
3 - associate analysis - do your partners/family members need to be sold things or marked as higher risk? is your daughter pregnant? is your grandmother dying? is half your family pregnant and the other half dying? (M*A*S*H episode recently, about Klinger always trying to get a visit to go home...)
4 - should you car insurance rates go up? were you diagnosed with diabetes, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, narcolepsy, fainting spells, heart disorders or attacks? stuff that could make you a risky driver or at risk of losing consciousness or driving recklessly means that they've got a reason for raising your rates!
5 - should they hire you? will the company's insurance rates go up if they hire you? do you have a disease? does your wife? your kids? are they likely to get sicker? is your wife pregnant? are you or other household members smokers or drinkers or drug users (all of whom become costly for insurance for small and large companies!)
6 - are you not one of us? pure unadulterated prejudice can rear its head! your abortion example for the employee, or their wife, or their daughter having an abortion, or even being raped? how dare they allow themselves to be raped! Do they have diseases that show they're unclean? VD? pregancies? miscarriages? drug use? a history of obesity? a history of mental illness, depression, suicide attempts? how else can we discriminate?
:>(
I agree with you. There ought not be any reason that anyone other than your doctors, nurses, hospitals, physical therapists, x-rays techs, pharmacists, etc., really needs to know your medical health records... yet somehow the insurance people and HR at your work get to know all about it as the bills flow through...
Exactly. Definitely talking his own book. Especially after failing miserably at having Google Health take hold at all, either amongst patients or amongst doctors, or hospitals, or even insurance providers. Google Health dropped with an empty thud as loud as Microsoft's Zune. Google never figured out how to make money off of it, even though it figured out it could avoid HIPAA restrictions by having people voluntarily enroll in it and freakin' voluntarily give up their privacy.
.
An idiot with a vested interest in invading our privacy tells us "we worry too much about medical privacy". No thanks, I don't care to hear the rest of his opinion or even an attempt at an explanation for why he holds that position. He's just "talking his own book", mate.
Are those blue eyes hovering over the pedestrian in the LED-crosswalk-sign the "eyes of big brother watching over us"? ;>) jk.
dude, it looks like you're exerting a lot of effort into your own "Two Minutes Hate". I actually made a real point, and instead of replying to the point about agency and intent, you seem lost and confused and circling back to hating on with ramblings about "Two Minute Hate". Why don't you take the same amount of time and effort into actually responding to my point, which I remind you (in case you've lost focus and attention in the last two sentences, you seem to do that...) is about "agency" and "intent". Did the company's hiring of an outside contractor to fulfill purpose X mean that the contractor took on the role of "actor" and "agent" for the original corporation. If you'd rather rant, go ahead, but I won't bother responding to non-on-point commentary. ;>)
.
A tu salud! ( bodily and mentally, whichever you may need more )
The fastest growing items are almost always those with the smallest quantity: i.e. the percentage rate of growth from 1 user to 2 users is 100% growth, whereas the percentage rate of growth from 10 users to 11 users is 10%, and the %age growth from 100 users to 101 users is 1%.
;>p
So don't throw your "fastest growing phone OS right now" at me right now! You're just admitting that MS is at the fucking bottom right now. (warning, results may not apply to a stable market with equally aged competitors, your results may vary, your mileage is worse with six fat friends in the back seat of your car on a Roberto's tacos run, etc.)
random neuron firing after the "corporate personhood" comment reminded me of Bain. Not " hatin' "; 'twas just a mere memory and recollection. But seriously, discuss the concept of agency and whether or not a corporate person can disavow "intent" through the hiring of an "agent" as their actor. That's the crux of my comment; don't get sidetracked by my random neuron firings!
intent? What about "agency"? They hired a company to do some work for them: they effectively made this other company and that other company's workers their "agent" to get that work done. So why should the original company be indemnified from the wrong-doing performed by their agents on their behalf? Do they have a contract saying "do work X, but if you do it wrong or illegally, you are fully to blame and we shall be held harmless"?? Because if they don't have such a contract, did they possibly induce someone into copyright infringement on their behalf?
;>) cynical, and proud of being cynical.
.
Oh, right, that's the whole point of "corporate" personhood: if there's profit, "it's all my responsibility and my profit"; if there's any liability, "screw that, I'm out of here and not responsible at all!" !! That's the mantra of Bain Capital too, isn't it?
.
re: ...does not just say "I am a teenage girl and as such more worried about what others think ... ;>)
:>(
as an aside comment, not all teenage girls are worried about what others think! As to wearing a watch, my parents don't even wear one, though my dad says he did when he was younger. Watches seem to be a grandparent generation thing to those of us still in school. Cell phones have time on them, and the class bells ring to let you know time's passing and that it's time to wake up and move on to the next partition of hell / classes / lunch-room mania !