I had a professor that taught M68k assembly to first year computer engineering students... when class started, he had just gotten back from spending the summer term back in India and his accent was so thick, nobody in the class could really understand him. On top of that, he struggled for words to help students relate to basic processor fundamentals, not being able to think of the terms like "post office box" when talking about registers. Despite the supposed pre-reqs to even get accepted maybe 2 of us in that class of 35 or so even knew what binary numbers were, so when it came time to actually take what we learned in class and implement it in a lab setting, all but a couple of us were completely lost and the vast majority of them failed the lab and class.
I don't care if the guy was Indian or whatever, but he was being paid to teach the students, which he was clearly unable to do. Those of us that had some previous experience (I knew x86 assembly, so learning the m68k flavor was fairly trivial) managed to get by, but for most students, the money they spent on tuition for that class was an utter waste. Sure, you could argue that they should have leaned more heavily on the book and taught themselves, but despite the $100 the book cost, they still spent somewhere around $4k on the credit hours they dedicated to that professor's class. As for why I didn't help the others much, I was busy working full time to pay for college so I wouldn't come out with a ton of debt, so it's not like I could afford to dedicate all of my time to teaching people what he should have been.
My mom and her siblings were raped and abused by family friends and ultimately abandoned by both parents... some of them managed to repress the memories on their own (only for it to resurface in their late 20s/early 30s, where they eventually processed it and moved on as best as they could or turned into the next group) or they coped through alcoholism and drug abuse, where their entire life is dysfunctional as they try to avoid dealing with what happened to them as kids.
My sister is flat out evil and spent her entire life using people for her own gain, often fabricating lies, including 3 false rape charges against different guys, to get what she wanted.... a few months ago she started having psychogenic seizures caused by the stress of suddenly gaining a conscience and not being able to repress what she's done to people. Either she'll find a way to make peace with what she's done, possibly by trying to make amends to those she's hurt, or she'll probably spend the rest of her life constantly seizing because the guilt will linger if she can't be honest enough with herself to process and move on.
Lots of people have bad things happen to them... most will repress the lesser bad memories entirely though the more significant trauma only seems to be able to be repressed for a period of time. It's possible that you're overly conscious to criticism and thus those wounds stick out for you more than they would for a "normal" person. I'm certainly not minimizing what you're feeling as I remember all of the negative things that have happened in my life too, regardless of how minor or petty those sleights may have been.
Likewise, it's funny you mention the sensory overload of cities... I don't mind visiting cities, but I could never live there precisely because of the sensory overload. My brain picks up on and remembers every little detail and, on top of the anxiety issues I have, it really stresses me out between the visual, audio and odor overload. It doesn't dull my autobiographical memory at all, it's still fully functional recalling in another "thread" of my brain while I'm there and outside of the city, I still have a full "recording" to recall of my experiences later.
I was born in the city, lived there for my first 6 months, then moved out to a trailer park in the sticks, moving further out again when I was 7... I was a pretty active kid and my memory of those days is just as good as my teen and adult memories. I can remember full days of playing, riding bikes, taking apart a calculator, even daydreams I had from back before I even started school, like it just happened today. I occasionally get this sense of prescience, knowing that I will recall a particular experience I'm having in the moment at some point in the future and years or decades later when that memory resurfaces, I'll even remember thinking about that feeling of prescience in that moment, however mundane as the moment might have been. I frequently get a sense of deja vu, knowing I've seen something before or that though will be the first time, the exact same thing will happen to me again in the future (down to specifics, not just "I'm gonna buy groceries and check out at register 3." I even get the occasional recurrent dream (one of several) that I've had randomly for decades. Oddly, I very rarely dream, or at least very rarely remember them, which may have something to do with my memory processing overall.
As far as doing something more involved goes, playing action oriented FPS games probably does the most to dull my ability to immediately, involuntarily recall past memories, but it's probably only 50% effective overall and will trigger other detailed memories of playing games (by myself, with friends, whatever).
My dad had a brain aneurysm and stroke... the ultimate result of which was he basically lost the entire top half of the right side of his brain. Other than the most obvious effect that he's paralyzed on the left side of his body, it affects his short term memory in particular (his long term memory is mostly intact, but confabulation has corrupted some of it). Whereas I remember every minute detail, he'll often forget a wide array of things and constantly need to be reminded of both trivial and important things.
Being familiar with both ends of the spectrum, I'd say they both suck pretty bad in their own ways. I don't want to be on the other extreme anymore than where I am now, I'd settle for just being able to be normal.
I suppose it's possible for people that don't feel emotion to not be harmed by what would cause normal people emotional pain... but emotional pain is a real consequence for the vast majority of people, they can feel negatively about something even if there isn't a physical consequence to doing it.
However, it only takes one more step for the emotionless to go from "well, I can get away with it because it isn't illegal" to "well, I'm so much smarter/more powerful than everyone else that I'll get away with it even if it is illegal." The group that proceeds to the latter step generally makes up politicians, CEOs, serial killers, out of control celebrities, griefers and the like.
people with little or no emotional response to the events of their lives are most likely sociopaths... I'm not saying that in a negative connotation, that's simply the definition, for better or worse.
Remorse/regret is a very useful tool, in that it will help us prevent doing harmful things again in the future. Someone without a feeling of remorse will likely do whatever benefits them in the moment without care for the consequences of that action.
You might feel that way, but what is painful or embarrassing to you isn't necessarily painful or embarrassing to someone else. There's no reason that I see to be upset over a memory. There's likely nothing you can do to change it, so there's no point. For people that don't care, I don't think that remembering moments that would be painful or embarrassing to a normal person would matter.
First of all, if someone has no emotional connection to their memories, there is something wrong with their brain... the limbic system tags memories, connecting them with the emotions we felt while experiencing them, which helps us to relieve them and to trigger anticipations of future similar circumstances. Secondly, two people will see the same incident in different ways - what may be a painful embarrassment for one may be completely unnotable for another. The type of memories I'm talking about are the ones that affect my life, many of which ARE pretty meaningless, I record the mundane memories just as often as the important moments, not necessarily the perspective of those around me (though I often remember what I thought they were thinking in connection to that moment as well).
Anyway, it isn't a matter of it being a simple snapshot in your mind. I constantly relive those moments, begging for the ability to do something different, when you know what the outcome is always going to be. Surely, you have something in your past that you regret... most people can eventually accept that regret, process things and mostly fade the ability to casually access those memories as time goes on unless there is a specific trigger that causes the memory to resurface.
Those things never fade for me and I'm always consciously placed back into that scene, remembering everything I felt, saw, heard, etc. The day I was 17 and balled my fist at my dad telling him I hated him, the time I stole a pack of baseball cards when I was 12, or the time I forged a note to help a girl pass our civics class my senior year, etc. I can't simply repress those memories and I tend to punish myself for them daily. Nobody can beat me up the way I beat myself up.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as keeping myself busy... to go along with my autobiographical memory, my brain seems to be very parallelized too. I'm often focusing on a number of different tasks independent from each other. Doing something in the foreground doesn't make the background thoughts go away.
Funny you mention dead cats... that immediately brought back the memories of finding both of mine dead. Where they were, what they looked like, how they felt, the slight warmth still left in their bodies, how their faces were positioned, how I felt emotionally, what was going on at the time, what type of day it what as well as the time of day, the other things I did during those days (visiting my dad in the hospital on one, waiting for my life insurance agent to come over to review my policy on the other).
Anyway, I suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder and over the last 5 years or so, I notice I'm becoming increasingly agoraphobic as well. On top of that, I take care of my dad (who has been disabled for the last 13 years now), so I don't get out much (and for that matter, I don't have a job anymore, which further limits my ability to be around other people in several ways). My new memories are generally a mix of the mundane tasks of every day life combined with the time I spend with my mom and nieces usually on the weekends. The oldest niece seems to exhibit a lot of the same traits I did at that age, so I worry about her too.
I have some other issues going on as well that I'm not going to talk about in public, that contribute to my daily negative reinforcements. On top of that, something about me seems to attract predatory women and every woman I've ever cared about in my life has used and abused me (including my mom and sister) at some point. That, too, just reinforces the AvPD.
Mix it all together and most days, I wonder how I manage to cope... the guilt of knowing those around me would be worse off if I wasn't there is the main thing that keeps me going. I've had a lot of time to reflect on things and I understand pretty much everything ticking inside my head that makes me the way that I am. Unfortunately, even with the best of help, most of what's wrong with me isn't exactly easy to fix. I've tried cognitive behavioral therapy, pills, etc and none of it sticks for more than a few months at a time. Ultimately, it's the inability to repress my past (and ongoing) trauma which always seems to overwhelm the positive steps I try to take.
I don't know that I have full blown hyperthymesia, I've never talked to a professional about it, I certainly don't recall EVERY day of my life in great detail but my friends and loved ones are often surprised at what I can recall and just how much trivial detail I can recall when doing so. I had a pretty bad concussion in 1997 which definitely affected my memory in a negative way, but I still still consider it to be far superior to most people.
Anyway, it is a curse to be forced to remember all of the worst days and moments of your life. Imagine constantly reliving your most painful or embarrassing moments. Imagine carrying around the burden of all of the not so nice things you may have done in your life, like the snippy retort you gave to the person that was marginally rude to you when you were tired. Imagine the insults and bullying that you endured not only through high school, but that the people you've cared about have thrown at you over the years during spats. Or maybe it was the time you made a suggestion at work or to a friend that everyone else has long forgotten but you still remember in vivid detail. I have detailed memories going back to the first house I lived in and we moved out of there when I was 6 months old.
Breakups can be hard, but remembering the little intimate details of your lost SO are worse, watching a loved one die in front of you, the laughter that still echoes in your mind from the time you had a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe, etc. Sure, it's nice that you can remember all of the details the day your child was born or that trip you saved up your entire life for, but when you can't forget the things that your brain really needs to in order for you to move on, every day has the potential of being a living hell. It's basically a permanent state of PTSD and you never know when it's going to hit you.
After my concussion, I've lost some of the factual retention memory ability that wasn't related to my personal life, but, unfortunately, I still mentally "record" virtually every moment of my life. I can't always tell you the date (though I often can), but I can deliver the full visual, audio and tactile memory of those moments. Friends/family tend to love that I can remember the things that they can't and help refresh their own memories, but for me, it sucks.
My dad just went for a quarterly checkup visit... the doctor charge him a $15 copay (supplemental Medicare HMO style plan through Blue Choice) and the doctor charged Blue Choice another $180, of which they paid $65. I don't have insurance and my last appointment was $60 cash.
Similarly, my dad was diagnosed with sleep apnea. His CPAP machine was $120 up front with a $15 payment every month (which they never charged me for some reason, I think their billing is screwed up since I sent in $100 for another copay for supplies and they credited my account but never cashed the check, but I digress), with the insurer paying apparently paying $680 (my dad has a 15% copay on medical equipment). He had an accident (he had a stroke and isn't always coherent, especially while sleeping) and ended up dumping his urinal into the CPAP machine. The replacement, off the books, albeit used? $100 cash for the entire machine.
We hear a lot of talk about just how expensive it is to pay out of pocket, but from what I've seen, is my costs, as an uninsured person, are routinely cheaper than the costs when insurance, be it regular HMO coverage, Medicare or a Medicare Advantage type program, is involved. I dropped my insurance coverage in 2004 or so, after the premiums increased to $1457/3 months (nearly $6k a year) for a single 20 something in perfect health (NY rates suck). Since then, I've saved $42k in premiums while only paying out a couple hundred dollars in the same time. Obviously, for someone in their 50s or higher, their expenses may be different, but for me, it was beyond stupid to keep paying my premiums. Likewise, under ObamaCare, it's still stupid for me to pay premiums, I'll just sign up if I get some expensive disease (and millions of other people doing the same thing as me will bankrupt the system, which is when we'll deliberately get the hue and cry to switch to socialized medicine). $42k invested in your 20s will provide you a major advantage by the time you get to retirement age (or it can be invested into a house, starting a business or whatever makes the most sense for your personal needs).
Most of the doctors I know would love to do away with the headaches of dealing with insurance regulations (imposed by insurers AND the government), so they could just get on with treating their patients. Most of them give up a lot of money just to hire someone to figure out how to play the games with the various insurers (including the government). The one thing that always seems to be forgotten, is the HMO system was created by government legislation and, to this day, is entirely governed by government regulation. When you hear the various politicians criticizing the HMO system, they're criticizing the very thing they created and have control over.
If these contracts are known for being so bad, why do people continue to sign them?
People want to be signed by a big label so bad, they'll do anything to get that contract. Often, they won't even hire an independent lawyer or will ignore the legal advice they're given, because they want to be signed so bad. The label knows that even if this group turns it down, there are 20 more waiting in the wings, itching for that contract. You either accept it or it goes to the next group.
It's just like the people you see on Jerry Springer or whatever. They don't care that they look like idiots, they got to be on tv... and on Jerry at that!
You close a couple programs? Or get more RAM? In all seriousness, there's never been more free RAM for programs to use than right now, and it's only going to get better. It could be worse: it could be 1985 and you have one program running at a time due to memory constraints.
My laptop is maxed out, the chipset only supports 4 GB max and unfortunately, it came with Vista 32 rather than 64 despite having a 64 bit processor so it'll only address 3 GB of that anyway. I could upgrade the OS, but, well, I don't really care for windows, I just use it out of convenience (and also have gentoo installed on it as well). So while RAM is cheap, most portable systems have significantly lower limits than traditional desktops.
On the subject of closing applications just because one refuses to behave nicely, we get back into the problem I've had with the GNOME devs over the years. My computer is a tool to get work done in the way that I find most efficient. My computer should conform to my style of usage, it shouldn't force a non-optimal (to me) experience on me because that's the only way some application's developer thought I should run it. That's why we have vi/emacs, gnome/kde, bash/csh, etc, because what is best for you might not be best for me.
I'm much more familiar with the Linux side of buffering/caching than Windows, but rather than make the app the manager of my system's memory, the apps should let the OS take care of caching because it is so difficult for one app to understand the needs of the other apps running simultaneously with it. Linux tends to keep what I need in memory, lets the disk buffers fill up and adjust as needed, swapping out what isn't being used and then the OOM killer comes in should one app get totally crazy. Windows (at least Vista) seems to just keep swapping more and more to disk, happily giving more and more RAM and swap to firefox, all while everything grinds to a halt and then rather than an OOM killer kick in, firefox seems to start playing nice, freeing some of its cache, all while just grinding the drive more. I regard that as both an OS problem (the OS should have better protections against letting one process crush all the others unless it is given the priority to be the process that gets to do that) and an application problem (the app simply shouldn't be designed to greedily take, take and take some more just because the OS hasn't told it that it has run out of memory).
Unfortunately, I think too many projects, especially heavily used projects, tend to get an inflated ego, whereby they think that all other apps should bow to their one true app. As I was saying, the problem is going to be when you get a half dozen or more of these mega-ego apps running simultaneously, each thinking they own the computer rather than you being the one that should be in charge.
what happens when every app decides it is "the one true app" and should use as much memory as it can grab? When you have a half dozen or more programs all deciding that it can use all of your RAM for its cache and you start swapping everything else out to disk, it can be extremely painful to switch between tasks.
I realize that not everyone has a problem with it, but Firefox kills my Vista laptop with 3GB RAM after leaving it running for a day or two with a dozen tabs open, and at some point, will often starting pausing for 60 seconds or more due to swapping. On the flip side, with my Linux desktop with 6GB of RAM, I hardly notice it chewing up crazy amounts of memory (1.2-1.5GB) until it's been open for a couple weeks. Still, all it takes is a couple of these monsters running together to really bog a machine down and apps shouldn't be so aggressive with caching that they force everything else into swap (and eventually themselves too).
As for Unity vs Gnome-Shell, I don't really care to have a major change in my UI. It's not about being a luddite, it's about not "fixing" what isn't broken for me. I'm planning to migrate to something more lightweight once support for GNOME 2 dies (and that was after waiting until GNOME 2.10 or so when it finally became usable enough again to ditch GNOME 1.4).
I'm not sure how "surprising" or novel that is... when I was on Prodigy back around 1991, a bunch of us belonging to a AD&D "group" did something quite similar to avoid the per-message fees for sending to other people. We'd all share a sub-account and deliberately bounce messages so others could log on and read them. If Prodigy closed a sub-account after noticing irregularities (high number of bounces, multiple people trying to log onto the account at the same time, etc), we'd all move to a different sub-account.
Uh, Loki was publishing modern games... just to pick a few of the AAA titles,
Civ:CTP: published March 1999, Loki released it in May 1999
HOMM 3: published February 1999, Loki released it in December 1999
Quake 3: published December 2, 1999. Loki released it December 7, 1999
SMAC: published February 1999 with the expansion pack released in 2000. Loki released it with the expansion pack in July 2000.
Loki was releasing current AAA games, their problems were with the financial management of the company, paying large sums to get the rights to AAA titles to port, overestimates of how many people would pay for the games (and they were pirated heavily by people that bought the Windows version and felt entitled to the Linux version for free) and with that an oversupply of retail packages (which is why you can still find some Loki games new in the box), and by trying to grow too big too fast.
I happened to buy most of what Loki put out while they were still in business because I was glad to be freed from Windows even if it meant I had to wait a staggering 5 days or even a couple months to get the games on my platform of choice. Waiting a few weeks is the price I paid to get what I wanted, much like you can eat a steak raw or take the time to cook and season it to your taste.
In the wake of Loki, the "main" Linux porting house became LGP and, yeah, I'll agree, they put out overpriced older B or C title games. I think they overcompensated for Loki's failure with the AAA market and, based over casual observation of the last couple years and the continuous catastrophes they seem to inflict upon themselves by being too low budget, I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around either. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for Linux games, only the two big porting houses got it wrong. Meanwhile, some publishers are quite happy putting out their own ports, whether they're done in house or contracted out For a major studio looking solely at the business aspect, Linux sales might not be worth the effort, but for smaller studios and indie developers, a Linux port may end up giving them a substantial influx of cash.
I was getting 15 mod points 1-2 times per week for the last couple years, but since the redesign, I've only gotten them a total of once.and that was a day or so after posting... so it may be that you only get mod points if you post now, rather than giving them to the infrequently posting, frequent readers. Instead of digging through comments to find unfair negative mods, I find myself more skimming slashdot now since I never have points to use (I almost never mod down unless it's something obvious like GNAA).
I realize that you're just another anonymous troll, but...
Ubuntu is moving away from X11 and GNOME to their own windowing system (Unity on Wayland), so whatever "Redhat does to GNOME" will matter little to them anyway since Ubuntu is abandoning the platform.
The GNOME devs have been pigheaded ever since the inception of GNOME 2 with their mentality of "dumb everything down and take away options from the users. Some functionality got added back sometime around GNOME 2.12 (I had stuck with 1.2 until then) making it usable again, but the vast majority of what was taken away never came back. I'm already preparing to abandon GNOME for something else once support for GNOME 2 has ended, though I haven't decided what I'll be using yet.
Redhat may have a lot of influence over the Linux world, but that's because they're the ones actively funding work and distributing efforts of that work. While they're busy paying the devs to work on some of the most critical tools and libraries (kernel, gcc, glibc, GNOME, etc), Ubuntu has gotten criticism for not even contributing patches back upstream.
But, the whole situation you describe is relaly, really depressing. Usually, hospitals are pretty on-the-ball when it comes to security, or at least moreso than individual clinics are. It's particularly surprising that they're overlooking the password sharing - most CIOs/CMIOs will shriek and faint if you jump out from behind a corner screaming "HIPAA HIPAA HIPAA!"
Maybe I should write to the CIO of the hospital with my concerns... after all, my records are stored there (and while there's nothing scandalous in my medical records, I do consider them to be some of my most private information). I don't want to get my personal doctor in trouble though, he's the 4th doctor my rural office has had in the last 8 years and I'm glad to finally have one that is competent and I feel I can trust again (the previous three were incompetent and outright assholes - one was a holy roller (literally preaching to patients) who turned me in to social services because my disabled dad ended up with an ulcer on his foot and, as it turns out, he had diabetes, which she hadn't bothered to test for/diagnose prior to that, blaming me as if I caused the ulcer out of abuse even though we didn't know he had diabetes). Anyway, I digress.
It sounds like your hospital has really, really dysfunctional IT, but EMRs are possible to do right. And are you sure it was sabotage? There's a lot that blows up when an EMR is first installed.
I'm not familiar with the two particular EMR systems involved since my mom didn't mention their names. The IT director had been wined and dined by the marketing department of the one she preferred (surprise!) and, despite the hospital choosing to go with the the other platform, she refused to learn it so she could teach and support the staff. My mom ended up having to figure everything out and then train her department as well as the ER doctors on how to use it since IT was totally uncooperative before AND after the rollout (probably in the hopes of causing enough pain that the hospital would abandon the system they chose for her (IT dir) preferred system). Clearly a case where the IT director needs to be fired for insubordination and gross misconduct (I mean, we're talking patients lives if they can't access radiology and lab work), but, due to politics, she (IT dir) somehow managed to keep her job.
Funny part, is I applied for a part time IT job there but didn't even get an interview... I wouldn't be surprised if said IT director canned my application/resume upon learning that my mom was her nemesis from radiology that actually won the EMR "battle" despite the fact that I'd be an improvement over any one of her existing staff.
Maybe they figure your average patient can't figure out what they're typing just by watching them from the side (I may be a touch typist, but my doctor is a two index finger hunter/pecker - again, his specialty is medicine and he's paying someone else to do his data entry for him)... and even if his access to patients are limited to the hundreds/thousands that list him as their primary care provider, it would still be trivial for me to access the medical history of people in my town that have him as a doctor (or likewise, for those people to access my history).
As for logging, what does the infiltrator care? Some offices (like my dad's neurologist) have dozens of doctors on staff with scores of patients scheduled for the same appointment times. You go to whatever exam room is open when you get called back and it would be nearly impossible for them to tie a one time access to a particular patient (multiple times and they'll compare who was scheduled those times). My own doctor's office routinely leaves the exam rooms open while the entire office takes their lunch outside (the main office and dr's personal office are locked but the exam rooms aren't), so it wouldn't be difficult to go there on a nice day (so they'll be eating outside) when you aren't scheduled to access an exam room terminal. Logging just means the doctor gets the blame, but the infiltrator gets away with it.
My mom is the secretarial administrator in the radiology department of another hospital and because of turf wars between various IT departments at the hospital, it can be difficult to get the proper credentials that techs, secretaries and per diem radiologists need to do their jobs, so people often have to piggyback on someone else's accounts to do their work (maybe they have a network login but not a login to the MRI system, so they log into windows, log into the network, then use someone else's MRI login), making logging virtually useless there too. My mom has fought with her director over it, who, in turn, has fought with the IT director, all while the board and CEO ignores the issue completely (in fact, IT at her hospital is totally fucked and the IT director has gone as far as to try to sabotage the rollout of a new EMR system because she preferred another one, meaning there have been days where critical departments didn't have much needed access to each other all because she refuses to support the chosen product, the hospital has no internet redundancy despite not having a radiologist on site 24/7 to interpret results, etc. But, that's what you get with a backwoods hospital where turf and ego wars are more important than patient care.)
I see lots of medical offices using their PCs to access the internet (many of which are using IE), some have their private networks open to wifi, etc. With everything I've seen, I simply don't trust EMR systems at all.
I sit there and watch my doctor type in his password to the EMR system every time I go. The EMR requires him to change his password every 3 months and so he goes with something easy to remember. So, we get (color)(number)(item) for his passwords and so far, I've only ever seen the number change. blue1tie, blue2tie, blue3tie, etc. His username is the astoundingly difficult to remember (firstinitial)(lastname) which is further abetted by a dropdown menu of the usernames of all the medical staff in his office. Oh, and since his office is owned by the local major hospital, he has access to not only his patients, but the records, lab updates, etc of all patients in the hospital and satellite offices (though it would be a HIPPA violation for him to go snooping, which does little to stop someone else from snooping while he gets the blame since it originates from his office IPs and username).
Since the whole hospital system uses the same EMR system, it wouldn't be too hard to guess anyone's username, most doctors and nurses aren't all that great at typing while hiding their password input since they specialize in medicine, not keyboarding, and there are terminals accessible in rooms you're frequently left alone in for extended periods of time (and if that isn't convenient enough, the free wifi on hospital grounds and web based access to the EMR is). Put the three together and it would be pretty trivial to get access to records of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people, not that I've ever tried to access records in ways that I don't have authorization for (you can access your own record through the web, though it is read only and patients have limited access to restrict them from seeing things like their own surgical notes or lab results, but those restrictions don't apply to medical staff accounts).
I'm fine with remakes of movies that were previously done badly... improve upon where the previous movie failed to try to make a better movie. Lately, Hollywood insists on remaking the existing good or profitable movies in an effort to cash in on their previous credentials. The 1972 Gene Hackman Poseidon Adventure was a compelling movie while the 2006 Poseidon was pretty mediocre at best. I loved the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder, but I didn't care for the 2005 Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory even if it was a closer adaptation to the book (most people that I know that like the latter better are Burton fans judging it based more on enjoying Burton's style than the quality of the work). The 1966 animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas was butchered by Jim Carrey in 2000.
By all means, re-imagine the badly executed movies if there is a good story to be told, but quit trying to cash in on the classics since it's going to be damn hard to do them any better than they were previously done. The business side of Hollywood wants safety and "guaranteed" success, which gets in the way of producing new movies that may stray from where movies have succeeded in the past... just like the commercial/conglomerate part of the video game industry lost its creativity in the name of churning out sequels, clones and add-ons.
That depends... if a site's content is mostly user generated, like with Slashdot, someone that posts or moderates frequently is creating and/or maintaining the content that draws in the people that don't block ads, making them valuable in their own right, regardless if they view ads themselves.
I liked the first season of Sanctuary for the most part... then they basically skipped all of the interesting stuff between season 1 and season 2, totally obliterating the plot that they spent all of season 1 building up. Then they knocked off Ashley, who along with Magnus provided an interesting mother/daughter dynamic, in an effort to be "bold." At that point, the show seemed to lose most of the storyline and mostly became a "monster of the week" feature. They replaced Ashley's character with Kate's, whom I just found downright annoying, not to mention she was accepted way too quickly for someone that was responsible for Ashley's demise. But wait! It's scifi, so, according to the same producer that said they killed Ashley to be bold, they said they may bring Ashley back at some point.
Anyway, a few episodes into season 2, I lost interest and haven't been back. After realizing there were 3 episodes I hadn't watched on my DVR and that I didn't care that I didn't watch them, I just deleted the series recording. I just don't care anymore... I only spent this long writing because I thought the show had some real promise, but they deliberately killed it.
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I had a professor that taught M68k assembly to first year computer engineering students... when class started, he had just gotten back from spending the summer term back in India and his accent was so thick, nobody in the class could really understand him. On top of that, he struggled for words to help students relate to basic processor fundamentals, not being able to think of the terms like "post office box" when talking about registers. Despite the supposed pre-reqs to even get accepted maybe 2 of us in that class of 35 or so even knew what binary numbers were, so when it came time to actually take what we learned in class and implement it in a lab setting, all but a couple of us were completely lost and the vast majority of them failed the lab and class.
I don't care if the guy was Indian or whatever, but he was being paid to teach the students, which he was clearly unable to do. Those of us that had some previous experience (I knew x86 assembly, so learning the m68k flavor was fairly trivial) managed to get by, but for most students, the money they spent on tuition for that class was an utter waste. Sure, you could argue that they should have leaned more heavily on the book and taught themselves, but despite the $100 the book cost, they still spent somewhere around $4k on the credit hours they dedicated to that professor's class. As for why I didn't help the others much, I was busy working full time to pay for college so I wouldn't come out with a ton of debt, so it's not like I could afford to dedicate all of my time to teaching people what he should have been.
My mom and her siblings were raped and abused by family friends and ultimately abandoned by both parents... some of them managed to repress the memories on their own (only for it to resurface in their late 20s/early 30s, where they eventually processed it and moved on as best as they could or turned into the next group) or they coped through alcoholism and drug abuse, where their entire life is dysfunctional as they try to avoid dealing with what happened to them as kids.
My sister is flat out evil and spent her entire life using people for her own gain, often fabricating lies, including 3 false rape charges against different guys, to get what she wanted.... a few months ago she started having psychogenic seizures caused by the stress of suddenly gaining a conscience and not being able to repress what she's done to people. Either she'll find a way to make peace with what she's done, possibly by trying to make amends to those she's hurt, or she'll probably spend the rest of her life constantly seizing because the guilt will linger if she can't be honest enough with herself to process and move on.
Lots of people have bad things happen to them... most will repress the lesser bad memories entirely though the more significant trauma only seems to be able to be repressed for a period of time. It's possible that you're overly conscious to criticism and thus those wounds stick out for you more than they would for a "normal" person. I'm certainly not minimizing what you're feeling as I remember all of the negative things that have happened in my life too, regardless of how minor or petty those sleights may have been.
Likewise, it's funny you mention the sensory overload of cities... I don't mind visiting cities, but I could never live there precisely because of the sensory overload. My brain picks up on and remembers every little detail and, on top of the anxiety issues I have, it really stresses me out between the visual, audio and odor overload. It doesn't dull my autobiographical memory at all, it's still fully functional recalling in another "thread" of my brain while I'm there and outside of the city, I still have a full "recording" to recall of my experiences later.
... I was a pretty active kid and my memory of those days is just as good as my teen and adult memories. I can remember full days of playing, riding bikes, taking apart a calculator, even daydreams I had from back before I even started school, like it just happened today. I occasionally get this sense of prescience, knowing that I will recall a particular experience I'm having in the moment at some point in the future and years or decades later when that memory resurfaces, I'll even remember thinking about that feeling of prescience in that moment, however mundane as the moment might have been. I frequently get a sense of deja vu, knowing I've seen something before or that though will be the first time, the exact same thing will happen to me again in the future (down to specifics, not just "I'm gonna buy groceries and check out at register 3." I even get the occasional recurrent dream (one of several) that I've had randomly for decades. Oddly, I very rarely dream, or at least very rarely remember them, which may have something to do with my memory processing overall.
I was born in the city, lived there for my first 6 months, then moved out to a trailer park in the sticks, moving further out again when I was 7
As far as doing something more involved goes, playing action oriented FPS games probably does the most to dull my ability to immediately, involuntarily recall past memories, but it's probably only 50% effective overall and will trigger other detailed memories of playing games (by myself, with friends, whatever).
My dad had a brain aneurysm and stroke... the ultimate result of which was he basically lost the entire top half of the right side of his brain. Other than the most obvious effect that he's paralyzed on the left side of his body, it affects his short term memory in particular (his long term memory is mostly intact, but confabulation has corrupted some of it). Whereas I remember every minute detail, he'll often forget a wide array of things and constantly need to be reminded of both trivial and important things.
Being familiar with both ends of the spectrum, I'd say they both suck pretty bad in their own ways. I don't want to be on the other extreme anymore than where I am now, I'd settle for just being able to be normal.
I suppose it's possible for people that don't feel emotion to not be harmed by what would cause normal people emotional pain... but emotional pain is a real consequence for the vast majority of people, they can feel negatively about something even if there isn't a physical consequence to doing it.
However, it only takes one more step for the emotionless to go from "well, I can get away with it because it isn't illegal" to "well, I'm so much smarter/more powerful than everyone else that I'll get away with it even if it is illegal." The group that proceeds to the latter step generally makes up politicians, CEOs, serial killers, out of control celebrities, griefers and the like.
people with little or no emotional response to the events of their lives are most likely sociopaths... I'm not saying that in a negative connotation, that's simply the definition, for better or worse.
Remorse/regret is a very useful tool, in that it will help us prevent doing harmful things again in the future. Someone without a feeling of remorse will likely do whatever benefits them in the moment without care for the consequences of that action.
You might feel that way, but what is painful or embarrassing to you isn't necessarily painful or embarrassing to someone else. There's no reason that I see to be upset over a memory. There's likely nothing you can do to change it, so there's no point. For people that don't care, I don't think that remembering moments that would be painful or embarrassing to a normal person would matter.
First of all, if someone has no emotional connection to their memories, there is something wrong with their brain... the limbic system tags memories, connecting them with the emotions we felt while experiencing them, which helps us to relieve them and to trigger anticipations of future similar circumstances. Secondly, two people will see the same incident in different ways - what may be a painful embarrassment for one may be completely unnotable for another. The type of memories I'm talking about are the ones that affect my life, many of which ARE pretty meaningless, I record the mundane memories just as often as the important moments, not necessarily the perspective of those around me (though I often remember what I thought they were thinking in connection to that moment as well).
Anyway, it isn't a matter of it being a simple snapshot in your mind. I constantly relive those moments, begging for the ability to do something different, when you know what the outcome is always going to be. Surely, you have something in your past that you regret... most people can eventually accept that regret, process things and mostly fade the ability to casually access those memories as time goes on unless there is a specific trigger that causes the memory to resurface.
Those things never fade for me and I'm always consciously placed back into that scene, remembering everything I felt, saw, heard, etc. The day I was 17 and balled my fist at my dad telling him I hated him, the time I stole a pack of baseball cards when I was 12, or the time I forged a note to help a girl pass our civics class my senior year, etc. I can't simply repress those memories and I tend to punish myself for them daily. Nobody can beat me up the way I beat myself up.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as keeping myself busy... to go along with my autobiographical memory, my brain seems to be very parallelized too. I'm often focusing on a number of different tasks independent from each other. Doing something in the foreground doesn't make the background thoughts go away.
Funny you mention dead cats... that immediately brought back the memories of finding both of mine dead. Where they were, what they looked like, how they felt, the slight warmth still left in their bodies, how their faces were positioned, how I felt emotionally, what was going on at the time, what type of day it what as well as the time of day, the other things I did during those days (visiting my dad in the hospital on one, waiting for my life insurance agent to come over to review my policy on the other).
Anyway, I suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder and over the last 5 years or so, I notice I'm becoming increasingly agoraphobic as well. On top of that, I take care of my dad (who has been disabled for the last 13 years now), so I don't get out much (and for that matter, I don't have a job anymore, which further limits my ability to be around other people in several ways). My new memories are generally a mix of the mundane tasks of every day life combined with the time I spend with my mom and nieces usually on the weekends. The oldest niece seems to exhibit a lot of the same traits I did at that age, so I worry about her too.
I have some other issues going on as well that I'm not going to talk about in public, that contribute to my daily negative reinforcements. On top of that, something about me seems to attract predatory women and every woman I've ever cared about in my life has used and abused me (including my mom and sister) at some point. That, too, just reinforces the AvPD.
Mix it all together and most days, I wonder how I manage to cope... the guilt of knowing those around me would be worse off if I wasn't there is the main thing that keeps me going. I've had a lot of time to reflect on things and I understand pretty much everything ticking inside my head that makes me the way that I am. Unfortunately, even with the best of help, most of what's wrong with me isn't exactly easy to fix. I've tried cognitive behavioral therapy, pills, etc and none of it sticks for more than a few months at a time. Ultimately, it's the inability to repress my past (and ongoing) trauma which always seems to overwhelm the positive steps I try to take.
I don't know that I have full blown hyperthymesia, I've never talked to a professional about it, I certainly don't recall EVERY day of my life in great detail but my friends and loved ones are often surprised at what I can recall and just how much trivial detail I can recall when doing so. I had a pretty bad concussion in 1997 which definitely affected my memory in a negative way, but I still still consider it to be far superior to most people.
Anyway, it is a curse to be forced to remember all of the worst days and moments of your life. Imagine constantly reliving your most painful or embarrassing moments. Imagine carrying around the burden of all of the not so nice things you may have done in your life, like the snippy retort you gave to the person that was marginally rude to you when you were tired. Imagine the insults and bullying that you endured not only through high school, but that the people you've cared about have thrown at you over the years during spats. Or maybe it was the time you made a suggestion at work or to a friend that everyone else has long forgotten but you still remember in vivid detail. I have detailed memories going back to the first house I lived in and we moved out of there when I was 6 months old.
Breakups can be hard, but remembering the little intimate details of your lost SO are worse, watching a loved one die in front of you, the laughter that still echoes in your mind from the time you had a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe, etc. Sure, it's nice that you can remember all of the details the day your child was born or that trip you saved up your entire life for, but when you can't forget the things that your brain really needs to in order for you to move on, every day has the potential of being a living hell. It's basically a permanent state of PTSD and you never know when it's going to hit you.
After my concussion, I've lost some of the factual retention memory ability that wasn't related to my personal life, but, unfortunately, I still mentally "record" virtually every moment of my life. I can't always tell you the date (though I often can), but I can deliver the full visual, audio and tactile memory of those moments. Friends/family tend to love that I can remember the things that they can't and help refresh their own memories, but for me, it sucks.
My dad just went for a quarterly checkup visit... the doctor charge him a $15 copay (supplemental Medicare HMO style plan through Blue Choice) and the doctor charged Blue Choice another $180, of which they paid $65. I don't have insurance and my last appointment was $60 cash.
Similarly, my dad was diagnosed with sleep apnea. His CPAP machine was $120 up front with a $15 payment every month (which they never charged me for some reason, I think their billing is screwed up since I sent in $100 for another copay for supplies and they credited my account but never cashed the check, but I digress), with the insurer paying apparently paying $680 (my dad has a 15% copay on medical equipment). He had an accident (he had a stroke and isn't always coherent, especially while sleeping) and ended up dumping his urinal into the CPAP machine. The replacement, off the books, albeit used? $100 cash for the entire machine.
We hear a lot of talk about just how expensive it is to pay out of pocket, but from what I've seen, is my costs, as an uninsured person, are routinely cheaper than the costs when insurance, be it regular HMO coverage, Medicare or a Medicare Advantage type program, is involved. I dropped my insurance coverage in 2004 or so, after the premiums increased to $1457/3 months (nearly $6k a year) for a single 20 something in perfect health (NY rates suck). Since then, I've saved $42k in premiums while only paying out a couple hundred dollars in the same time. Obviously, for someone in their 50s or higher, their expenses may be different, but for me, it was beyond stupid to keep paying my premiums. Likewise, under ObamaCare, it's still stupid for me to pay premiums, I'll just sign up if I get some expensive disease (and millions of other people doing the same thing as me will bankrupt the system, which is when we'll deliberately get the hue and cry to switch to socialized medicine). $42k invested in your 20s will provide you a major advantage by the time you get to retirement age (or it can be invested into a house, starting a business or whatever makes the most sense for your personal needs).
Most of the doctors I know would love to do away with the headaches of dealing with insurance regulations (imposed by insurers AND the government), so they could just get on with treating their patients. Most of them give up a lot of money just to hire someone to figure out how to play the games with the various insurers (including the government). The one thing that always seems to be forgotten, is the HMO system was created by government legislation and, to this day, is entirely governed by government regulation. When you hear the various politicians criticizing the HMO system, they're criticizing the very thing they created and have control over.
If these contracts are known for being so bad, why do people continue to sign them?
People want to be signed by a big label so bad, they'll do anything to get that contract. Often, they won't even hire an independent lawyer or will ignore the legal advice they're given, because they want to be signed so bad. The label knows that even if this group turns it down, there are 20 more waiting in the wings, itching for that contract. You either accept it or it goes to the next group.
It's just like the people you see on Jerry Springer or whatever. They don't care that they look like idiots, they got to be on tv... and on Jerry at that!
I saw this show... it was called Outsourced.
You close a couple programs? Or get more RAM? In all seriousness, there's never been more free RAM for programs to use than right now, and it's only going to get better. It could be worse: it could be 1985 and you have one program running at a time due to memory constraints.
My laptop is maxed out, the chipset only supports 4 GB max and unfortunately, it came with Vista 32 rather than 64 despite having a 64 bit processor so it'll only address 3 GB of that anyway. I could upgrade the OS, but, well, I don't really care for windows, I just use it out of convenience (and also have gentoo installed on it as well). So while RAM is cheap, most portable systems have significantly lower limits than traditional desktops.
On the subject of closing applications just because one refuses to behave nicely, we get back into the problem I've had with the GNOME devs over the years. My computer is a tool to get work done in the way that I find most efficient. My computer should conform to my style of usage, it shouldn't force a non-optimal (to me) experience on me because that's the only way some application's developer thought I should run it. That's why we have vi/emacs, gnome/kde, bash/csh, etc, because what is best for you might not be best for me.
I'm much more familiar with the Linux side of buffering/caching than Windows, but rather than make the app the manager of my system's memory, the apps should let the OS take care of caching because it is so difficult for one app to understand the needs of the other apps running simultaneously with it. Linux tends to keep what I need in memory, lets the disk buffers fill up and adjust as needed, swapping out what isn't being used and then the OOM killer comes in should one app get totally crazy. Windows (at least Vista) seems to just keep swapping more and more to disk, happily giving more and more RAM and swap to firefox, all while everything grinds to a halt and then rather than an OOM killer kick in, firefox seems to start playing nice, freeing some of its cache, all while just grinding the drive more. I regard that as both an OS problem (the OS should have better protections against letting one process crush all the others unless it is given the priority to be the process that gets to do that) and an application problem (the app simply shouldn't be designed to greedily take, take and take some more just because the OS hasn't told it that it has run out of memory).
Unfortunately, I think too many projects, especially heavily used projects, tend to get an inflated ego, whereby they think that all other apps should bow to their one true app. As I was saying, the problem is going to be when you get a half dozen or more of these mega-ego apps running simultaneously, each thinking they own the computer rather than you being the one that should be in charge.
what happens when every app decides it is "the one true app" and should use as much memory as it can grab? When you have a half dozen or more programs all deciding that it can use all of your RAM for its cache and you start swapping everything else out to disk, it can be extremely painful to switch between tasks.
I realize that not everyone has a problem with it, but Firefox kills my Vista laptop with 3GB RAM after leaving it running for a day or two with a dozen tabs open, and at some point, will often starting pausing for 60 seconds or more due to swapping. On the flip side, with my Linux desktop with 6GB of RAM, I hardly notice it chewing up crazy amounts of memory (1.2-1.5GB) until it's been open for a couple weeks. Still, all it takes is a couple of these monsters running together to really bog a machine down and apps shouldn't be so aggressive with caching that they force everything else into swap (and eventually themselves too).
As for Unity vs Gnome-Shell, I don't really care to have a major change in my UI. It's not about being a luddite, it's about not "fixing" what isn't broken for me. I'm planning to migrate to something more lightweight once support for GNOME 2 dies (and that was after waiting until GNOME 2.10 or so when it finally became usable enough again to ditch GNOME 1.4).
I'm not sure how "surprising" or novel that is... when I was on Prodigy back around 1991, a bunch of us belonging to a AD&D "group" did something quite similar to avoid the per-message fees for sending to other people. We'd all share a sub-account and deliberately bounce messages so others could log on and read them. If Prodigy closed a sub-account after noticing irregularities (high number of bounces, multiple people trying to log onto the account at the same time, etc), we'd all move to a different sub-account.
Uh, Loki was publishing modern games... just to pick a few of the AAA titles,
Civ:CTP: published March 1999, Loki released it in May 1999
HOMM 3: published February 1999, Loki released it in December 1999
Quake 3: published December 2, 1999. Loki released it December 7, 1999
SMAC: published February 1999 with the expansion pack released in 2000. Loki released it with the expansion pack in July 2000.
Loki was releasing current AAA games, their problems were with the financial management of the company, paying large sums to get the rights to AAA titles to port, overestimates of how many people would pay for the games (and they were pirated heavily by people that bought the Windows version and felt entitled to the Linux version for free) and with that an oversupply of retail packages (which is why you can still find some Loki games new in the box), and by trying to grow too big too fast.
I happened to buy most of what Loki put out while they were still in business because I was glad to be freed from Windows even if it meant I had to wait a staggering 5 days or even a couple months to get the games on my platform of choice. Waiting a few weeks is the price I paid to get what I wanted, much like you can eat a steak raw or take the time to cook and season it to your taste.
In the wake of Loki, the "main" Linux porting house became LGP and, yeah, I'll agree, they put out overpriced older B or C title games. I think they overcompensated for Loki's failure with the AAA market and, based over casual observation of the last couple years and the continuous catastrophes they seem to inflict upon themselves by being too low budget, I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around either. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for Linux games, only the two big porting houses got it wrong. Meanwhile, some publishers are quite happy putting out their own ports, whether they're done in house or contracted out For a major studio looking solely at the business aspect, Linux sales might not be worth the effort, but for smaller studios and indie developers, a Linux port may end up giving them a substantial influx of cash.
I was getting 15 mod points 1-2 times per week for the last couple years, but since the redesign, I've only gotten them a total of once.and that was a day or so after posting... so it may be that you only get mod points if you post now, rather than giving them to the infrequently posting, frequent readers. Instead of digging through comments to find unfair negative mods, I find myself more skimming slashdot now since I never have points to use (I almost never mod down unless it's something obvious like GNAA).
I realize that you're just another anonymous troll, but...
Ubuntu is moving away from X11 and GNOME to their own windowing system (Unity on Wayland), so whatever "Redhat does to GNOME" will matter little to them anyway since Ubuntu is abandoning the platform.
The GNOME devs have been pigheaded ever since the inception of GNOME 2 with their mentality of "dumb everything down and take away options from the users. Some functionality got added back sometime around GNOME 2.12 (I had stuck with 1.2 until then) making it usable again, but the vast majority of what was taken away never came back. I'm already preparing to abandon GNOME for something else once support for GNOME 2 has ended, though I haven't decided what I'll be using yet.
Redhat may have a lot of influence over the Linux world, but that's because they're the ones actively funding work and distributing efforts of that work. While they're busy paying the devs to work on some of the most critical tools and libraries (kernel, gcc, glibc, GNOME, etc), Ubuntu has gotten criticism for not even contributing patches back upstream.
But, the whole situation you describe is relaly, really depressing. Usually, hospitals are pretty on-the-ball when it comes to security, or at least moreso than individual clinics are. It's particularly surprising that they're overlooking the password sharing - most CIOs/CMIOs will shriek and faint if you jump out from behind a corner screaming "HIPAA HIPAA HIPAA!"
Maybe I should write to the CIO of the hospital with my concerns... after all, my records are stored there (and while there's nothing scandalous in my medical records, I do consider them to be some of my most private information). I don't want to get my personal doctor in trouble though, he's the 4th doctor my rural office has had in the last 8 years and I'm glad to finally have one that is competent and I feel I can trust again (the previous three were incompetent and outright assholes - one was a holy roller (literally preaching to patients) who turned me in to social services because my disabled dad ended up with an ulcer on his foot and, as it turns out, he had diabetes, which she hadn't bothered to test for/diagnose prior to that, blaming me as if I caused the ulcer out of abuse even though we didn't know he had diabetes). Anyway, I digress.
It sounds like your hospital has really, really dysfunctional IT, but EMRs are possible to do right. And are you sure it was sabotage? There's a lot that blows up when an EMR is first installed.
I'm not familiar with the two particular EMR systems involved since my mom didn't mention their names. The IT director had been wined and dined by the marketing department of the one she preferred (surprise!) and, despite the hospital choosing to go with the the other platform, she refused to learn it so she could teach and support the staff. My mom ended up having to figure everything out and then train her department as well as the ER doctors on how to use it since IT was totally uncooperative before AND after the rollout (probably in the hopes of causing enough pain that the hospital would abandon the system they chose for her (IT dir) preferred system). Clearly a case where the IT director needs to be fired for insubordination and gross misconduct (I mean, we're talking patients lives if they can't access radiology and lab work), but, due to politics, she (IT dir) somehow managed to keep her job.
Funny part, is I applied for a part time IT job there but didn't even get an interview... I wouldn't be surprised if said IT director canned my application/resume upon learning that my mom was her nemesis from radiology that actually won the EMR "battle" despite the fact that I'd be an improvement over any one of her existing staff.
Maybe they figure your average patient can't figure out what they're typing just by watching them from the side (I may be a touch typist, but my doctor is a two index finger hunter/pecker - again, his specialty is medicine and he's paying someone else to do his data entry for him)... and even if his access to patients are limited to the hundreds/thousands that list him as their primary care provider, it would still be trivial for me to access the medical history of people in my town that have him as a doctor (or likewise, for those people to access my history).
As for logging, what does the infiltrator care? Some offices (like my dad's neurologist) have dozens of doctors on staff with scores of patients scheduled for the same appointment times. You go to whatever exam room is open when you get called back and it would be nearly impossible for them to tie a one time access to a particular patient (multiple times and they'll compare who was scheduled those times). My own doctor's office routinely leaves the exam rooms open while the entire office takes their lunch outside (the main office and dr's personal office are locked but the exam rooms aren't), so it wouldn't be difficult to go there on a nice day (so they'll be eating outside) when you aren't scheduled to access an exam room terminal. Logging just means the doctor gets the blame, but the infiltrator gets away with it.
My mom is the secretarial administrator in the radiology department of another hospital and because of turf wars between various IT departments at the hospital, it can be difficult to get the proper credentials that techs, secretaries and per diem radiologists need to do their jobs, so people often have to piggyback on someone else's accounts to do their work (maybe they have a network login but not a login to the MRI system, so they log into windows, log into the network, then use someone else's MRI login), making logging virtually useless there too. My mom has fought with her director over it, who, in turn, has fought with the IT director, all while the board and CEO ignores the issue completely (in fact, IT at her hospital is totally fucked and the IT director has gone as far as to try to sabotage the rollout of a new EMR system because she preferred another one, meaning there have been days where critical departments didn't have much needed access to each other all because she refuses to support the chosen product, the hospital has no internet redundancy despite not having a radiologist on site 24/7 to interpret results, etc. But, that's what you get with a backwoods hospital where turf and ego wars are more important than patient care.)
I see lots of medical offices using their PCs to access the internet (many of which are using IE), some have their private networks open to wifi, etc. With everything I've seen, I simply don't trust EMR systems at all.
I sit there and watch my doctor type in his password to the EMR system every time I go. The EMR requires him to change his password every 3 months and so he goes with something easy to remember. So, we get (color)(number)(item) for his passwords and so far, I've only ever seen the number change. blue1tie, blue2tie, blue3tie, etc. His username is the astoundingly difficult to remember (firstinitial)(lastname) which is further abetted by a dropdown menu of the usernames of all the medical staff in his office. Oh, and since his office is owned by the local major hospital, he has access to not only his patients, but the records, lab updates, etc of all patients in the hospital and satellite offices (though it would be a HIPPA violation for him to go snooping, which does little to stop someone else from snooping while he gets the blame since it originates from his office IPs and username).
Since the whole hospital system uses the same EMR system, it wouldn't be too hard to guess anyone's username, most doctors and nurses aren't all that great at typing while hiding their password input since they specialize in medicine, not keyboarding, and there are terminals accessible in rooms you're frequently left alone in for extended periods of time (and if that isn't convenient enough, the free wifi on hospital grounds and web based access to the EMR is). Put the three together and it would be pretty trivial to get access to records of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people, not that I've ever tried to access records in ways that I don't have authorization for (you can access your own record through the web, though it is read only and patients have limited access to restrict them from seeing things like their own surgical notes or lab results, but those restrictions don't apply to medical staff accounts).
I'm fine with remakes of movies that were previously done badly... improve upon where the previous movie failed to try to make a better movie. Lately, Hollywood insists on remaking the existing good or profitable movies in an effort to cash in on their previous credentials. The 1972 Gene Hackman Poseidon Adventure was a compelling movie while the 2006 Poseidon was pretty mediocre at best. I loved the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder, but I didn't care for the 2005 Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory even if it was a closer adaptation to the book (most people that I know that like the latter better are Burton fans judging it based more on enjoying Burton's style than the quality of the work). The 1966 animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas was butchered by Jim Carrey in 2000.
By all means, re-imagine the badly executed movies if there is a good story to be told, but quit trying to cash in on the classics since it's going to be damn hard to do them any better than they were previously done. The business side of Hollywood wants safety and "guaranteed" success, which gets in the way of producing new movies that may stray from where movies have succeeded in the past... just like the commercial/conglomerate part of the video game industry lost its creativity in the name of churning out sequels, clones and add-ons.
There's also Computer Stupidities, which has been around forever but still gets updated every now and then
That depends... if a site's content is mostly user generated, like with Slashdot, someone that posts or moderates frequently is creating and/or maintaining the content that draws in the people that don't block ads, making them valuable in their own right, regardless if they view ads themselves.
I liked the first season of Sanctuary for the most part... then they basically skipped all of the interesting stuff between season 1 and season 2, totally obliterating the plot that they spent all of season 1 building up. Then they knocked off Ashley, who along with Magnus provided an interesting mother/daughter dynamic, in an effort to be "bold." At that point, the show seemed to lose most of the storyline and mostly became a "monster of the week" feature. They replaced Ashley's character with Kate's, whom I just found downright annoying, not to mention she was accepted way too quickly for someone that was responsible for Ashley's demise. But wait! It's scifi, so, according to the same producer that said they killed Ashley to be bold, they said they may bring Ashley back at some point.
Anyway, a few episodes into season 2, I lost interest and haven't been back. After realizing there were 3 episodes I hadn't watched on my DVR and that I didn't care that I didn't watch them, I just deleted the series recording. I just don't care anymore... I only spent this long writing because I thought the show had some real promise, but they deliberately killed it.