I go one step further, using my card's website to generate a unique number for every paypal transaction I've made. I'll never give them my real card number nor access to my banking accounts. Paypal is a method of last resort and, like the GP, I only use it as a card broker.
I've read a few too many horror stories involving Paypal and, even with my method above, somehow, I still ended up with a temporary freeze on my primary credit card (through a generated number) when I went to buy the Penumbra bundle for Linux last year.
It isn't annoyance, it's exhaustion. Let us know after you get to the stage where you help them through complete disability and death how "easier" and "cheaper" it was.
It may not be easier than throwing them in a home, and cheaper depends on the circumstances, but it certainly is much more fulfilling to know that your sacrifices have given a loved one a quality of life that they would have never achieved elsewhere.
In 12 years, I've lost thousands of hours of sleep, I've cleaned up more puke and diarrhea than I can remember, I've probably given up hundreds of thousands of dollars in income over the course of my life... and when I see the look in my dad's eyes when his granddaughter (my sister's kid) climbs up in bed next to him, gives him a kiss and hug, and then tells him that she loves him and is glad he's doing a sleepover, well... I have no doubts about my choice regardless of the sacrifices I've made along the way. I have a lot of regrets in my life, but choosing to take care of my dad isn't one of them.
Not with an elderly person. It only gets worse as time goes on. However bad they are now, they are going to be at least that bad if not worse in a few months, until they die. There's nothing to look forward to, they won't get better.
I take care of my disabled dad. He was 40 when it happened and he's 52 now.
Two words... Fuck you, if you think that's true in all, or even a majority of cases (the majority of disabled people, even disabled elderly, aren't in severe dementia). I could have thrown my dad in a nursing home to rot, but how could I do that to a 40 year old? You think his life's wants end there? He's gotten to, not only meet, but be a part of the lives of his grandchildren. In fact, he spent yesterday and today with his oldest (4 years old) one. If nothing else would, they alone make his life worth living and they absolutely adore him, wheelchair, the occasional grumpiness and all.
Hopefully, one day, he'll get to see me get married and have kids. Hopefully, he'll be able to see his daughter get married (hey, I'm posting on slashdot with a 5 digit id, the kids are obviously hers). Maybe he'll learn to walk again (yeah, 12 years in, he's still making progress). He looks forward to doing mundane shit that you and I hate like getting the mail or grilling himself a hotdog. He loves to go out and wax my truck with me or winning a game of solitaire. He's learning how to use a computer (something he absolutely detested prior to being injured). He has all the same things to look forward to that you or I do, and unlike both of us, he has a greater appreciation for every little thing he does have or gets to experience precisely because it was all taken away from him.
They will fight, sometimes physically, yell, etc and not listen.
This just in, there are a lot of stubborn ass people that aren't disabled that act the same way. Should we eliminate all of them from society at large too?
My dad has his moments, but who wouldn't, being 99% there mentally while one side of your body doesn't work so you can't easily do a lot of the things you want to (fwiw, hemiparesis is a bitch compared to lower body paralysis since you can still do almost everything with two functioning arms, but losing an arm and leg renders you unable to support that side to move). So he'll yell for a little while until he calms himself down and we move on like it never happened. Yeah, it's a pain in my ass, but that's life. If he wasn't yelling here at me, he'd be yelling somewhere else, with someone that didn't love him taking the abuse and maybe reflecting or even escalating it back at him.
After all, is it fair to the children to say "You cannot have the attention you want because grandma is too busy being crazy and demanding continual care"?
Sometimes, it IS fair and healthy. While it is important to give kids lots of attention, it is equally important to teach them independence, charity, patience and the real meaning of love. They may throw a temper tantrum because they have to wait 5 minutes while you take papa to the bathroom, but they do that when you have to change sissy's diaper too. Not only that, but a lot of times, papa has more patience to sit down with the kids, teaching them about all the mundane things in life that the parents don't have time for or telling them the family history that the parents always wanted to, but never actually will get around to. Maybe they learn to stop and smell the flowers instead of rushing off to a play date that they had to pencil in three weeks earlier.
I'm rather sad for you that you seem to have absolutely no reverence for elderly people... just remember, one day, you'll be old too. Hope for your sake that your heirs don't feel the same way that you do.
I'd love to take care of my mom all day, but if I did, I'd have to move into her tiny house (because I'd lose my house, which she can't get around in because of all the stairs), and YOU'D be paying for me to eat and go to the doctor, because I would have no income. Now, if we had universal healthcare, reasonably priced education (I'll probably be paying for college forever), and any ability to recover after losing jobs and our credit ratings getting screwed (which, ironically, hurts when looking for a good job, which would allow us to fix things), then our families might have the ability to care for our elderly again.
I DO take care of a disabled parent and have for 12 years, almost entirely by myself. I've been in the position of being unemployed for the last 4 years - you think it's hard getting a job right now, try getting a job that allows you to take a physically disabled parent to work with you since working is pointless unless you can make more, after taxes, than it costs to send the parent to adult daycare ($60+ per day (meaning you need to make at least $90, or about $12/hr just to break even or $20/hr to earn minimum wage after expenses)) or a home health aide ($24/hr through the agency that came for my dad when he first came home, which is even more expensive than the daycare option). I live with him in the same house I grew up in - his bedroom and the bathroom are on the first floor. We get by on his modest retirement income of about $25k per year, and yeah, that included paying a mortgage for 11 of the last 12 years (we paid off the house last year). His medical bills have become rather substantial since he's developed diabetes and various other complications after his brain aneurysm/stroke that rendered him immobile on his left side, and thus, largely non-ambulatory... but we get by.
As for me, I dropped my private health insurance 5 years ago. After 6 years, my premiums had gone from $200/month to nearly $500/month, largely because of new mandates required by the state insurance board. The likelihood of me needing expensive care at the age of 28 is pretty slim, not worth $6000 annually to me (and that wasn't the cadillac plan, I had high co-pays and whatnot). I'd love to buy catastrophic coverage, but my state won't let me and the federal government won't let me buy across state lines. Over the past 5 years, I've saved somewhere between $35-40k on premiums while my medical expenses amounted to $115, $515 or so if you want to include my glasses and contacts. I qualify for most of the welfare slate, including medical, but I refuse to take it because I believe that, on principle, it is theft for me to do so. I put up with some minor issues like tendonitis in my elbow and bone spurs in my feet, choosing to treat myself rather than go for surgery since it isn't necessary at this point (and I will pay for it when it is) and, in the case of my heels, because I can't be off my feet for weeks to heal post-surgery.
Most of his family shares the modern day American value of "me, me, me" and they do nothing to help. The vast majority of his family doesn't even call to check to see how he's doing. Why should they put themselves out in any manner to help a family member? While pretty shitty of them, it isn't their responsibility to care for him. Likewise, it is even less the responsibility of you or some other slashdotter, since you aren't even related to him. The government sees absolutely no value in him - he'll be a net loss for the rest of his life, thus, if they were in control, they have every reason to let him die early to save money. That goes likewise for the insurance companies if he wasn't on Medicare (hey, unlike me, he paid a lifetime of premiums). His family may like the idea of the someone taking care of him, so they don't have to feel guilty for not doing it, but that doesn't make government the moral choice. Too many people say "hey, I paid my taxes, so why should I have to give to charity on top of that?," which is the danger of government "promi
Where sports is REALLY a waste is at the High School level. Yeah I know people need exercise, but that's what gym is for. You don't need all those extra afterschool (and expensive) sports teams.
I played football in high school. The football team and boys basketball teams both made money since there was an admission charge for each and both drew good crowds. The basketball crowds were much smaller, but there was a lot less overhead (it's played in the gym and the equipment amounts to some clothes and balls). The football team had a large field house and a set of field lights donated to it by a member of the community, and despite the maintenance costs of the building/field, cost of running the lights and cost of buying/reconditioning equipment, it still turned a profit.
Where the problem came in, was the other sports teams decided that "it wasn't fair" that football players got night games and a building dedicated solely to it for a season (wrestling would get it during the winter and track during the spring). The first to complain were the boys soccer players, who demanded night games of their own. So, they'd use our game field (the football team only played games on the game field, practices were done on another field to keep the game field in shape) and, sure enough, the boys soccer team tore up the field. Then it was the girls soccer team complaining that it wasn't fair that the boys got special treatment, so they demanded their share of games on our field, which tore it up more.
After making our twice a week (JV on thursday, varsity on friday) football field nearly unusable, the school finally relented and spent 6 figures of tax money on redoing the soccer field and installing lights for them. They still don't draw a crowd, still don't charge admission and it costs a significant amount of money to run the lights, but the players got their way. Next up was the baseball/softball team complaining it wasn't fair that the other sports got to play night games, so, you guessed it, they ended up with a new baseball field, complete with lights, custom cast concrete dugouts, etc, again at the cost of 6 figures of tax money, with an even smaller draw than the soccer teams and, again, no admission fees.
And just like with the sports spending, school buildings have been growing like crazy despite a relatively flat student population. The school budget when I graduated 15 years ago was around $12 million (2100 kids), while it's about $33 million now (2200 kids). Dozens of new classrooms were added even though about half of all classrooms sit empty every day because "every teacher needs their own classroom," deity forbid they have to share. New gyms, new auditoriums, computer upgrade cycles so fast that any slashdotter would weep, etc. So they only spend about $175k a year on books, it's not like those are important.
The same story can be told about most of the school districts in my area (Western NY). Sadly, my school has one of the more efficient cost/student ratios (about $15,000/student) compared to most districts around here (average is around $17,000/student, with some extending over $20/student). Rochester is over $21k/student and has a roughly 40% graduation rate. Teachers are very, very well paid and have been for 20 years when their unions made the argument that better teacher pay=better student performance, so that isn't the problem here. The problems are parents simply don't instill any sense of value in education in their kids (for a myriad of reasons), administrators love building monuments to themselves, there are too many administrators in general, and finally, overpaying teachers (at 22/23 with no experience, they START at a higher pay rate than the median district income and within 10 years, are paid double it) has drawn a lot of teachers that are more interested in the pay and benefits than educating their students. Of that $33 million budget, $18m goes to teacher salary and benefits (about 240 teachers/aides or 9 kids/teacher, which tr
I've watched at least a half dozen relatives die of various addictions and watched others throw their lives away at a minimum. Addictions tend to run in families, my grandpa was a horrible alcoholic and absentee father that let his kids starve, get raped by his friends, etc. His wife up and left him and the seven kids (the oldest was about 11) without ever being heard from again. All of his kids have problems, ranging from the master carpenter that can't hold a job (he gets plastered, sleeps for two hours, gets plastered, rinse and repeat), to one that killed herself, to one that was a teacher and kidnapped his student trying to take her to Mexico, and on and on. My mom is probably the most stable of them, after having beat her alcoholism, a complete mental breakdown and suicidal phase. And that's just one part of my family, my dad's family is just as screwed up in different ways and it's amplified as you go further into the extended family.
Growing up with what I saw, I never wanted to be like them. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs (prescriptions, sure, but I tend to even refrain from tylenol and ibuprofen). I was 27 when I lost my virginity (partially through choice, I didn't want to have kids before I was ready, and partly because I'm like most slashdotters and am socially intimidated by women anyway. I also have an aunt that was a grandma at 32). I've even taken care of a severely disabled parent on my own since I was 21. I'm the first to admit that I have some rather deep psychological problems of my own, but I don't begrudge anyone that does want to drink or whatever. However, I will add that, despite what proponents say about it being victimless, pot abuse DOES affect the kids just like alcohol abuse does - not just in my own family, but watching a lot of family friends that use and how they treat their kids.
I tend to not judge people... and I've had a number of friends and acquaintances say that I'm the "coolest straight arrow they know." However, there is a contingent out there that hates people like me for some reason, most likely because by leaving the exceptions to the rule alone, they seem some type of dichotomy themselves that they feel makes them look bad. That doesn't just go for the drinking, I've had people tell me how wonderful they think it is that I take care of my dad and then, when I turn my back, they start trash talking me for making the sacrifices I have because they couldn't do it themselves; By tearing me down, they don't have to feel so bad about being more self-centered themselves. While they're the first to complain about feeling judged, they also tend to be the first TO judge.
Am I a saint? Absolutely not... in fact, I don't have too much good to say about myself. I suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder, whereby I tend to pre-reject myself so others don't get the chance to do it for me. You can't do that unless you detest yourself at a pretty deep level. Still, I don't judge others and if I do, I still find ways that I'm somehow worse than them.
My mom works in the radiology department of a small hospital in the middle of nowhere that transfers pretty much anyone that needs more than a bandaid (ie, it's not a big, fancy hospital with loads of special services). All of their various radiological machines are hooked up to the department's LAN and outside M-F,9-5 the images are sent to one of the radiologists to read and report on. The chief radiologist has an office at home and then there's a service they hire out when he's on vacation or not available. The tech has been available for years, you just need a large enough pipe to deliver the data in a reasonable amount of time.
To give you an idea of the size we're talking about, the iso of my dad's brain MRI and MRA weighs in at 282 MB. And yes, if you want a copy of your scans for yourself, generally all you have to do is ask them to burn you a CD.
Although they had other big problems revolving around Scott Draeker's business sense, Loki Software failed in part due to a high piracy rate. People had already bought the Windows versions of the games they sold and didn't want to pay a second time to buy the Linux ports; they simply expected to get them for free, so they'd snag a copy off the internet rather than the retail shelf.
Michael Simms from LGP has mentioned high piracy rates in the past as well (likewise, there are other problems at LGP contributing to its current woes).
Back in the late 90s, my dad had a brain aneurysm and stroke which resulted in left hemiparesis (paralysis of the left side of his body, moreso in the arm than the leg in his case). In fact, most of the top half of the right half of his brain was destroyed and it had effects on his speech, short term memory formation, visual processing (he tends to ignore the left half of his field of vision), balance, etc.
I got him a Wii. He can't do the Wii Fit since he can't stand on his own, but Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort has helped him significantly with his left neglect (both visual and physical awareness), his overall body coordination, his ability to concentrate on certain things and perform cognitive skills (Big Brain Academy), etc. I'd love to see more games, especially games playable with a single hand, which can be used to isolate certain functions to help patients recover from various injuries. Anyone that rejects the potential benefit for some patients obviously has never been in the position of being a caregiver (at home or in a professional capacity) to such people.
As an added bonus, the Wii is a great time killer for my dad. When you're literally stuck in a chair any time you're not stuck in a bed and you have limited monetary resources, it's a cheap way to entertain yourself through the endless, boring days. And for someone in his condition, even if that's all the Wii did for him, it was a good investment on my part.
Digging through an old bookmarks.html from Netscape, I added Slashdot to my bookmarks at 923516156 (04/07/1999 8:15pm GMT). I know it wasn't my first visit here, but that was the point when I finally decided to keep it.
Speaking of 4/7/1999 it was an interesting day. Headlines include ATI Releasing Specs for TV Tuner, Debian Logo Continues, Everyone and Their Brother Opens a Linux Site, "Intel Inside" campaign shackles OEMs, FSF updates Free Software definition, Al Gore Goes "Open Source", Salon buys The Well, SoundBlaster Live! under Linux?, and Using FAT32 with Linux.
Looking back, I realize what makes me nostalgic about the old days of Slashdot. Almost every story was related to tech somehow, whereas these days, there's a ton of general interest stories, slashvertisements and stories that are intended mostly to generate flame wars to increase page views.
Anyway, I don't remember exactly what brought me to Slashdot, or which of those stories it was that made me bookmark the site that day... I left for a while when kdawson and the politics section appeared (and kdawson still makes me miss jon katz in comparison), but I couldn't stay away for more than a couple months.
It took me a while to actually create an account, oh, how I wish my account number was even lower.
I say the same thing... I think it might be pervasive enough that we'd all probably have the same account numbers, or close to them, if we had signed up when we first got here.
I visit numerous times per day and get 15 mod points every 2-4 days whether I use them or not. I mod up 12-13 comments for every 2-3 I mod down, and will hold onto my mod points for really good posts rather than just blowing them on the first 15 decent posts I come across. I spend 3-5 points in a typical day. Sometimes I let 10 or 12 points expire (and get 15 more the next day), sometimes I get points, spend 3 and come back to find 15 waiting again. Maybe twice a month, I spend all 15 in less than 3 days.
I'd assume that I have a good history in meta-mod and that's why I get points the way that I do. I did go through a dry spell of almost a year where I didn't get any points at all for some reason, but they came back about 6 months ago and have been freely flowing since. It's rare that I sit here with no mod points to spend unless I just finished my 15 and then I know I'll almost always have more the next day.
While not a 486, I've got a K6-II/450 still running as a web/ftp server. It compiles a modern kernel in 44 minutes without distcc and emerge -ep world | genlop -p estimates 1 day, 20 hours, 43 minutes for a full system rebuild (261 packages with gcc 4.3.4 and -O2).
Of course, I could build that in a chroot on my modern system in probably an hour or less and then transfer it over.
I didn't know exactly what I had until a couple years ago, but I've been aware of the feelings since my early teens as well. I can trace the roots back to even before I started school.
I quit my restaurant management (small locally owned restaurant, not a chain) job a couple years ago, though not because of AvPD. I put up with a ton of abuse from the owners there for about 10 years and didn't quit BECAUSE of my AVpD. As bad as the abuse was, it was a known quantity. Since then, my avoidance has increased dramatically. Whereas it was only dominant in social situations, especially if I was around someone I was attracted to, it has now invaded every facet of my life. After being rejected a few times (because I take care of a disabled parent), I can't bring myself to even apply for jobs anymore. I'm having a hard time going to the store during hours that normal people go, so I'll go in the middle of the night to avoid the pressures (monitoring, anxiety, etc) that come from being around other people. Much like you, I have issues with the phone - I switched from Dish to Cable a few years ago and it took me more than a month to call and cancel Dish because I didn't want to deal with their retention tactics.
I'm fine as long as I remain in my comfort zone - hanging out with people I know, going to the same restaurants and stores I always go to, etc. As soon as something or someone knew is introduced into the equation, I begin to shut down, though it does help if I'm experiencing it with a close friend (say, going to a new restaurant with my best friend).
I have a number of family members with other issues whom self-medicate with alcohol and narcotics. All that has done, is turn them into alcoholics, drug addicts, etc. It lets them hide from their problems, but at the expense of never resolving the problems and compounding new ones. As such, I don't do either (4 years since my last drink and I've never touched a non-prescribed narcotic). I know that I'll get addicted to whichever I'd self-medicate with and an addiction isn't the answer. Losing myself in EverQuest for a couple years destroyed enough of my life (I was our guild and raid leader and nothing makes you feel better than everyone looking to you as their personal hero).
Some healthier recommendations that might help you cope with your AvPD:
1) Check out Painfully Shy by Drs Barbara and Gregory Markway (ISBN: 0-312-31623-2). Barbara has an anxiety disorder herself and has a number of ideas on how to help yourself try to adjust to society. This will probably be the easiest thing for you to do, since it requires no input from outside yourself.
2) Join an AvPD mailing list. Talking with others about your condition will help you understand it better, can take the edge off since you'll realize a lot of other people feel the same way you do, etc. Even if you don't write to others (I don't), just reading what others are going through themselves makes you feel like less of an outcast and more like a normal person. I belong to the Avoidant Sanctuary mailing list under an alias
3) See a shrink that specializes in anxiety. Most regular shinks have never even heard of AvPD, so their ability to understand and treat it is diminished. The doctor may prescribe some anti-anxiety meds to help take the edge off, will prescribe a plan to help condition you to not be afraid of others (we're much harder to "fix" than your static phobic types since ours is a more dynamic phobia) and can get you into a support group which can help you diminish your fear of rejection and trust issues. This is the hardest one for avoidants to do and I've never done it myself.
If you'd like to chat more off Slashdot, the email address attached to my account is valid.
I seem to remember paying about $30 for most of my NES games. I never would have been able to afford games on my allowance otherwise. SNES I seem to remember being in the $50-60 range (at least for ActRaiser and Pilot Wings), which is why I bought fewer games for it. Most of my PC games in that era were in the $30-40 range too (in fact, I abandoned the SNES and switched over to PC gaming exclusively sometime around 1995, largely due to price and depth/replayability)
The Wii suckered me back into console gaming when it came out and that seems to have a mix of $30 and $50 games, depending on the title.
I'm in my early 30s and have Avoidant Personality Disorder with an increasing amount of agoraphobia. Oddly, gaming stores are one of the few places I never feel weird going to. Maybe it's because they generally deal with enough misfits, that I feel like I'm normal in comparison there. In fact, I buy the vast majority of my games in person.
My ISP used to give me free access to USENET. At first, they ran their own servers, then they outsourced them and paid another company for access to their USENET servers. Last year, thanks to Andrew Cuomo, they cut the USENET access all together, so now I'm forced to buy my own access (which I'm fine with).
But, USENET was a value added service just like ESPN360 would be. Should Road Runner have charged everyone for USENET access if only 5 or 10% of us even knew what it was, much less used it? I didn't get a price reduction when they eliminated the service, so it's not like the savings were passed on to me. It was certainly cheaper for Road Runner to buy USENET service for their customers in bulk than it is for individual customers to buy service themselves. The same goes for ISPs that provide some web/ftp space or even just email.
Now, obviously most people are going to want email... but how many use their ISP's mail service versus signing up for a gmail/yahoo/msn/whatever account? Should they be forced to subsidized the people that do use the ISP's email service? You probably don't want ESPN360 and despite being a fan of a couple sports, I don't want ESPN360. But ESPN360 isn't much different than the email, personal web or usenet provider your ISP might partner with. If you enact legislation completely separating the connection and the services/content provided on it, you're also going to get rid of the things people do use through the law of unintended consequences. And while you can make an exception for certain services today, do you know what services are coming tomorrow that could benefit the users the same way, and what a pain it can be to change legislation to enable access to a new service (after all, that's what providing content is, a service)? Will those services even have a chance to succeed to that point if they're banned by default?
The solution is to let the customers hammer it out with their ISPs. Yeah, it sucks that there are only two broadband ISPs in most places. I'd support carefully created legislation forcing that to open up more. ISPs would be forced to listen to what their customers want that way... the problem all along has been the monopoly/duopoly of broadband access.
Linux death 2.6.29-gentoo-r3 #1 SMP Wed May 6 00:04:53 EDT 2009 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
gcc version 4.3.3 (Gentoo 4.3.3-r2 p1.1, pie-10.1.5)
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.18
glibc 2.9_p20081201-r2
I've got a dozen or so Loki games installed and all of them work despite me being on AMD64 (with multilib). No chroot required, though a few of the games require you to load them with the old ld-linux.so.2
Not even an old program written from Loki Software Entertainment would run on a modern Linux Mint (2.6 kernel) for example unless in a chroot'd sandbox. Truly sadistic, that I even remember this happening even on the same kernel branch. Bruce Perens would address this better than I, but my time is worth more elseware.
You can do it by installing the old libraries and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD. See the Gentoo Wiki archives for information and a tarball of the necessary libraries.
Not the most elegant solution, but it's easier than dealing with a chroot.
Sci-Fi costs 60 cents because everyone that has it in their package is subsidizing it for you. while via ala carte, it might be $5, maybe even $10 since its probably one of the lowest watched channels. Chances are, we'd be looking at the price of premium channels for each of the non-super popular channels. So, you might be looking at something more like $5 for Sci-Fi, $2 for USA and $2 for TNT, putting you at $19... and you don't get one single other channel.
So, we'll add in one of the local news channels at 50 cents and a national news channel at $2. Maybe you watch your local hockey team, so that's $2 for your regional sports channel and another 50 cents for your NBC affiliate. Maybe you add in ESPN (who is the current pig right now, tacking something like $10 onto every cable subscriber already) for another $15. $2 for Comedy Central. That adds in anthoer $22, so we're up to $41.
Some channels like Sci-Fi are going to be priced high enough that people won't want to pay for it, so the price will keep going up (is it worth $10 to you? $15?) or else the channel will die. No channels are going to drop in price... and at the end of the day, unless you are that really dedicated 1-2 channel watcher and you NEVER want to watch anything else, it's going to cost as much, if not more, than the current package system costs. On the surface, ala carte pricing sounds nice, but I think most people will still opt for packages.
BTW - lower income customers are probably the ones that watch the most tv and across the widest number of channels. At $720 a year, they have unlimited entertainment across hundreds of channels 24/7 versus going out twice a month at $30 per night to equal the same price. The only thing cheaper is OTA media (and broadcast sucks hard most of the time) and the library (but how many low income people read as a hobby? Chances are if they're that well read, they probably aren't poor).
All that said, I think people should have the option for ala carte.
Today, you and I might be people that nobody cares about... tomorrow, you might decide to run for public office. Then, suddenly, you become interesting. Your opponent(s) decide to do some dubious oppositional research on you (happens all the time in politics)...
Well, there was one time back a few years ago where you gave first aid to someone that fell and broke their leg (compound fracture, blood everywhere). It turned out they had HIV, so you got tested. That information is leaked and you find yourself on the defensive while ignorant people are left to assume you're simply covering up a questionable affair, IV drug habit or whatever.
So, even if you're relatively nobody today... that doesn't mean that access to that information won't be valuable to someone else in the future.
Or, talking again about my mom's hospital... My mom fired someone for violating HIPPA. That woman now works at a private doctor's office and has access to the magical new federal health database. Out of spite, she looks up my mom's medical history, finds out she tried to commit suicide, her sister did commit suicide, etc. The information mysteriously shows up on the desk of the hospital's CEO and suddenly, my mom finds herself in jeopardy. Or maybe it happens for a divorce case, accident, hiring, etc. There are lots of ways to abuse access once you have it, even against regular nobodies, and to some people, the rewards for doing so might exceed the penalties for it.
How are you suggesting getting that unencrypted data without a security breach taking place beforehand (like someone leaves their card)?
That's just it... I'm saying that is happening RIGHT NOW and that I've seen it first hand. It happens at my mom's hospital because the different departments all fight over territory (ER, radioology, IT, etc). Every application is owned by a different department, with radiology having multiple systems in and of itself*. Since everyone fights over territory, each employee has their own login but some departments refuse to give employees access that the employee actually needs to do their job, so an administrator has to leave their account logged in so the techs can actually get work done. No matter how much techs and the department leads complain, IT and the department directors refuse to give people adequate access.
So, in the end, you've got an administrator logged in 24/7 with techs using their account. There's no effective auditing, since everyone in the department is sharing a single account or two and there are long periods, especially on the weekends, where patients have easy access to those computers (2 techs and no secretaries are on duty. If they are busy, the entire department is open to people wandering through, with the waiting room sitting across the hall from the unsupervised terminals)
*The way things are "supposed" to work, is that each employee has a unified login with access to all of the things they need to use. Instead, they log into windows and then launch their application, which then asks for a different login (each app has a different login, so they need to remember a half dozen or more accounts).
IT won't let some techs have access to windows since they were browsing porn on the net (yeah, btw, these systems have internet access, though I've never checked out the setup to see if they're accessible from the net, but that still doesn't prevent them from becoming infected and sending out data anyway) but if they have someone log into windows for them, they do have access to imagining records. Other techs have access to windows but not to imaging data. The upper level management just doesn't care, so that's why everything is screwed up and why everything is logged in 24/7 since only the lead tech and lead secretary have access to everything people need to get their jobs done.
So, while two factor authentication might take care of the scenario like at my doctor's office, it doesn't take care of the access in places like hospitals... With unlimited physical access and bad IT policy, no amount of engineering is going to secure the data and with thousands of hospitals across the US having shared access, good luck locking everything down. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a lot of smaller doctors offices will just resort to the same type of thing (well, the one EMR computer is in the office, so we'll just leave it logged in all the time for convenience).
Clearly, their systems are not the way you or I would run them... but not every office and hospital is going to have competent IT staff either. You're only as secure as your weakest link and there are going to be a lot of weak links in a federally administered, universal access EMR system.
Two factor authentication can employ smart cards which, when removed, stop a terminal from working. Smart cards aren't the only thing that can provide that service either, but they are likely the most ubiquitous.
And that helps exactly how when the terminal is left logged in all the time?
PKI actually CAN restrict someone from accessing any data that is not accessed using the proper credentials. PKI provides the means of securely storing the keys for encrypting that data and decrypting it transparently to the approved user on the approved terminal. If by some fluke someone got your record on a disk, they would not be able to decrypt it in any reasonable amount of time.
Once you have access to the unencrypted data, the game is over... the data is available unencrypted at the terminal.
The idea of paper records being more secure because they reside in a building rather than in a computer only makes sense when you talk about network-based attacks. Then I can agree with you, as for the terminal-jacking you are describing, it's not likely a difficult threat to overcome.
The terminals are on the network... that's why they're terminals.
Always logged in terminal sitting in private areas with easy patient access with a stack of blank optical media sitting next to it. I've seen it first hand. When planning security, you don't plan for the best case scenario (physically inaccessible terminals which only the proper users can access), you have to plan for the worst case scenarios... because it WILL happen.
two-factor authentication doesn't prevent the device from remaining logged in all the time, as the radiology records terminals are at the hospital my mom works at. PKI also doesn't prevent someone from walking off with the records they want since the cat is already out of the bag.
Paper records are a bitch to go through. You have to first walk around a room full of records, locating the patient you're looking for. Then you have to physically look for the right records for the patient you're looking for, only to find out that the records you want are at a different office (for example, my pediatrician worked out of an office in a hospital, but it was a practice separate from the hospital. He relocated three times while I was with him, changing practices twice, so there are 4 places to look for my records and I've never been to his current office). You need physical access to all of those locations to have a shot and you'll leave a ton of evidence (cameras, fingerprints, etc) along the way, not to mention lots of time standing around waiting to get caught. Whereas the always logged in hospital terminal will just tell you that, yes, it accessed a record, and you'll be able to finish in a matter of a minute or two. As an added benefit, all of the information for hundreds or thousands of patients hides well in your pocket, while it's a little harder to be inconspicuous hauling out dozens or hundreds of filing boxes.
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I go one step further, using my card's website to generate a unique number for every paypal transaction I've made. I'll never give them my real card number nor access to my banking accounts. Paypal is a method of last resort and, like the GP, I only use it as a card broker.
I've read a few too many horror stories involving Paypal and, even with my method above, somehow, I still ended up with a temporary freeze on my primary credit card (through a generated number) when I went to buy the Penumbra bundle for Linux last year.
It isn't annoyance, it's exhaustion. Let us know after you get to the stage where you help them through complete disability and death how "easier" and "cheaper" it was.
It may not be easier than throwing them in a home, and cheaper depends on the circumstances, but it certainly is much more fulfilling to know that your sacrifices have given a loved one a quality of life that they would have never achieved elsewhere.
In 12 years, I've lost thousands of hours of sleep, I've cleaned up more puke and diarrhea than I can remember, I've probably given up hundreds of thousands of dollars in income over the course of my life... and when I see the look in my dad's eyes when his granddaughter (my sister's kid) climbs up in bed next to him, gives him a kiss and hug, and then tells him that she loves him and is glad he's doing a sleepover, well... I have no doubts about my choice regardless of the sacrifices I've made along the way. I have a lot of regrets in my life, but choosing to take care of my dad isn't one of them.
Not with an elderly person. It only gets worse as time goes on. However bad they are now, they are going to be at least that bad if not worse in a few months, until they die. There's nothing to look forward to, they won't get better.
I take care of my disabled dad. He was 40 when it happened and he's 52 now.
Two words... Fuck you, if you think that's true in all, or even a majority of cases (the majority of disabled people, even disabled elderly, aren't in severe dementia). I could have thrown my dad in a nursing home to rot, but how could I do that to a 40 year old? You think his life's wants end there? He's gotten to, not only meet, but be a part of the lives of his grandchildren. In fact, he spent yesterday and today with his oldest (4 years old) one. If nothing else would, they alone make his life worth living and they absolutely adore him, wheelchair, the occasional grumpiness and all.
Hopefully, one day, he'll get to see me get married and have kids. Hopefully, he'll be able to see his daughter get married (hey, I'm posting on slashdot with a 5 digit id, the kids are obviously hers). Maybe he'll learn to walk again (yeah, 12 years in, he's still making progress). He looks forward to doing mundane shit that you and I hate like getting the mail or grilling himself a hotdog. He loves to go out and wax my truck with me or winning a game of solitaire. He's learning how to use a computer (something he absolutely detested prior to being injured). He has all the same things to look forward to that you or I do, and unlike both of us, he has a greater appreciation for every little thing he does have or gets to experience precisely because it was all taken away from him.
They will fight, sometimes physically, yell, etc and not listen.
This just in, there are a lot of stubborn ass people that aren't disabled that act the same way. Should we eliminate all of them from society at large too?
My dad has his moments, but who wouldn't, being 99% there mentally while one side of your body doesn't work so you can't easily do a lot of the things you want to (fwiw, hemiparesis is a bitch compared to lower body paralysis since you can still do almost everything with two functioning arms, but losing an arm and leg renders you unable to support that side to move). So he'll yell for a little while until he calms himself down and we move on like it never happened. Yeah, it's a pain in my ass, but that's life. If he wasn't yelling here at me, he'd be yelling somewhere else, with someone that didn't love him taking the abuse and maybe reflecting or even escalating it back at him.
After all, is it fair to the children to say "You cannot have the attention you want because grandma is too busy being crazy and demanding continual care"?
Sometimes, it IS fair and healthy. While it is important to give kids lots of attention, it is equally important to teach them independence, charity, patience and the real meaning of love. They may throw a temper tantrum because they have to wait 5 minutes while you take papa to the bathroom, but they do that when you have to change sissy's diaper too. Not only that, but a lot of times, papa has more patience to sit down with the kids, teaching them about all the mundane things in life that the parents don't have time for or telling them the family history that the parents always wanted to, but never actually will get around to. Maybe they learn to stop and smell the flowers instead of rushing off to a play date that they had to pencil in three weeks earlier.
I'm rather sad for you that you seem to have absolutely no reverence for elderly people... just remember, one day, you'll be old too. Hope for your sake that your heirs don't feel the same way that you do.
I'd love to take care of my mom all day, but if I did, I'd have to move into her tiny house (because I'd lose my house, which she can't get around in because of all the stairs), and YOU'D be paying for me to eat and go to the doctor, because I would have no income. Now, if we had universal healthcare, reasonably priced education (I'll probably be paying for college forever), and any ability to recover after losing jobs and our credit ratings getting screwed (which, ironically, hurts when looking for a good job, which would allow us to fix things), then our families might have the ability to care for our elderly again.
I DO take care of a disabled parent and have for 12 years, almost entirely by myself. I've been in the position of being unemployed for the last 4 years - you think it's hard getting a job right now, try getting a job that allows you to take a physically disabled parent to work with you since working is pointless unless you can make more, after taxes, than it costs to send the parent to adult daycare ($60+ per day (meaning you need to make at least $90, or about $12/hr just to break even or $20/hr to earn minimum wage after expenses)) or a home health aide ($24/hr through the agency that came for my dad when he first came home, which is even more expensive than the daycare option). I live with him in the same house I grew up in - his bedroom and the bathroom are on the first floor. We get by on his modest retirement income of about $25k per year, and yeah, that included paying a mortgage for 11 of the last 12 years (we paid off the house last year). His medical bills have become rather substantial since he's developed diabetes and various other complications after his brain aneurysm/stroke that rendered him immobile on his left side, and thus, largely non-ambulatory... but we get by.
As for me, I dropped my private health insurance 5 years ago. After 6 years, my premiums had gone from $200/month to nearly $500/month, largely because of new mandates required by the state insurance board. The likelihood of me needing expensive care at the age of 28 is pretty slim, not worth $6000 annually to me (and that wasn't the cadillac plan, I had high co-pays and whatnot). I'd love to buy catastrophic coverage, but my state won't let me and the federal government won't let me buy across state lines. Over the past 5 years, I've saved somewhere between $35-40k on premiums while my medical expenses amounted to $115, $515 or so if you want to include my glasses and contacts. I qualify for most of the welfare slate, including medical, but I refuse to take it because I believe that, on principle, it is theft for me to do so. I put up with some minor issues like tendonitis in my elbow and bone spurs in my feet, choosing to treat myself rather than go for surgery since it isn't necessary at this point (and I will pay for it when it is) and, in the case of my heels, because I can't be off my feet for weeks to heal post-surgery.
Most of his family shares the modern day American value of "me, me, me" and they do nothing to help. The vast majority of his family doesn't even call to check to see how he's doing. Why should they put themselves out in any manner to help a family member? While pretty shitty of them, it isn't their responsibility to care for him. Likewise, it is even less the responsibility of you or some other slashdotter, since you aren't even related to him. The government sees absolutely no value in him - he'll be a net loss for the rest of his life, thus, if they were in control, they have every reason to let him die early to save money. That goes likewise for the insurance companies if he wasn't on Medicare (hey, unlike me, he paid a lifetime of premiums). His family may like the idea of the someone taking care of him, so they don't have to feel guilty for not doing it, but that doesn't make government the moral choice. Too many people say "hey, I paid my taxes, so why should I have to give to charity on top of that?," which is the danger of government "promi
Where sports is REALLY a waste is at the High School level. Yeah I know people need exercise, but that's what gym is for. You don't need all those extra afterschool (and expensive) sports teams.
I played football in high school. The football team and boys basketball teams both made money since there was an admission charge for each and both drew good crowds. The basketball crowds were much smaller, but there was a lot less overhead (it's played in the gym and the equipment amounts to some clothes and balls). The football team had a large field house and a set of field lights donated to it by a member of the community, and despite the maintenance costs of the building/field, cost of running the lights and cost of buying/reconditioning equipment, it still turned a profit.
Where the problem came in, was the other sports teams decided that "it wasn't fair" that football players got night games and a building dedicated solely to it for a season (wrestling would get it during the winter and track during the spring). The first to complain were the boys soccer players, who demanded night games of their own. So, they'd use our game field (the football team only played games on the game field, practices were done on another field to keep the game field in shape) and, sure enough, the boys soccer team tore up the field. Then it was the girls soccer team complaining that it wasn't fair that the boys got special treatment, so they demanded their share of games on our field, which tore it up more.
After making our twice a week (JV on thursday, varsity on friday) football field nearly unusable, the school finally relented and spent 6 figures of tax money on redoing the soccer field and installing lights for them. They still don't draw a crowd, still don't charge admission and it costs a significant amount of money to run the lights, but the players got their way. Next up was the baseball/softball team complaining it wasn't fair that the other sports got to play night games, so, you guessed it, they ended up with a new baseball field, complete with lights, custom cast concrete dugouts, etc, again at the cost of 6 figures of tax money, with an even smaller draw than the soccer teams and, again, no admission fees.
And just like with the sports spending, school buildings have been growing like crazy despite a relatively flat student population. The school budget when I graduated 15 years ago was around $12 million (2100 kids), while it's about $33 million now (2200 kids). Dozens of new classrooms were added even though about half of all classrooms sit empty every day because "every teacher needs their own classroom," deity forbid they have to share. New gyms, new auditoriums, computer upgrade cycles so fast that any slashdotter would weep, etc. So they only spend about $175k a year on books, it's not like those are important.
The same story can be told about most of the school districts in my area (Western NY). Sadly, my school has one of the more efficient cost/student ratios (about $15,000/student) compared to most districts around here (average is around $17,000/student, with some extending over $20/student). Rochester is over $21k/student and has a roughly 40% graduation rate. Teachers are very, very well paid and have been for 20 years when their unions made the argument that better teacher pay=better student performance, so that isn't the problem here. The problems are parents simply don't instill any sense of value in education in their kids (for a myriad of reasons), administrators love building monuments to themselves, there are too many administrators in general, and finally, overpaying teachers (at 22/23 with no experience, they START at a higher pay rate than the median district income and within 10 years, are paid double it) has drawn a lot of teachers that are more interested in the pay and benefits than educating their students. Of that $33 million budget, $18m goes to teacher salary and benefits (about 240 teachers/aides or 9 kids/teacher, which tr
I've watched at least a half dozen relatives die of various addictions and watched others throw their lives away at a minimum. Addictions tend to run in families, my grandpa was a horrible alcoholic and absentee father that let his kids starve, get raped by his friends, etc. His wife up and left him and the seven kids (the oldest was about 11) without ever being heard from again. All of his kids have problems, ranging from the master carpenter that can't hold a job (he gets plastered, sleeps for two hours, gets plastered, rinse and repeat), to one that killed herself, to one that was a teacher and kidnapped his student trying to take her to Mexico, and on and on. My mom is probably the most stable of them, after having beat her alcoholism, a complete mental breakdown and suicidal phase. And that's just one part of my family, my dad's family is just as screwed up in different ways and it's amplified as you go further into the extended family.
Growing up with what I saw, I never wanted to be like them. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs (prescriptions, sure, but I tend to even refrain from tylenol and ibuprofen). I was 27 when I lost my virginity (partially through choice, I didn't want to have kids before I was ready, and partly because I'm like most slashdotters and am socially intimidated by women anyway. I also have an aunt that was a grandma at 32). I've even taken care of a severely disabled parent on my own since I was 21. I'm the first to admit that I have some rather deep psychological problems of my own, but I don't begrudge anyone that does want to drink or whatever. However, I will add that, despite what proponents say about it being victimless, pot abuse DOES affect the kids just like alcohol abuse does - not just in my own family, but watching a lot of family friends that use and how they treat their kids.
I tend to not judge people... and I've had a number of friends and acquaintances say that I'm the "coolest straight arrow they know." However, there is a contingent out there that hates people like me for some reason, most likely because by leaving the exceptions to the rule alone, they seem some type of dichotomy themselves that they feel makes them look bad. That doesn't just go for the drinking, I've had people tell me how wonderful they think it is that I take care of my dad and then, when I turn my back, they start trash talking me for making the sacrifices I have because they couldn't do it themselves; By tearing me down, they don't have to feel so bad about being more self-centered themselves. While they're the first to complain about feeling judged, they also tend to be the first TO judge.
Am I a saint? Absolutely not... in fact, I don't have too much good to say about myself. I suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder, whereby I tend to pre-reject myself so others don't get the chance to do it for me. You can't do that unless you detest yourself at a pretty deep level. Still, I don't judge others and if I do, I still find ways that I'm somehow worse than them.
My mom works in the radiology department of a small hospital in the middle of nowhere that transfers pretty much anyone that needs more than a bandaid (ie, it's not a big, fancy hospital with loads of special services). All of their various radiological machines are hooked up to the department's LAN and outside M-F,9-5 the images are sent to one of the radiologists to read and report on. The chief radiologist has an office at home and then there's a service they hire out when he's on vacation or not available. The tech has been available for years, you just need a large enough pipe to deliver the data in a reasonable amount of time.
To give you an idea of the size we're talking about, the iso of my dad's brain MRI and MRA weighs in at 282 MB. And yes, if you want a copy of your scans for yourself, generally all you have to do is ask them to burn you a CD.
Although they had other big problems revolving around Scott Draeker's business sense, Loki Software failed in part due to a high piracy rate. People had already bought the Windows versions of the games they sold and didn't want to pay a second time to buy the Linux ports; they simply expected to get them for free, so they'd snag a copy off the internet rather than the retail shelf.
Michael Simms from LGP has mentioned high piracy rates in the past as well (likewise, there are other problems at LGP contributing to its current woes).
Back in the late 90s, my dad had a brain aneurysm and stroke which resulted in left hemiparesis (paralysis of the left side of his body, moreso in the arm than the leg in his case). In fact, most of the top half of the right half of his brain was destroyed and it had effects on his speech, short term memory formation, visual processing (he tends to ignore the left half of his field of vision), balance, etc.
I got him a Wii. He can't do the Wii Fit since he can't stand on his own, but Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort has helped him significantly with his left neglect (both visual and physical awareness), his overall body coordination, his ability to concentrate on certain things and perform cognitive skills (Big Brain Academy), etc. I'd love to see more games, especially games playable with a single hand, which can be used to isolate certain functions to help patients recover from various injuries. Anyone that rejects the potential benefit for some patients obviously has never been in the position of being a caregiver (at home or in a professional capacity) to such people.
As an added bonus, the Wii is a great time killer for my dad. When you're literally stuck in a chair any time you're not stuck in a bed and you have limited monetary resources, it's a cheap way to entertain yourself through the endless, boring days. And for someone in his condition, even if that's all the Wii did for him, it was a good investment on my part.
“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Mark Twain
Speaking of 4/7/1999 it was an interesting day. Headlines include ATI Releasing Specs for TV Tuner, Debian Logo Continues, Everyone and Their Brother Opens a Linux Site, "Intel Inside" campaign shackles OEMs, FSF updates Free Software definition, Al Gore Goes "Open Source", Salon buys The Well, SoundBlaster Live! under Linux?, and Using FAT32 with Linux.
Looking back, I realize what makes me nostalgic about the old days of Slashdot. Almost every story was related to tech somehow, whereas these days, there's a ton of general interest stories, slashvertisements and stories that are intended mostly to generate flame wars to increase page views.
Anyway, I don't remember exactly what brought me to Slashdot, or which of those stories it was that made me bookmark the site that day... I left for a while when kdawson and the politics section appeared (and kdawson still makes me miss jon katz in comparison), but I couldn't stay away for more than a couple months.
It took me a while to actually create an account, oh, how I wish my account number was even lower.
I say the same thing... I think it might be pervasive enough that we'd all probably have the same account numbers, or close to them, if we had signed up when we first got here.
I visit numerous times per day and get 15 mod points every 2-4 days whether I use them or not. I mod up 12-13 comments for every 2-3 I mod down, and will hold onto my mod points for really good posts rather than just blowing them on the first 15 decent posts I come across. I spend 3-5 points in a typical day. Sometimes I let 10 or 12 points expire (and get 15 more the next day), sometimes I get points, spend 3 and come back to find 15 waiting again. Maybe twice a month, I spend all 15 in less than 3 days.
I'd assume that I have a good history in meta-mod and that's why I get points the way that I do. I did go through a dry spell of almost a year where I didn't get any points at all for some reason, but they came back about 6 months ago and have been freely flowing since. It's rare that I sit here with no mod points to spend unless I just finished my 15 and then I know I'll almost always have more the next day.
While not a 486, I've got a K6-II/450 still running as a web/ftp server. It compiles a modern kernel in 44 minutes without distcc and emerge -ep world | genlop -p estimates 1 day, 20 hours, 43 minutes for a full system rebuild (261 packages with gcc 4.3.4 and -O2).
Of course, I could build that in a chroot on my modern system in probably an hour or less and then transfer it over.
I didn't know exactly what I had until a couple years ago, but I've been aware of the feelings since my early teens as well. I can trace the roots back to even before I started school.
I quit my restaurant management (small locally owned restaurant, not a chain) job a couple years ago, though not because of AvPD. I put up with a ton of abuse from the owners there for about 10 years and didn't quit BECAUSE of my AVpD. As bad as the abuse was, it was a known quantity. Since then, my avoidance has increased dramatically. Whereas it was only dominant in social situations, especially if I was around someone I was attracted to, it has now invaded every facet of my life. After being rejected a few times (because I take care of a disabled parent), I can't bring myself to even apply for jobs anymore. I'm having a hard time going to the store during hours that normal people go, so I'll go in the middle of the night to avoid the pressures (monitoring, anxiety, etc) that come from being around other people. Much like you, I have issues with the phone - I switched from Dish to Cable a few years ago and it took me more than a month to call and cancel Dish because I didn't want to deal with their retention tactics.
I'm fine as long as I remain in my comfort zone - hanging out with people I know, going to the same restaurants and stores I always go to, etc. As soon as something or someone knew is introduced into the equation, I begin to shut down, though it does help if I'm experiencing it with a close friend (say, going to a new restaurant with my best friend).
I have a number of family members with other issues whom self-medicate with alcohol and narcotics. All that has done, is turn them into alcoholics, drug addicts, etc. It lets them hide from their problems, but at the expense of never resolving the problems and compounding new ones. As such, I don't do either (4 years since my last drink and I've never touched a non-prescribed narcotic). I know that I'll get addicted to whichever I'd self-medicate with and an addiction isn't the answer. Losing myself in EverQuest for a couple years destroyed enough of my life (I was our guild and raid leader and nothing makes you feel better than everyone looking to you as their personal hero).
Some healthier recommendations that might help you cope with your AvPD:
1) Check out Painfully Shy by Drs Barbara and Gregory Markway (ISBN: 0-312-31623-2). Barbara has an anxiety disorder herself and has a number of ideas on how to help yourself try to adjust to society. This will probably be the easiest thing for you to do, since it requires no input from outside yourself.
2) Join an AvPD mailing list. Talking with others about your condition will help you understand it better, can take the edge off since you'll realize a lot of other people feel the same way you do, etc. Even if you don't write to others (I don't), just reading what others are going through themselves makes you feel like less of an outcast and more like a normal person. I belong to the Avoidant Sanctuary mailing list under an alias
3) See a shrink that specializes in anxiety. Most regular shinks have never even heard of AvPD, so their ability to understand and treat it is diminished. The doctor may prescribe some anti-anxiety meds to help take the edge off, will prescribe a plan to help condition you to not be afraid of others (we're much harder to "fix" than your static phobic types since ours is a more dynamic phobia) and can get you into a support group which can help you diminish your fear of rejection and trust issues. This is the hardest one for avoidants to do and I've never done it myself.
If you'd like to chat more off Slashdot, the email address attached to my account is valid.
I seem to remember paying about $30 for most of my NES games. I never would have been able to afford games on my allowance otherwise. SNES I seem to remember being in the $50-60 range (at least for ActRaiser and Pilot Wings), which is why I bought fewer games for it. Most of my PC games in that era were in the $30-40 range too (in fact, I abandoned the SNES and switched over to PC gaming exclusively sometime around 1995, largely due to price and depth/replayability)
The Wii suckered me back into console gaming when it came out and that seems to have a mix of $30 and $50 games, depending on the title.
I'm in my early 30s and have Avoidant Personality Disorder with an increasing amount of agoraphobia. Oddly, gaming stores are one of the few places I never feel weird going to. Maybe it's because they generally deal with enough misfits, that I feel like I'm normal in comparison there. In fact, I buy the vast majority of my games in person.
My ISP used to give me free access to USENET. At first, they ran their own servers, then they outsourced them and paid another company for access to their USENET servers. Last year, thanks to Andrew Cuomo, they cut the USENET access all together, so now I'm forced to buy my own access (which I'm fine with).
But, USENET was a value added service just like ESPN360 would be. Should Road Runner have charged everyone for USENET access if only 5 or 10% of us even knew what it was, much less used it? I didn't get a price reduction when they eliminated the service, so it's not like the savings were passed on to me. It was certainly cheaper for Road Runner to buy USENET service for their customers in bulk than it is for individual customers to buy service themselves. The same goes for ISPs that provide some web/ftp space or even just email.
Now, obviously most people are going to want email... but how many use their ISP's mail service versus signing up for a gmail/yahoo/msn/whatever account? Should they be forced to subsidized the people that do use the ISP's email service? You probably don't want ESPN360 and despite being a fan of a couple sports, I don't want ESPN360. But ESPN360 isn't much different than the email, personal web or usenet provider your ISP might partner with. If you enact legislation completely separating the connection and the services/content provided on it, you're also going to get rid of the things people do use through the law of unintended consequences. And while you can make an exception for certain services today, do you know what services are coming tomorrow that could benefit the users the same way, and what a pain it can be to change legislation to enable access to a new service (after all, that's what providing content is, a service)? Will those services even have a chance to succeed to that point if they're banned by default?
The solution is to let the customers hammer it out with their ISPs. Yeah, it sucks that there are only two broadband ISPs in most places. I'd support carefully created legislation forcing that to open up more. ISPs would be forced to listen to what their customers want that way... the problem all along has been the monopoly/duopoly of broadband access.
RT2 is working on AMD64/glibc 2.9 (multilib) under Gentoo with no extra (old) libraries needed for me.
Linux death 2.6.29-gentoo-r3 #1 SMP Wed May 6 00:04:53 EDT 2009 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
/usr/lib/Loki_Compat/ld-linux.so.2 /usr/local/games/smac/smacx.dynamic &
gcc version 4.3.3 (Gentoo 4.3.3-r2 p1.1, pie-10.1.5)
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.18
glibc 2.9_p20081201-r2
I've got a dozen or so Loki games installed and all of them work despite me being on AMD64 (with multilib). No chroot required, though a few of the games require you to load them with the old ld-linux.so.2
$ cat bin/smacx
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/Loki_Compat/"
Not even an old program written from Loki Software Entertainment would run on a modern Linux Mint (2.6 kernel) for example unless in a chroot'd sandbox. Truly sadistic, that I even remember this happening even on the same kernel branch. Bruce Perens would address this better than I, but my time is worth more elseware.
You can do it by installing the old libraries and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD. See the Gentoo Wiki archives for information and a tarball of the necessary libraries.
Not the most elegant solution, but it's easier than dealing with a chroot.
Sci-Fi costs 60 cents because everyone that has it in their package is subsidizing it for you. while via ala carte, it might be $5, maybe even $10 since its probably one of the lowest watched channels. Chances are, we'd be looking at the price of premium channels for each of the non-super popular channels. So, you might be looking at something more like $5 for Sci-Fi, $2 for USA and $2 for TNT, putting you at $19... and you don't get one single other channel.
So, we'll add in one of the local news channels at 50 cents and a national news channel at $2. Maybe you watch your local hockey team, so that's $2 for your regional sports channel and another 50 cents for your NBC affiliate. Maybe you add in ESPN (who is the current pig right now, tacking something like $10 onto every cable subscriber already) for another $15. $2 for Comedy Central. That adds in anthoer $22, so we're up to $41.
Some channels like Sci-Fi are going to be priced high enough that people won't want to pay for it, so the price will keep going up (is it worth $10 to you? $15?) or else the channel will die. No channels are going to drop in price... and at the end of the day, unless you are that really dedicated 1-2 channel watcher and you NEVER want to watch anything else, it's going to cost as much, if not more, than the current package system costs. On the surface, ala carte pricing sounds nice, but I think most people will still opt for packages.
BTW - lower income customers are probably the ones that watch the most tv and across the widest number of channels. At $720 a year, they have unlimited entertainment across hundreds of channels 24/7 versus going out twice a month at $30 per night to equal the same price. The only thing cheaper is OTA media (and broadcast sucks hard most of the time) and the library (but how many low income people read as a hobby? Chances are if they're that well read, they probably aren't poor).
All that said, I think people should have the option for ala carte.
Today, you and I might be people that nobody cares about... tomorrow, you might decide to run for public office. Then, suddenly, you become interesting. Your opponent(s) decide to do some dubious oppositional research on you (happens all the time in politics)...
Well, there was one time back a few years ago where you gave first aid to someone that fell and broke their leg (compound fracture, blood everywhere). It turned out they had HIV, so you got tested. That information is leaked and you find yourself on the defensive while ignorant people are left to assume you're simply covering up a questionable affair, IV drug habit or whatever.
So, even if you're relatively nobody today... that doesn't mean that access to that information won't be valuable to someone else in the future.
Or, talking again about my mom's hospital... My mom fired someone for violating HIPPA. That woman now works at a private doctor's office and has access to the magical new federal health database. Out of spite, she looks up my mom's medical history, finds out she tried to commit suicide, her sister did commit suicide, etc. The information mysteriously shows up on the desk of the hospital's CEO and suddenly, my mom finds herself in jeopardy. Or maybe it happens for a divorce case, accident, hiring, etc. There are lots of ways to abuse access once you have it, even against regular nobodies, and to some people, the rewards for doing so might exceed the penalties for it.
How are you suggesting getting that unencrypted data without a security breach taking place beforehand (like someone leaves their card)?
That's just it... I'm saying that is happening RIGHT NOW and that I've seen it first hand. It happens at my mom's hospital because the different departments all fight over territory (ER, radioology, IT, etc). Every application is owned by a different department, with radiology having multiple systems in and of itself*. Since everyone fights over territory, each employee has their own login but some departments refuse to give employees access that the employee actually needs to do their job, so an administrator has to leave their account logged in so the techs can actually get work done. No matter how much techs and the department leads complain, IT and the department directors refuse to give people adequate access.
So, in the end, you've got an administrator logged in 24/7 with techs using their account. There's no effective auditing, since everyone in the department is sharing a single account or two and there are long periods, especially on the weekends, where patients have easy access to those computers (2 techs and no secretaries are on duty. If they are busy, the entire department is open to people wandering through, with the waiting room sitting across the hall from the unsupervised terminals)
*The way things are "supposed" to work, is that each employee has a unified login with access to all of the things they need to use. Instead, they log into windows and then launch their application, which then asks for a different login (each app has a different login, so they need to remember a half dozen or more accounts).
IT won't let some techs have access to windows since they were browsing porn on the net (yeah, btw, these systems have internet access, though I've never checked out the setup to see if they're accessible from the net, but that still doesn't prevent them from becoming infected and sending out data anyway) but if they have someone log into windows for them, they do have access to imagining records. Other techs have access to windows but not to imaging data. The upper level management just doesn't care, so that's why everything is screwed up and why everything is logged in 24/7 since only the lead tech and lead secretary have access to everything people need to get their jobs done.
So, while two factor authentication might take care of the scenario like at my doctor's office, it doesn't take care of the access in places like hospitals... With unlimited physical access and bad IT policy, no amount of engineering is going to secure the data and with thousands of hospitals across the US having shared access, good luck locking everything down. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a lot of smaller doctors offices will just resort to the same type of thing (well, the one EMR computer is in the office, so we'll just leave it logged in all the time for convenience).
Clearly, their systems are not the way you or I would run them... but not every office and hospital is going to have competent IT staff either. You're only as secure as your weakest link and there are going to be a lot of weak links in a federally administered, universal access EMR system.
Two factor authentication can employ smart cards which, when removed, stop a terminal from working. Smart cards aren't the only thing that can provide that service either, but they are likely the most ubiquitous.
And that helps exactly how when the terminal is left logged in all the time?
PKI actually CAN restrict someone from accessing any data that is not accessed using the proper credentials. PKI provides the means of securely storing the keys for encrypting that data and decrypting it transparently to the approved user on the approved terminal. If by some fluke someone got your record on a disk, they would not be able to decrypt it in any reasonable amount of time.
Once you have access to the unencrypted data, the game is over... the data is available unencrypted at the terminal.
The idea of paper records being more secure because they reside in a building rather than in a computer only makes sense when you talk about network-based attacks. Then I can agree with you, as for the terminal-jacking you are describing, it's not likely a difficult threat to overcome.
The terminals are on the network... that's why they're terminals.
Always logged in terminal sitting in private areas with easy patient access with a stack of blank optical media sitting next to it. I've seen it first hand. When planning security, you don't plan for the best case scenario (physically inaccessible terminals which only the proper users can access), you have to plan for the worst case scenarios... because it WILL happen.
two-factor authentication doesn't prevent the device from remaining logged in all the time, as the radiology records terminals are at the hospital my mom works at. PKI also doesn't prevent someone from walking off with the records they want since the cat is already out of the bag.
Paper records are a bitch to go through. You have to first walk around a room full of records, locating the patient you're looking for. Then you have to physically look for the right records for the patient you're looking for, only to find out that the records you want are at a different office (for example, my pediatrician worked out of an office in a hospital, but it was a practice separate from the hospital. He relocated three times while I was with him, changing practices twice, so there are 4 places to look for my records and I've never been to his current office). You need physical access to all of those locations to have a shot and you'll leave a ton of evidence (cameras, fingerprints, etc) along the way, not to mention lots of time standing around waiting to get caught. Whereas the always logged in hospital terminal will just tell you that, yes, it accessed a record, and you'll be able to finish in a matter of a minute or two. As an added benefit, all of the information for hundreds or thousands of patients hides well in your pocket, while it's a little harder to be inconspicuous hauling out dozens or hundreds of filing boxes.