Well I know that for surgical tape and gauz and stuff being left inside resulting in further surgery to remove it the usual settlement is 30-50k and it is usually not the doctor's fault since the nurses do the counts and they work for the hospital. Much of the malpractice cost for doctors is the result of lawyers shotgunning the lawsuit and suing everyone, the hospital, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the assisting surgeon, and their partners in their practice. My fathers a physician and he was recently named in a suit because another surgeon in his practice did the surgery and the hospital staff miscounted. It gets dismissed but he had to show up and take time from seeing patients and the insurance companies count it as a claim against the him because it costs money to send a lawyer to have his name dropped, which means his 15% discount for not having any claims in the last few years goes poof.
At least where I live, every surgery begins and ends with counts of all the tools and gauze and other materials being used, with usually more than one person confirming the count. Accidents do happen but it wasn't too long ago that there was basically no such thing as a malpractice lawsuit because people recognized that surgery was extremely risky and diagnostics is not an exact science. Of course now juries know that the money comes the insurance companies so they rationalize giving money to someone who suffered as a kind of charity that does not necesarily have to involve blaming the doctor, only feeling sorry for the patient, even if as in many cases the patient ignored medical advice.
There was an editorial I read around the time this case was ruled on (The Sociopath You Work For) where one comment about how hard it is to get a megacorp to obey the law was along the lines of 'there is not much a government can do to make Microsoft do what it doesn't want to other than send in the troops.)
In this case though, if MS doesn't pay the EU can move to sieze their bank accounts and/or other assets within Europe or of course they could send in the troops. MS will certainly stall and try to get the fine reduced cause a few more million in legal fees don't quite compare to hundreds of millions of euros, but I get the feeling that the EU regulators are tired of the shenanigans and are basically saying to MS, "this is not the US where companies can defy the state, we will kill you, literally kill you if you don't obey"
I took this awful management class and they talked about Geek Squad like its some sort of Business miracle. We even had to watch a video where they talk about the company and its structure. Aside from their marketing they are really nothing special and time will tell on that as well. Geek Squad is just one of many essentially empty shell IT service organizations that charge a high rate to the end users who go to them because they have established a recognizable brand and then contract most if not all of the actual work out to others.
If you want to see even more disturbing examples of this trend sign up as a provider at onforce.com where a so-called free market for IT services is little more than a way for these empty shell providers to route low paying service calls to "independent contractors" except that marketplace is deliberately skewed so that the providers don't get to enforce their own rates but rather find themselves racing to accept low paying work orders from companies that are nothing more than a catchy name and a 800 number. One of the lowest paying of these companies suspiciously operates out of the same building as Onforce.com (formerly ComputerRepair.com) while routinely violating even the weak rules Onforce setup to guard against abuses, such as requiring that clients pay contractors at least 1 hours time and paying a fee for customer no-shows.
In many respects sending Reset packets to both sides of an unwanted connection based on the content of the traffic is much more the behavior of an Intrusion Detection System than just a firewall. The Cisco IDS devices and I would imagine other brands as well typically have an entire interface just for sending reset packets to close unwanted connections between hosts based on certain rules and content inspection.
If our legal system had not been corrupted by the loan sharking ( consumer banking/credit cards) industry you would have the right to sue for damages based on whatever this loss of your information cost you plus some measure of punitive damages for their failure to handle your information securely. Until the liability is placed squarely where it belongs identity theft will not be stopped because it doesn't hurt the bottom line.
One of my proposals.
Section 1: No sensitive information is to be stored on a Laptop or home computer of any employee or contractor of any company that routinely handles sensitive personal information. Violations are a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $25,000,000 and no less than a $25,000 fine per violation, and/or up to 1 year in prison to be served by the corporate executive(s) responsible for information security. Section 2: Any company or organization that regularly stores or uses more than 100 social security numbers, credit card, or bank account numbers, or personal and/or confidential information from its customers, contacts, or employees is liable to those on which information is kept for any damage caused by the loss or theft of that information. Section 4. Loss or theft of more than 100 customer or employee's sensitive information including bank/credit account numbers and/or social security numbers may be fined between $1000 and $10,000 per person affected by the loss. (ex. Lose 100,000 SS numbers and you get fined 100M to 1 Billion) Section 5. Individuals have the right of private action and class action to seek compensatory and punitive damages against companies that stored sensitive information on them that was lost or stolen regardless of how many individuals are affected. Section 6. Loss of sensitive customer personal information by corporations engaged in the banking or credit industries forfeit all rights to collect on debts owed by individuals where their sensitive information has been lost or stolen or shared with any third party from which such data is lost or stolen unless disclosure of such loss or theft is made within 4 business days of the discovery of the loss or theft and restitution in the amount of $10,000 per person is made in addition to full cooperation with affected persons in recovering their identity.
The article repeats the falsehoods that The Pirate Bay and the AllOfMP3.com are illegal file sharing websites. One is a legal under Swedish law and is a torrent site that does not host any copyrighted material. The Russian site, AllofMP3.com sells mp3 tracks legally by a quirk of Russian copyright law. The reason the RIAA is pissed is for 2 reasons, the first is that the songs are sold cheaply to both Russians and foreigners who go to the site which screws with their regional price fixing system, and the other is that they are not collecting the royalties to which they are owed because of those who are supposedly representing foreign copyright holders in Russia pocket the money themselves or they simply choose not to make the effort to get their share from those entities. This also infringes on the RIAA's patented business model which is mostly based on cheating artists out of royalties. If the writer did even a scrap of research beyond the press releases from the RIAA then at the very least the word "allegedly" illegal file sharing might be used instead.
I once watched a debate for the election of US Senator from Oklahoma. The Republican got up and said that doctors who perform abortions should get the death penalty. The Democrat got up and said doctors who perform abortions should just go to prison. OK is worse than Utah.
What she means is that Apple created a closed DRM system and sells hundreds of millions of songs at what consumers percieve to be a fair price with fair drm in a very convenient way. They did this in part to increase sales of their high profit ipods and because they are the most popular legal download site by far they have gained negotiating power with the RIAA members and can put their foot down on song prices. Apple could shut down Itunes tomorrow and people would still buy Ipods and the music industry knows they are at a disadvantage now in negotiations with Apple. Apple can shut down itunes, keep selling ipods, and the only difference is that the RIAA members who collect most of the $.99 per song would be out hundreds of millions of dollars. Apple has built a business model that the RIAA fears most, namely one where the hardware is more profitable than the content/software which means that the hardware companies don't have to obey the content companies. Its similar to the situation with the computer industry, originally the software was cheap and the hardware was expensive, then the hardware got cheaper and the software industry started charging a ton because the hardware did not do anything without the software, and now with competition from free (beer) software, the software companies are having to do something they never thought they would have to do again, negotiate with the hardware companies on an equal footing again.
I have actually had a pretty good experience with Citibank. I have paid less than $12 in fees ($3 maint fees when my balance dips too low) but there are no overdraft fees because you can borrow against a $500 credit account and just pay it back as if it were a credit card rather than being charged $35 overdraft fees for going.01 in the red.
Citibank may be destroying the rainforest but thats fine as long as they plant ATM's where all the trees used to be.
I am taking a technical writing course as part of my IS major at UMBC. This is a 300 level class. It is required for all the Engineering and IS majors here. It is mainly related to improving the writing for when we are out of school. Our assignments this semester included, writing a resume and cover letter, a full analytical research report (mine was about 30 pages) complete with appendixes, table of contents, glossary and sections and now we are writing a manual for our final project. English classes typically hold written assignments to a much higher standard than other departments so its been challenging but interesting to get some writing experience in our fields of interest while meeting the tough grading standards of most english departments.
What would a person be charged with rather than a company set up by some people to hide such an illegal activity? This is basically organized fraud and theft of information committed by individuals who set up a company knowing that because of our insane legal system corporate owners are seldom charged even when their companies were setup to be illegal enterprises from the beginning. Sophisticated con artists and fraudsters routinely form corporations for the purpose of limiting their own personal liability for their criminal enterprises. Spammers do it, cult leaders do it, and now black hats are doing it too.
If I did this under my own name, the media would be calling me a hacker who socially engineered and otherwise broke into computer systems for the purpose of stealing sensitive customer information and selling it to the highest bidder.
I find it difficult to conceive that a court will rule that the first ammendment protection of the press only covers those with multibillion dollar media conglomerates or old family owned newspapers behind them. Freedom of the press is freedom of speech as it applies to written or photographic material and should be no less free than speech and is not limited to those with journalism degrees.
Whether the trade secret law applies may be another matter beyond my knowledge, but the fact is that the website in question did not sign a non-disclosure agreement with Apple and is free to publish what it likes provided it is not libelous. That includes publishing information that Apple insiders chose to disclose to the site in violation of their agreements with Apple not to do so. Apple is obscessive about secrecy and it will just have to learn to live with leaks or Steve Jobs will just have to close the company down, fire all the workers and hire oompa loopas.
At UMBC all the lab computers dual boot to their own Linux which is pretty much Fedora. Granted we are probably one of the most geeky universities in the country. Go Chess!
That the Governor changed his mind when he found out that Diebold would be charging the state, abour $600 per machine to add a printer. That and help his reelection bid. It might also cause the democrats to take the opposing side of the issue now since they have been working hard in the legislature to make Erlich seem inneffective. The GOP minority leader in the state legislature said that the Democrats motto is "Fail Bobby [Erlich] Fail!"
How does one "approximately" break 11 international laws. I mean there are grey and untested areas in the law but usually the amount og laws that one is breaking has a definable numerical value.
Heh, I work in the MPAA's DC building (not for them) across the hall from Valenti's office, I wonder if he could hook me up, I've been dying to see that movie.
D'Angelo will. I was on a tour bus two weeks ago and we were chatting with the driver and he said he had gotten his degree in Information Systems, and I was like "oh god no, I am going to be a bus driver when I graduate." But then he said that the reason he started bus driving was because he hated sitting in an office all day long and loved to travel.
They should have been fined much more. 1.4 Million Complaints x $11,000 (the maximum fine per incident) = $15.4 Billion. Now that may be a bit excessive but the only message they are sending here, is "don't worry, you'll only be assessed the absolute minimum. After all $5.4M is only $3.85 per complaint. The time it takes me to file a complaint is worth more than that.
This is probably less expensive than having to go out and repo cars for late payments which usually results in exorbitant (300-500 dollars) charges in order to get the car back in addition to making all the late payments. At least this way, you call up, do an electronic payment and you can get your car back right away without being extorted for repo fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I know that for surgical tape and gauz and stuff being left inside resulting in further surgery to remove it the usual settlement is 30-50k and it is usually not the doctor's fault since the nurses do the counts and they work for the hospital. Much of the malpractice cost for doctors is the result of lawyers shotgunning the lawsuit and suing everyone, the hospital, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the assisting surgeon, and their partners in their practice. My fathers a physician and he was recently named in a suit because another surgeon in his practice did the surgery and the hospital staff miscounted. It gets dismissed but he had to show up and take time from seeing patients and the insurance companies count it as a claim against the him because it costs money to send a lawyer to have his name dropped, which means his 15% discount for not having any claims in the last few years goes poof.
At least where I live, every surgery begins and ends with counts of all the tools and gauze and other materials being used, with usually more than one person confirming the count. Accidents do happen but it wasn't too long ago that there was basically no such thing as a malpractice lawsuit because people recognized that surgery was extremely risky and diagnostics is not an exact science. Of course now juries know that the money comes the insurance companies so they rationalize giving money to someone who suffered as a kind of charity that does not necesarily have to involve blaming the doctor, only feeling sorry for the patient, even if as in many cases the patient ignored medical advice.
I for one welcome our new 128 bit overlords.
Wow, I could so go for a pill that would inhibit production of this protein as a wieght loss drug that does not rely on stimulants.
There was an editorial I read around the time this case was ruled on (The Sociopath You Work For) where one comment about how hard it is to get a megacorp to obey the law was along the lines of 'there is not much a government can do to make Microsoft do what it doesn't want to other than send in the troops.)
In this case though, if MS doesn't pay the EU can move to sieze their bank accounts and/or other assets within Europe or of course they could send in the troops. MS will certainly stall and try to get the fine reduced cause a few more million in legal fees don't quite compare to hundreds of millions of euros, but I get the feeling that the EU regulators are tired of the shenanigans and are basically saying to MS, "this is not the US where companies can defy the state, we will kill you, literally kill you if you don't obey"
I took this awful management class and they talked about Geek Squad like its some sort of Business miracle. We even had to watch a video where they talk about the company and its structure. Aside from their marketing they are really nothing special and time will tell on that as well. Geek Squad is just one of many essentially empty shell IT service organizations that charge a high rate to the end users who go to them because they have established a recognizable brand and then contract most if not all of the actual work out to others.
If you want to see even more disturbing examples of this trend sign up as a provider at onforce.com where a so-called free market for IT services is little more than a way for these empty shell providers to route low paying service calls to "independent contractors" except that marketplace is deliberately skewed so that the providers don't get to enforce their own rates but rather find themselves racing to accept low paying work orders from companies that are nothing more than a catchy name and a 800 number. One of the lowest paying of these companies suspiciously operates out of the same building as Onforce.com (formerly ComputerRepair.com) while routinely violating even the weak rules Onforce setup to guard against abuses, such as requiring that clients pay contractors at least 1 hours time and paying a fee for customer no-shows.
In many respects sending Reset packets to both sides of an unwanted connection based on the content of the traffic is much more the behavior of an Intrusion Detection System than just a firewall. The Cisco IDS devices and I would imagine other brands as well typically have an entire interface just for sending reset packets to close unwanted connections between hosts based on certain rules and content inspection.
If our legal system had not been corrupted by the loan sharking ( consumer banking/credit cards) industry you would have the right to sue for damages based on whatever this loss of your information cost you plus some measure of punitive damages for their failure to handle your information securely. Until the liability is placed squarely where it belongs identity theft will not be stopped because it doesn't hurt the bottom line.
One of my proposals.
Section 1: No sensitive information is to be stored on a Laptop or home computer of any employee or contractor of any company that routinely handles sensitive personal information. Violations are a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $25,000,000 and no less than a $25,000 fine per violation, and/or up to 1 year in prison to be served by the corporate executive(s) responsible for information security. Section 2: Any company or organization that regularly stores or uses more than 100 social security numbers, credit card, or bank account numbers, or personal and/or confidential information from its customers, contacts, or employees is liable to those on which information is kept for any damage caused by the loss or theft of that information. Section 4. Loss or theft of more than 100 customer or employee's sensitive information including bank/credit account numbers and/or social security numbers may be fined between $1000 and $10,000 per person affected by the loss. (ex. Lose 100,000 SS numbers and you get fined 100M to 1 Billion) Section 5. Individuals have the right of private action and class action to seek compensatory and punitive damages against companies that stored sensitive information on them that was lost or stolen regardless of how many individuals are affected. Section 6. Loss of sensitive customer personal information by corporations engaged in the banking or credit industries forfeit all rights to collect on debts owed by individuals where their sensitive information has been lost or stolen or shared with any third party from which such data is lost or stolen unless disclosure of such loss or theft is made within 4 business days of the discovery of the loss or theft and restitution in the amount of $10,000 per person is made in addition to full cooperation with affected persons in recovering their identity.
The article repeats the falsehoods that The Pirate Bay and the AllOfMP3.com are illegal file sharing websites. One is a legal under Swedish law and is a torrent site that does not host any copyrighted material. The Russian site, AllofMP3.com sells mp3 tracks legally by a quirk of Russian copyright law. The reason the RIAA is pissed is for 2 reasons, the first is that the songs are sold cheaply to both Russians and foreigners who go to the site which screws with their regional price fixing system, and the other is that they are not collecting the royalties to which they are owed because of those who are supposedly representing foreign copyright holders in Russia pocket the money themselves or they simply choose not to make the effort to get their share from those entities. This also infringes on the RIAA's patented business model which is mostly based on cheating artists out of royalties. If the writer did even a scrap of research beyond the press releases from the RIAA then at the very least the word "allegedly" illegal file sharing might be used instead.
I once watched a debate for the election of US Senator from Oklahoma. The Republican got up and said that doctors who perform abortions should get the death penalty. The Democrat got up and said doctors who perform abortions should just go to prison. OK is worse than Utah.
What she means is that Apple created a closed DRM system and sells hundreds of millions of songs at what consumers percieve to be a fair price with fair drm in a very convenient way. They did this in part to increase sales of their high profit ipods and because they are the most popular legal download site by far they have gained negotiating power with the RIAA members and can put their foot down on song prices. Apple could shut down Itunes tomorrow and people would still buy Ipods and the music industry knows they are at a disadvantage now in negotiations with Apple. Apple can shut down itunes, keep selling ipods, and the only difference is that the RIAA members who collect most of the $.99 per song would be out hundreds of millions of dollars. Apple has built a business model that the RIAA fears most, namely one where the hardware is more profitable than the content/software which means that the hardware companies don't have to obey the content companies. Its similar to the situation with the computer industry, originally the software was cheap and the hardware was expensive, then the hardware got cheaper and the software industry started charging a ton because the hardware did not do anything without the software, and now with competition from free (beer) software, the software companies are having to do something they never thought they would have to do again, negotiate with the hardware companies on an equal footing again.
I have actually had a pretty good experience with Citibank. I have paid less than $12 in fees ($3 maint fees when my balance dips too low) but there are no overdraft fees because you can borrow against a $500 credit account and just pay it back as if it were a credit card rather than being charged $35 overdraft fees for going .01 in the red.
Citibank may be destroying the rainforest but thats fine as long as they plant ATM's where all the trees used to be.
So which one of the Bloomberg Youth gets to die first trying to stick me with that needle?
FOX actually stands for Fueling Our Xenophobia.
and pass a law that sends all children to boarding school at an early age and denies them all contact with the outside world until they are 21.
I am taking a technical writing course as part of my IS major at UMBC. This is a 300 level class. It is required for all the Engineering and IS majors here. It is mainly related to improving the writing for when we are out of school. Our assignments this semester included, writing a resume and cover letter, a full analytical research report (mine was about 30 pages) complete with appendixes, table of contents, glossary and sections and now we are writing a manual for our final project. English classes typically hold written assignments to a much higher standard than other departments so its been challenging but interesting to get some writing experience in our fields of interest while meeting the tough grading standards of most english departments.
What would a person be charged with rather than a company set up by some people to hide such an illegal activity? This is basically organized fraud and theft of information committed by individuals who set up a company knowing that because of our insane legal system corporate owners are seldom charged even when their companies were setup to be illegal enterprises from the beginning. Sophisticated con artists and fraudsters routinely form corporations for the purpose of limiting their own personal liability for their criminal enterprises. Spammers do it, cult leaders do it, and now black hats are doing it too.
If I did this under my own name, the media would be calling me a hacker who socially engineered and otherwise broke into computer systems for the purpose of stealing sensitive customer information and selling it to the highest bidder.
I find it difficult to conceive that a court will rule that the first ammendment protection of the press only covers those with multibillion dollar media conglomerates or old family owned newspapers behind them. Freedom of the press is freedom of speech as it applies to written or photographic material and should be no less free than speech and is not limited to those with journalism degrees.
Whether the trade secret law applies may be another matter beyond my knowledge, but the fact is that the website in question did not sign a non-disclosure agreement with Apple and is free to publish what it likes provided it is not libelous. That includes publishing information that Apple insiders chose to disclose to the site in violation of their agreements with Apple not to do so. Apple is obscessive about secrecy and it will just have to learn to live with leaks or Steve Jobs will just have to close the company down, fire all the workers and hire oompa loopas.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
At UMBC all the lab computers dual boot to their own Linux which is pretty much Fedora. Granted we are probably one of the most geeky universities in the country. Go Chess!
That the Governor changed his mind when he found out that Diebold would be charging the state, abour $600 per machine to add a printer. That and help his reelection bid. It might also cause the democrats to take the opposing side of the issue now since they have been working hard in the legislature to make Erlich seem inneffective. The GOP minority leader in the state legislature said that the Democrats motto is "Fail Bobby [Erlich] Fail!"
How does one "approximately" break 11 international laws. I mean there are grey and untested areas in the law but usually the amount og laws that one is breaking has a definable numerical value.
Heh, I work in the MPAA's DC building (not for them) across the hall from Valenti's office, I wonder if he could hook me up, I've been dying to see that movie.
D'Angelo will. I was on a tour bus two weeks ago and we were chatting with the driver and he said he had gotten his degree in Information Systems, and I was like "oh god no, I am going to be a bus driver when I graduate." But then he said that the reason he started bus driving was because he hated sitting in an office all day long and loved to travel.
They should have been fined much more. 1.4 Million Complaints x $11,000 (the maximum fine per incident) = $15.4 Billion. Now that may be a bit excessive but the only message they are sending here, is "don't worry, you'll only be assessed the absolute minimum. After all $5.4M is only $3.85 per complaint. The time it takes me to file a complaint is worth more than that.
This is probably less expensive than having to go out and repo cars for late payments which usually results in exorbitant (300-500 dollars) charges in order to get the car back in addition to making all the late payments. At least this way, you call up, do an electronic payment and you can get your car back right away without being extorted for repo fees.