For a language to change rapidly, there would need to be a small, or at least well-connected group of people using that language, in order for them to be able to adapt to those changes.
History demonstrates that language in small and well-connected groups tends to stagnate, not grow. The French spoken in rural parts of Quebec is interesting to linguists because it has changed very little from the 1600s when that area was settled... while Parisian French has changed markedly, to the extent that a Parisian and a Canadienne would have difficulty understanding each other. Similarly, the French spoken on the Channel Islands has more in common with the French that was spoken in the 1100s than it does with "modern" French: those pesky Normans haven't changed much since they conquered England. (Except they are all bilingual in an odd kind of way: English in school and church, French at home and on the boats. To such an extent that there is a kind of tacit taboo about speaking on some subjects in the "wrong" language.)
Languages grow when they are rubbed against each other. There are a remarkable number of different languages that are currently rubbing against English, and English benefits from new expressions and insights that were not previously a part of its culture. It also loses touch with some of its heritage. Not to worry; there will always be pockets here and there that preserve the old ways.
Meanwhile, we seem to be riding English toward a future global cosmopolis.
For example, I couldn't figure out how to turn an image to black and white in the GIMP,
You might find that rather than converting to b&w, you'll get better results by reducing the color saturation to where everything appears to be gray scale. You end up with a very rich palette of dozens of nearly black, oodles of nearly white, and all those almost grays... you can really play with subliminal effects. Much more fun than staying with the limitations of pure grays. There are at least 64 shades that even discerning viewers will see as each being white... until you place a couple of those shades next to each other. So you can get into neat stuff where some whites are purer than others, some are warmer than others, some are dingier than others.
Suppose I were a pirate; what would I get in this? After all, I can still get my copy of Windows software "free".
But suppose you are a CIO of a company with a thousand WinXP workstations, and you don't sleep well at night because your predecessor had some lax policies and you've no idea how much of your ass is exposed to any employee who has an ax to grind. You might welcome the opportunity to get clean, before a BSA audit comes your way.
Much as I hate MS business practices in general, I can see where this scheme is beneficial. It could give a lot of small and mid-size businesses the breathing room they need while they decide which version of Linux is right for their future.... now that we all can finally see what the future with Vista would be like....
What possessed you to post in English on an English-mostly place, when the link is in Finnish? You're an ass, and Shirke is a poor "editor."
Parent post is bullshit of a quality unfit for even fertilizing my roses. I certainly wouldn't be spreading it around my vegetable garden.
TFAs on slashdot in non-English languages make perfect sense. This is a global community. Anyone with a slashdot membership knows, or should know, how to use the various translation utilities that are all over the web.
That said, I would appreciate posts that provide an English translation of non-English text, and commentary about the quality of the translation from someone who knows the original language. This is partly because I'm lazy, and if someone else will take the thing to a babelfish, then I won't have to. While I'm proficient in writing in several languages other than English, they are all computer languages...
Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue, is as readable as it is fascinating.... Who would have guessed that there are more distinct dialects of English within 50 miles of London than there are in all of North America?
I also agree that the English I grew up speaking in the 1950s is likely to be as foreign to English speakers of the next century as the writings of the 1500s are to me. But I think the result will be an improvement where we have an increased number of different ways of saying the same thing— each with its own nuances. AND some easy ways of saying things that we cannot say easily today.
For example, which of these equivalent phrases is easier to express?
"A person is the person he is because of his interactions with the persons around him."
t's fairly obvious that once you begin to write a language down, and even take the step of codifying it in grammar texts and dictionaries, its rate of evolution slows dramatically.
WTF?? Post ignores TLAs, and is seemingly in denial about/. readership and the effect that such things are having on all aspects of English. To wit: "Google" is now a common verb; go google it. The process of verbing nouns has gained worldwide recognition as a useful English communication technique, through the internet. English grammarians need to scramble to keep up with emerging accepted practices, and frankly a lot of them are still stumbling around in the starting gate.
The evolution of a language advances at its margins. The margin of advancement for English today is primarily the internet... text. English's current changes are being driven by people who can write English, but very well might not be able to speak it in any recognized fashion.
It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.
For years now, there are more users of English as a second language than there are native speakers of the language. If we have not done so already, we are coming close to the point where there is more correspondence in English between people who learned English as a second language than there is correspondence that involves at least one native speaker of English. We are also moving toward the point where there sum of all documents ever published in English by native English speakers is smaller than the total of all English documents written by non-natives.
It is now not uncommon for a Finn, a Pakistani, an Israeli, and a Brazilian to collaborate on a software project written in Python, Ruby, or Perl, and use English as the language for all aspects of the project even though none of them are good speakers of English.
English is getting stripped of a bunch of silly rules that were never really core to the language, and is being expanded by a bunch of new concepts that new users are bringing in from their own native languages. The result is probably going to offend the sensibilities of a lot of the older English teachers in English speaking countries. Gee, that's too bad if they can't keep up. But the benefits of a global language are worth putting up with jarring phrases and strange sounding usages.
Here's my understanding. A crime has allegedly been commited,
If Essent Healthcare has reason to believe that a violation of HIPAA regulations has occurred, they are obligated to report the crime to the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services who will investigate and prosecute the perpetrators. The Feds will use search warrants as necessary, not subpoenas. The action will be a criminal investigation, not the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit. It will be carried out by policemen, FBI agents, not by lawyers in Essent Healthcare's pay.
...according to this blogger who reasonably would know the identity of the perpetrator.
That's just silly. Here is this guy who is an anonymous coward saying that some other guy showed him some stuff from some third guy's medical record, and Essent Healthcare is saying that this is sufficient reason for demanding that an ISP release the identity of this anonymous coward? That's like a bad knock-off of an Abbot and Costello routine.
Again, if Essent Healthcare has reason to believe that a violation of HIPAA has occurred, they are obligated to report it and the Feds will pursue it as a crime. They have no basis for pursuing it in a civil court proceeding.
It gives the hospital cause to subpoena the ISP for the blogger's identity.
Please explain why the hospital's negligence in conforming to HIPAA regulations can be the basis for them to interfere with a blogger's rights to anonymity.
While you are doing this, please point me to where the hospital has asked the blogger to voluntarily cooperate with their investigation of their failed internal procedures, because I don't see that anywhere. Certainly that should be the first step in the process.
You might also explain to me why the blogging equivalent of an anonymous coward should be accorded more veracity than ACs on slashdot enjoy. This guy apparently claims he has seen patient records; what happens if he now says, "No, I never saw such things, so go away please"? It would seem that the court would have to accept both of these as equally valid, or dismiss both of these as so much hot air. Since there is no basis for establishing the validity of either.
In fact I think I'll go ahead and post an AC comment here on slashdot that I am in fact the blogger and I now deny that I have ever seen any patient records. That should have the same weight in a courtroom as the conditions that Essent Healthcare claims are sufficient for this discovery motion. In fact, since slashdot has a much wider readership, my AC comment should clearly have more authority.
Supposedly the blogger has claimed to have seen patient records provided by employees of the hospital. No one says the blogger released this information. It's still a crime, if it occured.
If this occurred, the culpability is with the employees, IF they were healthcare professionals bound by HIPAA constraints. IF these employees were janitors, food service workers, or the like, the culpability would be on the hospital for failure to develop and utilize effective procedures for securing confidential information. In any event, the person who receives this information, the blogger in this case, is not bound by any law except his own good judgment.
The other means by which the blogger could have seen patient records is if a patient requested a copy of their records and then shared it with the blogger, or with someone who passed it to the blogger.
Essent Healthcare has, or is supposed to have, an effective method for identifying and closing its security leaks. The existence of this lawsuit demonstrates on several levels that they are incompetent at hospital management: they have no conception of the issues that are involved. They should take their Swim with the Sharks skills back to selling envelopes, where the important things of marketing and capitalistic pursuits are not going to be polluted by matters of professional conduct, altruism, etc.
I've read TFA, and went beyond that to find the blog (the paris site blogspot and google a little on Essent Healthcare.
I did not see anything suggesting a violation of HIPAA on the web site (my background includes several years as the Information Security Officer for Nursing Service at a largish hospital: I'm reasonably familiar with HIPAA requirements). There is nothing illegal about a third party discussing the particulars of someone's treatment at a hospital, even when that includes information that could allow someone to identify the patient. It is illegal for a hospital or healthcare professional to release identifying information, even unintentionally, but if that occurred here, it would have occurred before the blog posted about it.
In other words, if there was such a violation, it would have involved the hospital employee who leaked the data to the blogger, not the blogger or the blog. HIPAA governs healthcare providers and the policies and procedures they use: its scope does not extend to information that has gotten out into the wild.
If the hospital had adequate information security and HR policies in place, the alleged leak could not have occurred without triggering flags that would identify the staff person who leaked the information. Essent's pursuit of this blogger on the basis of HIPAA violations is a tacit admission that they are negligent— not exercising due diligence— regarding confidential information. Maybe they need to spend more money on paper shredders, enforce policies about logging out of the system when leaving a workstation unattended, disallow corporate officer access to confidential patient files, and so forth.
A noteworthy tidbit is that Essent Healthcare is a small part of the Healthtrust Purchasing Group, which seems to be buying up hospitals and clinics all over the country for the purpose of making profits. This is capitalism at its finest, but it does mean that improving patient care is no longer the highest concern of those running the show.
"Do not look in ass end of warp drive engine when it pulses."
Well, that's a very rough translation of part of the instruction manual. It is about as good as I can do with the limited concepts of mathematics and physics presently available on this rock.
This concludes our current injection of alien concepts into the Internet through the Slashdot interface. We now return you to your rockbound networks.
The sliderule was essential to my Dad's work, back in the day. He used it heavily in the thermodynamics engineering of jet engine parts, and later when working on the design of the Apollo heat shield.
A good sliderule in the 1950s was ivory laminated on teak, ebony, or lignum vitae, with a magnifying hairline cursor. The wood was selected for stability despite changes in humidity: ideally it would never warp, crack, expand or contract. The ivory surface was needed for the fine, closely calibrated lines critical to accuracy. The cursors were real hairs: stretched and sealed under optical quality glass lenses in a carrier designed and built with the same tolerances as a Swiss watch. A good sliderule cost several hundred dollars at the time: the equivalent cost today would be more than most desktop computers.
I learned to do basic sliderule operations before high school. Fortunately for me, the first four function calculators arrived on the scene before I faced any critical need for arithmetic. Those were the clunky, heavy things with red displays that could eat up a couple of nine volt batteries in a day's work. But that's another story.
I'll back up parent post on this one. I've tried Kubuntu and Ubuntu in the last 8 months or so, and both are very pleasant working environments. I'm continuing to dual boot Ubuntu with WinXP, since I have a fancy printer (photorealistic up to 13"x19") and the Linux drivers for it only support a business-grade subset of its capabilities. Aside from fancy printing, I don't need Windows any more.
And the full cost of Nuclear Waste disposal is still not known, nor is it included in the quoted "price" of the electricity.
This last point is, for me, the telling one.
There may be strong technical arguments against using fission technology, yet these are overshadowed by the huge accounting argument against using fission at this time. Basically, fission technology is the first instance we've encountered of an industrial process where the greatest costs are post-production. Current bookkeeping systems were never designed to capture post productions costs and apply them properly against revenues. Accounting schemes being used to "adjust" the numbers to get around this small matter of enormous future costs are quite humorous in their use of blue sky numbers.
What we need is a council to determine the way these future costs are to be accounted for in current financials and proposals. It should be made up of persons with no technical knowledge of fission, but who are recognized for their general business sense, and who know how to ask the technical experts the tough questions, and how to smell out those answers that have no basis in current knowledge. And it should be a panel composed of persons who have a demonstrated vested interest in the long term future: grandparents who are focused on what the children of their grandchildren are going to have to face.
We have a long heritage of using councils of elders to handle the tough decisions. We should draw on that heritage now, as we face decisions whose consequences will shape the lives of the children of today's toddlers and infants.
While I really do not want to reply to author of parent post, there is a misconception in that post that needs to be corrected for the benefit of 3rd party readers.
So, Troll, please don't bother to read any further: you have staked out a position that I respect as historically sound. I'm not going to attack it, and so long as you stay in that place where reality maybe used to be, we can go our separate ways.
For everyone else, reality has shifted in the last decade or two...
...I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software.
Actually, no, that isn't even close. The GPL in particular, and the FOSS movement in general, are ways to frame a gift economy in terms of current law. A gift economy is no more socialist than it is capitalist: it is a distinct method building and distributing wealth that is unlike either of those European Age of Industry conceptualizations.
Capitalism and socialism both focus on dividing up the pie of existing wealth. A gift economy focuses on making the pie bigger. It is "I freely give my labor to dig this much more of the village's irrigation ditch", "we recognize and celebrate your contribution", and everyone benefits from the new wealth of corn, beans, and squash that the fields then produce.
Except that with software, the incremental increases in wealth of a traditional gift economy takes a strange turning and becomes a geometric or exponential function. There is no marginal cost associated with duplicating software. It is as if I could dig ten feet of new irrigation ditch to better my own garden plot, and I could then magically duplicate that new ditch for all my other villagers, just by uttering the right magic words. If those magic words were like the GPL, so long as they agreed to work the same magic if and when they added a bit more ditching for their gardens, any of them could take advantage of my work, and my magic. When they, too, do a little digging, it directly benefits me through the same magic-- and I don't have to lift a finger to get that bonus. We all eat better, and have more celebrational feasts.
Software is direct wealth, independent of money. The success of FOSS demonstrates that. It demonstrates that in the current post industrial age, lots of people who may not have a great deal of money are now able to live a life that is wealthier than that of the rich men and women of their grandparents' age.
Capitalism and socialism are both relics of the industrial age that are being outmoded by societies that are increasingly relying on information for their wealth. A gift economy is a natural way of maximizing the benefits when there is no cost associated with giving away copies of something that you were going to make anyway.
The pie gets bigger. That is neither capitalist nor socialist: it is something else again. A gift economy can handle it. The concepts of a gift economy are not something we needed to study since we started to use printing presses to make textbooks, but those concepts are things our ancestors were quite familiar with. The gift economy is not a new idea. It is a recycling of a very old way of making life better.
If you enter "77.1" into a cell, you get the problem.
But if you enter the sequence "76.9", "77.0" in adjacent cells, then use the sequence extender to fill the next cell with "77.1", arithmetic using that cell works right. But inspection of the cell shows it holds "77.09999...", not the "77.1" that it displays.
Is there an easy algorithm to identify other similar numbers? I'm guessing this has to do with representations of fractional numbers as binary floats, and that there are a family of numbers that will generate the 77.1 problem.
If nothing else, somebody with a few minutes could probably generate a "sieve" matrix that would explore this empirically.
The distinction between humans and other living things seems to be pretty much unique to the cultures that have been heavily influenced by the Middle East Desert War God religions.
In many languages, the words for trees translates as "Standing Peoples", birds are "Winged People", and so forth. There is no artificial distance imposed between the human group and the other beings that are all part of the same ecosystem.
This leads to some very basic differences in world view. It would be hard in the language that gives us the word "ubuntu" to express the concept of Man having been granted dominion over all the other creatures, for instance.
If there's really a market for these things, and if this is really the right price, why do they need these governments to sign on?
Nobody said that there is an existing market for OLPCs. There is a dire need, which creates a potential market, but a bunch of other things have to come together before the market actually comes into existence. It will take government resources to set up the infrastructures that will make OLPCs usable in the way they are intended to be used.
Part of the reason the expected cost is so low is the expectation of having orders for 3 million units in hand on the first day of production.
Outside of governments, the Bill & Melida Gates Foundation could mobilize the necessary resources, but that organization doesn't appear to be interested.
Decentralized— there is no core or hub and there are multiple potential pathways between each node and any other node
Global
Anarchic— there is no agency that controls usage, there is no decision-making hierarchy
Cooperative— protocols come into use through cooperation between sovereign entities
Open— the protocols that make up the various parts of the Internet are publicly available and unencumbered by patents, privately held copyrights, or any similar controls
Evolutionary— the Internet runs entirely on ad hoc protocols that are subject to evolution as specific changes become generally recognized as improvements (XHTMLRequest), or specific details are generally recognized as detrimental (blink)
Self-healing— physical damage gets routed around; logical damage gets worked around
This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it recognizes most of what was intended as DARPAnet evolved into the early Internet, and the way the Internet has grown since that time.
I agree that a tubes analogy is actually a good one. Out of the mouths of babes... and sometimes politicians...
Most of us who are fifty or over— and who also have some say in making laws, rules, and policies— have memories of seeing pneumatic message tubes in use. It is easy to make the leap from the physical packets of pneumatic tube capsules to the digital packets of the Internet protocols. Routing, switching, temporary storage areas, and so on are also well supported by this imagery. This is, in fact, what came to mind when I first heard about the Esteemed Senator's analogy. (It was only later when I read his actual words that I experienced a laugh or cry moment— I chose to laugh.)
Those too young to have memories of pneumatic tube messaging systems generally fall into two groups: those who already have an innate concept of what the Internet is and its limitations and promises; and those who refuse to know and don't care. The latter group has very little impact on formulating today's policies, rules, and laws, and will have even less impact tomorrow. That they might not understand references to pneumatic tube messaging systems doesn't matter so much since they have opted out.
The scrubber volume of a mature 10 acre stand of douglas fir is around 600 acre-feet (not 60). The freshly replanted plot would have scrubber volume of no more than 0.8% of this; its effective scrubbing volume would be less than 0.1% of the mature stand that it replaced.
Apologies about the original figures. They were calculated using pre-coffee wetware, which has a local reputation for being notoriously unreliable.
It was my understanding that lumber companies generally plant more trees than they cut down.
I think when you look at it closely, you will find that "more" is a more subtle and complex concept than it first appears to be.
In terms of simple counting, the "tree growing company" and others like it do plant more seedlings than the count of mature trees harvested. So if I pick up four pebbles while a backhoe picks up a single boulder, I'm holding more rock than the backhoe is. Yeah.
In context with air scrubbers, an appropriate kind of "moreness" would be the volume of air swept by needles. In a 10 acre stand of mature douglas fir, that volume begins about 20 feet above the ground and extends upward for another 80 feet. The stand has an active scrubbing volume of 60 acre-feet. Transpiration and the temperature differential caused by its shade assure that there is a constant flow of air through the canopy, even when there is no external wind.
In a freshly replanted 10 acre plot, the volume of effective scrubbing starts a couple of inches above the ground and is about 6 inches deep, at most. Even if all other factors were equal, the scrubbing volume is no more than 8% of the mature forest it has replaced. Considering other factors, like density of needles and the loss of "churn" on still air days, the effective scrubbing volume is much less than 1% of a mature stand.
On reflection, it seems we need to know much more about "more" than the forest products industry will willingly tell us.
Slashdot Mirror
History demonstrates that language in small and well-connected groups tends to stagnate, not grow. The French spoken in rural parts of Quebec is interesting to linguists because it has changed very little from the 1600s when that area was settled... while Parisian French has changed markedly, to the extent that a Parisian and a Canadienne would have difficulty understanding each other. Similarly, the French spoken on the Channel Islands has more in common with the French that was spoken in the 1100s than it does with "modern" French: those pesky Normans haven't changed much since they conquered England. (Except they are all bilingual in an odd kind of way: English in school and church, French at home and on the boats. To such an extent that there is a kind of tacit taboo about speaking on some subjects in the "wrong" language.)
Languages grow when they are rubbed against each other. There are a remarkable number of different languages that are currently rubbing against English, and English benefits from new expressions and insights that were not previously a part of its culture. It also loses touch with some of its heritage. Not to worry; there will always be pockets here and there that preserve the old ways.
Meanwhile, we seem to be riding English toward a future global cosmopolis.
You might find that rather than converting to b&w, you'll get better results by reducing the color saturation to where everything appears to be gray scale. You end up with a very rich palette of dozens of nearly black, oodles of nearly white, and all those almost grays... you can really play with subliminal effects. Much more fun than staying with the limitations of pure grays. There are at least 64 shades that even discerning viewers will see as each being white... until you place a couple of those shades next to each other. So you can get into neat stuff where some whites are purer than others, some are warmer than others, some are dingier than others.
But suppose you are a CIO of a company with a thousand WinXP workstations, and you don't sleep well at night because your predecessor had some lax policies and you've no idea how much of your ass is exposed to any employee who has an ax to grind. You might welcome the opportunity to get clean, before a BSA audit comes your way.
Much as I hate MS business practices in general, I can see where this scheme is beneficial. It could give a lot of small and mid-size businesses the breathing room they need while they decide which version of Linux is right for their future.... now that we all can finally see what the future with Vista would be like....
Parent post is bullshit of a quality unfit for even fertilizing my roses. I certainly wouldn't be spreading it around my vegetable garden.
TFAs on slashdot in non-English languages make perfect sense. This is a global community. Anyone with a slashdot membership knows, or should know, how to use the various translation utilities that are all over the web.
That said, I would appreciate posts that provide an English translation of non-English text, and commentary about the quality of the translation from someone who knows the original language. This is partly because I'm lazy, and if someone else will take the thing to a babelfish, then I won't have to. While I'm proficient in writing in several languages other than English, they are all computer languages...
True enough.
Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue , is as readable as it is fascinating.... Who would have guessed that there are more distinct dialects of English within 50 miles of London than there are in all of North America?
I also agree that the English I grew up speaking in the 1950s is likely to be as foreign to English speakers of the next century as the writings of the 1500s are to me. But I think the result will be an improvement where we have an increased number of different ways of saying the same thing— each with its own nuances. AND some easy ways of saying things that we cannot say easily today.
For example, which of these equivalent phrases is easier to express?
...even though none of them are good speakers of English. wow - you too speak english very goodly also as well.perhaps you meant "...even though none of them speak English well?"
All three work: even the one that came from the Department of Redundancy Department conveys its meaning adequately.
One thing that English is losing that I have no regrets about is the silliness of elevating pedantic precision over effective communication.
WTF?? Post ignores TLAs, and is seemingly in denial about /. readership and the effect that such things are having on all aspects of English. To wit: "Google" is now a common verb; go google it. The process of verbing nouns has gained worldwide recognition as a useful English communication technique, through the internet. English grammarians need to scramble to keep up with emerging accepted practices, and frankly a lot of them are still stumbling around in the starting gate.
The evolution of a language advances at its margins. The margin of advancement for English today is primarily the internet... text. English's current changes are being driven by people who can write English, but very well might not be able to speak it in any recognized fashion.
It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.
For years now, there are more users of English as a second language than there are native speakers of the language. If we have not done so already, we are coming close to the point where there is more correspondence in English between people who learned English as a second language than there is correspondence that involves at least one native speaker of English. We are also moving toward the point where there sum of all documents ever published in English by native English speakers is smaller than the total of all English documents written by non-natives.
It is now not uncommon for a Finn, a Pakistani, an Israeli, and a Brazilian to collaborate on a software project written in Python, Ruby, or Perl, and use English as the language for all aspects of the project even though none of them are good speakers of English.
English is getting stripped of a bunch of silly rules that were never really core to the language, and is being expanded by a bunch of new concepts that new users are bringing in from their own native languages. The result is probably going to offend the sensibilities of a lot of the older English teachers in English speaking countries. Gee, that's too bad if they can't keep up. But the benefits of a global language are worth putting up with jarring phrases and strange sounding usages.
If Essent Healthcare has reason to believe that a violation of HIPAA regulations has occurred, they are obligated to report the crime to the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services who will investigate and prosecute the perpetrators. The Feds will use search warrants as necessary, not subpoenas. The action will be a criminal investigation, not the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit. It will be carried out by policemen, FBI agents, not by lawyers in Essent Healthcare's pay.
...according to this blogger who reasonably would know the identity of the perpetrator.That's just silly. Here is this guy who is an anonymous coward saying that some other guy showed him some stuff from some third guy's medical record, and Essent Healthcare is saying that this is sufficient reason for demanding that an ISP release the identity of this anonymous coward? That's like a bad knock-off of an Abbot and Costello routine.
Again, if Essent Healthcare has reason to believe that a violation of HIPAA has occurred, they are obligated to report it and the Feds will pursue it as a crime. They have no basis for pursuing it in a civil court proceeding.
Please explain why the hospital's negligence in conforming to HIPAA regulations can be the basis for them to interfere with a blogger's rights to anonymity.
While you are doing this, please point me to where the hospital has asked the blogger to voluntarily cooperate with their investigation of their failed internal procedures, because I don't see that anywhere. Certainly that should be the first step in the process.
You might also explain to me why the blogging equivalent of an anonymous coward should be accorded more veracity than ACs on slashdot enjoy. This guy apparently claims he has seen patient records; what happens if he now says, "No, I never saw such things, so go away please"? It would seem that the court would have to accept both of these as equally valid, or dismiss both of these as so much hot air. Since there is no basis for establishing the validity of either.
In fact I think I'll go ahead and post an AC comment here on slashdot that I am in fact the blogger and I now deny that I have ever seen any patient records. That should have the same weight in a courtroom as the conditions that Essent Healthcare claims are sufficient for this discovery motion. In fact, since slashdot has a much wider readership, my AC comment should clearly have more authority.
If this occurred, the culpability is with the employees, IF they were healthcare professionals bound by HIPAA constraints. IF these employees were janitors, food service workers, or the like, the culpability would be on the hospital for failure to develop and utilize effective procedures for securing confidential information. In any event, the person who receives this information, the blogger in this case, is not bound by any law except his own good judgment.
The other means by which the blogger could have seen patient records is if a patient requested a copy of their records and then shared it with the blogger, or with someone who passed it to the blogger.
Essent Healthcare has, or is supposed to have, an effective method for identifying and closing its security leaks. The existence of this lawsuit demonstrates on several levels that they are incompetent at hospital management: they have no conception of the issues that are involved. They should take their Swim with the Sharks skills back to selling envelopes, where the important things of marketing and capitalistic pursuits are not going to be polluted by matters of professional conduct, altruism, etc.
I've read TFA, and went beyond that to find the blog (the paris site blogspot and google a little on Essent Healthcare.
I did not see anything suggesting a violation of HIPAA on the web site (my background includes several years as the Information Security Officer for Nursing Service at a largish hospital: I'm reasonably familiar with HIPAA requirements). There is nothing illegal about a third party discussing the particulars of someone's treatment at a hospital, even when that includes information that could allow someone to identify the patient. It is illegal for a hospital or healthcare professional to release identifying information, even unintentionally, but if that occurred here, it would have occurred before the blog posted about it.
In other words, if there was such a violation, it would have involved the hospital employee who leaked the data to the blogger, not the blogger or the blog. HIPAA governs healthcare providers and the policies and procedures they use: its scope does not extend to information that has gotten out into the wild.
If the hospital had adequate information security and HR policies in place, the alleged leak could not have occurred without triggering flags that would identify the staff person who leaked the information. Essent's pursuit of this blogger on the basis of HIPAA violations is a tacit admission that they are negligent— not exercising due diligence— regarding confidential information. Maybe they need to spend more money on paper shredders, enforce policies about logging out of the system when leaving a workstation unattended, disallow corporate officer access to confidential patient files, and so forth.
A noteworthy tidbit is that Essent Healthcare is a small part of the Healthtrust Purchasing Group, which seems to be buying up hospitals and clinics all over the country for the purpose of making profits. This is capitalism at its finest, but it does mean that improving patient care is no longer the highest concern of those running the show.
"Do not look in ass end of warp drive engine when it pulses."
Well, that's a very rough translation of part of the instruction manual. It is about as good as I can do with the limited concepts of mathematics and physics presently available on this rock.
This concludes our current injection of alien concepts into the Internet through the Slashdot interface. We now return you to your rockbound networks.
The sliderule was essential to my Dad's work, back in the day. He used it heavily in the thermodynamics engineering of jet engine parts, and later when working on the design of the Apollo heat shield.
A good sliderule in the 1950s was ivory laminated on teak, ebony, or lignum vitae, with a magnifying hairline cursor. The wood was selected for stability despite changes in humidity: ideally it would never warp, crack, expand or contract. The ivory surface was needed for the fine, closely calibrated lines critical to accuracy. The cursors were real hairs: stretched and sealed under optical quality glass lenses in a carrier designed and built with the same tolerances as a Swiss watch. A good sliderule cost several hundred dollars at the time: the equivalent cost today would be more than most desktop computers.
I learned to do basic sliderule operations before high school. Fortunately for me, the first four function calculators arrived on the scene before I faced any critical need for arithmetic. Those were the clunky, heavy things with red displays that could eat up a couple of nine volt batteries in a day's work. But that's another story.
ugh. That's in the same class as tub girl and goatse.
I'll back up parent post on this one. I've tried Kubuntu and Ubuntu in the last 8 months or so, and both are very pleasant working environments. I'm continuing to dual boot Ubuntu with WinXP, since I have a fancy printer (photorealistic up to 13"x19") and the Linux drivers for it only support a business-grade subset of its capabilities. Aside from fancy printing, I don't need Windows any more.
This last point is, for me, the telling one.
There may be strong technical arguments against using fission technology, yet these are overshadowed by the huge accounting argument against using fission at this time. Basically, fission technology is the first instance we've encountered of an industrial process where the greatest costs are post-production. Current bookkeeping systems were never designed to capture post productions costs and apply them properly against revenues. Accounting schemes being used to "adjust" the numbers to get around this small matter of enormous future costs are quite humorous in their use of blue sky numbers.
What we need is a council to determine the way these future costs are to be accounted for in current financials and proposals. It should be made up of persons with no technical knowledge of fission, but who are recognized for their general business sense, and who know how to ask the technical experts the tough questions, and how to smell out those answers that have no basis in current knowledge. And it should be a panel composed of persons who have a demonstrated vested interest in the long term future: grandparents who are focused on what the children of their grandchildren are going to have to face.
We have a long heritage of using councils of elders to handle the tough decisions. We should draw on that heritage now, as we face decisions whose consequences will shape the lives of the children of today's toddlers and infants.
I guess it's time to feed the troll.
While I really do not want to reply to author of parent post, there is a misconception in that post that needs to be corrected for the benefit of 3rd party readers.
So, Troll, please don't bother to read any further: you have staked out a position that I respect as historically sound. I'm not going to attack it, and so long as you stay in that place where reality maybe used to be, we can go our separate ways.
For everyone else, reality has shifted in the last decade or two...
...I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software.Actually, no, that isn't even close. The GPL in particular, and the FOSS movement in general, are ways to frame a gift economy in terms of current law. A gift economy is no more socialist than it is capitalist: it is a distinct method building and distributing wealth that is unlike either of those European Age of Industry conceptualizations.
Capitalism and socialism both focus on dividing up the pie of existing wealth. A gift economy focuses on making the pie bigger. It is "I freely give my labor to dig this much more of the village's irrigation ditch", "we recognize and celebrate your contribution", and everyone benefits from the new wealth of corn, beans, and squash that the fields then produce.
Except that with software, the incremental increases in wealth of a traditional gift economy takes a strange turning and becomes a geometric or exponential function. There is no marginal cost associated with duplicating software. It is as if I could dig ten feet of new irrigation ditch to better my own garden plot, and I could then magically duplicate that new ditch for all my other villagers, just by uttering the right magic words. If those magic words were like the GPL, so long as they agreed to work the same magic if and when they added a bit more ditching for their gardens, any of them could take advantage of my work, and my magic. When they, too, do a little digging, it directly benefits me through the same magic-- and I don't have to lift a finger to get that bonus. We all eat better, and have more celebrational feasts.
Software is direct wealth, independent of money. The success of FOSS demonstrates that. It demonstrates that in the current post industrial age, lots of people who may not have a great deal of money are now able to live a life that is wealthier than that of the rich men and women of their grandparents' age.
Capitalism and socialism are both relics of the industrial age that are being outmoded by societies that are increasingly relying on information for their wealth. A gift economy is a natural way of maximizing the benefits when there is no cost associated with giving away copies of something that you were going to make anyway.
The pie gets bigger. That is neither capitalist nor socialist: it is something else again. A gift economy can handle it. The concepts of a gift economy are not something we needed to study since we started to use printing presses to make textbooks, but those concepts are things our ancestors were quite familiar with. The gift economy is not a new idea. It is a recycling of a very old way of making life better.
This just in...
Is there an easy algorithm to identify other similar numbers? I'm guessing this has to do with representations of fractional numbers as binary floats, and that there are a family of numbers that will generate the 77.1 problem.
If nothing else, somebody with a few minutes could probably generate a "sieve" matrix that would explore this empirically.
The distinction between humans and other living things seems to be pretty much unique to the cultures that have been heavily influenced by the Middle East Desert War God religions.
In many languages, the words for trees translates as "Standing Peoples", birds are "Winged People", and so forth. There is no artificial distance imposed between the human group and the other beings that are all part of the same ecosystem.
This leads to some very basic differences in world view. It would be hard in the language that gives us the word "ubuntu" to express the concept of Man having been granted dominion over all the other creatures, for instance.
Nobody said that there is an existing market for OLPCs. There is a dire need, which creates a potential market, but a bunch of other things have to come together before the market actually comes into existence. It will take government resources to set up the infrastructures that will make OLPCs usable in the way they are intended to be used.
Part of the reason the expected cost is so low is the expectation of having orders for 3 million units in hand on the first day of production.
Outside of governments, the Bill & Melida Gates Foundation could mobilize the necessary resources, but that organization doesn't appear to be interested.
These words:
This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it recognizes most of what was intended as DARPAnet evolved into the early Internet, and the way the Internet has grown since that time.
I agree that a tubes analogy is actually a good one. Out of the mouths of babes... and sometimes politicians...
Most of us who are fifty or over— and who also have some say in making laws, rules, and policies— have memories of seeing pneumatic message tubes in use. It is easy to make the leap from the physical packets of pneumatic tube capsules to the digital packets of the Internet protocols. Routing, switching, temporary storage areas, and so on are also well supported by this imagery. This is, in fact, what came to mind when I first heard about the Esteemed Senator's analogy. (It was only later when I read his actual words that I experienced a laugh or cry moment— I chose to laugh.)
Those too young to have memories of pneumatic tube messaging systems generally fall into two groups: those who already have an innate concept of what the Internet is and its limitations and promises; and those who refuse to know and don't care. The latter group has very little impact on formulating today's policies, rules, and laws, and will have even less impact tomorrow. That they might not understand references to pneumatic tube messaging systems doesn't matter so much since they have opted out.
The scrubber volume of a mature 10 acre stand of douglas fir is around 600 acre-feet (not 60). The freshly replanted plot would have scrubber volume of no more than 0.8% of this; its effective scrubbing volume would be less than 0.1% of the mature stand that it replaced.
Apologies about the original figures. They were calculated using pre-coffee wetware, which has a local reputation for being notoriously unreliable.
I think when you look at it closely, you will find that "more" is a more subtle and complex concept than it first appears to be.
In terms of simple counting, the "tree growing company" and others like it do plant more seedlings than the count of mature trees harvested. So if I pick up four pebbles while a backhoe picks up a single boulder, I'm holding more rock than the backhoe is. Yeah.
In context with air scrubbers, an appropriate kind of "moreness" would be the volume of air swept by needles. In a 10 acre stand of mature douglas fir, that volume begins about 20 feet above the ground and extends upward for another 80 feet. The stand has an active scrubbing volume of 60 acre-feet. Transpiration and the temperature differential caused by its shade assure that there is a constant flow of air through the canopy, even when there is no external wind.
In a freshly replanted 10 acre plot, the volume of effective scrubbing starts a couple of inches above the ground and is about 6 inches deep, at most. Even if all other factors were equal, the scrubbing volume is no more than 8% of the mature forest it has replaced. Considering other factors, like density of needles and the loss of "churn" on still air days, the effective scrubbing volume is much less than 1% of a mature stand.
On reflection, it seems we need to know much more about "more" than the forest products industry will willingly tell us.