None of us pukes would ever live forever, even if the tech for immortality was invented. It wouldn't be the Einsteins or the Johnny Cashes either. It'd be the Rich Kids of Instagram and Donald Trump, the 1% who are narcissistic enough and have access to blow tons of money in an effort to prolong their shallow lives, because that is their only legacy.
Do you think immortality will be for the likes of you? Consider the escalation of costs for a heart attack:
Aspirin - $0.10 Beta-blocker - $0.10 Platelet inhibitor - $1.00 Statin - $1.00 EKG - $10 with $50 for interpretation Chest X-ray - $50 with $200 for interpretation Heart catheterization - $5000 Stent placement - $10000 Bypass surgery - $50000
And this is the progression of medical tech from 1900 to 2000 (not linear, of course)...better start saving your pennies.
You answered it yourself in the summary, SomePgmr, we need an outlet for discovery and whistleblowers that is neutral and independent. Once you become the news (thank you, Julian Assange, for being a douchebag and completely screwing over the organization that was once yours), you are neither neutral nor independent, because now you have a foot in the game.
We need a faceless, boring, monotone organization where the only intriguing elements are the documents and information it provides to everyone. No stupid grandstanding "release schedules", no James Bond preening, and no ridiculous press conferences. Leave that to the politicians. Thankfully, we have such an ad hoc organization. It's called the Internet.
What Assange was trying to do was organize the efforts to his own self-gratification and reward. Thank you, but no thank you. He's like the stereotypical corporate middle manager who's trying to pimp the efforts of the engineers, coders, etc. to advance his own career up the ladder of success without adding a single bit of significant value himself. (Instead, he's a liability.) We have enough of those in the world already. Wikileaks is sunk, because its name has been forever sullied by the antics of the idiot that was its public mouthpiece. It's time for new blood.
I don't agree with the treatment that he received. And I'm highly critical of the TSA security theater as well. But I'm curious what kind of response he was expecting when he purposefully went through airport wearing that T-shirt.
Back in the '70s, people did this kind of shit expecting to get arrested - that was at least part of the point of civil disobedience.
If he wears a T-shirt walking through Harlem that says "PLEASE DONATE TO THE N*ERS NEED TO GO BACK TO AFRIKA FUND" I would expect that he would get the shit kicked out of him fairly quickly, free speech or no free speech. If the police are interviewing him as a person of interest (or me, or whoever) and he chooses to wear a T-shirt that says "ZOMG ARENT THE DONUTZ GETTING COLD PIGZ" I would expect that he would be harassed there (at a minimum), as well, rights or no rights.
I may defend the right of this dude to wear the shirt wherever he wants, but intentionally provoking the TSA will cause a reaction. And if he doesn't realize that, then either A) he's an idiot or B) being disingenuous about his civil disobedience, which loses him respect.
The other currencies are backed by nothing, just like bitcoins are...
The other currencies are backed up by weight of law, which is backed up by the weight of regulations and enforcement of entire communities. Bitcoins are backed up by a collective delusion of short-term investors looking for a profit. I wonder which will be around in 10 years...
So how about companies whose expertise is not in coming up with novel ideas that don't work very well, but rather in design--taking concepts that are well known and finally making them actually work well? Clearly (considering how rarely it is done) that is often harder than coming up with the original germ of an idea. And it clearly is not risk free: there are many of examples of companies that introduced original designs, but failed because they could not compete with other companies who simply copied the designs of others.
CORPORATIONS should not have functional, limited or unlimited monopolies on DESIGN any more than you should have to pay a tax on buying a knife that cuts because it is sharp. We need to STOP this destructive meme that once you do something innovative (NOT inventive) you should be continually rewarded in the future for that!
In design, there are the good designers, and then there are the rock stars. Do you notice no one in fashion is bothering to patent the "look and feel" of this season's clothing lines, or suing the inevitable cheaper knockoffs? The rock stars, the industry leaders, are already moving on to the Next Big Thing. This is how design is supposed to work - innovate, be rewarded handsomely, and then move on to your next project! The designers of the iPhone or iPad are never going to hurt for work again - it doesn't matter how many knockoffs come later. The CORPORATION may go under if it sits on its laurels, but that is what is supposed to happen! If Apple is losing ground because their newer iPhones have less and less about them to justify their profit margins, then the answer is for them to innovate again, with something that consumers will find worth rewarding them for again, or die. Hint: adding 4G functionality to your next iPhone iteration probably doesn't qualify.
...our reasonable expectation of privacy and the experiment of civil liberties. The sad thing is that we have lost a lot of them to "aid in fighting" un-winnable and/or lost wars.
No, We The People sold it all to get a few "freebies" from the likes of Facebook and Google, who specialize in monetizing what was once private personal information. You think Facebook hasn't already been working on a way to market continuous tracking of everyone as a Feature?
After reading your comments, if you were my doctor you'd be fired.
And I'd welcome it. I have more sick patients to deal with and little enough time than to spend hours focusing on the queries of a single recalcitrant patient who demands to stare at meaningless, asymptomatic 1s and 0s. As a doctor I support your principle of owning your own medical records. I don't have a problem with getting you the same reports I have access to, whenever you want to come make an appointment. I also don't have a problem with you gaining 24/7 access to the online reports that cardiologists receive.
What I question is your wisdom in what amounts to spending everyone else's precious time (our most precious commodity) just because either A) you want to make a point or B) you really are a hoarder of meaningless junk. If you're discounting the reports as data, then what you're doing is akin to asking for a copy of War and Peace, because you have "A Universal Human Right to A Copy of War and Peace". After I give you a copy of War and Peace and the Cliff's Notes for it, you throw them away and demand a copy of it in Russian, even though you don't speak or read Russian. And after I give you a copy of War and Peace in Russian, you throw that away and demand the original hard copy manuscript from Tolstoy because apparently you don't trust the Russian publishers.
I'm curious. How do you dine at any restaurant, without seeing a list of the ingredients in your meal, the validated shipping manifests of where they're sourced from, and the food handling certifications of every employee of the restaurant? Because your odds of landing in the hospital are a lot higher from someone at the restaurant botching your meal than the machines botching the interpretation of your ICD/pacer's raw data into recognizable rhythm strips. That meal you just ate? It goes into you, too, and becomes a part of you too.
HIPAA guarantees my right to see and get copies of my health records. My interrogation reports are part of my records, I'm aware of that. (I have every single interrogation report ever since receiving the device in 2007.) I am not after printouts. That is not data. What I am after is the raw data collected remotely by the manufacturer of the device. Even doctors do not have access to the raw data. All doctors have access to are the reports. Although doctors have 24/7, unrestricted, and convenient access to reports online and on their mobile devices. At the very least, I want the same level of access my doctor has to my remote monitoring interrogations. End of story.
And I'm confused. Once again, what exactly is this "raw data" to you? As a doctor, I have to wade through enough meaningless drivel in records already in order to cut to the point that will help my patient. You say below you're not interested in the report, which includes the raw rhythm strips to be interpreted by the device as well as the interpretations and how it acts on them. Well then...you lost me. It seems that at the heart of this dispute is the interpretation of what constitutes a reasonable fulfillment of the duty to provide you "with a copy of your medical records". If you came into my office and asked for a copy of your blood pressures from your office visits of the last five years, I'd fire up the EMR, generate a report of your blood pressures from your office visits of the last five years, and give it to you. If you came back and said, "I demand a copy of the electronic database file that those blood pressures are stored in, because I don't trust your EMR in interpreting the raw bits into numbers on-screen", at that point I'd throw up my hands and hope that you would fire me as a doctor, because you're frankly being unreasonable and wasting my time.
Now I'm actually thinking you're not a cardiac electrophysiologist. The reports are never "several hundred" pages long. The full interrogation report for an ICD is rarely longer than about two dozen 8
That's subsidized by the company. Is this really news? It's also not what most financial advisors tell you to get from full coverage if you purchase your own, either. Standard is 10 years of full salary - a Googler can always purchase more to make up the difference.
I get why two-step authorization might not be clinically desirable, but why does it need to use the same key for encrypting the output that it uses for decrypting the input, other than to provide an excuse not to allow the patient to see his own info?
The patient, btw, has the greatest personal investment in a positive outcome, and while it's certainly plausible that they are not and will not study medicine and become a doctor, most people can afford to invest the time to become experts or near-experts in a narrow enough field - like the specific operation of the medical device implanted in their own bodies. Certainly enough to be able to say, "woah, that looks like something I should go see a doctor about right away."
Doctors are supposed to be knowledgable people who can interpret results and come to reasonable conclusions. Not opaque oracles pronouncing their decrees from on-high.
Patient care is always better when the patient is interested in helping themselves. I encourage patients to keep their own medical records. The way the system works does nothing to prevent that; any time a doctor reads his device's data, he should be able to get his own copy. What this guy really wants seems to be the tools to decrypt the working of his ICD/pacer, and the medical equipment company is understandably leery of such a request, since such tools are currently universal.
It's interesting you mention insulin pumps. Until very recently, it used to be the input and output were completely separate (and 2 separate devices). The output (data) from the glucometer was easily read by anybody, and there are wireless data gathering tools to help with that. The input (insulin pump) you had to change the function by hand. There is less security risk because these devices are all external to the body; the only thing that is actually inside is the insulin delivery needle. But FOR CONVENIENCE ONLY, there are several models coming out or already out which tie the two functions together wirelessly; i.e., the patient can either manually or automatically adjust their insulin pump based on the glucometer so it requires no physical input, which introduces a security risk for the patient.
This setup, by the way, can't work for permanent pacemakers. The leads run straight to the heart, so anything externally protruding is a serious infection risk.
The problem with printouts is they are not machine-readable. For records keeping and trends analysis purposes, that is a pretty unsavory proposition, versus a suitable digital file format for gathering the raw datapoints instead of displaying some visualization of them.
The raw printouts themselves are pretty worthless. (At least for pacemakers/defibrillators.) It's the interpretation of them that is worth something. The signal/noise ratio is astoundingly low, simply because the heart functions are expected to be stable if not normal for someone who is an outpatient. There's an old adage of anesthesia: "2 hours of boredom (or crosswords, or sudoku, depending on how up to date the adage is), and 2 minutes of sheer terror." For reading a printout of the raw data of a pacemaker, it's more like 1,209,530 seconds of boredom, and 30 seconds of clinically relevant material.
And, welcome to electronic medical records. Half of it is still scanned-in digitalized versions of hard copies. Until there is a mandated-from-high, universal standardized medical data output, it's going to stay that way.
UNLESS every implant in use has a unique non-shared encryption key, that cannot possibly be obtained except with proper authorization, then the encryption is not really "security" in the first place.
If there is one shared key and no unique password; then the key material is available.... for the right price, and with the right reverse-engineering skills applied.
It might surprise you that I agree. It's certainly a double-edged sword; having a device that you don't have to surgically remove every time you need to adjust its settings is a blessing for the patient for routine healthcare maintenance. (Plug-ins are not an option due to infection risk.) The real problem is this: in order to get maximum benefit (and prevent potential harm) from these devices, in the right situation complete strangers with no personal knowledge of who you are or what device is in you needs to be able to access the device, read the data, and make changes if necessary. And in the wrong situation, if a complete stranger has access to the same tools, they can do a world of harm.
In a way, it's similar to who gets to own a set of lockpicks. The best compromise seems to be to keep them with certified professionals with an accountable paper trail. The general rule for tools like this in medicine is this: if you are qualified to fix something should it go wrong, and in a position to do so, you have access to the tools. Otherwise you don't.
I don't suppose it occurs to you to have the device send a serial number, and for there to be a central clearinghouse capable of authorizing any device to be reprogrammed, by lookup up the password, and giving it to the emergency responder, but to keep the device READ-ONLY otherwise?
So what happens when the central clearinghouse, or access to communications, goes down? The more complicated you make the interface for medical devices, the more potential points of failure you introduce when it comes to an emergency for any particular patient. The last thing you want to see in an emergency is a message pop up on a machine "CANNOT FIND WI-FI SIGNAL (TRY AGAIN LATER)".
Disclosure: I am a doctor, and I work with patients with pacemakers on a frequent basis.
If he wants a raw printout of the data generated, he should make an appointment, stop by his cardiologist's office, and ask the cardiologist. I've been asked a few times by curious patients to see the readouts. I always show it to them, give them the clinical interpretation of the data, and let them keep it if they want. Most don't; it's several hundred small pages of gibberish to an untrained eye, linked together like the old dot matrix printer pages.
If he feels uncomfortable with having a machine in his body that he can't check out himself every second of every day, he can ask to have it turned off ("turned off" being simplistic) or for a surgeon to remove it. [Insert belief system here] didn't give him the pacemaker growing in him when he was born - he can choose to use it as designed or choose not to use it, which is a valid choice. There are real potential harms to widely propogating machines that could decrypt the data; the exact same machines allow us to reprogram the device, including settings that could harm or kill the patient. The encryption IS the security on implantable, reprogrammable medical devices; password, 2 step authorization or the like is not possible due to the existence of medical emergencies in which prompt access by medical personnel not normally involved in his care to the input and output of the device can mean the difference between life and death.
Do-not-track should be enabled by default. The problem is not that "it will be rendered worthless", the problem is that it IS worthless, currently. Do-not-spam-me-with-unwanted-telemarketers should be the default too. The reason the Do-Not-Call lists work is that there is legislative teeth behind them, not that it is opt-in. Do-not-track is a lame attempt at self-regulating to avoid regulation, a veneer of respecting privacy in an industry where the most profit is to be found by finding the most inventive ways of violating said privacy. Couple do-not-track with real economic penalties, and opt-in or opt-out, it will work.
I am more than happy to pay for services that I use and enjoy. I don't choose to pay for them in the form of digital stalkerati.
My wallet stays in a secured, not-readily-accessible pocket, and only comes out when I need it. My phone is shown and changes hands everywhere, so friends and acquaintances can look at photos, videos, or use an app. I understand the big corporate push to monetize your smartphone - it's part of the neverending drive to depersonalize and devalue money so corporations can more easily separate it from you - but why do people buy into it? Is the minute convenience of not having to converse with the barrista or pulling out your wallet really worth the NFC security risk? No thanks! I might as well wear my credit card number, expiration date and CVV on a T shirt.
Remind me - how it is that early investors are not shareholders?
Easy! There are 3 major groups of investors in the Facebook IPO fiasco.
1) the actual employee shareholders - those that have a day-to-day stake in seeing Facebook succeed 2) the gamblers / day traders who were betting on riding the initial pop of the Facebook IPO to a quick short-term turnaround profit (this group expanded quite a bit as a lot of casual investors got caught up in the hype) 3) long-term investors who saw this coming but are betting on a positive outlook on Facebook's long-term financial health
Five years from now, as long as Facebook doesn't tank or pull a Myspace, there will only be one group out of these three that will still be pissed off at the Facebook offering. Why are the #2 group (the early investors) not true shareholders? Because they're really nothing but speculating middlemen. They genuinely have no stake in how the company performs or any other metric for that matter, as long as the price per share on their holding goes up over the specified period of time that they want. "Facebook" just happens to be the name on the black box that they put up money for that they hoped would turn into a big payday.
The first humans cured of the HIV virus, and they get the reward of taking immunosuppressive medications, possibly for the rest of their life. This is the medical equivalent of napalming the village in order to save it...
The problem is, everything can be invented twice...
That's the whole point of reverse engineering. And it's not a problem. It's a common sense limitation on patents - if it takes your competition all of 30 seconds to reverse engineer your software patent for X, without seeing the code or the specifications for it, the patent isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Obviousness.
Always follow the money... do you think Google, or Facebook, or any other company that feeds itself on ad revenue really cares about your privacy? Their hard work is to find new ways to either take it from you or sell it to them for a new shiny widget. Is the big money from Google TV and Apple TV going to be selling low-margin boxes, or in selling your viewing habits?
You are not the customer. You have never been the customer. You're just the meat.
If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go. If digital anonymity is what you want, then you need an escrow holder that will take cash and convert it to some form of one-shot unique digital account without any personal information involved.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
You'll be subsidized if you can't afford it. Otherwise, it's pretty much like car insurance, so was the game already over decades ago?
Seriously?
Please name me the US Federal Government Car Insurance Mandate. Oh wait, there isn't one... because the Federal Government mandating car insurance would be unconstitutional. A mandate for car or health care insurance is properly the right of States, not of the Federal government.
Even 5 Supreme Court justices said the US Federal Government Medical Insurance Mandate is unconstitutional. The only reason this slid by is because A) CJ Roberts wanted to use this as a platform to tell Congress to quit using the SC as an alternative to a vote to repeal, and B) magical hand-waving by which the practical implementation of a tax burden to cover health care was enough to not strike down the underlying theory behind the Affordable Care Act.
Obama and the Democrats were idiots for not implementing the "insurance individual mandate" as a tax break / monetary payout to buy health insurance anyways. They could have avoided this entire debate by doing so.
So when you come to Europe and have a beer at 18, it's perfectly all right that you be arrested on setting foot in the US if they saw your vacation photos on Facebook ?!? Cancun is gonna close shop.
Legally, yes. In practicality, everyone knows the 21 year age limit on alcohol use is retarded, which is why it's not enforced.
And why I explicitly said in my prior post, "Or else try to change the laws in this country."
The fun part is how you can do something overseas that's completely legal in the country you did it in, but then get arrested when you return to the US if it's a crime in the US. This is often used when citizens go overseas, have sex with young girls who are of legal age in their country but under age by US law, then arrested when they return to the US.
I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing the downside of this.
Did you ever shoplift as a child or teen? How would you feel about having your right hand cut off upon entering an islamic country? What if you had a friend who lived in a western country but had dual citizenship by birth?
Or how about this: Have you ever attended a rally or written a letter of complaint to an official? How would you feel about being jailed as a subversive if you went on holiday to China?
If you don't understand the reason for jurisdiction, you really shouldn't be commenting. Laws vary so widely that you're bound to be a criminal somewhere no matter how you behave. Without some limits and barriers everyone who ever went overseas would risk jail.
That's seriously funny, coming from you. Apparently you don't understand the difference between being a US citizen and having Chinese laws apply to you while acting in the US and being a US citizen and having US laws apply to you while in another country. Or being a US citizen and having Sharia apply to you for acts done in the US, versus being a US citizen and being arrested for stolen property that you obtained overseas.
Being outside of the US geographically does not give you carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want, just because you happen to be in a country that you can bribe the local official to say its ok. Err, I mean, where the law says its ok. On the flipside, being a US citizen traveling outside the US affords you certain protections and privileges (up to a point).
Apparently some creepy old white guy with mod points is coming after me! That's OK, bring it on! If you can't win an argument, burn your mod points...
How interesting that Kim Dotcom has his assets seized and his business killed just a couple of months after announcing a new service called MegaBox that would have competed directly and legally with record labels.
The bad news for those guys is that it's still good to go. I wonder if it will be successful.
The fun part is how you can do something overseas that's completely legal in the country you did it in, but then get arrested when you return to the US if it's a crime in the US. This is often used when citizens go overseas, have sex with young girls who are of legal age in their country but under age by US law, then arrested when they return to the US.
I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing the downside of this. Except for creepy old white guys who can't get laid otherwise or, worse, have a fetish about having sex with underage girls.
If slavery were still legal in some backwards 3rd world country, I'd want the fuckers living in the US but owning slaves legally overseas arrested and jailed, too.
If you truly feel constrained by the US legal system, feel like it shouldn't apply to you, and think another country has a better set of rules, than I highly encourage you to renounce your citizenship and move elsewhere. Or else try to change the laws in this country. (Good luck if your main point is trying to change the legal age of statutory rape to 10.)
"Or that the professional managers outperformed the Dow Jones Average index only 51 out of 100 times?"
Since the DJIA goes up over time, on average, matching it makes money, over the long term. If a trader, high frequency or otherwise, is making money on average, he is participating in something that is very much NOT like a casino.
Fallacious logic. And the same logic that led mass hordes of people to think that investing in housing will ALWAYS make money on average. The OP supposes that actively investing is a skill set, and not based on random luck. Therefore, professional investors who have spent years training and being educated on investing should be able to consistently beat (A) monkeys throwing darts at stocks and (B) beat an index based on a LISTING of stocks, not on professional predictions of how well they're going to do in the future! They can only do (A) 61% of the time... and doesn't it worry you that they can't beat the monkeys 99% of the time? And they can't beat a LISTING of the biggest stocks more than 51% of the time!
So what happens when the index listings themselves come crashing down? I certainly hope you're not expecting those professional fund managers to exercise those wonderful "skill sets" and pull your retirement out of the fire...
Slashdot Mirror
None of us pukes would ever live forever, even if the tech for immortality was invented. It wouldn't be the Einsteins or the Johnny Cashes either. It'd be the Rich Kids of Instagram and Donald Trump, the 1% who are narcissistic enough and have access to blow tons of money in an effort to prolong their shallow lives, because that is their only legacy.
Do you think immortality will be for the likes of you? Consider the escalation of costs for a heart attack:
Aspirin - $0.10
Beta-blocker - $0.10
Platelet inhibitor - $1.00
Statin - $1.00
EKG - $10 with $50 for interpretation
Chest X-ray - $50 with $200 for interpretation
Heart catheterization - $5000
Stent placement - $10000
Bypass surgery - $50000
And this is the progression of medical tech from 1900 to 2000 (not linear, of course)...better start saving your pennies.
You answered it yourself in the summary, SomePgmr, we need an outlet for discovery and whistleblowers that is neutral and independent. Once you become the news (thank you, Julian Assange, for being a douchebag and completely screwing over the organization that was once yours), you are neither neutral nor independent, because now you have a foot in the game.
We need a faceless, boring, monotone organization where the only intriguing elements are the documents and information it provides to everyone. No stupid grandstanding "release schedules", no James Bond preening, and no ridiculous press conferences. Leave that to the politicians. Thankfully, we have such an ad hoc organization. It's called the Internet.
What Assange was trying to do was organize the efforts to his own self-gratification and reward. Thank you, but no thank you. He's like the stereotypical corporate middle manager who's trying to pimp the efforts of the engineers, coders, etc. to advance his own career up the ladder of success without adding a single bit of significant value himself. (Instead, he's a liability.) We have enough of those in the world already. Wikileaks is sunk, because its name has been forever sullied by the antics of the idiot that was its public mouthpiece. It's time for new blood.
I don't agree with the treatment that he received. And I'm highly critical of the TSA security theater as well. But I'm curious what kind of response he was expecting when he purposefully went through airport wearing that T-shirt.
Back in the '70s, people did this kind of shit expecting to get arrested - that was at least part of the point of civil disobedience.
If he wears a T-shirt walking through Harlem that says "PLEASE DONATE TO THE N*ERS NEED TO GO BACK TO AFRIKA FUND" I would expect that he would get the shit kicked out of him fairly quickly, free speech or no free speech. If the police are interviewing him as a person of interest (or me, or whoever) and he chooses to wear a T-shirt that says "ZOMG ARENT THE DONUTZ GETTING COLD PIGZ" I would expect that he would be harassed there (at a minimum), as well, rights or no rights.
I may defend the right of this dude to wear the shirt wherever he wants, but intentionally provoking the TSA will cause a reaction. And if he doesn't realize that, then either A) he's an idiot or B) being disingenuous about his civil disobedience, which loses him respect.
The other currencies are backed by nothing, just like bitcoins are ...
The other currencies are backed up by weight of law, which is backed up by the weight of regulations and enforcement of entire communities. Bitcoins are backed up by a collective delusion of short-term investors looking for a profit. I wonder which will be around in 10 years...
So how about companies whose expertise is not in coming up with novel ideas that don't work very well, but rather in design--taking concepts that are well known and finally making them actually work well? Clearly (considering how rarely it is done) that is often harder than coming up with the original germ of an idea. And it clearly is not risk free: there are many of examples of companies that introduced original designs, but failed because they could not compete with other companies who simply copied the designs of others.
CORPORATIONS should not have functional, limited or unlimited monopolies on DESIGN any more than you should have to pay a tax on buying a knife that cuts because it is sharp. We need to STOP this destructive meme that once you do something innovative (NOT inventive) you should be continually rewarded in the future for that!
In design, there are the good designers, and then there are the rock stars. Do you notice no one in fashion is bothering to patent the "look and feel" of this season's clothing lines, or suing the inevitable cheaper knockoffs? The rock stars, the industry leaders, are already moving on to the Next Big Thing. This is how design is supposed to work - innovate, be rewarded handsomely, and then move on to your next project! The designers of the iPhone or iPad are never going to hurt for work again - it doesn't matter how many knockoffs come later. The CORPORATION may go under if it sits on its laurels, but that is what is supposed to happen! If Apple is losing ground because their newer iPhones have less and less about them to justify their profit margins, then the answer is for them to innovate again, with something that consumers will find worth rewarding them for again, or die. Hint: adding 4G functionality to your next iPhone iteration probably doesn't qualify.
...our reasonable expectation of privacy and the experiment of civil liberties. The sad thing is that we have lost a lot of them to "aid in fighting" un-winnable and/or lost wars.
No, We The People sold it all to get a few "freebies" from the likes of Facebook and Google, who specialize in monetizing what was once private personal information. You think Facebook hasn't already been working on a way to market continuous tracking of everyone as a Feature?
After reading your comments, if you were my doctor you'd be fired.
And I'd welcome it. I have more sick patients to deal with and little enough time than to spend hours focusing on the queries of a single recalcitrant patient who demands to stare at meaningless, asymptomatic 1s and 0s. As a doctor I support your principle of owning your own medical records. I don't have a problem with getting you the same reports I have access to, whenever you want to come make an appointment. I also don't have a problem with you gaining 24/7 access to the online reports that cardiologists receive.
What I question is your wisdom in what amounts to spending everyone else's precious time (our most precious commodity) just because either A) you want to make a point or B) you really are a hoarder of meaningless junk. If you're discounting the reports as data, then what you're doing is akin to asking for a copy of War and Peace, because you have "A Universal Human Right to A Copy of War and Peace". After I give you a copy of War and Peace and the Cliff's Notes for it, you throw them away and demand a copy of it in Russian, even though you don't speak or read Russian. And after I give you a copy of War and Peace in Russian, you throw that away and demand the original hard copy manuscript from Tolstoy because apparently you don't trust the Russian publishers.
I'm curious. How do you dine at any restaurant, without seeing a list of the ingredients in your meal, the validated shipping manifests of where they're sourced from, and the food handling certifications of every employee of the restaurant? Because your odds of landing in the hospital are a lot higher from someone at the restaurant botching your meal than the machines botching the interpretation of your ICD/pacer's raw data into recognizable rhythm strips. That meal you just ate? It goes into you, too, and becomes a part of you too.
HIPAA guarantees my right to see and get copies of my health records. My interrogation reports are part of my records, I'm aware of that. (I have every single interrogation report ever since receiving the device in 2007.) I am not after printouts. That is not data. What I am after is the raw data collected remotely by the manufacturer of the device. Even doctors do not have access to the raw data. All doctors have access to are the reports. Although doctors have 24/7, unrestricted, and convenient access to reports online and on their mobile devices. At the very least, I want the same level of access my doctor has to my remote monitoring interrogations. End of story.
And I'm confused. Once again, what exactly is this "raw data" to you? As a doctor, I have to wade through enough meaningless drivel in records already in order to cut to the point that will help my patient. You say below you're not interested in the report, which includes the raw rhythm strips to be interpreted by the device as well as the interpretations and how it acts on them. Well then...you lost me. It seems that at the heart of this dispute is the interpretation of what constitutes a reasonable fulfillment of the duty to provide you "with a copy of your medical records". If you came into my office and asked for a copy of your blood pressures from your office visits of the last five years, I'd fire up the EMR, generate a report of your blood pressures from your office visits of the last five years, and give it to you. If you came back and said, "I demand a copy of the electronic database file that those blood pressures are stored in, because I don't trust your EMR in interpreting the raw bits into numbers on-screen", at that point I'd throw up my hands and hope that you would fire me as a doctor, because you're frankly being unreasonable and wasting my time.
Now I'm actually thinking you're not a cardiac electrophysiologist. The reports are never "several hundred" pages long. The full interrogation report for an ICD is rarely longer than about two dozen 8
That's subsidized by the company. Is this really news? It's also not what most financial advisors tell you to get from full coverage if you purchase your own, either. Standard is 10 years of full salary - a Googler can always purchase more to make up the difference.
I get why two-step authorization might not be clinically desirable, but why does it need to use the same key for encrypting the output that it uses for decrypting the input, other than to provide an excuse not to allow the patient to see his own info?
The patient, btw, has the greatest personal investment in a positive outcome, and while it's certainly plausible that they are not and will not study medicine and become a doctor, most people can afford to invest the time to become experts or near-experts in a narrow enough field - like the specific operation of the medical device implanted in their own bodies. Certainly enough to be able to say, "woah, that looks like something I should go see a doctor about right away."
Doctors are supposed to be knowledgable people who can interpret results and come to reasonable conclusions. Not opaque oracles pronouncing their decrees from on-high.
Patient care is always better when the patient is interested in helping themselves. I encourage patients to keep their own medical records. The way the system works does nothing to prevent that; any time a doctor reads his device's data, he should be able to get his own copy. What this guy really wants seems to be the tools to decrypt the working of his ICD/pacer, and the medical equipment company is understandably leery of such a request, since such tools are currently universal.
It's interesting you mention insulin pumps. Until very recently, it used to be the input and output were completely separate (and 2 separate devices). The output (data) from the glucometer was easily read by anybody, and there are wireless data gathering tools to help with that. The input (insulin pump) you had to change the function by hand. There is less security risk because these devices are all external to the body; the only thing that is actually inside is the insulin delivery needle. But FOR CONVENIENCE ONLY, there are several models coming out or already out which tie the two functions together wirelessly; i.e., the patient can either manually or automatically adjust their insulin pump based on the glucometer so it requires no physical input, which introduces a security risk for the patient.
This setup, by the way, can't work for permanent pacemakers. The leads run straight to the heart, so anything externally protruding is a serious infection risk.
The problem with printouts is they are not machine-readable. For records keeping and trends analysis purposes, that is a pretty unsavory proposition,
versus a suitable digital file format for gathering the raw datapoints instead of displaying some visualization of them.
The raw printouts themselves are pretty worthless. (At least for pacemakers/defibrillators.) It's the interpretation of them that is worth something. The signal/noise ratio is astoundingly low, simply because the heart functions are expected to be stable if not normal for someone who is an outpatient. There's an old adage of anesthesia: "2 hours of boredom (or crosswords, or sudoku, depending on how up to date the adage is), and 2 minutes of sheer terror." For reading a printout of the raw data of a pacemaker, it's more like 1,209,530 seconds of boredom, and 30 seconds of clinically relevant material.
And, welcome to electronic medical records. Half of it is still scanned-in digitalized versions of hard copies. Until there is a mandated-from-high, universal standardized medical data output, it's going to stay that way.
UNLESS every implant in use has a unique non-shared encryption key, that cannot possibly be obtained except with proper authorization,
then the encryption is not really "security" in the first place.
If there is one shared key and no unique password; then the key material is available.... for the right price, and with the right reverse-engineering skills applied.
It might surprise you that I agree. It's certainly a double-edged sword; having a device that you don't have to surgically remove every time you need to adjust its settings is a blessing for the patient for routine healthcare maintenance. (Plug-ins are not an option due to infection risk.) The real problem is this: in order to get maximum benefit (and prevent potential harm) from these devices, in the right situation complete strangers with no personal knowledge of who you are or what device is in you needs to be able to access the device, read the data, and make changes if necessary. And in the wrong situation, if a complete stranger has access to the same tools, they can do a world of harm.
In a way, it's similar to who gets to own a set of lockpicks. The best compromise seems to be to keep them with certified professionals with an accountable paper trail. The general rule for tools like this in medicine is this: if you are qualified to fix something should it go wrong, and in a position to do so, you have access to the tools. Otherwise you don't.
I don't suppose it occurs to you to have the device send a serial number, and for there to be a central clearinghouse capable of authorizing any device to be reprogrammed, by lookup up the password, and giving it to the emergency responder, but to keep the device READ-ONLY otherwise?
So what happens when the central clearinghouse, or access to communications, goes down? The more complicated you make the interface for medical devices, the more potential points of failure you introduce when it comes to an emergency for any particular patient. The last thing you want to see in an emergency is a message pop up on a machine "CANNOT FIND WI-FI SIGNAL (TRY AGAIN LATER)".
Disclosure: I am a doctor, and I work with patients with pacemakers on a frequent basis.
If he wants a raw printout of the data generated, he should make an appointment, stop by his cardiologist's office, and ask the cardiologist. I've been asked a few times by curious patients to see the readouts. I always show it to them, give them the clinical interpretation of the data, and let them keep it if they want. Most don't; it's several hundred small pages of gibberish to an untrained eye, linked together like the old dot matrix printer pages.
If he feels uncomfortable with having a machine in his body that he can't check out himself every second of every day, he can ask to have it turned off ("turned off" being simplistic) or for a surgeon to remove it. [Insert belief system here] didn't give him the pacemaker growing in him when he was born - he can choose to use it as designed or choose not to use it, which is a valid choice. There are real potential harms to widely propogating machines that could decrypt the data; the exact same machines allow us to reprogram the device, including settings that could harm or kill the patient. The encryption IS the security on implantable, reprogrammable medical devices; password, 2 step authorization or the like is not possible due to the existence of medical emergencies in which prompt access by medical personnel not normally involved in his care to the input and output of the device can mean the difference between life and death.
Thank you for looking after the consumer.
Do-not-track should be enabled by default. The problem is not that "it will be rendered worthless", the problem is that it IS worthless, currently. Do-not-spam-me-with-unwanted-telemarketers should be the default too. The reason the Do-Not-Call lists work is that there is legislative teeth behind them, not that it is opt-in. Do-not-track is a lame attempt at self-regulating to avoid regulation, a veneer of respecting privacy in an industry where the most profit is to be found by finding the most inventive ways of violating said privacy. Couple do-not-track with real economic penalties, and opt-in or opt-out, it will work.
I am more than happy to pay for services that I use and enjoy. I don't choose to pay for them in the form of digital stalkerati.
Not that it hasn't been ongoing already...
My wallet stays in a secured, not-readily-accessible pocket, and only comes out when I need it. My phone is shown and changes hands everywhere, so friends and acquaintances can look at photos, videos, or use an app. I understand the big corporate push to monetize your smartphone - it's part of the neverending drive to depersonalize and devalue money so corporations can more easily separate it from you - but why do people buy into it? Is the minute convenience of not having to converse with the barrista or pulling out your wallet really worth the NFC security risk? No thanks! I might as well wear my credit card number, expiration date and CVV on a T shirt.
Remind me - how it is that early investors are not shareholders?
Easy! There are 3 major groups of investors in the Facebook IPO fiasco.
1) the actual employee shareholders - those that have a day-to-day stake in seeing Facebook succeed
2) the gamblers / day traders who were betting on riding the initial pop of the Facebook IPO to a quick short-term turnaround profit (this group expanded quite a bit as a lot of casual investors got caught up in the hype)
3) long-term investors who saw this coming but are betting on a positive outlook on Facebook's long-term financial health
Five years from now, as long as Facebook doesn't tank or pull a Myspace, there will only be one group out of these three that will still be pissed off at the Facebook offering. Why are the #2 group (the early investors) not true shareholders? Because they're really nothing but speculating middlemen. They genuinely have no stake in how the company performs or any other metric for that matter, as long as the price per share on their holding goes up over the specified period of time that they want. "Facebook" just happens to be the name on the black box that they put up money for that they hoped would turn into a big payday.
The first humans cured of the HIV virus, and they get the reward of taking immunosuppressive medications, possibly for the rest of their life. This is the medical equivalent of napalming the village in order to save it...
ITs sad that we allow money to be the catalyst for better treatment of a human....sad indeed.
You obviously have not waited tables at any point in your life.
The problem is, everything can be invented twice...
That's the whole point of reverse engineering. And it's not a problem. It's a common sense limitation on patents - if it takes your competition all of 30 seconds to reverse engineer your software patent for X, without seeing the code or the specifications for it, the patent isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Obviousness.
Always follow the money... do you think Google, or Facebook, or any other company that feeds itself on ad revenue really cares about your privacy? Their hard work is to find new ways to either take it from you or sell it to them for a new shiny widget. Is the big money from Google TV and Apple TV going to be selling low-margin boxes, or in selling your viewing habits?
You are not the customer. You have never been the customer. You're just the meat.
Why?
If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go. If digital anonymity is what you want, then you need an escrow holder that will take cash and convert it to some form of one-shot unique digital account without any personal information involved.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
You'll be subsidized if you can't afford it. Otherwise, it's pretty much like car insurance, so was the game already over decades ago?
Seriously?
Please name me the US Federal Government Car Insurance Mandate. Oh wait, there isn't one... because the Federal Government mandating car insurance would be unconstitutional. A mandate for car or health care insurance is properly the right of States, not of the Federal government.
Even 5 Supreme Court justices said the US Federal Government Medical Insurance Mandate is unconstitutional. The only reason this slid by is because A) CJ Roberts wanted to use this as a platform to tell Congress to quit using the SC as an alternative to a vote to repeal, and B) magical hand-waving by which the practical implementation of a tax burden to cover health care was enough to not strike down the underlying theory behind the Affordable Care Act.
Obama and the Democrats were idiots for not implementing the "insurance individual mandate" as a tax break / monetary payout to buy health insurance anyways. They could have avoided this entire debate by doing so.
So when you come to Europe and have a beer at 18, it's perfectly all right that you be arrested on setting foot in the US if they saw your vacation photos on Facebook ?!? Cancun is gonna close shop.
Legally, yes. In practicality, everyone knows the 21 year age limit on alcohol use is retarded, which is why it's not enforced.
And why I explicitly said in my prior post, "Or else try to change the laws in this country."
So get involved, and get the drinking age lowered to 18 where it should be.
The fun part is how you can do something overseas that's completely legal in the country you did it in, but then get arrested when you return to the US if it's a crime in the US. This is often used when citizens go overseas, have sex with young girls who are of legal age in their country but under age by US law, then arrested when they return to the US.
I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing the downside of this.
Did you ever shoplift as a child or teen? How would you feel about having your right hand cut off upon entering an islamic country? What if you had a friend who lived in a western country but had dual citizenship by birth?
Or how about this: Have you ever attended a rally or written a letter of complaint to an official? How would you feel about being jailed as a subversive if you went on holiday to China?
If you don't understand the reason for jurisdiction, you really shouldn't be commenting. Laws vary so widely that you're bound to be a criminal somewhere no matter how you behave. Without some limits and barriers everyone who ever went overseas would risk jail.
That's seriously funny, coming from you. Apparently you don't understand the difference between being a US citizen and having Chinese laws apply to you while acting in the US and being a US citizen and having US laws apply to you while in another country. Or being a US citizen and having Sharia apply to you for acts done in the US, versus being a US citizen and being arrested for stolen property that you obtained overseas.
Being outside of the US geographically does not give you carte blanche to do whatever the fuck you want, just because you happen to be in a country that you can bribe the local official to say its ok. Err, I mean, where the law says its ok. On the flipside, being a US citizen traveling outside the US affords you certain protections and privileges (up to a point).
Apparently some creepy old white guy with mod points is coming after me! That's OK, bring it on! If you can't win an argument, burn your mod points...
How interesting that Kim Dotcom has his assets seized and his business killed just a couple of months after announcing a new service called MegaBox that would have competed directly and legally with record labels.
The bad news for those guys is that it's still good to go. I wonder if it will be successful.
http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-artists-rejoice-megabox-is-not-dead-120621/
How interesting really is this? Not very. Bandcamp already does this. Spotify already does this. And, if megaupload was any indication, both services will be much better than megabox.
The fun part is how you can do something overseas that's completely legal in the country you did it in, but then get arrested when you return to the US if it's a crime in the US. This is often used when citizens go overseas, have sex with young girls who are of legal age in their country but under age by US law, then arrested when they return to the US.
I'm sorry, I'm just not seeing the downside of this. Except for creepy old white guys who can't get laid otherwise or, worse, have a fetish about having sex with underage girls.
If slavery were still legal in some backwards 3rd world country, I'd want the fuckers living in the US but owning slaves legally overseas arrested and jailed, too.
If you truly feel constrained by the US legal system, feel like it shouldn't apply to you, and think another country has a better set of rules, than I highly encourage you to renounce your citizenship and move elsewhere. Or else try to change the laws in this country. (Good luck if your main point is trying to change the legal age of statutory rape to 10.)
"Or that the professional managers outperformed the Dow Jones Average index only 51 out of 100 times?"
Since the DJIA goes up over time, on average, matching it makes money, over the long term. If a trader, high frequency or otherwise, is making money on average, he is participating in something that is very much NOT like a casino.
Fallacious logic. And the same logic that led mass hordes of people to think that investing in housing will ALWAYS make money on average. The OP supposes that actively investing is a skill set, and not based on random luck. Therefore, professional investors who have spent years training and being educated on investing should be able to consistently beat (A) monkeys throwing darts at stocks and (B) beat an index based on a LISTING of stocks, not on professional predictions of how well they're going to do in the future! They can only do (A) 61% of the time... and doesn't it worry you that they can't beat the monkeys 99% of the time? And they can't beat a LISTING of the biggest stocks more than 51% of the time!
So what happens when the index listings themselves come crashing down? I certainly hope you're not expecting those professional fund managers to exercise those wonderful "skill sets" and pull your retirement out of the fire...