Currently Doctors are using word documents with every patient's name as the title in some locations. While others are using VB apps with a Acess Database type solution.
Putting real money into a real electronic system with access controls and a audit trail is a GOOD thing and will stop things like records spreading onto P2P networks.
It is good for patients, it is good for doctors, and it is good for the general quality of healthcare.
I grant that it is expensive though. I also grant that governments are bad at large IT projects and always give it to the lowest bidder.
Although seriously questionable legally, if the authors guild was able to prove that Text-To-Speech of copyright books was copyright infringement then that would be absolutely huge.
Tons of disabled people already depend on text-to-speech and with an ever older populace this is only going to become even more important to everyone.
Plus, where does the copyright end? If someone makes a book reference in public will they get their butt sued? Or will we have to get a public display licence to have a conversation now?
Ultimately Amazon shouldn't concede on this. In fact I want this to be legally tested and put to rest asap.
Maybe the US Gov. is wise to slow the deployment of DNSSEC. The current design of DNSSEC basically lays out your entire catalogue of DNA entries for anyone to lookup.
Now nobody wants security though obscurity but at the same time nobody wants to give the bad guys a long list of potential targets or a network diagram.
While several solutions to this issue have been suggested most of them flat out fly in the face of how DNSSEC is designed to work.
So you replaced a DLL and the application stopped working? What DLL? What evidence do you have supporting your theory that it is the OS's fault?
So you can no longer record application's audio? Are you using the same drivers? On my system the sound card has to specifically support such functionality.
Windows 7 might contain tons of scary DRM but unfortunately this article contains no real proof of that. In fact it is so vague that is sounds almost like voodoo.
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
Now when listening to music on a PC those additional cycles might be a drop in the ocean but what we've seen is a lot of MP3 players skipping the codec because their cheap devices couldn't handle the playback load.
I entirely appreciate that this is a debate about I.D. and about religion in the classroom.
But that aside it is a great shame that we teach all science as hard "fact" with little experimentation or room for asking "Why?"
If you've gone though a Science education you know that you learn from the textbook and everything you read is gospel.
God forbid we'd ever want kids actually thinking for themselves or questioning anything, if that happened they might, you know... Push the field forward...
But in the academic world the "geniuses" are those students that can memorise the most trivia (see TV game shows for example). While truly intelligent lateral thinkers get put in the bottom classes and made to feel dumb.
They requested data on at least 3,000 people from the ISPs (at £60 per request). But assuming most ISPs don't charge them then the real number is likely significantly higher perhaps even over 10,000 requests... That's a lot of requests.
As far as the charges go... I like them. It forces the police to at least look at how many people they're requesting data on so they just can't put out a drag net to see what they catch.
I've been saying this is Linux's biggest issue for years. I keep on asking when my mom can use Linux herself and keep getting fobbed off...
When will terminal windows, compiling your own software, and configuration files disappear and in place get a consistent modern UI?
Yes, Linux has been doing better in this regard but everyone seems to be going in a completely different direction with a lot of the supporters and developers scuffing at the idea of making Linux easier for the common man.
The real question is: Is Linux for developers and geeks, or is it for everyone? And that is something the Linux community needs to answer before it can move forward.
The summary questions why they're being fined for less than the $172M taken from customers...
Well the answer is very simple: Tax and costs. Even running a somewhat illegal operation has running costs particularly if they had 1,000 people on the payroll.
So the "take home" net might have been $50M which is where the fine was set. Otherwise you're fining them money that they've already paid in tax.
A study conducted today finds that an [extremely common thing] and [extremely uncommon thing] are happening a lot.
e.g. A study conducted today finds that sleep and winning the lottery are happening to IT workers almost daily.... Because physical abuse is SO common at work?
The act defines a "child" as a "person": (2) the term âchildâ(TM) means a person who has not attained the age of 18 years and isâ" ââ(A) under the perpetratorâ(TM)s care or control; or ââ(B) at least six years younger than the perpetrator;
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
There is nothing in principle wrong with "movie style ratings" for sites. The question is two fold: - How will it be enforced? - Who will [pay] to enforce it?
If the answer to the first question is "software that users put onto their systems" then I am fine with that. Parents should have the power to control what their own kids view. We're always talking about parents taking parental responsibility so let's give them TOOLS to do so.
The second question is who will enforce these movie style ratings? Now that is really the hard part as you have 90% of the internet outside of the control of the US and UK governments unless they wish to put up some kind of firewall (bad plan).
I think everyone should get together, Governments, ISPs, and internet standards bodies and come up with a cheap, and simple way to mark all sites.
Then the UK and US should mandate it within their own borders and put international pressure on other countries to do the same.
That way we will give parents control, make the parental software really work, and give governments less ammo to firewall the Internet for us adults.
I guess what it really comes down to is if the gameplay is good?
We've had highly immersive games (e.g. Half Life 2) that have been great. But we've also had many with as good or better technology that have been terrible.
2D games aren't good just because they're 2D; they're good because the development team has to get really good gameplay in order to draw people in.
A lot of the recent bad games are the result of EA and other big companies stamp pressing out generic titles improving the technology ever so slightly each time.
They spend no time improving the gameplay. In fact new and original gameplay is against their business model (too "high risk").
The real problem with the gaming industry is too few risk takers. As small companies are by their nature risk takers that translates directly into the conclusion that there is too few small developers and too many large ones.
In answer to - "have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?"
I'm going into the "no practical difference whatsoever" camp. In fact you're taking a huge risk if any of them are broken and you gain nothing that simply salting your hashes doesn't already give you.
We know that MD5 is secure to a degree. Just salt that bad boy up so rainbow tables no longer have any impact.
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at? Or what rights do I have to then your apple at all?
Obviously the original manufacturer has certain rights like copyright, trademark, but I fail to see how these right extend to something like price further down the supply chain.
This whole system just seems abusive and will make it harder for competition to ensue which last I checked was meant to be what a capitalist society was all about.
You know Microsoft has been pushing for the Chinese government to do something about the rampant piracy in China... They no doubt expected reduced piracy to lead to more legal installations of Windows but it has backfired on them hugely with this move to allow Internet Cafés to use Red Flag Linux.
Also the spying claims are meh. We already know the Chinese Gov. watch the pipes closely there really is no advantage in further monitoring within Internet Cafés.
If you actually look at the Chemistry curriculum from then and now you might see just how very wrong you are.
All subjects except Maths evolve. Even staple subjects like History and English. Even if some of the basics remain similar you'll find that they're tort in a way that makes them more applicable in today's society and world.
The real question/issue we should be asking/addressing is - How good are degree students in the workplace?
Now that is a problem we should our time looking into. Because from my point of view people leaving University are damn near never qualified to walk into any job (*with a few exceptions). I'm also sure that in all cases learning 1950s Maths and Chemistry wouldn't fix then and might even make the problems worse.
I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish. I know that these old accidemics studied back then and want to feel smart but making kids feel dumb today is wrong and they should feel ashamaned.
Let me break it down for them and you: - Kids in the 1950s did not study what we study today - Kids today did not study what kids studied back in the 1950s
I know this is a shocking revolation but still true. If possible I would love to see what would happen if you sat a 1950s kid down in front of a 2008 exam, my guess is the results would be similar.
The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.
You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative.
So what of the things that rarely fails me is a "common sense" check on new designs, particularly when it comes to renewable energy concepts (as there are a lot of impossible inventions around).
So let's break down this design: - Works like a normal electric motor so thus we know it works *CHECK* - Have electronic switches to open and close a circuit, which we know works *CHECK* - We know longer circuits have more resistance than shorter ones *CHECK* - We know changing the number of coils in an electric generator is optimal for different levels of generation *CHECK*
So it seems to be a very good design that should work very well. Their claims of 100% more efficiency are a little over the top but may work in some locations. I think it is safe to say that most locations should see an increase in efficiency with the new design over the old one.
The way they've built their motor is also a little novel but only really amounts to a way to customize the motor for different situations and thus really isn't all too interesting in the grand scheme of things.
Microsoft themselves have said that Windows 7 will ship will the same underlying infrastructure as Windows Vista. They also said that Windows Vista was the biggest kernel rewrite since Windows 2000.
The interesting thing about a lot of Vista's bloat is that it isn't kernel level. We know this since we can compare Windows 2003 and Vista. Windows 2003 has almost identical program startup times to Windows XP/2000.
I do think that Windows 7 is going in a disappointing direction in general. They seem to be playing right into what I like to call the "Apple Trap." Instead of doing what Microsoft do best which is to produce a workhorse they instead try and play the designer, and want to make a work of art.
Funny how when Microsoft rejects Open Source they get people crawling down their backs. When they suggest they might move in that general direction they get people accusing them of trying to poison Open Source and calling them liars.
Seems whatever happens people just want to hate Microsoft whatever moves the company makes...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but what does one have to do with another?
Currently Doctors are using word documents with every patient's name as the title in some locations. While others are using VB apps with a Acess Database type solution.
Putting real money into a real electronic system with access controls and a audit trail is a GOOD thing and will stop things like records spreading onto P2P networks.
It is good for patients, it is good for doctors, and it is good for the general quality of healthcare.
I grant that it is expensive though. I also grant that governments are bad at large IT projects and always give it to the lowest bidder.
That exemption doesn't extend to text-to-speech. It is in reference Tactile Paper, Books, and other materials.
Note the sentence - "specialized format exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities."
As text-to-speech is in no way specialised it isn't inclusive. Also you don't need a prescription to get hold of a tactile interface.
Although seriously questionable legally, if the authors guild was able to prove that Text-To-Speech of copyright books was copyright infringement then that would be absolutely huge.
Tons of disabled people already depend on text-to-speech and with an ever older populace this is only going to become even more important to everyone.
Plus, where does the copyright end? If someone makes a book reference in public will they get their butt sued? Or will we have to get a public display licence to have a conversation now?
Ultimately Amazon shouldn't concede on this. In fact I want this to be legally tested and put to rest asap.
Maybe the US Gov. is wise to slow the deployment of DNSSEC. The current design of DNSSEC basically lays out your entire catalogue of DNA entries for anyone to lookup.
Now nobody wants security though obscurity but at the same time nobody wants to give the bad guys a long list of potential targets or a network diagram.
While several solutions to this issue have been suggested most of them flat out fly in the face of how DNSSEC is designed to work.
This article is seriously short on details.
So you replaced a DLL and the application stopped working? What DLL? What evidence do you have supporting your theory that it is the OS's fault?
So you can no longer record application's audio? Are you using the same drivers? On my system the sound card has to specifically support such functionality.
Windows 7 might contain tons of scary DRM but unfortunately this article contains no real proof of that. In fact it is so vague that is sounds almost like voodoo.
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
Now when listening to music on a PC those additional cycles might be a drop in the ocean but what we've seen is a lot of MP3 players skipping the codec because their cheap devices couldn't handle the playback load.
Why is it "news" that it can launch Windows 7?
I guess what I am struggling to understand is why the news isn't - "CoreBoot can now boot x86 operating systems."
What is special about Windows 7 that made it harder to boot / run under CoreBoot as opposed to Windows XP or 2003 Server?
Should a bios even be able to tell the difference between booting Linux and Window's bootloaders?
I entirely appreciate that this is a debate about I.D. and about religion in the classroom.
But that aside it is a great shame that we teach all science as hard "fact" with little experimentation or room for asking "Why?"
If you've gone though a Science education you know that you learn from the textbook and everything you read is gospel.
God forbid we'd ever want kids actually thinking for themselves or questioning anything, if that happened they might, you know... Push the field forward...
But in the academic world the "geniuses" are those students that can memorise the most trivia (see TV game shows for example). While truly intelligent lateral thinkers get put in the bottom classes and made to feel dumb.
I hope we like the world we made for ourselves...
They requested data on at least 3,000 people from the ISPs (at £60 per request). But assuming most ISPs don't charge them then the real number is likely significantly higher perhaps even over 10,000 requests... That's a lot of requests.
As far as the charges go... I like them. It forces the police to at least look at how many people they're requesting data on so they just can't put out a drag net to see what they catch.
Plus it does cost ISPs money.
I've been saying this is Linux's biggest issue for years. I keep on asking when my mom can use Linux herself and keep getting fobbed off...
When will terminal windows, compiling your own software, and configuration files disappear and in place get a consistent modern UI?
Yes, Linux has been doing better in this regard but everyone seems to be going in a completely different direction with a lot of the supporters and developers scuffing at the idea of making Linux easier for the common man.
The real question is: Is Linux for developers and geeks, or is it for everyone? And that is something the Linux community needs to answer before it can move forward.
The summary questions why they're being fined for less than the $172M taken from customers...
Well the answer is very simple: Tax and costs. Even running a somewhat illegal operation has running costs particularly if they had 1,000 people on the payroll.
So the "take home" net might have been $50M which is where the fine was set. Otherwise you're fining them money that they've already paid in tax.
A study conducted today finds that an [extremely common thing] and [extremely uncommon thing] are happening a lot.
e.g. ... Because physical abuse is SO common at work?
A study conducted today finds that sleep and winning the lottery are happening to IT workers almost daily.
This is one of my favourite security conundrums.
How do you limit someone's login attempts to an account without allowing an account to be denial of serviced?
Captcha - hurts young, old, and disabled users. It can also make it hard for normal users if poorly designed (as many are).
IP Limit - Very easy to bypass with a proxy list.
Hard Account Limits - Denial of service
Thus is the problem. How do you limit logins without hurting legitimate users?
This year has 366 days in it instead of the normal 365.
So if you did (365-day) you could end up with -1 which might cause either a crash or freeze.
Just one (likely) possible cause. If that is the case it should fix its self tomorrow.
The act defines a "child" as a "person":
(2) the term âchildâ(TM) means a person who has not attained
the age of 18 years and isâ"
ââ(A) under the perpetratorâ(TM)s care or control; or
ââ(B) at least six years younger than the perpetrator;
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
There is nothing in principle wrong with "movie style ratings" for sites. The question is two fold:
- How will it be enforced?
- Who will [pay] to enforce it?
If the answer to the first question is "software that users put onto their systems" then I am fine with that. Parents should have the power to control what their own kids view. We're always talking about parents taking parental responsibility so let's give them TOOLS to do so.
The second question is who will enforce these movie style ratings? Now that is really the hard part as you have 90% of the internet outside of the control of the US and UK governments unless they wish to put up some kind of firewall (bad plan).
I think everyone should get together, Governments, ISPs, and internet standards bodies and come up with a cheap, and simple way to mark all sites.
Then the UK and US should mandate it within their own borders and put international pressure on other countries to do the same.
That way we will give parents control, make the parental software really work, and give governments less ammo to firewall the Internet for us adults.
I guess what it really comes down to is if the gameplay is good?
We've had highly immersive games (e.g. Half Life 2) that have been great. But we've also had many with as good or better technology that have been terrible.
2D games aren't good just because they're 2D; they're good because the development team has to get really good gameplay in order to draw people in.
A lot of the recent bad games are the result of EA and other big companies stamp pressing out generic titles improving the technology ever so slightly each time.
They spend no time improving the gameplay. In fact new and original gameplay is against their business model (too "high risk").
The real problem with the gaming industry is too few risk takers. As small companies are by their nature risk takers that translates directly into the conclusion that there is too few small developers and too many large ones.
In answer to - "have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?"
I'm going into the "no practical difference whatsoever" camp. In fact you're taking a huge risk if any of them are broken and you gain nothing that simply salting your hashes doesn't already give you.
We know that MD5 is secure to a degree. Just salt that bad boy up so rainbow tables no longer have any impact.
How can minimal pricing be legal or logical?
If I sell you an apple from my apple tree then what right should I have to say that you sell that apple at? Or what rights do I have to then your apple at all?
Obviously the original manufacturer has certain rights like copyright, trademark, but I fail to see how these right extend to something like price further down the supply chain.
This whole system just seems abusive and will make it harder for competition to ensue which last I checked was meant to be what a capitalist society was all about.
You know Microsoft has been pushing for the Chinese government to do something about the rampant piracy in China... They no doubt expected reduced piracy to lead to more legal installations of Windows but it has backfired on them hugely with this move to allow Internet Cafés to use Red Flag Linux.
Also the spying claims are meh. We already know the Chinese Gov. watch the pipes closely there really is no advantage in further monitoring within Internet Cafés.
If you actually look at the Chemistry curriculum from then and now you might see just how very wrong you are.
All subjects except Maths evolve. Even staple subjects like History and English. Even if some of the basics remain similar you'll find that they're tort in a way that makes them more applicable in today's society and world.
The real question/issue we should be asking/addressing is - How good are degree students in the workplace?
Now that is a problem we should our time looking into. Because from my point of view people leaving University are damn near never qualified to walk into any job (*with a few exceptions). I'm also sure that in all cases learning 1950s Maths and Chemistry wouldn't fix then and might even make the problems worse.
I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish. I know that these old accidemics studied back then and want to feel smart but making kids feel dumb today is wrong and they should feel ashamaned.
Let me break it down for them and you:
- Kids in the 1950s did not study what we study today
- Kids today did not study what kids studied back in the 1950s
I know this is a shocking revolation but still true. If possible I would love to see what would happen if you sat a 1950s kid down in front of a 2008 exam, my guess is the results would be similar.
The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.
You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative.
So what of the things that rarely fails me is a "common sense" check on new designs, particularly when it comes to renewable energy concepts (as there are a lot of impossible inventions around).
So let's break down this design:
- Works like a normal electric motor so thus we know it works *CHECK*
- Have electronic switches to open and close a circuit, which we know works *CHECK*
- We know longer circuits have more resistance than shorter ones *CHECK*
- We know changing the number of coils in an electric generator is optimal for different levels of generation *CHECK*
So it seems to be a very good design that should work very well. Their claims of 100% more efficiency are a little over the top but may work in some locations. I think it is safe to say that most locations should see an increase in efficiency with the new design over the old one.
The way they've built their motor is also a little novel but only really amounts to a way to customize the motor for different situations and thus really isn't all too interesting in the grand scheme of things.
What exactly is this article trying to prove?
Microsoft themselves have said that Windows 7 will ship will the same underlying infrastructure as Windows Vista. They also said that Windows Vista was the biggest kernel rewrite since Windows 2000.
The interesting thing about a lot of Vista's bloat is that it isn't kernel level. We know this since we can compare Windows 2003 and Vista. Windows 2003 has almost identical program startup times to Windows XP/2000.
I do think that Windows 7 is going in a disappointing direction in general. They seem to be playing right into what I like to call the "Apple Trap." Instead of doing what Microsoft do best which is to produce a workhorse they instead try and play the designer, and want to make a work of art.
Funny how when Microsoft rejects Open Source they get people crawling down their backs. When they suggest they might move in that general direction they get people accusing them of trying to poison Open Source and calling them liars.
Seems whatever happens people just want to hate Microsoft whatever moves the company makes...