I'm not so sure. Malpractice and poor care are hideously difficult to prove, and HIPAA's constraints on staff providing medical details make it even worse. While you're supposed to be able to respond to a subpoena or provide records for a court order, it's extremely unsafe to reach out and blow the whistle on misconduct. If you do, if no lawsuit results or if the lawsuit fails, the whistle-blower is vulnerable under HIPAA to even more serious damage than merely a non-disclousre agreement or reputation problems.
While HIPAA has its uses in theory, in practice it's created a nightmare of semi-centralized recordkeeping that seems to make it actually *HARDER* to track back records for patients, and helps hide records for hospitals for long-term research on their effectiveness and quality of care.
While truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel or slander, it can be very expensive to defend against in court. And the allegedly libeled party can, and often does, engage in serious harassing behavior against their target. This is often enough to put an individual out of work, cost them a mortgage, ruin their career from negative publicity, destroy their professional accreditation (which is a huge deal in nursing or doctor work), or even wind up with their assets in the hands of their attacker, including their confidential records.
If you'd like to see a good example, take a look at the thousands of harassing lawsuits filed by Scientology against the Cult Awareness Network, especially those based on libel or slander. When the cult finally found a lawsuit from someone else that their well-funded lawyers were able to use to bankrupt CAN. (Then that lawyer got sued by his client for misrepresenting him in court, using the case to destroy CAN instead of protect his client's interests.) Then they bought up the office space, phone numbers, etc. If you call Cult Awareness Network these days, it's actually the cult of Scientology manning the line.
No, if it does anything it's violating their published API's, or refusing to publish them. Seriously, if you take a look at what they did to Kerberos, or look at what they did to SMB for their file sharing and the necessary reverse-engineering for creating Samba, or at what they do the fundamentals of LDAP for that oddness they call Active Directory, you see a lot of violatioin of API's and secret API's.
There are solid reasons the European Union just slapped Microsoft with hige fines for their anti-competitive behavior in this regard. It's a very anti-competitive measure, adn they've been repeatedly caught hiding customized internal API's even from their development partners.
They use the legislative cover to expand their activities and avoid prosecution. We lack absolute defenses against police, or federal, abuse of powers. We can merely control or curtail them, much as we do against drug abuse or the spread of AIDS. The modest protections available to an informed public really, really help prevent such abuses from running rampant.
Police who misuse such powers also lie, and pretend "national security" when told to produce the foundation for their search. They also gather political, not criminal, information. The FBI history of this goes right back to J. Edgar Hoover gathering information on peaceful protesters.
Failing to impeach Bush the elder for his involvementn in the Iran/Contra affair, which would have doomed his son's political career and the continuing deceit by security personnel working directly for the White House to avoid the laws set by Congress.
Every generation has its misadventures, but remember that Bush the elder was the head of the CIA for a time when they were funding Manuel Noriega's adventures in Panama. He helped teach his son to make deals with awful leaders to protect "American interests", and leave the resulting mess for the next generation to try to clean up.
Oddly enough, the nuclear candidates have a lot of job offerings. Overseas, in countries that do not so tightly regulate their technologies: Pakistan, for example, has been hirng left and right. And for nuclear medicine, they seem to be very popular almost anywhere but the US, according to graduates I chatted with 2 years ago.
Of course, keeping your US visa valid may be a bit difficult depending on where you go.
And your folders are arranged on your off-line servers, but very awkward to keep arranged on your Gmail account, right? That consistent synchronization of folders on local and server based storage is very useful indeed to some of us.
Saying that pleasure and pain are all in the brain is flat-out neural nonsense. Pain and pleasure are hardwired into many sensory nerves, and the responses to it play out in all sorts of biochemistry and neurological responses with little to no brain involvement.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you examine the basic pain responses of your feet and hands and the testing of RSI in the hands of us geeks.
Take a look at the cochlear implant wearers in the US. The auditory nerve is considered part of the brain in the paper I read a few years ago. There are 10,000 children in the US alone wearing them, according to Wikipedia. Then there are the implants for epilepsy, Parkinson's, and attempts to provide them for balance disorders.
It's interesting work: they're apparently much more effective for transmitting a signal than picking up signals, so the idea of using them for artificial limbs or thought-control of aircraft has never really worked well.
Actually, Vista's strong commitment to the old "Palladium" project, inappropriately renamed "Trusted Computing", is precisely this kind of driver and hardware and software level DRM. It's extremely troubling work, designed to prevent access to hardware or software or files without keys signed from a central key authority. And those central keys live in Microsoft's hands, and in turn are easily obtained by federal authorities without even bothering with warrants that monitored targets can find out about.
Its primary aim is for DRM, not security: that's extremely clear from its design. It's not broadly in use yet, but it's directly built into current Intal and AMD CPU's as well.
You forgot Fortran, D, ADA, and others. Mind you, many of them are actually translated to somewhat awkward C first by the compiler, but still they're built in.
Vista won't take off until new games won't run on XP, and until the latest Office release won't run on XP. It's much vaunted features, such as the extensive DRM, are unwanted by consumers. And the drivers for existing or even new hardware are still not working.
The other big goal of Vista was WinFS, which turned out to be such a nightmare of XML nonsense they had to throw it out. But make no mistake, WinFS was designed to break the existing NTFS compatibility tools and interfere with the existing NTFS compatibility tools for MacOS, Linux, and UNIX. And its heavily patented XML base would have made using such tools in the states, especially OS virtualization tools, impossible in the open source world.
You seem to be missing out on proprietary cross-compiler code, added to support specific new hardware. Such tools are easy to build with gcc, but the GPL licensing means that as soon as they give anyone their developer tools, they have to make them GPL licensed and can't keep them secret.
This matters quite a lot to developers of new hardware, especially micro-systems such as cell phones and PDA's and control systems. Having a closed, BSD-licensed compiler helps restrict competition in their markets, and the BSD license allows this. GPL does not.
Or when the 10 years of development in getting gcc and glibc and various kernels, BIND and sendmail and postfix and BIND and xinetd and other common freeware system components, to compile correctly on multiple architectures.
It's easy to optimize something where you throw out compatibility, especially cross-platform compilation, with all the systems gcc supports. To waste another 10 years upgrading another compiler to reach the same level of workability as gcc already provides this way seems insane.
There's at least one XBox Beowulf cluster I've seen. It was only 10 servers, since they're so light on RAM, but it was an interesting proof of concept.
You have looked into Scientology's use of the primitive polygraph called an e-meter? Go look at www.xenu.net for details on how they use it for brainwashing their own new members, and track the links for testimony about how the "auditing" confessional materials get recorded and sent back to their headquarters, for use against anyone who tries to leave the cult and speak out against it.
Such monitoring is old hat: the US government grew very fond of using polygraphs on security personnel, and probing for political information.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure. Malpractice and poor care are hideously difficult to prove, and HIPAA's constraints on staff providing medical details make it even worse. While you're supposed to be able to respond to a subpoena or provide records for a court order, it's extremely unsafe to reach out and blow the whistle on misconduct. If you do, if no lawsuit results or if the lawsuit fails, the whistle-blower is vulnerable under HIPAA to even more serious damage than merely a non-disclousre agreement or reputation problems.
While HIPAA has its uses in theory, in practice it's created a nightmare of semi-centralized recordkeeping that seems to make it actually *HARDER* to track back records for patients, and helps hide records for hospitals for long-term research on their effectiveness and quality of care.
While truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel or slander, it can be very expensive to defend against in court. And the allegedly libeled party can, and often does, engage in serious harassing behavior against their target. This is often enough to put an individual out of work, cost them a mortgage, ruin their career from negative publicity, destroy their professional accreditation (which is a huge deal in nursing or doctor work), or even wind up with their assets in the hands of their attacker, including their confidential records.
If you'd like to see a good example, take a look at the thousands of harassing lawsuits filed by Scientology against the Cult Awareness Network, especially those based on libel or slander. When the cult finally found a lawsuit from someone else that their well-funded lawyers were able to use to bankrupt CAN. (Then that lawyer got sued by his client for misrepresenting him in court, using the case to destroy CAN instead of protect his client's interests.) Then they bought up the office space, phone numbers, etc. If you call Cult Awareness Network these days, it's actually the cult of Scientology manning the line.
Or even learn to do it right, and say "sprintf"?
No, if it does anything it's violating their published API's, or refusing to publish them. Seriously, if you take a look at what they did to Kerberos, or look at what they did to SMB for their file sharing and the necessary reverse-engineering for creating Samba, or at what they do the fundamentals of LDAP for that oddness they call Active Directory, you see a lot of violatioin of API's and secret API's.
There are solid reasons the European Union just slapped Microsoft with hige fines for their anti-competitive behavior in this regard. It's a very anti-competitive measure, adn they've been repeatedly caught hiding customized internal API's even from their development partners.
They use the legislative cover to expand their activities and avoid prosecution. We lack absolute defenses against police, or federal, abuse of powers. We can merely control or curtail them, much as we do against drug abuse or the spread of AIDS. The modest protections available to an informed public really, really help prevent such abuses from running rampant.
Bill was acquitted. It's not clear to me that there is a good phrase for "impeached and convicted". Do you know one?
We tried that with Reagan. It didn't work out well.
Police who misuse such powers also lie, and pretend "national security" when told to produce the foundation for their search. They also gather political, not criminal, information. The FBI history of this goes right back to J. Edgar Hoover gathering information on peaceful protesters.
You misspelled "Reaganomics" there.
Failing to impeach Bush the elder for his involvementn in the Iran/Contra affair, which would have doomed his son's political career and the continuing deceit by security personnel working directly for the White House to avoid the laws set by Congress.
Every generation has its misadventures, but remember that Bush the elder was the head of the CIA for a time when they were funding Manuel Noriega's adventures in Panama. He helped teach his son to make deals with awful leaders to protect "American interests", and leave the resulting mess for the next generation to try to clean up.
You *have* seen what happened to NetBSD, right? And you have tried working with Theo on anything?
Oddly enough, the nuclear candidates have a lot of job offerings. Overseas, in countries that do not so tightly regulate their technologies: Pakistan, for example, has been hirng left and right. And for nuclear medicine, they seem to be very popular almost anywhere but the US, according to graduates I chatted with 2 years ago.
Of course, keeping your US visa valid may be a bit difficult depending on where you go.
And your folders are arranged on your off-line servers, but very awkward to keep arranged on your Gmail account, right? That consistent synchronization of folders on local and server based storage is very useful indeed to some of us.
Or a "delete" button that goes to the next thread automatically.
Saying that pleasure and pain are all in the brain is flat-out neural nonsense. Pain and pleasure are hardwired into many sensory nerves, and the responses to it play out in all sorts of biochemistry and neurological responses with little to no brain involvement.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you examine the basic pain responses of your feet and hands and the testing of RSI in the hands of us geeks.
Take a look at the cochlear implant wearers in the US. The auditory nerve is considered part of the brain in the paper I read a few years ago. There are 10,000 children in the US alone wearing them, according to Wikipedia. Then there are the implants for epilepsy, Parkinson's, and attempts to provide them for balance disorders.
It's interesting work: they're apparently much more effective for transmitting a signal than picking up signals, so the idea of using them for artificial limbs or thought-control of aircraft has never really worked well.
Actually, Vista's strong commitment to the old "Palladium" project, inappropriately renamed "Trusted Computing", is precisely this kind of driver and hardware and software level DRM. It's extremely troubling work, designed to prevent access to hardware or software or files without keys signed from a central key authority. And those central keys live in Microsoft's hands, and in turn are easily obtained by federal authorities without even bothering with warrants that monitored targets can find out about.
Its primary aim is for DRM, not security: that's extremely clear from its design. It's not broadly in use yet, but it's directly built into current Intal and AMD CPU's as well.
Or on T-shirts. (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/)
You forgot Fortran, D, ADA, and others. Mind you, many of them are actually translated to somewhat awkward C first by the compiler, but still they're built in.
Vista won't take off until new games won't run on XP, and until the latest Office release won't run on XP. It's much vaunted features, such as the extensive DRM, are unwanted by consumers. And the drivers for existing or even new hardware are still not working.
The other big goal of Vista was WinFS, which turned out to be such a nightmare of XML nonsense they had to throw it out. But make no mistake, WinFS was designed to break the existing NTFS compatibility tools and interfere with the existing NTFS compatibility tools for MacOS, Linux, and UNIX. And its heavily patented XML base would have made using such tools in the states, especially OS virtualization tools, impossible in the open source world.
You seem to be missing out on proprietary cross-compiler code, added to support specific new hardware. Such tools are easy to build with gcc, but the GPL licensing means that as soon as they give anyone their developer tools, they have to make them GPL licensed and can't keep them secret.
This matters quite a lot to developers of new hardware, especially micro-systems such as cell phones and PDA's and control systems. Having a closed, BSD-licensed compiler helps restrict competition in their markets, and the BSD license allows this. GPL does not.
Or when the 10 years of development in getting gcc and glibc and various kernels, BIND and sendmail and postfix and BIND and xinetd and other common freeware system components, to compile correctly on multiple architectures.
It's easy to optimize something where you throw out compatibility, especially cross-platform compilation, with all the systems gcc supports. To waste another 10 years upgrading another compiler to reach the same level of workability as gcc already provides this way seems insane.
There's at least one XBox Beowulf cluster I've seen. It was only 10 servers, since they're so light on RAM, but it was an interesting proof of concept.
He meant "Igasm".
You have looked into Scientology's use of the primitive polygraph called an e-meter? Go look at www.xenu.net for details on how they use it for brainwashing their own new members, and track the links for testimony about how the "auditing" confessional materials get recorded and sent back to their headquarters, for use against anyone who tries to leave the cult and speak out against it. Such monitoring is old hat: the US government grew very fond of using polygraphs on security personnel, and probing for political information.