Actually, he should have gotten a job with one of the big banks. Goldman Sachs or such. Lighter sentence yet.
Rob a liquor store, get 20 years. Rob 20,000 people of $200,000 in life savings, the feds don't have a case to pursue.
Score of 5, insightful? Are you people sane? Does anyone read history?
Drone strikes produce 80% civilian casulties as far as I can read on the subject. And that's a conservative estimate.
And the comparison to Nazis? Read about the air raids on Germany and Japan by LeMay et al. They/we specifically targeted civilians in order to reduce production of war time supplies.
We are killing civilians of other countries specifically and for a reason, and have done so for decades. Robert MacNamara himself said that if the Allies lost WWII, he would have been rightfully executed as a war criminal.
My point is that the gamers seem to understand nothing. 72% of them agree that launching a hellfire at a guy emptying his truck at night is reasonable given a 80% chance that he is innocent of wrongdoing.
People, look at your school or apartment or city block and consider killing 10 people to get two criminals. Is this acceptable for us? If not, then why Pakistan? I'm not aware of a state of war with them, did I miss something?
Well,
The next time I break the law, I will issue a sincere apology. This apparently makes everything all right and obviates the need for punishment, prosecution, or any such things.
Or, are politicians simply a different class of people with different rules and consequences than the rest of us?
Orwell said: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
Oh yeah.
Group health is a business. I would guess that if their analysts show that spending $X on vaccines leads to savings of $Y when people are not admitted to the hospital or visit the ER with influenza and $Y>$X then they are likely to pay for the vaccine. If $X>$Y than it is not worth it to them. I can't see any businessman/underwriter doing anything different.
I'll go along with the above. The US educational system needs some changes. I suppose that a part of our science Zeitgeist is reflected in the banning of one of my favorite books: "The Golden Book of Chemistry". When I was a little kid, science was alive! If I wasn't outside wading in a pond, mixing stuff together or (later in life) coding, I was busy thinking of what to do next...
My kids live in a different world. The Golden Book of Chemistry is dangerous knowledge. Banned by people that know better than I (I suppose). Students take ecology classes "on line". Science ed has managed to take the marvel and discovery from science and replace it with regurgitation of numbers and tables.
Thinking sceptically and critically has been replaced with "thinking in a way that agrees with the current authorities".
I do know that at least a few teachers still have the right ideas and fire and fire up and educate their students. My hat is off to you few teachers. You have made a difference in my life (and my three children) by opening our minds to endless possibilities.
Yeah, it is flimsy. I was being tongue in cheek rather than making a legal case. I don't know what is in the contract, the wording there (or lack thereof) will determine whether there is a case or not.
My purpose for submitting this story is to bring attention to Sony's handling of a artist who chose to go with a different studio.
And the fact that a individual caught printing 6000 unauthorized CDs is treated differently than a mutinational corp. that does the same. Will the Sony Mexico CEO or local manager face a suit for personal liability and face jail time and a huge verdict?
Will RIAA go after Sony on behalf of the recording artist?
Will the exRIAA riddled Justice department come out in support a $1,000,000,000 judgment against Sony?
Would the same Minnesota jury award the same damages against Sony as it did J. Thomas.
Now I understand this will be tried in Mexico, not the USA, but...
We'll see how the Mexican legal system will handle a big multinational in comparison the the Land of the Free's legal system handling of individuals... Whatever that proves...
I agree that the title is inflammatory. But.
I'll take issue with the statement "The numbers are there". Well, the numbers are wrong. So, they are not useful unless you do a lot of work to figure out the errors.
Then there is the issue of the govt. releasing the contract to revamp the recovery.gov website. Almost entirely redacted and given to someone (Smartronix), a company that specializes in security, does not even mention web design on it's page... (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090803_2176.php). A $18m contract.
All this does not bode well for transparency and accountability.
I suppose what really bites is that if I were to produce incorrect data for a IRS inspector, my life would probably be destroyed by fines and reprisals. I can just imagine giving the IRS redacted copies of my business contracts. The fun would be short lived. Why do we, the citizens and taxpayers, accept this crap from people that want to run more and more of our lives?/rant
What a headline.
Actually, overall, I would think that helmets reduce injury and death. Both in combat and civilian arenas. Just because an inefficiency in military helmet design exists is no reason to say that "Helmet Design Contributes to Brain Damage". As compared to what? Taking shrapnel or a bullet without a helmet?
Now the article does suggest that the helmet may increase skull deformation from pressure waves secondary to the helmet design. But the authors admit that these are preliminary results and may or may not relate to the final outcome; TBI.
Still, if this line of research pans out, it could lead to some real improvement in head protection. Civilian and military.
I just hate misleading, sensational headlines...
How about kids playing a radio on a bus? That's a public performance if enough kids are there... More potential litigation. Kids! Report that stolen music and earn iTunes credits from RIAA!
I guess that I'm sorry that the law has changed so much from the days my friends and I traded compilation tapes. I'm sorry that a judgment of $1m and more is considered constitutionally valid and not excessive when levied at a single individual who did not profit from the crime. Stealing from the king...
It was meant to be sarcastic:)The way we are moving as a country, my comment may not be all that sarcastic or funny before too long though. IMHO. A few more RIAA lawyers going through the revolving door of the Justice dept. will do it.
BTW I think you meant "uninformed" rather than "uniformed"...
Well, RIAA should go after libraries next. Think of the hundreds of people that have viewed movies, listened to music, copied books and magazines, without paying their fair share.
Billions of dollars must have been lost in sales over the years! Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the industry lost because of the scourge called a "public library". A true menace to this country and the American Way of Life. Sue them all, from the NY Public library to the smallest church library. If people want content, they should pay for content. One copy per device per user.
We won't even start with the copying machine. No reason for those other then theft of printed content.
No, religion is really not pertinent. Evil is caused by individuals insane/incoherent or selfish. That is, they consider others expendable. Your serial killer considers his physical/sexual gratification more important than his victims life and pain. People who steal money (Madoff, Lay, etc) consider their ability to live lavishly more important than their victims retirement funds. Right? Religion can play into evil like all other human impulses but is not a requirement (depending on the religion I suppose).
Well, this relatively young, dark haired, white male is offended by this ****. I want these researchers to put out an arabic or black man and deal with the political consequences. Or a female for that matter. How am I supposed to raise two young male sons in this society that considers us evil, abusable, disposable, second rate. Ok, end the rant here.
If you need a quickie citation this is what you need. Make a new wiki article on something related or even a blog I suppose, make your statment, then cite your new article/blog in the old wiki article.Then cite the old wiki article in the new article! Voila instant citations! Hey, the PhDs have been doing this crap for generations, so it must be OK. Actually, this seems to really be a problem in that Wiki articles make a statement, media picks it up, they quote Wiki, Wiki quotes them. Instant fact.
Yeah, Wiki is on it's death bed for a lot of subjects as far as I'm concerned.
As long as Wiki was open to editing by the world at large, I was confident that I was getting a range of opinions. That is in general what I want when I look for information. I can trust myself to ignore obviously biased or (what I consider) crackpot statements or unsupported statements. I like having access to a range of opinion and then can further research info I want before making an informed decision.
Now, we have an elite core of editors who approve... well, what they want to approve I guess. The information is no longer open, that makes it increasingly suspect.
At best, wiki may be like an encyclopedia, at worst, Stalinist era propaganda. With the reputations of some editors (see "Slim Virgin" for example), I suspect that we are closer to Stalinist propaganda than anything else.
I have already started to see bias and exclusions in a lot of the more interesting and charged topics and am starting to understand that Wiki is untrustworthy for those topics. These topics include politics, human rights, aspects of history, etc.
On the other hand for simple topics, say looking up discussion of scholarly terms or concept, wiki remains pretty good.
So, I suppose if I'm doing homework with one of my kids and need to review one of the properties of multiplication, Wiki is great. If I want a range of opinions on say Darfur or Gaza I'll look elswhere and teach my kids to do likewise.
Shame, the concept of a democratic exchange of information was really tantalizing.
I have to agree, blocking ads is circumventing a micropayment. I try not to do that, at least to websites that I care about and feel are honest.
Having said that, Madison avenue is insatiable. When I think back to when I was a kid, TV was free over the airwaves, commercials were... reasonable.
Today, I pay $90/m for basic dish service and suck down 20+ minutes of ads in a hour for medium popularity shows. I live out in the country where over the air service is bad. I don't have the choice to pay a small amount of money for just a couple of channels that I do actually watch.Talk about a bad deal. I'm told that if I am given the privilege of just paying for a couple of channels rather than a "package" all hell will break loose and all the small players in the industry will fail... I really think I'm being lied to, but whatever.
I do understand that the advertisers/content providers will continue to pile advertising on until the system breaks (diminishing returns). Right? You have to maximize profits, which equates to putting in maximum advertising that the consumer will tolerate and still watch. So I do feel it is my duty to make my displeasure known by not visiting sites with excessive advertising. Popups, high volume audio, ads that obscure the page are all lethal to my viewing habits.
I've wondered whether Ad blockers are a valid method of civil disobedience. If I don't visit a site because of advertising, the site may go away, especially the small players. On the other hand, with ad blockers, they see the traffic, so they know it's there, and have a chance to change their advertising plan... I'm probably rationalizing now though.
As far as Mr. Murdoch goes, that *** manipulator can do whatever he wants. IMHO if he filed bankruptcy, the world would be better. I really stopped trusting WSJ after he picked it up. I don't really want his biased brand of so called news for free. He's just looking for a way to charge other news outlet, Fark, bloggers, etc for what he considers "his news".
But all in all, the morals of using Ad Blocker are kinda hard, and made harder by a greedy, relentlessly progressive industry.
We are a contractor for the Veterans administration. The VA insists that we comply with privacy issues strictly. Any communications that have patient information must be sent on encrypted secure systems. No open email servers/hotmail/gmail/whatever is allowed. Failure to comply with the privacy (detailed in the out of control HIPAA set of rules and standards) is punishable both financially and by being banned from contracting with the US federal government.
As an administrator, I have to remind physicians that if they are caught transmitting identifiable information of our patients over unsecured channels, it may cost us our contract and may result in their being banned from seeing medicare/medicaid patients.
Anyhow, that's my two cents on utilizing gmail or such for sensitive information.
No, in the modern US medical system, the paperwork amounts to tons of paper. The manpower needed to maintain it; file new info, pull deceased patients is huge, for a large hospital, the space requirements are huge. The possibility of error (misfiling info, patients with similar name, married name changes, etc)is huge.
From a legal point of view, you are probably more safe shutting the place down because EMR is down rather than trying to deal with a backup paper system.
It's not best for the patients, but the medical/legal/government system has cared increasingly little about the individual human being for a while now. I say this as an employed experienced MD.
I do IT for a small multispeciality group. This story really points out some problems I've seen.
We are in a small town, we have surges, brownouts, you name it. I occasionally have problems even though all my racks are behind decent APC UPSes/conditioners. Inevitably though, spring and fall we have storms and people fire up their AC and the power grid is for crap.
I've tried to work with the utility company but they *deny everything*. At this point I am thinking of getting management involved and pulling together a group of merchants who are IT heavy and petitioning the utility directly or through the state. I do worry about the repercussions though.
As far as EMR goes, we use redundant systems, offsite backup but with imaging we have well over a TB of data. If the system were to go completely fubar, I don't know what would happen. Critical info like allergic reactions, med lists, would be unavailable. We won't even go into billing. For a small four physician group like ours, we could make do I suppose. For a large hospital in a litigious part of the country? I don't know.
I suppose the answer is updatable RFIDs in every citizen so that medical info can travel with and be available with the patient, right? Welcome to the future everyone.
In our business, wired predominates, we use gigabit ethernet for a bunch of reasons. 1) Reliability: We are in a old building, lots of steel and concrete. WiFi is a lot less reliable and a lot slower. I do use WiFi in places where we have mobile carts or where wire is hard to pull but WiFi remains a hassle. I see occasional dropouts, I have to put in and maintain multiple APs to cover poor signal regions. 2)Speed: We send many large files (medical images) during the work day. Gigabit wire handles these well, WiFi tends to choke. 3. Cost: Gigabit ethernet is built into every system/mobo, wireless is not. The concept of installing/maintaining all these APs and wireless cards is daunting in terms of my time and budget.
Anyhow, this is just marketing spew from a marketing guy as far as I see. WiFi is complementary to our wired network, certainly not a replacement.
I don't really see this changing in the next 2 years (2011) as quoted. Unless an outrageous new wireless tech comes out and is build into all business mobos/systems, in 2011 we will probably continue running predominantly wired ethernet.
That's one of the biggest arguments I've heard. That Microsoft products are a standard in the United States and schools are obliged to teach kids how to use the products that they will encounter in daily life rather than teach about outliers.
Microsoft of course donates a lot to get schools and kids "hooked" on their products. See for example this older article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=108319§ioncode=26
At home, I make it a point to use Open Office but I can't see arguing with the school system to include OO in the curriculum even though I hate the thought of mandatory "Microsoft Word" classes that my kids take.
I really agree that the change has to come from home and business down to the schools but boy does Linux have some problems to overcome there too.
Trying to help Linux acceptance, I have tried to move to Linux in my small business. Trying to buy Linux configured desktops however is still painful and seems to be slightly more expensive. We still have proprietary Windows based software. We may be able to move to a Windows remote desktop for the apps we can't bypass and move to Linux on the desktop.
I keep on saying that the next batch of desktops I get will be Linux but it still has not happened. If XP becomes unavailable, that choice will be easier though:)
Well, this is not open source but free. I use and so far like Spiceworks. Spiceworks uses fairly unobtrusive IT related advertising.
We are a small business, about 30 users, less than 1 question/day. Spiceworks has some nice tracking and monitoring features besides the helpdesk. Helps me keep track of errors, low disk space, new software installs, etc.
I think they just wanted to get their names in the press. Looks like callouses and a blister to me. I used to get stuff like that on the sides of my fingers after too many hours at the arcade. Well, here's their 15 minutes of fame.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he should have gotten a job with one of the big banks. Goldman Sachs or such. Lighter sentence yet. Rob a liquor store, get 20 years. Rob 20,000 people of $200,000 in life savings, the feds don't have a case to pursue.
Score of 5, insightful? Are you people sane? Does anyone read history? Drone strikes produce 80% civilian casulties as far as I can read on the subject. And that's a conservative estimate. And the comparison to Nazis? Read about the air raids on Germany and Japan by LeMay et al. They/we specifically targeted civilians in order to reduce production of war time supplies. We are killing civilians of other countries specifically and for a reason, and have done so for decades. Robert MacNamara himself said that if the Allies lost WWII, he would have been rightfully executed as a war criminal. My point is that the gamers seem to understand nothing. 72% of them agree that launching a hellfire at a guy emptying his truck at night is reasonable given a 80% chance that he is innocent of wrongdoing. People, look at your school or apartment or city block and consider killing 10 people to get two criminals. Is this acceptable for us? If not, then why Pakistan? I'm not aware of a state of war with them, did I miss something?
Well, The next time I break the law, I will issue a sincere apology. This apparently makes everything all right and obviates the need for punishment, prosecution, or any such things. Or, are politicians simply a different class of people with different rules and consequences than the rest of us? Orwell said: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Oh yeah.
Group health is a business. I would guess that if their analysts show that spending $X on vaccines leads to savings of $Y when people are not admitted to the hospital or visit the ER with influenza and $Y>$X then they are likely to pay for the vaccine. If $X>$Y than it is not worth it to them. I can't see any businessman/underwriter doing anything different.
Homeworld is available for Linux. Great stuff, strategic space combat, real time. I have replayed this game a few times...
Well, there is a wiki too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_games I've played the Penumbra games, they are ... adventure games really but fairly atmospheric.
I'll go along with the above. The US educational system needs some changes. I suppose that a part of our science Zeitgeist is reflected in the banning of one of my favorite books: "The Golden Book of Chemistry". When I was a little kid, science was alive! If I wasn't outside wading in a pond, mixing stuff together or (later in life) coding, I was busy thinking of what to do next... My kids live in a different world. The Golden Book of Chemistry is dangerous knowledge. Banned by people that know better than I (I suppose). Students take ecology classes "on line". Science ed has managed to take the marvel and discovery from science and replace it with regurgitation of numbers and tables. Thinking sceptically and critically has been replaced with "thinking in a way that agrees with the current authorities". I do know that at least a few teachers still have the right ideas and fire and fire up and educate their students. My hat is off to you few teachers. You have made a difference in my life (and my three children) by opening our minds to endless possibilities.
Yeah, it is flimsy. I was being tongue in cheek rather than making a legal case. I don't know what is in the contract, the wording there (or lack thereof) will determine whether there is a case or not. My purpose for submitting this story is to bring attention to Sony's handling of a artist who chose to go with a different studio. And the fact that a individual caught printing 6000 unauthorized CDs is treated differently than a mutinational corp. that does the same. Will the Sony Mexico CEO or local manager face a suit for personal liability and face jail time and a huge verdict? Will RIAA go after Sony on behalf of the recording artist? Will the exRIAA riddled Justice department come out in support a $1,000,000,000 judgment against Sony? Would the same Minnesota jury award the same damages against Sony as it did J. Thomas. Now I understand this will be tried in Mexico, not the USA, but... We'll see how the Mexican legal system will handle a big multinational in comparison the the Land of the Free's legal system handling of individuals... Whatever that proves...
I agree that the title is inflammatory. But. I'll take issue with the statement "The numbers are there". Well, the numbers are wrong. So, they are not useful unless you do a lot of work to figure out the errors. Then there is the issue of the govt. releasing the contract to revamp the recovery.gov website. Almost entirely redacted and given to someone (Smartronix), a company that specializes in security, does not even mention web design on it's page... (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090803_2176.php). A $18m contract. All this does not bode well for transparency and accountability. I suppose what really bites is that if I were to produce incorrect data for a IRS inspector, my life would probably be destroyed by fines and reprisals. I can just imagine giving the IRS redacted copies of my business contracts. The fun would be short lived. Why do we, the citizens and taxpayers, accept this crap from people that want to run more and more of our lives? /rant
What a headline. Actually, overall, I would think that helmets reduce injury and death. Both in combat and civilian arenas. Just because an inefficiency in military helmet design exists is no reason to say that "Helmet Design Contributes to Brain Damage". As compared to what? Taking shrapnel or a bullet without a helmet? Now the article does suggest that the helmet may increase skull deformation from pressure waves secondary to the helmet design. But the authors admit that these are preliminary results and may or may not relate to the final outcome; TBI. Still, if this line of research pans out, it could lead to some real improvement in head protection. Civilian and military. I just hate misleading, sensational headlines...
How about kids playing a radio on a bus? That's a public performance if enough kids are there... More potential litigation. Kids! Report that stolen music and earn iTunes credits from RIAA! I guess that I'm sorry that the law has changed so much from the days my friends and I traded compilation tapes. I'm sorry that a judgment of $1m and more is considered constitutionally valid and not excessive when levied at a single individual who did not profit from the crime. Stealing from the king...
It was meant to be sarcastic :)The way we are moving as a country, my comment may not be all that sarcastic or funny before too long though. IMHO. A few more RIAA lawyers going through the revolving door of the Justice dept. will do it.
BTW I think you meant "uninformed" rather than "uniformed"...
Well, RIAA should go after libraries next. Think of the hundreds of people that have viewed movies, listened to music, copied books and magazines, without paying their fair share. Billions of dollars must have been lost in sales over the years! Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the industry lost because of the scourge called a "public library". A true menace to this country and the American Way of Life. Sue them all, from the NY Public library to the smallest church library. If people want content, they should pay for content. One copy per device per user. We won't even start with the copying machine. No reason for those other then theft of printed content.
No, religion is really not pertinent. Evil is caused by individuals insane/incoherent or selfish. That is, they consider others expendable. Your serial killer considers his physical/sexual gratification more important than his victims life and pain. People who steal money (Madoff, Lay, etc) consider their ability to live lavishly more important than their victims retirement funds. Right? Religion can play into evil like all other human impulses but is not a requirement (depending on the religion I suppose).
Well, this relatively young, dark haired, white male is offended by this ****. I want these researchers to put out an arabic or black man and deal with the political consequences. Or a female for that matter. How am I supposed to raise two young male sons in this society that considers us evil, abusable, disposable, second rate. Ok, end the rant here.
If you need a quickie citation this is what you need. Make a new wiki article on something related or even a blog I suppose, make your statment, then cite your new article/blog in the old wiki article.Then cite the old wiki article in the new article! Voila instant citations! Hey, the PhDs have been doing this crap for generations, so it must be OK. Actually, this seems to really be a problem in that Wiki articles make a statement, media picks it up, they quote Wiki, Wiki quotes them. Instant fact.
Yeah, Wiki is on it's death bed for a lot of subjects as far as I'm concerned. As long as Wiki was open to editing by the world at large, I was confident that I was getting a range of opinions. That is in general what I want when I look for information. I can trust myself to ignore obviously biased or (what I consider) crackpot statements or unsupported statements. I like having access to a range of opinion and then can further research info I want before making an informed decision. Now, we have an elite core of editors who approve ... well, what they want to approve I guess. The information is no longer open, that makes it increasingly suspect.
At best, wiki may be like an encyclopedia, at worst, Stalinist era propaganda. With the reputations of some editors (see "Slim Virgin" for example), I suspect that we are closer to Stalinist propaganda than anything else.
I have already started to see bias and exclusions in a lot of the more interesting and charged topics and am starting to understand that Wiki is untrustworthy for those topics. These topics include politics, human rights, aspects of history, etc.
On the other hand for simple topics, say looking up discussion of scholarly terms or concept, wiki remains pretty good.
So, I suppose if I'm doing homework with one of my kids and need to review one of the properties of multiplication, Wiki is great. If I want a range of opinions on say Darfur or Gaza I'll look elswhere and teach my kids to do likewise.
Shame, the concept of a democratic exchange of information was really tantalizing.
I have to agree, blocking ads is circumventing a micropayment. I try not to do that, at least to websites that I care about and feel are honest. Having said that, Madison avenue is insatiable. When I think back to when I was a kid, TV was free over the airwaves, commercials were ... reasonable.
Today, I pay $90/m for basic dish service and suck down 20+ minutes of ads in a hour for medium popularity shows. I live out in the country where over the air service is bad. I don't have the choice to pay a small amount of money for just a couple of channels that I do actually watch.Talk about a bad deal. I'm told that if I am given the privilege of just paying for a couple of channels rather than a "package" all hell will break loose and all the small players in the industry will fail... I really think I'm being lied to, but whatever.
I do understand that the advertisers/content providers will continue to pile advertising on until the system breaks (diminishing returns). Right? You have to maximize profits, which equates to putting in maximum advertising that the consumer will tolerate and still watch. So I do feel it is my duty to make my displeasure known by not visiting sites with excessive advertising. Popups, high volume audio, ads that obscure the page are all lethal to my viewing habits.
I've wondered whether Ad blockers are a valid method of civil disobedience. If I don't visit a site because of advertising, the site may go away, especially the small players. On the other hand, with ad blockers, they see the traffic, so they know it's there, and have a chance to change their advertising plan... I'm probably rationalizing now though.
As far as Mr. Murdoch goes, that *** manipulator can do whatever he wants. IMHO if he filed bankruptcy, the world would be better. I really stopped trusting WSJ after he picked it up. I don't really want his biased brand of so called news for free. He's just looking for a way to charge other news outlet, Fark, bloggers, etc for what he considers "his news".
But all in all, the morals of using Ad Blocker are kinda hard, and made harder by a greedy, relentlessly progressive industry.
We are a contractor for the Veterans administration. The VA insists that we comply with privacy issues strictly. Any communications that have patient information must be sent on encrypted secure systems. No open email servers/hotmail/gmail/whatever is allowed. Failure to comply with the privacy (detailed in the out of control HIPAA set of rules and standards) is punishable both financially and by being banned from contracting with the US federal government. As an administrator, I have to remind physicians that if they are caught transmitting identifiable information of our patients over unsecured channels, it may cost us our contract and may result in their being banned from seeing medicare/medicaid patients. Anyhow, that's my two cents on utilizing gmail or such for sensitive information.
No, in the modern US medical system, the paperwork amounts to tons of paper. The manpower needed to maintain it; file new info, pull deceased patients is huge, for a large hospital, the space requirements are huge. The possibility of error (misfiling info, patients with similar name, married name changes, etc)is huge. From a legal point of view, you are probably more safe shutting the place down because EMR is down rather than trying to deal with a backup paper system. It's not best for the patients, but the medical/legal/government system has cared increasingly little about the individual human being for a while now. I say this as an employed experienced MD.
I do IT for a small multispeciality group. This story really points out some problems I've seen. We are in a small town, we have surges, brownouts, you name it. I occasionally have problems even though all my racks are behind decent APC UPSes/conditioners. Inevitably though, spring and fall we have storms and people fire up their AC and the power grid is for crap. I've tried to work with the utility company but they *deny everything*. At this point I am thinking of getting management involved and pulling together a group of merchants who are IT heavy and petitioning the utility directly or through the state. I do worry about the repercussions though. As far as EMR goes, we use redundant systems, offsite backup but with imaging we have well over a TB of data. If the system were to go completely fubar, I don't know what would happen. Critical info like allergic reactions, med lists, would be unavailable. We won't even go into billing. For a small four physician group like ours, we could make do I suppose. For a large hospital in a litigious part of the country? I don't know. I suppose the answer is updatable RFIDs in every citizen so that medical info can travel with and be available with the patient, right? Welcome to the future everyone.
In our business, wired predominates, we use gigabit ethernet for a bunch of reasons. 1) Reliability: We are in a old building, lots of steel and concrete. WiFi is a lot less reliable and a lot slower. I do use WiFi in places where we have mobile carts or where wire is hard to pull but WiFi remains a hassle. I see occasional dropouts, I have to put in and maintain multiple APs to cover poor signal regions. 2)Speed: We send many large files (medical images) during the work day. Gigabit wire handles these well, WiFi tends to choke. 3. Cost: Gigabit ethernet is built into every system/mobo, wireless is not. The concept of installing/maintaining all these APs and wireless cards is daunting in terms of my time and budget. Anyhow, this is just marketing spew from a marketing guy as far as I see. WiFi is complementary to our wired network, certainly not a replacement. I don't really see this changing in the next 2 years (2011) as quoted. Unless an outrageous new wireless tech comes out and is build into all business mobos/systems, in 2011 we will probably continue running predominantly wired ethernet.
That's one of the biggest arguments I've heard. That Microsoft products are a standard in the United States and schools are obliged to teach kids how to use the products that they will encounter in daily life rather than teach about outliers. Microsoft of course donates a lot to get schools and kids "hooked" on their products. See for example this older article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=108319§ioncode=26 At home, I make it a point to use Open Office but I can't see arguing with the school system to include OO in the curriculum even though I hate the thought of mandatory "Microsoft Word" classes that my kids take. I really agree that the change has to come from home and business down to the schools but boy does Linux have some problems to overcome there too. Trying to help Linux acceptance, I have tried to move to Linux in my small business. Trying to buy Linux configured desktops however is still painful and seems to be slightly more expensive. We still have proprietary Windows based software. We may be able to move to a Windows remote desktop for the apps we can't bypass and move to Linux on the desktop. I keep on saying that the next batch of desktops I get will be Linux but it still has not happened. If XP becomes unavailable, that choice will be easier though :)
Well, this is not open source but free. I use and so far like Spiceworks. Spiceworks uses fairly unobtrusive IT related advertising. We are a small business, about 30 users, less than 1 question/day. Spiceworks has some nice tracking and monitoring features besides the helpdesk. Helps me keep track of errors, low disk space, new software installs, etc.
I think they just wanted to get their names in the press. Looks like callouses and a blister to me. I used to get stuff like that on the sides of my fingers after too many hours at the arcade. Well, here's their 15 minutes of fame.