You have apparently heard there's something called HIPAA. Good for you.
"Since he's a health care provider, the company is required to file their A/R electronically by HIPAA"
Why anyone thinks this is beyond me; why they'd be so foolish as to post it as a truth statement?...
HIPAA does not just cover computery goodness. HIPAA also covers what staff say in public corridors. It covers medical records - paper or electronic. It covers FAX machines, for goodness' sakes.
It's possible that a large place with a lot of private-pay patients would indeed have AR and GL that would include HIPAA protected information. But that would be true whether the info was stored on paper, electronically, or by searing it in 6 point font onto the backsides of you and all of your spawn unto the 8th generation and keeping you chained in a malodorous pen out by the loading dock, periodically swilling you with waste from abscess drainages.
All of which would be fine ways to store the data, and the last might be an excellent way of speeding our fiscal audit. I'll have to look into the cost of bringing in a branding kit with movable typefaces.
"Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers"
Voting? Only for posessors of penises and property! Wooo! Slavery legal in every state! [Slavery, in fact, the norm for the ruling elite (Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mason, etc.)] Black folks? Worth three fifths of what I am.
Yes, indeed, the ideals of the Founders. Let's definitely fight hard to keep them intact - but also, let's be damned sure we admit to what the ideals were before we go flogging them as our patriotic advert.
When I started doing this with the various cracked OSX releases last year, it was primarily Because It Was There. Once I got it working, I was interested that things like MSoffice for Mac could install on teh platform, and that it was relatively speedy (for a two year old i845 based notebook, it was blazing, really.) For work I use win2k or winxp primarily, and linux where needed. Since I was doing all this on a laptop I use for work, I needed access to (at least) windows and win and lin.
It works. I borked it bad when I tried upgrading to X.4.6, I think it was, and fat32 is a terrible thing to let OSX near in my experience - I lost a LOT of data to the Mac disk tool utility.
Right now I'm far more interested in virtualization - cute as it is, the whole 'and-then-you-reboot-to-do-such-and-such" is stupid. And I can sell my boss on being interested in virtualization as a business thing; we're moving that into production soon. I cannot sell anyone on triple booting as useful, though my girlfriend likes to brag that I sorted it out when she's trying to get me geekwork in the town she lives in.
By contrast, vmware's a clean build, a simple install and it fookin' works. No reboot needed. And although some here are excited about how standard the Mac platform is, well, the VMWare platform can easily be standardized, too : )
"I bet that if you took the time to look at 96, 92, etc, you'd see the same trend."
You would indeed. I went as far back as '88 for four counties, pulling county-by-county data from http://www.uselectionatlas.org/ I looked at the four counties highlighted in the Common Dreams piece: Baker, Dixie, Franklin, and Holmes.
I was interested, though, that in most of these counties Kerry got smoked worse than Dukakis did in '88, 8-10 points worse than the mighty D in each county but Franklin.
I looked at one other things just now. In the US House of Representatives races, two of these districts went for the democrat by 2:1. One went republican, and one election wasn't contested.
When I first fished around for numbers, I noticed that in each of these districts both the minimum wage and the abortion restriction passed.
Abortion restriction looked to be the best predictor of Bush margin in these counties.
I don't find that too surprising; what I find surprising is that Kerry did as well as he did statewide, given the number of people voting for the abortion restriction. Given that Kerry did do substantially better statewide than you'd expect if all the abortion votes (passes by 64% statewide) went to Bush, this reinforces the possibility of some weird trend-bucking in those four counties. Each is small, though, and this is why we use the word "trend... "
Alternately, you could have had something going on in the big counties that passed abortion restrictions but voted against Bush - you can argue that Bush should've done much better, except them damn democrat hackers was tryin' to tip the election to him. And they just plumb forgot to try anything funny up north.
It is possible there was some margin exagerration going on in these small counties, yes. And that similar "overtipping" of returns in favor of Bush would have been hard to see statewide.
You'd do it, if you could do it, with a list of the modem lines that dial into the county tabulation points across the state. You'd need to know what each county was using to tabulate, and you'd probably need an administrative access for the systems, to speed the process up.
I hope Bev Harris gets her FOIAs answered, and I hope she does look at the logfiles she's specifically requesting. Her PDFs of the logfiles from King County are Definitely Worth A Look. Logging appears to cease, but during the quiescent period, print jobs are getting done. And print jobs in that environment do issue log entries at other times.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/auditlog.PDF
and
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/resultspages.PDF look like a pretty convincing argument that the logs are hosed, at the very least. I'd be interested in what people with more experience reviewing database logs think.
The detail levels of her FOIA requests are great - she's asking for specific files from each of the vendors' systems, she looks to me to know what she needs as a minimum. I'd hope that any state vote auditor would grab a copy of the FOIA request from her and use it as a guide to look for things that smell bad on their system.
What's most bothersome is that it's unlikely that anyone will pay for a recount - requester pays for a recount that doesn't change outcome in a lot of jurisdictions, if the margin's wide enough that law doesn't require it to be done.
Journalists will never be able to do what they did in '00, which is to look over the paper trail for themselves and report back on what they find.
Someone in this thread was claiming that the companies only provided what they were asked for, and would delightedly provide paper if asked.
That's just not true. There has been extensive reporting on the fact that the companies in fact do not want to do paper, have tried to pretend that paperless is just as good as verifiable voting.
Public opinion at last seems to be shifting toward paper receipts and plenty of provisional paper ballots on hand for when the shiny machines break down.
The content on this page causes my a/v software to spawn an alert. A friend who's in a better-firewalled environment is not seeing his browser throwing an a/v alert.
What we're trying to decide right now is if the problem is at my end or at his end - is it that my a/v product sees things his does not, or that his firewall is protecting him from things mine is not?
My first step was to turn down all the bells and whistles in IE. I continue to see the payload try to get sucked over.
Thanks again to the team at Microsoft for providing us with such productive uses of our time.
To the person who writes "That line of thinking has caused thousands of hours of vintage TV programming to be lost forever" I can only say "oh, the humanity! I tremble with the loss to the ages to which follow!"
To the folks who point out that lifetime (or close to it) copyright is what some here think is okay, and that that's oh so European of us, I'm thinking this: I'd like to distinguish between copyrights accrued to human beings and corporate entities. In the case of a single human being, yes, I think that absolute control over publication should exist as long as does the person. Once the person is dead, or if the work was never generated by an individual to start with but by a subhuman entity such as Microsoft then yes, I can see not giving them creative control.
In current US law, this approach won't work; corporations are people and get the whole bill of rights, because the law is an ass and has been settled for more than 100 years on this point.
If it works in Europe, great. Go for it.
also, please note: I distinguish here between copyright and patent. In software, I realize, that's a way less clean distinction than in door hinges or sonnets.
In this particular case, I can't be sure who I like less, Kahle or Ashcroft. I know more about Ashcroft lately, so it'd probably be him, but man oh man do I dislike Kahle.
Please remember, his internet archive project was something he just decided to do because he could. When he first cut loose his spiders and started hoovering the nascent web, he made no effort to drum up consensus over what he could and could not inhale.
I see his arguments now as his hope to be able to break out, down the road, his archive of things from the early days, legally.
Fortunately for me, at the time I was attending a school with an asskicking legal department. I wrote the archive a note suggesting that they'd needed to tell more end-developers about their plans, and they wrote back and acted, in essence, as if I was telling Galileo that the Earth was the center of the Universe.
A bit back, I went and looked - and to my delight discovered that that entire university's student websites from the time had been pulled out of Kahle's archive. Not because of anything I'd done, I don't believe, but because it was a big school with a real legal department and they asserted copyright on their students' behalf.
And more power to them.
But I also know that that's only for now, it sounds as if he'd like to pull a google and do an ex post facto rule change on all of us who were working or fucking around on the net at the time. I suspect, that as with Dejanews and Google, he's hoping to make a buck out of bringing that long-dead shit back to life.
So, my problem is this: no one on earth could reasonably have expected Ashcroft to know any better. He's behaving pretty much as expected, rolling around in post-911 legislation happy like a pig in shit.
Kahle, on the other hand, is in a whole different ethical landscape. He could and should have started out being much more overt about his plans, and much less snippy with people who, shortly after he went live, heard about it a little too late and wrote him.
Let these Prada customers have their tags.
When the revolution comes, having one of the readers will be most useful - no inadvertent slaughtering of staff in the confusion, nossir.
Using high concentrations of the RFID tags as target designators would lead to a little collateral damage, of course. But you tend to get that when you're doing time on target against even the most carefully chosen sites.
Here's the difference:
Mossad gets the job done, fairly regularly. And they're not shy about admitting to it. They're less excited about admitting to their clusterfucks, like waltzing into a theater in Scandihoovia and machinegunning one of the patrons.
The CIA almost never gets the job done, and when they do, they absolutely refuse to admit to it, ever. So, they were able to rig 'free' elections across much of Europe just after WWII, and in Australia in the '70s. They don't admit to it.
They sponsored the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran nun-raping teams in the Olympics throughout the 80s but again preferred to do so anonymously.
Mostly, the CIA does things like let the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Pakistani/Indian nuclear standoff and the like take them utterly by surprise, and then explain how what they really need is more money so they can do a better job next time.
They get it, and pay folks like Safire to shill for them. He takes a tale he probably heard told about a successful Mossad operation against Iraq in the '90s, changes the names and locations and runs it in the Times and makes his boys look good.
Slashdot Mirror
You have apparently heard there's something called HIPAA. Good for you.
...
"Since he's a health care provider, the company is required to file their A/R electronically by HIPAA"
Why anyone thinks this is beyond me; why they'd be so foolish as to post it as a truth statement?
HIPAA does not just cover computery goodness. HIPAA also covers what staff say in public corridors. It covers medical records - paper or electronic. It covers FAX machines, for goodness' sakes.
It's possible that a large place with a lot of private-pay patients would indeed have AR and GL that would include HIPAA protected information. But that would be true whether the info was stored on paper, electronically, or by searing it in 6 point font onto the backsides of you and all of your spawn unto the 8th generation and keeping you chained in a malodorous pen out by the loading dock, periodically swilling you with waste from abscess drainages.
All of which would be fine ways to store the data, and the last might be an excellent way of speeding our fiscal audit. I'll have to look into the cost of bringing in a branding kit with movable typefaces.
"Conservatives stand for the ideas of the Founding Fathers"
Voting? Only for posessors of penises and property! Wooo! Slavery legal in every state! [Slavery, in fact, the norm for the ruling elite (Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mason, etc.)] Black folks? Worth three fifths of what I am.
Yes, indeed, the ideals of the Founders. Let's definitely fight hard to keep them intact - but also, let's be damned sure we admit to what the ideals were before we go flogging them as our patriotic advert.
When I started doing this with the various cracked OSX releases last year, it was primarily Because It Was There. Once I got it working, I was interested that things like MSoffice for Mac could install on teh platform, and that it was relatively speedy (for a two year old i845 based notebook, it was blazing, really.) For work I use win2k or winxp primarily, and linux where needed. Since I was doing all this on a laptop I use for work, I needed access to (at least) windows and win and lin. It works. I borked it bad when I tried upgrading to X.4.6, I think it was, and fat32 is a terrible thing to let OSX near in my experience - I lost a LOT of data to the Mac disk tool utility. Right now I'm far more interested in virtualization - cute as it is, the whole 'and-then-you-reboot-to-do-such-and-such" is stupid. And I can sell my boss on being interested in virtualization as a business thing; we're moving that into production soon. I cannot sell anyone on triple booting as useful, though my girlfriend likes to brag that I sorted it out when she's trying to get me geekwork in the town she lives in. By contrast, vmware's a clean build, a simple install and it fookin' works. No reboot needed. And although some here are excited about how standard the Mac platform is, well, the VMWare platform can easily be standardized, too : )
"I bet that if you took the time to look at 96, 92, etc, you'd see the same trend."
. ht ml.
You would indeed. I went as far back as '88 for four counties, pulling county-by-county data from http://www.uselectionatlas.org/ I looked at the four counties highlighted in the Common Dreams piece: Baker, Dixie, Franklin, and Holmes.
I was interested, though, that in most of these counties Kerry got smoked worse than Dukakis did in '88, 8-10 points worse than the mighty D in each county but Franklin.
I looked at one other things just now. In the US House of Representatives races, two of these districts went for the democrat by 2:1. One went republican, and one election wasn't contested.
When I first fished around for numbers, I noticed that in each of these districts both the minimum wage and the abortion restriction passed.
Abortion restriction looked to be the best predictor of Bush margin in these counties.
I don't find that too surprising; what I find surprising is that Kerry did as well as he did statewide, given the number of people voting for the abortion restriction. Given that Kerry did do substantially better statewide than you'd expect if all the abortion votes (passes by 64% statewide) went to Bush, this reinforces the possibility of some weird trend-bucking in those four counties. Each is small, though, and this is why we use the word "trend... "
Alternately, you could have had something going on in the big counties that passed abortion restrictions but voted against Bush - you can argue that Bush should've done much better, except them damn democrat hackers was tryin' to tip the election to him. And they just plumb forgot to try anything funny up north.
It is possible there was some margin exagerration going on in these small counties, yes. And that similar "overtipping" of returns in favor of Bush would have been hard to see statewide.
You'd do it, if you could do it, with a list of the modem lines that dial into the county tabulation points across the state. You'd need to know what each county was using to tabulate, and you'd probably need an administrative access for the systems, to speed the process up.
I hope Bev Harris gets her FOIAs answered, and I hope she does look at the logfiles she's specifically requesting. Her PDFs of the logfiles from King County are Definitely Worth A Look. Logging appears to cease, but during the quiescent period, print jobs are getting done. And print jobs in that environment do issue log entries at other times.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/auditlog.PDF
and
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/resultspages.PDF
look like a pretty convincing argument that the logs are hosed, at the very least. I'd be interested in what people with more experience reviewing database logs think.
The detail levels of her FOIA requests are great - she's asking for specific files from each of the vendors' systems, she looks to me to know what she needs as a minimum. I'd hope that any state vote auditor would grab a copy of the FOIA request from her and use it as a guide to look for things that smell bad on their system.
What's most bothersome is that it's unlikely that anyone will pay for a recount - requester pays for a recount that doesn't change outcome in a lot of jurisdictions, if the margin's wide enough that law doesn't require it to be done.
Journalists will never be able to do what they did in '00, which is to look over the paper trail for themselves and report back on what they find.
Someone in this thread was claiming that the companies only provided what they were asked for, and would delightedly provide paper if asked.
That's just not true. There has been extensive reporting on the fact that the companies in fact do not want to do paper, have tried to pretend that paperless is just as good as verifiable voting.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,60864,00
Public opinion at last seems to be shifting toward paper receipts and plenty of provisional paper ballots on hand for when the shiny machines break down.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa fe=active&q=cross-zone+scripting+exploit+test+tool
The content on this page causes my a/v software to spawn an alert. A friend who's in a better-firewalled environment is not seeing his browser throwing an a/v alert.
What we're trying to decide right now is if the problem is at my end or at his end - is it that my a/v product sees things his does not, or that his firewall is protecting him from things mine is not?
My first step was to turn down all the bells and whistles in IE. I continue to see the payload try to get sucked over.
Thanks again to the team at Microsoft for providing us with such productive uses of our time.
To the person who writes "That line of thinking has caused thousands of hours of vintage TV programming to be lost forever" I can only say "oh, the humanity! I tremble with the loss to the ages to which follow!" To the folks who point out that lifetime (or close to it) copyright is what some here think is okay, and that that's oh so European of us, I'm thinking this: I'd like to distinguish between copyrights accrued to human beings and corporate entities. In the case of a single human being, yes, I think that absolute control over publication should exist as long as does the person. Once the person is dead, or if the work was never generated by an individual to start with but by a subhuman entity such as Microsoft then yes, I can see not giving them creative control. In current US law, this approach won't work; corporations are people and get the whole bill of rights, because the law is an ass and has been settled for more than 100 years on this point. If it works in Europe, great. Go for it. also, please note: I distinguish here between copyright and patent. In software, I realize, that's a way less clean distinction than in door hinges or sonnets. In this particular case, I can't be sure who I like less, Kahle or Ashcroft. I know more about Ashcroft lately, so it'd probably be him, but man oh man do I dislike Kahle. Please remember, his internet archive project was something he just decided to do because he could. When he first cut loose his spiders and started hoovering the nascent web, he made no effort to drum up consensus over what he could and could not inhale. I see his arguments now as his hope to be able to break out, down the road, his archive of things from the early days, legally. Fortunately for me, at the time I was attending a school with an asskicking legal department. I wrote the archive a note suggesting that they'd needed to tell more end-developers about their plans, and they wrote back and acted, in essence, as if I was telling Galileo that the Earth was the center of the Universe. A bit back, I went and looked - and to my delight discovered that that entire university's student websites from the time had been pulled out of Kahle's archive. Not because of anything I'd done, I don't believe, but because it was a big school with a real legal department and they asserted copyright on their students' behalf. And more power to them. But I also know that that's only for now, it sounds as if he'd like to pull a google and do an ex post facto rule change on all of us who were working or fucking around on the net at the time. I suspect, that as with Dejanews and Google, he's hoping to make a buck out of bringing that long-dead shit back to life. So, my problem is this: no one on earth could reasonably have expected Ashcroft to know any better. He's behaving pretty much as expected, rolling around in post-911 legislation happy like a pig in shit. Kahle, on the other hand, is in a whole different ethical landscape. He could and should have started out being much more overt about his plans, and much less snippy with people who, shortly after he went live, heard about it a little too late and wrote him.
Let these Prada customers have their tags. When the revolution comes, having one of the readers will be most useful - no inadvertent slaughtering of staff in the confusion, nossir. Using high concentrations of the RFID tags as target designators would lead to a little collateral damage, of course. But you tend to get that when you're doing time on target against even the most carefully chosen sites.
Here's the difference: Mossad gets the job done, fairly regularly. And they're not shy about admitting to it. They're less excited about admitting to their clusterfucks, like waltzing into a theater in Scandihoovia and machinegunning one of the patrons. The CIA almost never gets the job done, and when they do, they absolutely refuse to admit to it, ever. So, they were able to rig 'free' elections across much of Europe just after WWII, and in Australia in the '70s. They don't admit to it. They sponsored the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran nun-raping teams in the Olympics throughout the 80s but again preferred to do so anonymously. Mostly, the CIA does things like let the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Pakistani/Indian nuclear standoff and the like take them utterly by surprise, and then explain how what they really need is more money so they can do a better job next time. They get it, and pay folks like Safire to shill for them. He takes a tale he probably heard told about a successful Mossad operation against Iraq in the '90s, changes the names and locations and runs it in the Times and makes his boys look good.