And this is the real point. 911 is OK for individual emergencies - as a mechanism to deal with massive problems, it's never going to work. Landline or wireless. Verizon should indeed look at how their system responded to the stress but society needs to get a clue - you can't always call daddy and have them pull your unprepared ass out of the ice. Yes, it can be a real problem for older / younger / disadvantaged folks but as a number of posters have demonstrating, survival in place isn't all that hard. The biggest issue is realizing that you might have to do it BEFORE the problem starts.
We could all come up with government lead systems for this sort of thing, but it rankles me to think that we're creating a society that absolutely has to have big brother deal with damned near everything. Everything tends to get expensive after a while...
You just might want to do the reboot at off-peak hours.
As someone who tends to work during 'off-peak' hours, I have a special room in Hell just expressly reserved for admins like you (and my admins who apparently are your soul mates). Just thought I'd mention this. You've been warned.
I know Mac is a magic word and answer to world peace and all. And the song is cute.
But really, do they have a clue? Did the guy try to open up a Macbook? It's worse than his HP. The official Apple answer to cleaning the fan is to buy a new computer:)
Right. That's why there are dozens of posts here (and hundreds on previous threads, we've really attacked this poor little meme before on many an occasion) discussing stripping MacBooks. Yes, you have to do it in a sequence. No, you can't just start unscrewing things until the correct module falls out of the bottom (typical Dell / HP dis assembly protocol). It's not hard. There are even instructional videos. Get over it.
If somebody would force it down the manufacturers' throats I would be happy.:)
Commie. Socialist. Your mother wears army boots.
Now that I've insulted you, let me just point you to the error in your thinking. You WANT "somebody" (a governmental agency, perhaps) to first figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only, that program? You want a COMMITTEE of a GOVERNMENTAL agency to figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only that, program? You want a some LOBBYIST talking to a COMMITTEE of a GOVERNMENTAL agency to figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only that, program?
Like any of us actually read warnings like that. If you're bothered by scary warnings and labels, be sure to stay the hell away from a new ladder. You'll get apoplexy before the first step.
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at, but you do realize that MacBooks are easy to upgrade. It's not any harder than doing it on POS Dell machines. Yes, you have to go to Mac Fixit to see just how it comes apart instead of randomly attacking screws on the bottom of the case, but it's not difficult at all.
A person just does not last very long in 40 degree water.
I'd be surprised if in the next 20 years it doesn't become common for a cruise ship to have one or two of these just in case.
A good immersion suit can keep you alive for several hours, at least. There are documented survival times of over 24 hours at around 40 degrees F.
Cruise ships are more likely to have UAVs designed to watch for terrorist / pirate activity rather than purely personnel rescue. I've heard of (but not seen) this being actively researched. Having a humanitarian aspect might make them more palatable.
It's a bit more interesting than that. This guy had been outed two years ago. The Federal government, instead of just admitting it got screwed, decided to toss the whole incident under the rug and declare it a secret. This is even more outrageous than the initial fraud and incompetence. Using secrecy as an excuse for incompetence is nothing new, however it is such a serious issue that it needs to be brought up every time it's discovered.
You're right. America has a bad case of corporate ADHD. We need to cut out the sugar, turn off our computers and TVs, drop a couple tabs of Ritalin and solve one war at a time. We can call it Focus America! Now we just need a Focus Czar.
I am so interested in putting a 46 inch screen in my book bag. Or on my lap. Or in my bed. If you think that is a tablet substitute, I'd hate to see what your desktop looks like.
Right. Windows 7 Home Premium on a touchscreen. Works as well as all of those XP tablets that have taken the market by storm over the last decade.
You just made an Apple to WIndows comparison. They're different machines going for different markets. It's wonderful that you like the Lenovo but the big deal is that Apple figured out how to make something else entirely.
I generally find the low unexcused absence threshold in the U.S. to be overboard, by an order of magnitude at least, or maybe two. When I was in 11th grade of high school in Poland, I had 51% attendance rate. You'd get to repeat the grade if it dropped to 50% or less. That was fair, IMHO. I don't think I turned out all that bad, nor do I think I missed out on much.
Counterpoint - you're posting on Slashdot as opposed to doing something with your life.
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.
Not economic, eh? I suppose you can make any economic argument up and buttress it with facts and graphs and sell it to somebody, but if fails the sanity test. Even China who has the closest thing to a command economy on the planet is hell bent on running up coal and nuclear for the short term. We've barely started to bring 300 MW concentrated solar plants on line, much less create 50,000 of them, hydro is pretty much tapped out in most places and is a risky bet when you factor in climate change (hard to move the stupid things if rainfall predictions are wrong). Tidal and mwave are beta technologies at best and damned expensive ones at that. In the event that the authors of the study have missed it, we're in the midst of a generation changing recession with most of the first world countries who would putatively bankroll this non economic problem having major problems making next month's payroll.
And even if the supposition is correct - even if it's 'only social and political' - how the hell do you plan on solving the most intractable issues that the human race has managed to come up with - that of getting along with each other? Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies (that's Steve Job's department).
Any widely deployed system would also support dedicated PDA type units for practically nothing.
And my 80 year old mother, who can't remember much at all is supposed to take the bus back home when she forgets her iPad? Nope, not happening in the real world.
2. I forgot my smartphone, do I have to go back home to get it?
Yes. If you forget your wallet you have to go back home and get it too.
No, not at all. I don't necessarily need anything to show up at the doctors' office. The feds make me show ID for the ER but that's their insanity showing. So, in your magic world, we keep some of the most private information we have, our medical history, on our persons at all times? Again, not in the real world.
3. The insurance company needs to drop a bill, do they text message you to get the data?
Yes, but only if you envision health insurance working exactly the way it does today. For example, a record of services rendered could be transmitted to the insurance company at point of sale with 3 parties required - doctors office, patient and insurance company.
And you're going to fund an enormous initiative to force hospitals and doctors to be able to drop bills as the patient wanders off, not twelve times in the next two weeks like they do now. I personally have no interest in getting texts every couple of days for two weeks after my colonoscopy, thank you very much.
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
Yes.
Right. And if you refuse, or turn your phone off, the whole survey team has to wait for you to wake up?
5. Oops, my smartphone got squashed when I got run over by a bus and they need my data ASAP, now what do I do?
No different than what happens today when they can't call up your doctor and get something faxed over.
No, in a decent EMR world (not that we have one now), it's in there. We just punch it up. From what I understand about your system, the data is held in the smartphone which has just been converted to rubble in this particular scenario.
6. Oops, the cell phones are down again.
See #5. But this is scenario is even sillier because if we have that level of infrastructure failure, medical records are not going to be a priority,
Hah. Cell phones routinely fail where I live and yet the rest of our little world wanders on.
No, this makes no sense at all. People don't WANT to manage their information. Most people CAN'T manage their information.
You suffer from a failure of imagination. Unable to conceive of a system that HELPS people to manage their information you can only see the crap that we have now. Its like someone who has only driven stick-shift completely dismissing the utility of an automatic transmission in favor of hiring a taxi.
And you suffer from an overactive imagination. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but your system has no possible way of working in any feasible way. It would take enormous amounts of money and social change merely to put the individual completely in charge of something they don't want to be completely in charge of. The system as it stands is far from perfect and really does need to be improved if digitalized medical records are going to do much useful, and individuals should indeed take more of an interest in how the data is used. But this level of control is simply not feasible.
For example, use the patient's smartphone to keep their records (with automated backups of the data as an encrypted blob). If a doctor needs the info, he can request it via a secured version of a text message. Make it a closed system so that when the patient responds to the request, he can set an expiration date for the copy that the doctor gets. Meanwhile the records on the phone are encrypted too prevent loss of the phone exposing records.
1. I don't have a smartphone.
2. I forgot my smartphone, do I have to go back home to get it?
3. The insurance company needs to drop a bill, do they text message you to get the data?
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
5. Oops, my smartphone got squashed when I got run over by a bus and they need my data ASAP, now what do I do?
6. Oops, the cell phones are down again.
No, this makes no sense at all. People don't WANT to manage their information. Most people CAN'T manage their information.
excellent tool for neutering storage. build up a roaring fire with about 6 inches of coals, and then toss the hard disk into it. retrieve in morning, dump in trash. done.
And now, data recovery experts announced they were able to salvage scientific data from a charred hard drive.
Said hard drive deorbited on the Columbia.
What NASA sent to Kroll Ontrack was almost unrecognizable as a hard drive. Jon Edwards, a senior clean room engineer at the company said that the circuit board on the drive was burned beyond recognition and that all its components had fallen off. Every piece of plastic on the 400 MB Seagate hard drive had melted, and the chips were burned.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is the real point. 911 is OK for individual emergencies - as a mechanism to deal with massive problems, it's never going to work. Landline or wireless. Verizon should indeed look at how their system responded to the stress but society needs to get a clue - you can't always call daddy and have them pull your unprepared ass out of the ice. Yes, it can be a real problem for older / younger / disadvantaged folks but as a number of posters have demonstrating, survival in place isn't all that hard. The biggest issue is realizing that you might have to do it BEFORE the problem starts.
We could all come up with government lead systems for this sort of thing, but it rankles me to think that we're creating a society that absolutely has to have big brother deal with damned near everything. Everything tends to get expensive after a while...
Parody is protected, so just make Tolkin, Toking, and turn him into an old doobie smoking proto-hippie.
Been There. Done That.
OOh. +1 Evil Geek trivia points
You just might want to do the reboot at off-peak hours.
As someone who tends to work during 'off-peak' hours, I have a special room in Hell just expressly reserved for admins like you (and my admins who apparently are your soul mates). Just thought I'd mention this. You've been warned.
i'm really tired of this semi-technical stuff on slashdot that seems aimed at semi-competent manager-types.
Well, there's Digg for totally non technical stuff aimed at completely incompetent manager types. Your choice.
I know Mac is a magic word and answer to world peace and all. And the song is cute.
But really, do they have a clue? Did the guy try to open up a Macbook? It's worse than his HP. The official Apple answer to cleaning the fan is to buy a new computer :)
Right. That's why there are dozens of posts here (and hundreds on previous threads, we've really attacked this poor little meme before on many an occasion) discussing stripping MacBooks. Yes, you have to do it in a sequence. No, you can't just start unscrewing things until the correct module falls out of the bottom (typical Dell / HP dis assembly protocol). It's not hard. There are even instructional videos. Get over it.
If somebody would force it down the manufacturers' throats I would be happy. :)
Commie. Socialist. Your mother wears army boots.
Now that I've insulted you, let me just point you to the error in your thinking. You WANT "somebody" (a governmental agency, perhaps) to first figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only, that program? You want a COMMITTEE of a GOVERNMENTAL agency to figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only that, program? You want a some LOBBYIST talking to a COMMITTEE of a GOVERNMENTAL agency to figure out what's 'cheaper and more flexible' and then force everyone to follow that, and only that, program?
May God have mercy on your soul.
Like any of us actually read warnings like that. If you're bothered by scary warnings and labels, be sure to stay the hell away from a new ladder. You'll get apoplexy before the first step.
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at, but you do realize that MacBooks are easy to upgrade. It's not any harder than doing it on POS Dell machines. Yes, you have to go to Mac Fixit to see just how it comes apart instead of randomly attacking screws on the bottom of the case, but it's not difficult at all.
... the majority of 3D gamers are moving to consoles and cellphones anyway.
I'm not sure what it is, but something seems very, very wrong with this statement.
A person just does not last very long in 40 degree water.
I'd be surprised if in the next 20 years it doesn't become common for a cruise ship to have one or two of these just in case.
A good immersion suit can keep you alive for several hours, at least. There are documented survival times of over 24 hours at around 40 degrees F.
Cruise ships are more likely to have UAVs designed to watch for terrorist / pirate activity rather than purely personnel rescue. I've heard of (but not seen) this being actively researched. Having a humanitarian aspect might make them more palatable.
I realize this is winter..but must we go on with the repeats?"
It's a bit more interesting than that. This guy had been outed two years ago. The Federal government, instead of just admitting it got screwed, decided to toss the whole incident under the rug and declare it a secret. This is even more outrageous than the initial fraud and incompetence. Using secrecy as an excuse for incompetence is nothing new, however it is such a serious issue that it needs to be brought up every time it's discovered.
The poor little FBI is having trouble spying on people (court order or not). Let's all show our love for them and help them out!
If they ask nicely, they can have my Capn Crunch secret decoder ring. But they have to be nice about it.
Oh cry me a river!
You'll need an Environmental Impact Statement before you can do that, citizen.
You're right. America has a bad case of corporate ADHD. We need to cut out the sugar, turn off our computers and TVs, drop a couple tabs of Ritalin and solve one war at a time. We can call it Focus America! Now we just need a Focus Czar.
I think I will give them this informational video as an example prior art
Maybe they can get the taxpayers to front a trip to England for 'research'.
I am so interested in putting a 46 inch screen in my book bag. Or on my lap. Or in my bed. If you think that is a tablet substitute, I'd hate to see what your desktop looks like.
Right. Windows 7 Home Premium on a touchscreen. Works as well as all of those XP tablets that have taken the market by storm over the last decade.
You just made an Apple to WIndows comparison. They're different machines going for different markets. It's wonderful that you like the Lenovo but the big deal is that Apple figured out how to make something else entirely.
I generally find the low unexcused absence threshold in the U.S. to be overboard, by an order of magnitude at least, or maybe two. When I was in 11th grade of high school in Poland, I had 51% attendance rate. You'd get to repeat the grade if it dropped to 50% or less. That was fair, IMHO. I don't think I turned out all that bad, nor do I think I missed out on much.
Counterpoint - you're posting on Slashdot as opposed to doing something with your life.
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.
Not economic, eh? I suppose you can make any economic argument up and buttress it with facts and graphs and sell it to somebody, but if fails the sanity test. Even China who has the closest thing to a command economy on the planet is hell bent on running up coal and nuclear for the short term. We've barely started to bring 300 MW concentrated solar plants on line, much less create 50,000 of them, hydro is pretty much tapped out in most places and is a risky bet when you factor in climate change (hard to move the stupid things if rainfall predictions are wrong). Tidal and mwave are beta technologies at best and damned expensive ones at that. In the event that the authors of the study have missed it, we're in the midst of a generation changing recession with most of the first world countries who would putatively bankroll this non economic problem having major problems making next month's payroll.
And even if the supposition is correct - even if it's 'only social and political' - how the hell do you plan on solving the most intractable issues that the human race has managed to come up with - that of getting along with each other? Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies (that's Steve Job's department).
Some people really need to go outside sometimes.
1. I don't have a smartphone.
Any widely deployed system would also support dedicated PDA type units for practically nothing.
And my 80 year old mother, who can't remember much at all is supposed to take the bus back home when she forgets her iPad? Nope, not happening in the real world.
2. I forgot my smartphone, do I have to go back home to get it?
Yes. If you forget your wallet you have to go back home and get it too.
No, not at all. I don't necessarily need anything to show up at the doctors' office. The feds make me show ID for the ER but that's their insanity showing. So, in your magic world, we keep some of the most private information we have, our medical history, on our persons at all times? Again, not in the real world.
3. The insurance company needs to drop a bill, do they text message you to get the data?
Yes, but only if you envision health insurance working exactly the way it does today. For example, a record of services rendered could be transmitted to the insurance company at point of sale with 3 parties required - doctors office, patient and insurance company.
And you're going to fund an enormous initiative to force hospitals and doctors to be able to drop bills as the patient wanders off, not twelve times in the next two weeks like they do now. I personally have no interest in getting texts every couple of days for two weeks after my colonoscopy, thank you very much.
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
Yes.
Right. And if you refuse, or turn your phone off, the whole survey team has to wait for you to wake up?
5. Oops, my smartphone got squashed when I got run over by a bus and they need my data ASAP, now what do I do?
No different than what happens today when they can't call up your doctor and get something faxed over.
No, in a decent EMR world (not that we have one now), it's in there. We just punch it up. From what I understand about your system, the data is held in the smartphone which has just been converted to rubble in this particular scenario.
6. Oops, the cell phones are down again.
See #5. But this is scenario is even sillier because if we have that level of infrastructure failure, medical records are not going to be a priority,
Hah. Cell phones routinely fail where I live and yet the rest of our little world wanders on.
No, this makes no sense at all. People don't WANT to manage their information. Most people CAN'T manage their information.
You suffer from a failure of imagination. Unable to conceive of a system that HELPS people to manage their information you can only see the crap that we have now. Its like someone who has only driven stick-shift completely dismissing the utility of an automatic transmission in favor of hiring a taxi.
And you suffer from an overactive imagination. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but your system has no possible way of working in any feasible way. It would take enormous amounts of money and social change merely to put the individual completely in charge of something they don't want to be completely in charge of. The system as it stands is far from perfect and really does need to be improved if digitalized medical records are going to do much useful, and individuals should indeed take more of an interest in how the data is used. But this level of control is simply not feasible.
For example, use the patient's smartphone to keep their records (with automated backups of the data as an encrypted blob). If a doctor needs the info, he can request it via a secured version of a text message. Make it a closed system so that when the patient responds to the request, he can set an expiration date for the copy that the doctor gets. Meanwhile the records on the phone are encrypted too prevent loss of the phone exposing records.
1. I don't have a smartphone.
2. I forgot my smartphone, do I have to go back home to get it?
3. The insurance company needs to drop a bill, do they text message you to get the data?
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
5. Oops, my smartphone got squashed when I got run over by a bus and they need my data ASAP, now what do I do?
6. Oops, the cell phones are down again.
No, this makes no sense at all. People don't WANT to manage their information. Most people CAN'T manage their information.
I do not think this word means what you think it means.
That's OK, the entire article doesn't mean what the reporter thought it meant.
excellent tool for neutering storage. build up a roaring fire with about 6 inches of coals, and then toss the hard disk into it. retrieve in morning, dump in trash. done.
Don't be so sure of that.
And now, data recovery experts announced they were able to salvage scientific data from a charred hard drive.
Said hard drive deorbited on the Columbia.
What NASA sent to Kroll Ontrack was almost unrecognizable as a hard drive. Jon Edwards, a senior clean room engineer at the company said that the circuit board on the drive was burned beyond recognition and that all its components had fallen off. Every piece of plastic on the 400 MB Seagate hard drive had melted, and the chips were burned.
It's the only way to be sure.