Because Google wants a platform running all of it's applications in a Google branded environment that google controls. This isn't some altruistic, give to the Linux community effort. This is a business move. And if it drives even more people to their sites, it sounds like a pretty good one.
For hiking, and boating it doesn't fit. But Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom have been rolling in piles of cash from the market of individuals who want turn by turn in their cars or as toys. It sounds like they are losing that market, and a big market it is. There will still exist the niche markets which existed before. Recreational motoring, and serious hiking, etc.
I was also referring to entrances to parking lots, etc. People do drive into these entry ways without looking, they approach them at 40+ mph and enter them quite quickly. Much more quickly than 5mph.
800 for a cheap used car + registration fees + car insurance (which tends to be very high in the places the less fortunate live) + maintenance + fuel. Suddenly that 200 dollar bike that requires a pittance to maintain looks a lot better than a couple thousand dollars a year.
Another issue is that the roads tend to be worse the closer you are to the side of the road. It's generally a problem where inadequate shoulders are built and the road begins to crumble at the edges, but it's common in most of the places I ride in Michigan. The net result is that I have to ride a foot or two out simply for stability.
People don't watch for cyclists on the road, they are even worse looking for cyclists riding across driveways. It's far more dangerous for the cyclist to ride on the sidewalk.
And I agree, this most heavily hits those at the bottom of the income scale who have no margin to spare and who have very tenuous travel as it is. It does not appear that any effort is being made to offset this cost for the lowest classes in the society.
Again, my point was more simply to point out that a sufficient tax would indeed change habits, I wasn't pointing out any of the side effects or correctness of such legislation.
Which opens Clear up to the ability to sell the data to a company who wants to perform the same function. It doesn't look like they can blindly sell it to anyone. It is still concerning that customers have no option or method to opt out of this. Maybe there are lawyers here who can confirm this, but I would suspect that any company buying this data would be bound by the same terms of the contract or would be forced to purge the data for all people on the list who did not agree to any new terms. This would limit the new company to using the data to provide a similar service, making this, possibly, not so bad as it sounds.
I wasn't supporting the legislation. I was responding to the GP who was implying that higher energy prices wouldn't change habits. Yes, a lot will be because people can't trim gas usage any further. But I think in a few years, if prices stayed that way, you'd see a shift in purchasing to more fuel efficient vehicles. But no where in any of my posts have I supported this legislation.
Note my qualifier about using taxes to do it. Something they currently do with cigarettes. The question will be how big of a ripple it will cause when everyone gets hit with this on something as important as transportation.
People are definitely affected by the price, it will just depend 1) on how much money people have, and 2) on how much of this surcharge the consumer sees. When gas climbed to 2-2.50 the consumer generally didn't change habits, such as driving those big SUVs. But when gas hit 4.00 last year, they definitely started to change tastes and habits. Surcharges do work, it just depends on how high of a surcharge, and whether the legislators want to try and use taxes to legislate morality. I think if they see the backlash from it, they'll strongly reconsider. The country has had a dramatic shift and isn't nearly so interested in the climate right now. They are very concerned about the economy and just need a couple lobby groups to start saying how this bill will slow economic recovery to start making congressmen really nervous about adding their vote.
Unfortunately, because of lack of standards, while those systems do communicate, it makes it very difficult to get an accurate snapshot of a patients stay. I work with EMR systems, which, at this point is a document imaging system. It means exporting a patients history is not much more than a print or a fax, paper, or digital paper doesn't have the utility of actual digital data. The ability to receive vitals on admissions or discharge, etc. To receive a digital version of all medications administered or prescribed. Anyone receiving records needs to plow through the paper to find that. That is an inefficiency.
That said, I can't imagine the disaster of trying to implement a goliath system to run it all.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
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· Score: 1
Add in two more issues, which are the incredible amount of power any given, technophobe doctor wields in making technology decisions, and the IT systems they breed. Doctor's control a great deal of the decisions in any hospital for the reasons mentioned by the parent.
While administrators are more likely to be aware of the long-term benefits, there is generally little they can do when doctors threaten that babies will die if doctors have to change their ways.
As a result, an industry of medical technology providers have popped up with people holding medical backgrounds running them and making decisions. These people with medical backgrounds give hospital decision makers warm fuzzy feelings, because they think they are very special and their problems aren't even remotely similar and are orders of magnitude more complex than similar functions in the business world. It turns out most of the software I've seen from these boutique health technology software firms are several years behind anything being developed for business functions and considerably less polished.
It's the ego of being special because it's medical that holds many things back.
Except that a healthy part of Social Security and Medicare are covered by separate taxes. Take the operating budget on it's own and start looking at things like 250 billion dollars paid on interest on debt. For comparison, that's almost half of the defense spending. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007
Michigan is in the same situation. We've had declining tax revenues for a long time, and have progressively added wonderful taxes like the recent service tax and the dreaded small business tax that discourage entrepreneurs in a state that is bleeding jobs from large businesses. And rather than slash services that were propped up by unsustainably high income from the big three during the steady decline, they raised taxes, and are now in the position of having to make enormous cuts at once, rather than slow budget balancing throughout.
The funny bit is that they don't much mention anything about IT. It's almost all about the environment. Alaska has moose, and Syracuse gets too much snow, and Detroit is Detroit, etc, ad nauseum.
This is reproduced hearsay, so please take it for what it's worth. But I've heard that the education system in most of India focuses on memorization. So the person who receives a request to make that firewall change needed to have been taught exactly how to do that firewall change, rather than understanding the basic concepts of how the system works and where to get information when one doesn't know how to do something.
But it looks like he wants to hire someone as an entry-level person at entry-level wages i.e. no real-world experience except, perhaps, some hobby experience.
It's a two-fold problem. The public sectors have an incentive to show higher performance on whatever metric is being thrown at them. Generally standardized tests, and scores, etc. They shoot to meet these requirements to make parents feel better about little Johnny, because every little Johnny deserves to have a degree, even if he is a twit. The private or semi-public schools (like most of the public universities in the US) are competing to become big. They all want to be big schools with high enrollment. And they act like any other business, they try to attract as many students as they can handle. And if they can't attract the best and the brightest, they'll attract the next level down and dumb down the coursework.
And CS programs aren't meant to train people how to be developers. They are taught by people (generally) who study the theory and academic ideas of computer science. Most programs I've seen don't have classes in development life cycles, etc. They aren't meant for that. For better or worse...
Two quick notes. First, the US education system is generally geared toward the academic and theoretical aspects of computers. A computer science major should be able to answer most of those questions, but try and get them to develop things to production standards from start to finish, etc, and they won't know how. And yes, I understand that CS != coding. But there really don't exist many B.A./B.S. programs for learning how to code, i.e. trade school. Most of those people are going to need to come in and be highly supervised and taken under a wing for a while. But I think you'll find that the good ones will pick it up quickly and be able to perform far advanced tasks in short order.
Second, as mentioned elsewhere I.S. programs != development even more so than C.S. programs in my experience.
Note that the cases cited were unusually aggressive forms of prostate cancer and had a high chance of mortality. So while it may be a very good idea to take the wait and see approach to many kinds of prostate cancer, there is new hope for people with life-threatening, aggressive prostate cancer. Also, possibly hope for similar applications in other cancers that aren't nearly so slow moving.
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Because Google wants a platform running all of it's applications in a Google branded environment that google controls. This isn't some altruistic, give to the Linux community effort. This is a business move. And if it drives even more people to their sites, it sounds like a pretty good one.
I may be mistaken, but the mapping software on my blackberry will use a location from a tower to get an initial location until it can get a sat lock.
For hiking, and boating it doesn't fit. But Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom have been rolling in piles of cash from the market of individuals who want turn by turn in their cars or as toys. It sounds like they are losing that market, and a big market it is. There will still exist the niche markets which existed before. Recreational motoring, and serious hiking, etc.
I was also referring to entrances to parking lots, etc. People do drive into these entry ways without looking, they approach them at 40+ mph and enter them quite quickly. Much more quickly than 5mph.
800 for a cheap used car + registration fees + car insurance (which tends to be very high in the places the less fortunate live) + maintenance + fuel. Suddenly that 200 dollar bike that requires a pittance to maintain looks a lot better than a couple thousand dollars a year.
Another issue is that the roads tend to be worse the closer you are to the side of the road. It's generally a problem where inadequate shoulders are built and the road begins to crumble at the edges, but it's common in most of the places I ride in Michigan. The net result is that I have to ride a foot or two out simply for stability.
People don't watch for cyclists on the road, they are even worse looking for cyclists riding across driveways. It's far more dangerous for the cyclist to ride on the sidewalk.
And those people are wrong.
And I agree, this most heavily hits those at the bottom of the income scale who have no margin to spare and who have very tenuous travel as it is. It does not appear that any effort is being made to offset this cost for the lowest classes in the society.
Again, my point was more simply to point out that a sufficient tax would indeed change habits, I wasn't pointing out any of the side effects or correctness of such legislation.
Which opens Clear up to the ability to sell the data to a company who wants to perform the same function. It doesn't look like they can blindly sell it to anyone. It is still concerning that customers have no option or method to opt out of this. Maybe there are lawyers here who can confirm this, but I would suspect that any company buying this data would be bound by the same terms of the contract or would be forced to purge the data for all people on the list who did not agree to any new terms. This would limit the new company to using the data to provide a similar service, making this, possibly, not so bad as it sounds.
I wasn't supporting the legislation. I was responding to the GP who was implying that higher energy prices wouldn't change habits. Yes, a lot will be because people can't trim gas usage any further. But I think in a few years, if prices stayed that way, you'd see a shift in purchasing to more fuel efficient vehicles. But no where in any of my posts have I supported this legislation.
Note my qualifier about using taxes to do it. Something they currently do with cigarettes. The question will be how big of a ripple it will cause when everyone gets hit with this on something as important as transportation.
People are definitely affected by the price, it will just depend 1) on how much money people have, and 2) on how much of this surcharge the consumer sees. When gas climbed to 2-2.50 the consumer generally didn't change habits, such as driving those big SUVs. But when gas hit 4.00 last year, they definitely started to change tastes and habits. Surcharges do work, it just depends on how high of a surcharge, and whether the legislators want to try and use taxes to legislate morality. I think if they see the backlash from it, they'll strongly reconsider. The country has had a dramatic shift and isn't nearly so interested in the climate right now. They are very concerned about the economy and just need a couple lobby groups to start saying how this bill will slow economic recovery to start making congressmen really nervous about adding their vote.
Unfortunately, because of lack of standards, while those systems do communicate, it makes it very difficult to get an accurate snapshot of a patients stay. I work with EMR systems, which, at this point is a document imaging system. It means exporting a patients history is not much more than a print or a fax, paper, or digital paper doesn't have the utility of actual digital data. The ability to receive vitals on admissions or discharge, etc. To receive a digital version of all medications administered or prescribed. Anyone receiving records needs to plow through the paper to find that. That is an inefficiency.
That said, I can't imagine the disaster of trying to implement a goliath system to run it all.
While administrators are more likely to be aware of the long-term benefits, there is generally little they can do when doctors threaten that babies will die if doctors have to change their ways.
As a result, an industry of medical technology providers have popped up with people holding medical backgrounds running them and making decisions. These people with medical backgrounds give hospital decision makers warm fuzzy feelings, because they think they are very special and their problems aren't even remotely similar and are orders of magnitude more complex than similar functions in the business world. It turns out most of the software I've seen from these boutique health technology software firms are several years behind anything being developed for business functions and considerably less polished.
It's the ego of being special because it's medical that holds many things back.
Except that a healthy part of Social Security and Medicare are covered by separate taxes. Take the operating budget on it's own and start looking at things like 250 billion dollars paid on interest on debt. For comparison, that's almost half of the defense spending. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007
Michigan is in the same situation. We've had declining tax revenues for a long time, and have progressively added wonderful taxes like the recent service tax and the dreaded small business tax that discourage entrepreneurs in a state that is bleeding jobs from large businesses. And rather than slash services that were propped up by unsustainably high income from the big three during the steady decline, they raised taxes, and are now in the position of having to make enormous cuts at once, rather than slow budget balancing throughout.
The funny bit is that they don't much mention anything about IT. It's almost all about the environment. Alaska has moose, and Syracuse gets too much snow, and Detroit is Detroit, etc, ad nauseum.
This is reproduced hearsay, so please take it for what it's worth. But I've heard that the education system in most of India focuses on memorization. So the person who receives a request to make that firewall change needed to have been taught exactly how to do that firewall change, rather than understanding the basic concepts of how the system works and where to get information when one doesn't know how to do something.
Entirely selfish request: Can you recommend a book that is more practical for budding CS students/future programmers?
But it looks like he wants to hire someone as an entry-level person at entry-level wages i.e. no real-world experience except, perhaps, some hobby experience.
It's a two-fold problem. The public sectors have an incentive to show higher performance on whatever metric is being thrown at them. Generally standardized tests, and scores, etc. They shoot to meet these requirements to make parents feel better about little Johnny, because every little Johnny deserves to have a degree, even if he is a twit. The private or semi-public schools (like most of the public universities in the US) are competing to become big. They all want to be big schools with high enrollment. And they act like any other business, they try to attract as many students as they can handle. And if they can't attract the best and the brightest, they'll attract the next level down and dumb down the coursework.
And CS programs aren't meant to train people how to be developers. They are taught by people (generally) who study the theory and academic ideas of computer science. Most programs I've seen don't have classes in development life cycles, etc. They aren't meant for that. For better or worse...
Two quick notes. First, the US education system is generally geared toward the academic and theoretical aspects of computers. A computer science major should be able to answer most of those questions, but try and get them to develop things to production standards from start to finish, etc, and they won't know how. And yes, I understand that CS != coding. But there really don't exist many B.A./B.S. programs for learning how to code, i.e. trade school. Most of those people are going to need to come in and be highly supervised and taken under a wing for a while. But I think you'll find that the good ones will pick it up quickly and be able to perform far advanced tasks in short order.
Second, as mentioned elsewhere I.S. programs != development even more so than C.S. programs in my experience.
Note that the cases cited were unusually aggressive forms of prostate cancer and had a high chance of mortality. So while it may be a very good idea to take the wait and see approach to many kinds of prostate cancer, there is new hope for people with life-threatening, aggressive prostate cancer. Also, possibly hope for similar applications in other cancers that aren't nearly so slow moving.