There are a couple of non-obvious downsides to paying for Amazon Prime.
The first is that it can be a false economy - the expedited shipping is not free, you pay for it up front a year at a time. But since the extra cost is not accounted for in the price of each transaction it makes it harder to comparison shop - it becomes mentally easier to pay a higher price for an item at Amazon rather than purchase it elsewhere because the "total cost" appears to be lower.
The second downside is more insidious - since you've paid up front, Amazon can hold your money hostage. I saw one case a few years ago where Amazon had a dispute with a bunch of fatwallet types - Amazon shipped out 20-30 different products to a couple of hundred customers at a very low price and then changed their mind about the price after the orders were delivered. They told the buyers that they could either return the products for a refund or pay the difference in a second charge to their credit cards. Amazon even went so far as to process those second charges without getting permission.
The people who disputed the charge with their credit cards got the charges cancelled as they were never authorised in the first place. BUT Amazon then "froze" their accounts on their website. The people who had paid for Prime were SOL - sure they had the privilege of expedited shipping on any order for another ~10 months, they just couldn't place any orders. As far as I know, none of those people ever saw a penny of that Prime fee refunded.
While I wasn't financially affected by the incident, seeing how Amazon handled it, I was convinced to never pay Amazon for their Prime service. It isn't a stretch to see Amazon pulling the same stunt with the video streaming - you can stream any video you pay for, but they won't actually let you pay for anything.
FWIW, it also made me think twice about "deals" at Amazon - if they won't stand behind their own system's pricing info, how am I supposed to tell the difference between a promotional discount and a computer error?
I can understand ceasing to buy their media in the future, but why must you stop downloading it, too? You're not giving them any money, and in almost all cases, they don't even know you exist.
For the same reason that piracy frequently promotes sales rather than reduces them - the network effect. Even if you don't buy, if you like it and you talk about liking it, you've increased the chances that someone you've talked to, or that they've talked to, etc, will buy.
Also, if you boycott the bad guys, you are more likely to fill the void with products from the good guys. Its not just about tearing down the bad guys, its about building up the good guys.
Because people who like to download free music and movies make themselves feel comfortable by demonizing the industry they are ripping off to make themselves feel better. It's called cognitive dissonance. Accepting my explanation as valid would lead to uncomfortable feelings, so you'll see many posters make lame arguments about my very simple and valid explanation.
So, you are saying that demonising someone who holds a contrary opinion so as to make yourself feel better about ignoring any valid points they have is a kind of intellectual hypocrisy? That's very insightful. Where else have I seen someone do that? I can't quite put my finger on it.
Without copyright, we'd likely go back to a patronage system, and as a result we'd have significantly fewer books and movies.
The current system is essentially a patronage system where the patrons are large corps that control access to the market. Effectively no one makes a significant sum of money in movies/music/books/theater without the permission of a huge corporate patron.
No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
Of course that theory doesn't stand up to any sort of critical examination. Death of an author would put the work in the public domain so no one would gain an advantage over anyone else by killing the author.
If anything the current system of copyright encourages such murders because the heirs inherent the copyright so they do have incentive to murder. After all, killing a spouse/parent/relative for the inheritance is not unheard of in society. But who has ever heard of someone committing murder in order to cause their estate to be donated to charity?
By saying set an expiration date for a copy aren't you basically asking for DRM. And we all know how DRM cannot work in reality.
The situation with medical records is different from the piracy scenario.
Piracy wins because all it takes is for one person to extract a copy and then everybody can get a copy for free. With medical records and other personal information the biggest risk is not to any specific individual but rather systemic misuse. DRM plus policy can be effective against systemic misuse because (a) individual records are of limited value to big brother and big corp and (b) swiping a ton of records at once hard to do because there is no centralisation.
I've said it a couple of times already - we will never be able to completely prevent one-offs (e.g. someone will always be able to point a camera at a computer screen), but we can design the system such that the only real vulnerability is to one-offs. As it is now, the popular EMR systems are practically begging for systemic abuse and are just as vulnerable to one-offs too.
Simply put, failure rates that are ok for other bussiness are just not acceptable to live-or-death bussiness (do you want a nuclear central with the same rate of failures that the shop at the next corner?).
Are you familiar with the term "false equivalence?" You should be. You just made one.
So far the best anyone has been able to do is point out extremely rare, though possible, failure modes - but you seem to think that any alternative system is 100% failure-proof and that's just not the case. There will always be failures - the goal is that any new system reduce the rate of failures. Expecting a new system to eliminate failures is just magical thinking.
Your device is tamper-proof, and will always be tamper-proof. It is perfectly reliable for the purposes of determining who diagnosed who with what.
Unneccessary, that's what digital signatures are for.
You cannot receive healthcare without the PDA.
Obviously not true - tons of healthcare don't require access to medical records until after the fact - routine check-ups, sore throats, even broken bones don't generally require access in order to treat. The results only need to be logged which can be done well after the fact. So in the infrequent case where the PDA isn't immediately available, treatment is going to be at least as good as walking into an urgent care clinic today.
You're requiring millions of people, who may not even know how to operate a computer, to keep encrypted backups
Obviously not true - a closed system could easily automatically backup the encrypted blob over the network automatically and in the background.
EMR records are exchanged in real time.
In this hypothetical perfect world you have dreamt up, perhaps. The NEED for them be exchanged in real-time is far from common. In the cases where it is necessary, the PDA will be physically present - no need to even rely on the external network.
"Individual responsibility" has jack all to do with regulation, oversight, or accreditation. It is not possible to audit an organisation with this system, especially if there is no central record of which patients have been seen.
Keeping a list of patients is not even remotely like keeping a list of treatments and test results. Its not a significant risk for a hospital to keep such list and use it query patients when and if an audit is necessary.
# Your system will kill you if you have drug allergies and end up in an ER.
This is different from the current situation, how? Such events are exceptionally rare today and "my system" could still reduce them. Make the PDA take a thumb-print in order to get short-term access. Make the PDA a souped up MedicAlert bracelet and you are WAY ahead of today's game.
Billing insurance requires what procedures were done for which diagnoses, both of which live on that PDA. Doctors now depend on the patient to get paid.
Again something that can be handled via a 3-way handshake between doctor, patient and payer at the point of delivery.
Carrying around a PDA does nothing to keep hospitals from keeping their own records regardless.
Now we are going in circles. Pay close attention to what I write instead of making baloney that can't stand up to even a second's worth of critical thought. As I said in my original post, in a closed system all of the computers which access the data will enforce the rules about multi-generational copies and expiration.
what advantages does your system have over an EMR, or even over paper charts?
It has EXACTLY the same functionality as a naive EMR implementation because it is an EMR system. The benefit comes from the fact that it is much more highly resistant to systemic abuse because it marries much of the privacy benefits of paper charts with the strengths of an EMR system.
I assume sufficiently imaginative people will disband a half-dozen regulatory bodies in the time it takes to hand out PDAs
See, it's dickish comments like that indicate you aren't interested in giving it any serious analysis, only in shooting it down by throwing as much shit at the wall and hoping something will stick. If you aren't going to at least think through what you write, why bother writing it?
I know the popular thing is to constantly cry about our precious privacy, but I'm more worried about my medical records not showing up when they are needed, not the other way around. I'm thinking of allergies, drug interaction, and relevant medical history during emergencies, and the like.
That's a strong argument for each person to keep a copy of their records physically with them - like on their smartphone, ipod or a MedicAlert bracelet souped up with flash-storage.
Requiring everyone to own a smartphone or PDA just to have a medical record is impractical, at best.
Really? If it is practical to spend a couple of billion on national healthcare data centres it is practical to give everyone a $25 PDA.
You currently can't "forget" your medical record. This isn't an improvement, or even necessary.
Not sure what you mean here. If I go to a new doctor without doing the legwork to transfer my records from my other doctors then I certainly have "forgotten" my medical records. Maybe you mean something else, the context is not clear.
You've made your entire medical record essentially patient reported. Your insurance company isn't going to write you a check just on your word, and that's now all you have.
Digital signatures can insure the integrity of the records. You aren't even trying to make it work. If you want to poke holes you gotta at least think them through beyond the first poke.
If Medicare, or the Joint Commission, or AIUM, or whoever wants to audit the hospital, they now require the cooperation of every patient that hospital has seen. Hospitals see a lot of patients. Audits span years. You've just made oversight impossible.
Its weird how you seem to be repeating all of ColdWetDog's poorly thought out arguments. Yes auditing is harder, but far from impossible - send an automated request to the entire patient list and wait a few weeks for the responses to come back. Furthermore that's an argument against centralised healthcare payment and return to individual responsibility.
# The only copy of your medical record getting run over by a bus
Woah, you really are just repeating his points with zero added thought. Why are you doing that? Just because the PDA gets run over by a bus doesn't mean the records are gone - didn't you see the point about backing it up as an encrypted binary blob? Hell, nothing to stop a person from giving a backup viewable copy to their "emergency contact" people too.
# Current medical records depend on very little infrastructure. Some are still entirely on paper. You want to five nines the cell network, nationwide.
No this is not a five-nines case because the VAST, VAST, VAST majority of record transfers don't have to happen in anything near real-time.
This doesn't help people "manage their information", because currently, they don't. As people increase their "management" of their medical record, the information it contains because impossible to act on, either for medical or legal reasons.
Sorry you've made a couple assertions here, but haven't even providing supporting logic for them. Consequently the conclusions you've asserted are baseless.
Actually that is precisely your problem. All of your counterpoints are nothing more than rare corner-cases blown out of proportion. No system will ever be free of corner-cases. The trick is to design for the common case and make it work as well as possible. Your blindered focus on corner cases and your desire to throw the baby out with the bathwater doesn't prove anything other than you aren't willing to give the idea more than a passing thought because you have your own predispositions.
Any widely deployed system would also support dedicated PDA type units for practically nothing.
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.
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.
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
Yes.
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.
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,
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 the fact that most people speak openly about it (is it actually really most, or does it only feel like that?) doesn't invalidate the rights of those who don't want others to know about their illnesses or other medical conditions.
Yeah, he was making the Zuckerberg argument - most people use facebook so we should all just make our lives an open book to anyone and everyone.
Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Not quite impossible. Since a laser is coherent light, it should theoretically be possible to produce a beam that is phase-shifted so as to cancel out another laser of the same frequency. That wouldn't be a "beam of darkness" in the general sense, but it could null out the other laser. It would probably take a massive amount of real-time DSP computations to make it even partially work.
I dare claim I know miles more about information security than your average patient, and I'd certainly prefer to have my medical details kept safe by the pros than trying ( and probably failing ) to do so myself.
The problem is that you can't trust "the pros" to act in your best interests. Money is 100% fungible and misuse is pretty straight-forward -- a bank steals your money and its obvious what happened. But for someone doing searches of healthcare records it is much harder to tell if the intent is nefarious. Even the people doing the searches may not fully understand the implications themselves - ala netflix's "anonymised" data fiasco.
What we need is less centralisation, not more. The push for electronic records in healthcare is inexorable, so we need to develop systems that inherently limit access. Not just fancy permission bits that can be ignored with the right privileges, but actually keeping the data physically inaccessible to those who don't absolutely need it. The best way to do that is to decentralise.
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.
If we had a system where each person was responsible for their own information, then the overhead of widescale misuse would be significantly increased. You'll never stop one-off abuses, but you can design a system that (a) makes widescale abuse difficult and (b) makes it easy for individuals to safely manage their own records.
Right now are moving to the worst of both worlds - centralisation of data with protection no better than flimsy laws subject to interpretation and rewriting by people with money and interests that conflict with that of the patient.
This is as bad as the remake of Red Dawn, yeah for those who didn't know they are doing a remake of Red Dawn.
If hollywood were brave, they'd remake Red Dawn in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Who needs nudity to tell most of these stories?
Who needs gore and violence on screen to tell these stories? Hell, who even needs good looking actors? People like nudity. They are just a little schizo about it.
If you are going to do something online, then use Google. The difference between something being 'easy' for them and 'hard' is about 2 minutes
All you shit can be link together be experts. So why make it hard on yourself?
You are thinking about it in the wrong direction. The risk isn't to any specific individual, it is to society in general. Sure, anyone can target an individual that they have already decided to investigate. But what they can't do - without the aid of centralised databases - is trawl for people who fit a certain criteria.
For example, look at Sony's attempt to subpoena youtube's records of everybody who merely watched a PS3 cracking video. If Sony gets that subpoena, then they will get lots of information about people who have handed over all of their data to google. But for everyone else, at worst Sony is going to get an IP address and a timestamp. Fucking with the first group of people will be significantly easier for Sony than fucking with the second group of people. Not impossible, obviously, but significantly more effort per individual than the first group.
Yes, you're right, I missed everything you said I missed, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Ah, your one of those ego-driven types that can't stop themselves from digging in deeper by trying to get the last word despite royally fucking up all of the previous attempts at putdowns. Well, do your worst since you can't help yourself. Enjoy the grammar bait.
It's not clear what point you are making regarding downloadable music, but one thing is incorrect - practically all major label CDs have DRM now. It may be easily bypassed, but that's not for want of trying on the labels' part.
As a matter of interest "the proof is in the pudding" is not a legitimate phrase in UK English, so I assume it must be an Americanism. We still say "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", unless we are illiterate/stupid.
Have to disagree with you there - no true scottsman fallacy not withstanding:
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that I am not backtracking;
AC called it, you are quacking like a duck.
I'd like to see a link to this because it sounds to me like the OP made it up out of his ass.
Here you go:
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/store-forum/491638-amazon-pricing-error-anyone-charged-yet-those-sick-attacks-arguing-5.html#112
There are a couple of non-obvious downsides to paying for Amazon Prime.
The first is that it can be a false economy - the expedited shipping is not free, you pay for it up front a year at a time. But since the extra cost is not accounted for in the price of each transaction it makes it harder to comparison shop - it becomes mentally easier to pay a higher price for an item at Amazon rather than purchase it elsewhere because the "total cost" appears to be lower.
The second downside is more insidious - since you've paid up front, Amazon can hold your money hostage. I saw one case a few years ago where Amazon had a dispute with a bunch of fatwallet types - Amazon shipped out 20-30 different products to a couple of hundred customers at a very low price and then changed their mind about the price after the orders were delivered. They told the buyers that they could either return the products for a refund or pay the difference in a second charge to their credit cards. Amazon even went so far as to process those second charges without getting permission.
The people who disputed the charge with their credit cards got the charges cancelled as they were never authorised in the first place. BUT Amazon then "froze" their accounts on their website. The people who had paid for Prime were SOL - sure they had the privilege of expedited shipping on any order for another ~10 months, they just couldn't place any orders. As far as I know, none of those people ever saw a penny of that Prime fee refunded.
While I wasn't financially affected by the incident, seeing how Amazon handled it, I was convinced to never pay Amazon for their Prime service. It isn't a stretch to see Amazon pulling the same stunt with the video streaming - you can stream any video you pay for, but they won't actually let you pay for anything.
FWIW, it also made me think twice about "deals" at Amazon - if they won't stand behind their own system's pricing info, how am I supposed to tell the difference between a promotional discount and a computer error?
I can understand ceasing to buy their media in the future, but why must you stop downloading it, too? You're not giving them any money, and in almost all cases, they don't even know you exist.
For the same reason that piracy frequently promotes sales rather than reduces them - the network effect. Even if you don't buy, if you like it and you talk about liking it, you've increased the chances that someone you've talked to, or that they've talked to, etc, will buy.
Also, if you boycott the bad guys, you are more likely to fill the void with products from the good guys. Its not just about tearing down the bad guys, its about building up the good guys.
Because people who like to download free music and movies make themselves feel comfortable by demonizing the industry they are ripping off to make themselves feel better. It's called cognitive dissonance. Accepting my explanation as valid would lead to uncomfortable feelings, so you'll see many posters make lame arguments about my very simple and valid explanation.
So, you are saying that demonising someone who holds a contrary opinion so as to make yourself feel better about ignoring any valid points they have is a kind of intellectual hypocrisy? That's very insightful. Where else have I seen someone do that? I can't quite put my finger on it.
Without copyright, we'd likely go back to a patronage system, and as a result we'd have significantly fewer books and movies.
The current system is essentially a patronage system where the patrons are large corps that control access to the market. Effectively no one makes a significant sum of money in movies/music/books/theater without the permission of a huge corporate patron.
No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
Of course that theory doesn't stand up to any sort of critical examination. Death of an author would put the work in the public domain so no one would gain an advantage over anyone else by killing the author.
If anything the current system of copyright encourages such murders because the heirs inherent the copyright so they do have incentive to murder. After all, killing a spouse/parent/relative for the inheritance is not unheard of in society. But who has ever heard of someone committing murder in order to cause their estate to be donated to charity?
By saying set an expiration date for a copy aren't you basically asking for DRM. And we all know how DRM cannot work in reality.
The situation with medical records is different from the piracy scenario.
Piracy wins because all it takes is for one person to extract a copy and then everybody can get a copy for free. With medical records and other personal information the biggest risk is not to any specific individual but rather systemic misuse. DRM plus policy can be effective against systemic misuse because (a) individual records are of limited value to big brother and big corp and (b) swiping a ton of records at once hard to do because there is no centralisation.
I've said it a couple of times already - we will never be able to completely prevent one-offs (e.g. someone will always be able to point a camera at a computer screen), but we can design the system such that the only real vulnerability is to one-offs. As it is now, the popular EMR systems are practically begging for systemic abuse and are just as vulnerable to one-offs too.
Simply put, failure rates that are ok for other bussiness are just not acceptable to live-or-death bussiness (do you want a nuclear central with the same rate of failures that the shop at the next corner?).
Are you familiar with the term "false equivalence?" You should be. You just made one.
So far the best anyone has been able to do is point out extremely rare, though possible, failure modes - but you seem to think that any alternative system is 100% failure-proof and that's just not the case. There will always be failures - the goal is that any new system reduce the rate of failures. Expecting a new system to eliminate failures is just magical thinking.
Your device is tamper-proof, and will always be tamper-proof. It is perfectly reliable for the purposes of determining who diagnosed who with what.
Unneccessary, that's what digital signatures are for.
You cannot receive healthcare without the PDA.
Obviously not true - tons of healthcare don't require access to medical records until after the fact - routine check-ups, sore throats, even broken bones don't generally require access in order to treat. The results only need to be logged which can be done well after the fact. So in the infrequent case where the PDA isn't immediately available, treatment is going to be at least as good as walking into an urgent care clinic today.
You're requiring millions of people, who may not even know how to operate a computer, to keep encrypted backups
Obviously not true - a closed system could easily automatically backup the encrypted blob over the network automatically and in the background.
EMR records are exchanged in real time.
In this hypothetical perfect world you have dreamt up, perhaps. The NEED for them be exchanged in real-time is far from common. In the cases where it is necessary, the PDA will be physically present - no need to even rely on the external network.
"Individual responsibility" has jack all to do with regulation, oversight, or accreditation. It is not possible to audit an organisation with this system, especially if there is no central record of which patients have been seen.
Keeping a list of patients is not even remotely like keeping a list of treatments and test results. Its not a significant risk for a hospital to keep such list and use it query patients when and if an audit is necessary.
# Your system will kill you if you have drug allergies and end up in an ER.
This is different from the current situation, how? Such events are exceptionally rare today and "my system" could still reduce them. Make the PDA take a thumb-print in order to get short-term access. Make the PDA a souped up MedicAlert bracelet and you are WAY ahead of today's game.
Billing insurance requires what procedures were done for which diagnoses, both of which live on that PDA. Doctors now depend on the patient to get paid.
Again something that can be handled via a 3-way handshake between doctor, patient and payer at the point of delivery.
Carrying around a PDA does nothing to keep hospitals from keeping their own records regardless.
Now we are going in circles. Pay close attention to what I write instead of making baloney that can't stand up to even a second's worth of critical thought. As I said in my original post, in a closed system all of the computers which access the data will enforce the rules about multi-generational copies and expiration.
what advantages does your system have over an EMR, or even over paper charts?
It has EXACTLY the same functionality as a naive EMR implementation because it is an EMR system. The benefit comes from the fact that it is much more highly resistant to systemic abuse because it marries much of the privacy benefits of paper charts with the strengths of an EMR system.
I assume sufficiently imaginative people will disband a half-dozen regulatory bodies in the time it takes to hand out PDAs
See, it's dickish comments like that indicate you aren't interested in giving it any serious analysis, only in shooting it down by throwing as much shit at the wall and hoping something will stick. If you aren't going to at least think through what you write, why bother writing it?
I know the popular thing is to constantly cry about our precious privacy, but I'm more worried about my medical records not showing up when they are needed, not the other way around. I'm thinking of allergies, drug interaction, and relevant medical history during emergencies, and the like.
That's a strong argument for each person to keep a copy of their records physically with them - like on their smartphone, ipod or a MedicAlert bracelet souped up with flash-storage.
Requiring everyone to own a smartphone or PDA just to have a medical record is impractical, at best.
Really? If it is practical to spend a couple of billion on national healthcare data centres it is practical to give everyone a $25 PDA.
You currently can't "forget" your medical record. This isn't an improvement, or even necessary.
Not sure what you mean here. If I go to a new doctor without doing the legwork to transfer my records from my other doctors then I certainly have "forgotten" my medical records. Maybe you mean something else, the context is not clear.
You've made your entire medical record essentially patient reported. Your insurance company isn't going to write you a check just on your word, and that's now all you have.
Digital signatures can insure the integrity of the records. You aren't even trying to make it work. If you want to poke holes you gotta at least think them through beyond the first poke.
If Medicare, or the Joint Commission, or AIUM, or whoever wants to audit the hospital, they now require the cooperation of every patient that hospital has seen. Hospitals see a lot of patients. Audits span years. You've just made oversight impossible.
Its weird how you seem to be repeating all of ColdWetDog's poorly thought out arguments. Yes auditing is harder, but far from impossible - send an automated request to the entire patient list and wait a few weeks for the responses to come back. Furthermore that's an argument against centralised healthcare payment and return to individual responsibility.
# The only copy of your medical record getting run over by a bus
Woah, you really are just repeating his points with zero added thought. Why are you doing that? Just because the PDA gets run over by a bus doesn't mean the records are gone - didn't you see the point about backing it up as an encrypted binary blob? Hell, nothing to stop a person from giving a backup viewable copy to their "emergency contact" people too.
# Current medical records depend on very little infrastructure. Some are still entirely on paper. You want to five nines the cell network, nationwide.
No this is not a five-nines case because the VAST, VAST, VAST majority of record transfers don't have to happen in anything near real-time.
This doesn't help people "manage their information", because currently, they don't. As people increase their "management" of their medical record, the information it contains because impossible to act on, either for medical or legal reasons.
Sorry you've made a couple assertions here, but haven't even providing supporting logic for them. Consequently the conclusions you've asserted are baseless.
And you suffer from an overactive imagination.
Actually that is precisely your problem. All of your counterpoints are nothing more than rare corner-cases blown out of proportion. No system will ever be free of corner-cases. The trick is to design for the common case and make it work as well as possible. Your blindered focus on corner cases and your desire to throw the baby out with the bathwater doesn't prove anything other than you aren't willing to give the idea more than a passing thought because you have your own predispositions.
1. I don't have a smartphone.
Any widely deployed system would also support dedicated PDA type units for practically nothing.
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.
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.
4. Medicare wants to audit the hospital. Do they text a message to get the data?
Yes.
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.
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,
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 the fact that most people speak openly about it (is it actually really most, or does it only feel like that?) doesn't invalidate the rights of those who don't want others to know about their illnesses or other medical conditions.
Yeah, he was making the Zuckerberg argument - most people use facebook so we should all just make our lives an open book to anyone and everyone.
Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Not quite impossible. Since a laser is coherent light, it should theoretically be possible to produce a beam that is phase-shifted so as to cancel out another laser of the same frequency. That wouldn't be a "beam of darkness" in the general sense, but it could null out the other laser. It would probably take a massive amount of real-time DSP computations to make it even partially work.
It probably kept him alive long enough to reach the top of the list, though.
Some discussion of that:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/18/steve-jobs-went-to-switzerland-in-search-of-cancer-treatment/
On the other end of what? Her records never leave her office network, which is the most common arrangement I've seen.
If she takes health insurance, then yes, plenty of data about her patients and up far beyond her control.
I dare claim I know miles more about information security than your average patient, and I'd certainly prefer to have my medical details kept safe by the pros than trying ( and probably failing ) to do so myself.
The problem is that you can't trust "the pros" to act in your best interests. Money is 100% fungible and misuse is pretty straight-forward -- a bank steals your money and its obvious what happened. But for someone doing searches of healthcare records it is much harder to tell if the intent is nefarious. Even the people doing the searches may not fully understand the implications themselves - ala netflix's "anonymised" data fiasco.
What we need is less centralisation, not more. The push for electronic records in healthcare is inexorable, so we need to develop systems that inherently limit access. Not just fancy permission bits that can be ignored with the right privileges, but actually keeping the data physically inaccessible to those who don't absolutely need it. The best way to do that is to decentralise.
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.
If we had a system where each person was responsible for their own information, then the overhead of widescale misuse would be significantly increased. You'll never stop one-off abuses, but you can design a system that (a) makes widescale abuse difficult and (b) makes it easy for individuals to safely manage their own records.
Right now are moving to the worst of both worlds - centralisation of data with protection no better than flimsy laws subject to interpretation and rewriting by people with money and interests that conflict with that of the patient.
This is as bad as the remake of Red Dawn, yeah for those who didn't know they are doing a remake of Red Dawn.
If hollywood were brave, they'd remake Red Dawn in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Who needs nudity to tell most of these stories?
Who needs gore and violence on screen to tell these stories? Hell, who even needs good looking actors? People like nudity. They are just a little schizo about it.
If you are going to do something online, then use Google.
The difference between something being 'easy' for them and 'hard' is about 2 minutes
All you shit can be link together be experts. So why make it hard on yourself?
You are thinking about it in the wrong direction. The risk isn't to any specific individual, it is to society in general. Sure, anyone can target an individual that they have already decided to investigate. But what they can't do - without the aid of centralised databases - is trawl for people who fit a certain criteria.
For example, look at Sony's attempt to subpoena youtube's records of everybody who merely watched a PS3 cracking video. If Sony gets that subpoena, then they will get lots of information about people who have handed over all of their data to google. But for everyone else, at worst Sony is going to get an IP address and a timestamp. Fucking with the first group of people will be significantly easier for Sony than fucking with the second group of people. Not impossible, obviously, but significantly more effort per individual than the first group.
Yes, you're right, I missed everything you said I missed, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Ah, your one of those ego-driven types that can't stop themselves from digging in deeper by trying to get the last word despite royally fucking up all of the previous attempts at putdowns. Well, do your worst since you can't help yourself. Enjoy the grammar bait.
If you get 51% of the people to agree that 2+2=5 it's still wrong.
Apparently you missed high school math class where they taught you that math is not english.
It's not clear what point you are making regarding downloadable music, but one thing is incorrect - practically all major label CDs have DRM now. It may be easily bypassed, but that's not for want of trying on the labels' part.
As a matter of interest "the proof is in the pudding" is not a legitimate phrase in UK English, so I assume it must be an Americanism. We still say "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", unless we are illiterate/stupid.
Have to disagree with you there - no true scottsman fallacy not withstanding:
http://careers.guardian.co.uk/do-you-need-experience-for-first-job
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1333255.stm