Very astute. It's hard to say which is "worse."...
While electronic records are vulnerable to mass exposure in a way that paper records are not, they are far less vulnerable to casual or targeted exposure, which I tend to feel gives them a security benefit.
No, specific records can be copied from EHR systems through bribes or social engineering more easily than paper records. There are more ways of approaching the system, more people and terminals have simultaneous access than a paper record existing in only one place. Access logs are seldom implemented in a way that can't be gotten around or will be effectively reviewed. The security of EHR systems is almost entirely dependent on obscurity and a belief that no one really wants to break in, anyway. Many providers, staff, system administrators, and programmers will have access to records, and some of them will have access to each others' open sessions and passwords. It really can't be secured as well as a paper record.
Plus HIPAA gives effectively open access to wide classes of government employees and insurance companies can get whatever they want by threatening to withhold payment. The EHR may have benefits, but the providers and patients are incidental beneficiaries at best.
A good electronic system does not require that your information be accessible to anyone aside from care providers (and the inevitable medical billing personnel). It also allows access only to the information relevant to your care, rather than your ENTIRE history being carted around just to get you a routine blood test.
A system that only gives information relevant to your care cannot be constructed - it will have silos that prevent needed information from being shared between departments and programmers determining by general rules what will be shared rather than the real professionals dealing with specific cases who need a broad overview to be able to act intelligently. OTOH irrelevant information will usually be too much of a pain in the ass to access without a good reason, or even with a good reason, so your information is safe (though you aren't).
If the system is actually more usable than what it replaces, then resistance by the staff will be short-lived and greater among those with the most experience in the old system. If the resistance is widespread and long-lasting, it's the system that is bad, not the staff.
A system that requires doctors and nurses to spend more time typing than providing care is broken. A system that requires practice to adapt to the dictates of programmers who never bothered to see whether their solution was appropriate for the needs of the users is garbage. A system that does not allow seeing all relevant information instantly without wading through irrelevant CYA notes is useless. Medical information cannot be uniformly structured - a system that is tries to shoehorn the practice of medicine into standard database practices is badly designed. A system that records the same information unreconciled in multiple places and treats different departments as separate programs is criminal.
Sadly, these traits seem to be more typical than not of EHR systems. When the electronic systems are worse than paper then the healthcare providers should use paper. Let the suits hire data transcriptionists if they want the records entered into their overpriced, clunky automated patient privacy invasion system. EHR is primarily for the convenience of insurance companies, administrators, lawyers, police, and state and federal agencies for whom loopholes were written into HIPPA, anyway.
Hospital administrators are almost never doctors. Departments have doctors, nurses or techs as heads, but the higher administration is 98% weasels in suits. Doctors usually like technology as long as it doesn't require them to become data-entry clerks. Nurses and support staff bear the brunt of bad software and bureaucratic policies, so their buy-in depends mostly on utility.
The biggest impediments to good technology in hospitals are the IT department managers protecting their fiefdoms and the weasels in suits who like to buy whatever system has the slickest salesmen.
If I knew the details and could make credible threats, then I'd be getting large amounts of federal money. I imagine that there are many different bits of information both true and false applicable to individuals or small numbers of individuals. The Russians have a word for compromising information and allegations often used in political blackmail: "kompromat". It's an art form there.
Hard information really isn't needed in most cases, though. The guilty consciences of the congressmen plus some veiled "we know what you did" threats with a little shrewd guesswork, a sprinkling of scuttlebutt and actual information together with some credibly planted rumors about widespread targeted intercept operations and you have enough to cow most of the spineless politicians. A few public examples and the rest of the herd will follow. Also, blackmail can be supplemented with physical threats such as the anthrax that only seemed to go to opponents of the "Patriot" Act, among other plausibly deniable possible non-accidents. It doesn't matter if it really was a lone nut or an accident if the target thinks you really do play that kind of hardball. Spin the unfortunate event one way for the press, and the insiders will not be adverse to listening to rumors that give the story a sinister spin implying their opponents are dangerous psychopaths. Once they think you are a dangerous psychopath and know you have real power, veiled threats are much more effective - in fact your opponent will perceive them when they aren't even there. The victims will often be so scared that they'll try to anticipate and fulfill your desires.
There are first-hand reports that the number of fatalities reported publicly and the mortality rate are under-reported in the news. Emails to the BBC from doctors and others in Mexico tell a different story than we're getting from the Mexican government and the CDC- here are two of the most interesting:
I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. There is a severe emergency over the swine flu here. More and more patients are being admitted to the intensive care unit. Despite the heroic efforts of all staff (doctors, nurses, specialists, etc) patients continue to inevitably die. The truth is that anti-viral treatments and vaccines are not expected to have any effect, even at high doses. It is a great fear among the staff. The infection risk is very high among the doctors and health staff.
There is a sense of chaos in the other hospitals and we do not know what to do. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. The truth is that mortality is even higher than what is being reported by the authorities, at least in the hospital where I work it. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks. It is a shame and there is great fear here. Increasingly younger patients aged 20 to 30 years are dying before our helpless eyes and there is great sadness among health professionals here.
Antonio Chavez, Mexico City
I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from "under control". As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid to panic, but telling the truth it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths.
Well, with the exception of launch and reentry of spacecraft - which is where 99% of the risk is. That the deaths weren't in space seems like a technicality.
We need to set a value on astronauts that is not wildly out of line on what we are willing to spend to avoid driving, mine, or construction fatalities. If manned space missions are going to become more than occasional curiosities, many more astronauts will have to be launched and some of them will have to die, and we need to accept that as a cost that can only partially be avoided.
It's all MUMPS / M / Cache underneath. MUMPS is old - the programming language is the OS is the database:
To give you an idea of what MUMPS is all about, following is an abbreviated list of features pulled straight from the MUMPS FAQ:
CASE SENSITIVITY: Commands and intrinsic functions are case-insensitive. Variable names and labels are case-sensitive.
COMMANDS: may be abbreviated to one letter, case-insensitive. Includes commands such as IF, ELSE, GOTO, WRITE, and XECUTE [which is my personal favorite, it allows arbitrary execution of code contained in a variable]
OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50.
DATA TYPES: one universal datatype, interpreted/converted to string, integer, or floating-point number as context requires.
DECLARATIONS: NONE. Everything dynamically created on first reference.
LINES: important syntactic entities. Multiple statements per line are idiomatic. Scope of IF and FOR is "remainder of current line."
LOCAL ARRAYS: created dynamically, any number of subscripts, subscripts can be strings or integers. Stored in process space and expire when process terminates.
GLOBAL ARRAYS: arrays that start with a caret symbol. Stored on disk, available to all processes, persist when process terminates. This is M's main "database" mechanism.
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There are different vendors and layers on top, but it's all the same underneath. VistA, the VA system is the underlying MUMPS open-source system that has been forked into many versions around he world
Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s FISA application...
I believe that makes this a legal wiretap under the 1978 FISA law.
Porter Goss was involved in an especially juicy prostitutes-for contracts scandal and is now in prison. He is this decade's poster boy for CIA corruption. Anything he signed off on should be scrutinized very closely.
The argument is that while the wiretap may have been legal, using it to subvert the independence of Congress was not - they can prosecute or not, but they can't legally blackmail. This argument calls into question all sorts of things prosecutors do every day, but there is additional reason for questioning the methods in this case since they either effect the control of a Congresswoman by the Executive or allow her control by a foreign power or both.
Bush was, in general, very reluctant to prosecute Democratic politicians because he was afraid people would assume the prosecutions were partisan in nature.
I don't think he gave a shit whether people thought he was being partisan - his administration's conduct certainly shows that they did pretty much whatever they wanted. Anyway, only Democrats can be called partisan, didn't you get the memo?
No, as I have said for several years, the only reasonable explanation for the total surrender of the Democrats in Congress to Bush's policies is that they were and are being blackmailed. Turning reality around and asking why Bush was "reluctant to prosecute Democratic politicians" is the kind of mindfuck that would make Karl Rove proud. The Democrats weren't being set up for selective prosecution only because they were being sufficiently grovelingly servile to their spying, blackmailing controllers.
The United States is defined by the Constitution. Levying war against the United States requires an organized, armed force which attacks the United States. Therefore relying on the arms of officers of the United States to enforce violations of the Constitution is levying war against the United States. This specified as treason in Article III, along with adhering to enemies of the United States (violators of the Constitution), and giving such enemies aid and comfort. Therefore those who have relied on armed force as officers of the United States government to enforce unconstitutional acts, orders, or regulations are levying war against the United States, and they and those who support them or give them aid and comfort are guilty of treason.
Not "even if". It is treason. It is a direct, intentional violation of the constitution and a willful violation of the oaths of office of everybody involved. There isn't anything to be debated, because there is no counter argument possible. It is treason. Everybody involved needs to be put to death or we need to admit that America has no respect for the rule of law or for its founding principles. Personally, I don't support the death penalty, but the law demands their deaths for their willfully chosen treasonous actions, so my statement is an absolute fact.
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Levying war against the U.S. absolutely includes willfully violating the Constitution under color of law: such actions rely on the arms of other governmental traitors committing treason against the Constitution. As they are actively levying war, unless they are prisoners, they are no more entitled to a trial before being shot than invading soldiers would be. If the acts are overt, if they are perceived by more than one person, reliant on the arms of a group and serving to attack the States or the provisions of Constitutional government that define the United States, or adhering to or giving aid and comfort to those who do so, then all parts of the Militia - that is the whole body of armed citizens - have a duty under the supreme law to defend the United States and its Constitution with military force, and all citizens have the duty to withhold aid and comfort to the perpetrators of such treason and not to adhere to their cause; any lesser law is inapplicable, and any attempt to punish such defense of the United States under the color of law backed by armed groups is itself treason and levying war against the United States.
Those who hold offices under the Constitution and rule against the plain provisions of the Constitution - whether taking powers for the government which were not delegated by the people or abridging rights of citizens - when they issue such usurping orders enforced by the arms of bailiffs, sheriffs, marshals, or others, these officers are levying war against the people, the Constitution, and the United States; they are guilty of treason, as are their adherents and those who aid them.
It is the right and duty of all citizens to defend the United States against the armed attacks of these traitors and to war on them as they war on our rights as a nation.
Yeah... you're paying the dues anyway... whether you're a member or not.
Not true in so-called "right to work" states, at least.
Also, if anyone thinks that they are free to join a union, just try it while working for any employer that does not already have a union contract, or while in a salaried position. The companies fight dirty, and have little fear of being fined, even though they outrageously break the law in the vast majority of cases when it looks like there is any chance of unionization.
Libertarians should have no trouble affirming that employees have the right to contract among themselves and thus to bargain collectively with their employers. To prevent freeloading and thus preserve the effectiveness of the right to contract, the parties to such bargaining must be able to agree that other parties should not get the benefit of deals made in collective bargaining without paying the same as those in the union did.
You do know that the "Federal" Reserve is a corporation owned and run by the largest private banks? Other than periodic appointments to the boards of governors, the government has no control over what the Fed does. It's a private cartel with some window dressing for the proles, but one which can claim governmental powers and sovereign immunity when it desires, or non-governmental status when it finds it more convenient. The value of any money you have in US currency or US banks is at the sufferance of this unaccountable, unaudited, untaxed cartel which carries out its banks' agenda of redistributing the nation and the world's wealth to themselves. It isn't the government doing this, at least not freely, but their owners, the bankers. The "free market" versus "socialism" is useful propaganda to push the wannabes around, but the real owners demand a sure thing - rents - rather than competitive uncertainties, and have no trouble shaking down the taxpayers and their descendants for everything they've got or can sign for.
If some of this extortion and inflation is not diverted from the gangsters to making lasting real-world wealth that cannot be shipped to China, then things will be much worse than otherwise. Rail is a good bet, sustainable energy is a decent bet - but war, sickness insurance companies, real estate reflation, toxic asset scams, corporatist looting collaborations and further subsidies for profiteers who externalize their costs to the public are all sure losers.
The rail system was not the cause of the "lost decade" that I have ever heard. Observers that I have read say that it was the real estate bubble and their bank bailout's refusal to allow adjustment to market realities in valuations and interest rates.
A link to the Wall Street Journal's opinion page should seldom be modded informative. Their corporate partisan editorial writers make Bill O'Reilly look calm and reasoned.
Much of what is alleged to be "Medicare fraud" is regulatory entrapment using a maze of shifting rules and onerous reporting requirements. See the article: The Feds and Regulatory Abuse by Richard N. Fogoros, MD, for a look at the dark side of Federal healthcare regulation.
Plus nearly all the damage to the roads is from trucks carrying goods that could be carried by intermodal, containerized rail for 90%+ of their trips. We can subsidize the roads or the tracks for cargo, but rail is much, much cheaper and more energy efficient per ton-mile - the truckers are only competitive because they externalize the costs of the damage done to the roads and pass it off to taxpayers. Nevertheless there is still enough rail freight sharing routes with passenger rail to keep the tracks in poor shape that does not allow high-speed passenger service.
I think a high-speed passenger rail system plan ought to start building a separate set of tracks that freight cannot use. Technology has made some advances in the last century that it would be stupid not to use. Mag-lev is now economical, using aluminum rails and Hallbach permanent magnet arrays in the trains, with rubber wheels for speeds under about 20 mph.
I know what the terms mean and used them correctly; your ham-handed use of condescension is noted, as is your attempt to make the plain language "public trial" mean whatever powerful persons find convenient. Your use of scare quotes around "fair" is also revealing of your attitude toward justice and equity.
I was pushing your argument: "nothing about having more people watching makes anything more 'fair'" out to the point that its absurdity becomes evident.
So, you tacitly admit that at some point at or before the proceedings are closed entirely, allowing fewer spectators could compromise the rights of at least one of the parties, the right to a fair trial, that is, one which meets the Constitutional guarantees of a public trial.
How then can you assert that your bugbears "media meddling", "jury contamination", and "witness tampering", which could be prevented entirely by proceeding in camera, are not present whenever a trial is public? How can you claim that a more distorted, second-hand account of the trial that is bound to be conveyed when most people can only know about the proceedings via media accounts reconstructed from notebooks and sketchpads is going to reduce "media meddling"?
Do you really think that a direct video feed is not only going to have a greater audience than media portrayals, but such a greater audience that it will be hard to impanel a jury? Or that somehow the greater factual content of a direct feed is exceptionally dangerous - that any factual, accurate, complete airing that alleviates any part of the public's ignorance means some fantastic, overwhelming threat to jury impartiality?
Do you really think that witnesses are going to perjure themselves solely because they had potential access to others' testimony in the same case? Isn't it at least as likely that if they wanted to coordinate stories with others on the same side they would do so before the trial? Isn't that in fact what the lawyers of both sides are doing by interviewing their witnesses beforehand, asking leading questions based on the other witnesses' testimonies they have heard, and not calling witnesses whose testimonies do not fit with the witnesses they have selected to testify? The idea that further exposure to facts would have a corrupting influence on witnesses is curious when there is so much overt gaming of the system by the attorneys.
These phantasms of potential corruption are just a cover for your fear of public exposure of the real and customary corruption of these proceedings.
The trial isn't closed. There is still a record, the courtroom is still open to members of the public, and both the trial and the result are covered by the media.
A closed proceeding is one in which access is restricted, no record is made or the record is entirely sealed, and the media has no access to any information on the matter. None of that is true here.
Here we have on display a prime example of shyster sophistry. If it isn't completely closed, then it must be open - even if 99.9% of those who would otherwise be able to view the trial are practically excluded, even if it would cost thousands of dollars in travel expenses and perhaps be impossible to work into a person's schedule to have a chance to see the trial, even if the courtroom can only hold a few dozen people, even so, that's "open". And if a member of the public can't attend in person, then a second-hand, erroneous, sensationalized, and radically edited media account should be good enough for the hoi polloi. Or perhaps the official record, edited at the court's direction and lacking vocal tone, timing, postures and facial expressions should be good enough, although likely not cheap by any standards.
Because to a bar reptile like "Mr. Matticus", all that matters are legalistic assertions, conventional fictions, manipulative evasions of truth - legal fictions are his very stock in trade, and the spirit and purpose of the law and the truths of the real world are to his sort merely potential hazards to the fictions he conflates with law.
re: (b) If neither side argues the right bit of the law, that does not absolve the judge of moral responsibility for applying the correct law sua sponte, particularly when equity or other rights would otherwise be harmed.
Furthermore, Constitutional issues take precedence over other laws and rules, such issues were legitimately raised, but the Circuit Court ignored them.
To predict what a given judge will do in a particular case, however, it is far more effective to look at the relative social, political, and financial standings of the parties in the eyes of the judge than at competing legal theories. This is particularly true in cases where the odds of an appeal being heard are low. A judge can come up with some plausible-sounding justification when required, which is surprisingly rarely - usually rulings are without any justification at all. The stuff taught in law schools and rendered in published cases is mostly window dressing for the sausage factory.
So by your reasoning all proceedings should be in camera? The Constitutional guarantees of public trials should not be whittled down until they can be brushed off like an errant bit of dandruff from an Oxxford suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Very astute. It's hard to say which is "worse." ...
While electronic records are vulnerable to mass exposure in a way that paper records are not, they are far less vulnerable to casual or targeted exposure, which I tend to feel gives them a security benefit.
No, specific records can be copied from EHR systems through bribes or social engineering more easily than paper records. There are more ways of approaching the system, more people and terminals have simultaneous access than a paper record existing in only one place. Access logs are seldom implemented in a way that can't be gotten around or will be effectively reviewed. The security of EHR systems is almost entirely dependent on obscurity and a belief that no one really wants to break in, anyway. Many providers, staff, system administrators, and programmers will have access to records, and some of them will have access to each others' open sessions and passwords. It really can't be secured as well as a paper record.
Plus HIPAA gives effectively open access to wide classes of government employees and insurance companies can get whatever they want by threatening to withhold payment. The EHR may have benefits, but the providers and patients are incidental beneficiaries at best.
A good electronic system does not require that your information be accessible to anyone aside from care providers (and the inevitable medical billing personnel). It also allows access only to the information relevant to your care, rather than your ENTIRE history being carted around just to get you a routine blood test.
A system that only gives information relevant to your care cannot be constructed - it will have silos that prevent needed information from being shared between departments and programmers determining by general rules what will be shared rather than the real professionals dealing with specific cases who need a broad overview to be able to act intelligently. OTOH irrelevant information will usually be too much of a pain in the ass to access without a good reason, or even with a good reason, so your information is safe (though you aren't).
If the system is actually more usable than what it replaces, then resistance by the staff will be short-lived and greater among those with the most experience in the old system. If the resistance is widespread and long-lasting, it's the system that is bad, not the staff.
A system that requires doctors and nurses to spend more time typing than providing care is broken.
A system that requires practice to adapt to the dictates of programmers who never bothered to see whether their solution was appropriate for the needs of the users is garbage.
A system that does not allow seeing all relevant information instantly without wading through irrelevant CYA notes is useless.
Medical information cannot be uniformly structured -
a system that is tries to shoehorn the practice of medicine into standard database practices is badly designed.
A system that records the same information unreconciled in multiple places and treats different departments as separate programs is criminal.
Sadly, these traits seem to be more typical than not of EHR systems. When the electronic systems are worse than paper then the healthcare providers should use paper. Let the suits hire data transcriptionists if they want the records entered into their overpriced, clunky automated patient privacy invasion system. EHR is primarily for the convenience of insurance companies, administrators, lawyers, police, and state and federal agencies for whom loopholes were written into HIPPA, anyway.
Hospital administrators are almost never doctors. Departments have doctors, nurses or techs as heads, but the higher administration is 98% weasels in suits. Doctors usually like technology as long as it doesn't require them to become data-entry clerks. Nurses and support staff bear the brunt of bad software and bureaucratic policies, so their buy-in depends mostly on utility.
The biggest impediments to good technology in hospitals are the IT department managers protecting their fiefdoms and the weasels in suits who like to buy whatever system has the slickest salesmen.
I'd think it would take at least 2 holograffs to make a holomargrave, and three for a holoduke.
If I knew the details and could make credible threats, then I'd be getting large amounts of federal money. I imagine that there are many different bits of information both true and false applicable to individuals or small numbers of individuals. The Russians have a word for compromising information and allegations often used in political blackmail: "kompromat". It's an art form there.
Hard information really isn't needed in most cases, though. The guilty consciences of the congressmen plus some veiled "we know what you did" threats with a little shrewd guesswork, a sprinkling of scuttlebutt and actual information together with some credibly planted rumors about widespread targeted intercept operations and you have enough to cow most of the spineless politicians. A few public examples and the rest of the herd will follow. Also, blackmail can be supplemented with physical threats such as the anthrax that only seemed to go to opponents of the "Patriot" Act, among other plausibly deniable possible non-accidents. It doesn't matter if it really was a lone nut or an accident if the target thinks you really do play that kind of hardball. Spin the unfortunate event one way for the press, and the insiders will not be adverse to listening to rumors that give the story a sinister spin implying their opponents are dangerous psychopaths. Once they think you are a dangerous psychopath and know you have real power, veiled threats are much more effective - in fact your opponent will perceive them when they aren't even there. The victims will often be so scared that they'll try to anticipate and fulfill your desires.
There are first-hand reports that the number of fatalities reported publicly and the mortality rate are under-reported in the news. Emails to the BBC from doctors and others in Mexico tell a different story than we're getting from the Mexican government and the CDC- here are two of the most interesting:
I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. There is a severe emergency over the swine flu here. More and more patients are being admitted to the intensive care unit. Despite the heroic efforts of all staff (doctors, nurses, specialists, etc) patients continue to inevitably die. The truth is that anti-viral treatments and vaccines are not expected to have any effect, even at high doses. It is a great fear among the staff. The infection risk is very high among the doctors and health staff.
There is a sense of chaos in the other hospitals and we do not know what to do. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. The truth is that mortality is even higher than what is being reported by the authorities, at least in the hospital where I work it. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks. It is a shame and there is great fear here. Increasingly younger patients aged 20 to 30 years are dying before our helpless eyes and there is great sadness among health professionals here.
Antonio Chavez, Mexico City
I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from "under control". As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid to panic, but telling the truth it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths.
Yeny Gregorio Davila, Mexico City
The US has never lost a person in space,...
Well, with the exception of launch and reentry of spacecraft - which is where 99% of the risk is. That the deaths weren't in space seems like a technicality.
We need to set a value on astronauts that is not wildly out of line on what we are willing to spend to avoid driving, mine, or construction fatalities. If manned space missions are going to become more than occasional curiosities, many more astronauts will have to be launched and some of them will have to die, and we need to accept that as a cost that can only partially be avoided.
It's far, far easier to control access to an electronic chart than a paper one.
umm... no?
It's all MUMPS / M / Cache underneath. MUMPS is old - the programming language is the OS is the database:
To give you an idea of what MUMPS is all about, following is an abbreviated list of features pulled straight from the MUMPS FAQ:
CASE SENSITIVITY: Commands and intrinsic functions are case-insensitive. Variable names and labels are case-sensitive.
COMMANDS: may be abbreviated to one letter, case-insensitive. Includes commands such as IF, ELSE, GOTO, WRITE, and XECUTE [which is my personal favorite, it allows arbitrary execution of code contained in a variable]
OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50.
DATA TYPES: one universal datatype, interpreted/converted to string, integer, or floating-point number as context requires.
DECLARATIONS: NONE. Everything dynamically created on first reference.
LINES: important syntactic entities. Multiple statements per line are idiomatic. Scope of IF and FOR is "remainder of current line."
LOCAL ARRAYS: created dynamically, any number of subscripts, subscripts can be strings or integers. Stored in process space and expire when process terminates.
GLOBAL ARRAYS: arrays that start with a caret symbol. Stored on disk, available to all processes, persist when process terminates. This is M's main "database" mechanism.
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There are different vendors and layers on top, but it's all the same underneath. VistA, the VA system is the underlying MUMPS open-source system that has been forked into many versions around he world
I've never seen a theoretical description of any transistor device that required any form of quantum mechanics for its explanation.
Maybe not transistors as usually used, but LEDs show quantum mechanics quite directly. Here's a simple lab to measure Planck's constant using LEDs.
The article mentions attaining a FISA application
Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Departmentâ(TM)s FISA application ...
I believe that makes this a legal wiretap under the 1978 FISA law.
Porter Goss was involved in an especially juicy prostitutes-for contracts scandal and is now in prison. He is this decade's poster boy for CIA corruption. Anything he signed off on should be scrutinized very closely.
The argument is that while the wiretap may have been legal, using it to subvert the independence of Congress was not - they can prosecute or not, but they can't legally blackmail. This argument calls into question all sorts of things prosecutors do every day, but there is additional reason for questioning the methods in this case since they either effect the control of a Congresswoman by the Executive or allow her control by a foreign power or both.
Bush was, in general, very reluctant to prosecute Democratic politicians because he was afraid people would assume the prosecutions were partisan in nature.
I don't think he gave a shit whether people thought he was being partisan - his administration's conduct certainly shows that they did pretty much whatever they wanted. Anyway, only Democrats can be called partisan, didn't you get the memo?
No, as I have said for several years, the only reasonable explanation for the total surrender of the Democrats in Congress to Bush's policies is that they were and are being blackmailed. Turning reality around and asking why Bush was "reluctant to prosecute Democratic politicians" is the kind of mindfuck that would make Karl Rove proud. The Democrats weren't being set up for selective prosecution only because they were being sufficiently grovelingly servile to their spying, blackmailing controllers.
The United States is defined by the Constitution. Levying war against the United States requires an organized, armed force which attacks the United States. Therefore relying on the arms of officers of the United States to enforce violations of the Constitution is levying war against the United States. This specified as treason in Article III, along with adhering to enemies of the United States (violators of the Constitution), and giving such enemies aid and comfort. Therefore those who have relied on armed force as officers of the United States government to enforce unconstitutional acts, orders, or regulations are levying war against the United States, and they and those who support them or give them aid and comfort are guilty of treason.
Yup. A torture victim will tell his torturers anything!
For example, that 2+2=5.
Yeeearrghhhh!!!... OK! OK! ... for sufficiently high values of 2 ... or low values of 5 ...
Not "even if". It is treason. It is a direct, intentional violation of the constitution and a willful violation of the oaths of office of everybody involved. There isn't anything to be debated, because there is no counter argument possible. It is treason. Everybody involved needs to be put to death or we need to admit that America has no respect for the rule of law or for its founding principles. Personally, I don't support the death penalty, but the law demands their deaths for their willfully chosen treasonous actions, so my statement is an absolute fact.
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Levying war against the U.S. absolutely includes willfully violating the Constitution under color of law: such actions rely on the arms of other governmental traitors committing treason against the Constitution. As they are actively levying war, unless they are prisoners, they are no more entitled to a trial before being shot than invading soldiers would be. If the acts are overt, if they are perceived by more than one person, reliant on the arms of a group and serving to attack the States or the provisions of Constitutional government that define the United States, or adhering to or giving aid and comfort to those who do so, then all parts of the Militia - that is the whole body of armed citizens - have a duty under the supreme law to defend the United States and its Constitution with military force, and all citizens have the duty to withhold aid and comfort to the perpetrators of such treason and not to adhere to their cause; any lesser law is inapplicable, and any attempt to punish such defense of the United States under the color of law backed by armed groups is itself treason and levying war against the United States.
Those who hold offices under the Constitution and rule against the plain provisions of the Constitution - whether taking powers for the government which were not delegated by the people or abridging rights of citizens - when they issue such usurping orders enforced by the arms of bailiffs, sheriffs, marshals, or others, these officers are levying war against the people, the Constitution, and the United States; they are guilty of treason, as are their adherents and those who aid them.
It is the right and duty of all citizens to defend the United States against the armed attacks of these traitors and to war on them as they war on our rights as a nation.
Yeah... you're paying the dues anyway... whether you're a member or not.
Not true in so-called "right to work" states, at least.
Also, if anyone thinks that they are free to join a union, just try it while working for any employer that does not already have a union contract, or while in a salaried position. The companies fight dirty, and have little fear of being fined, even though they outrageously break the law in the vast majority of cases when it looks like there is any chance of unionization.
Libertarians should have no trouble affirming that employees have the right to contract among themselves and thus to bargain collectively with their employers. To prevent freeloading and thus preserve the effectiveness of the right to contract, the parties to such bargaining must be able to agree that other parties should not get the benefit of deals made in collective bargaining without paying the same as those in the union did.
You do know that the "Federal" Reserve is a corporation owned and run by the largest private banks? Other than periodic appointments to the boards of governors, the government has no control over what the Fed does. It's a private cartel with some window dressing for the proles, but one which can claim governmental powers and sovereign immunity when it desires, or non-governmental status when it finds it more convenient. The value of any money you have in US currency or US banks is at the sufferance of this unaccountable, unaudited, untaxed cartel which carries out its banks' agenda of redistributing the nation and the world's wealth to themselves. It isn't the government doing this, at least not freely, but their owners, the bankers. The "free market" versus "socialism" is useful propaganda to push the wannabes around, but the real owners demand a sure thing - rents - rather than competitive uncertainties, and have no trouble shaking down the taxpayers and their descendants for everything they've got or can sign for.
If some of this extortion and inflation is not diverted from the gangsters to making lasting real-world wealth that cannot be shipped to China, then things will be much worse than otherwise. Rail is a good bet, sustainable energy is a decent bet - but war, sickness insurance companies, real estate reflation, toxic asset scams, corporatist looting collaborations and further subsidies for profiteers who externalize their costs to the public are all sure losers.
The rail system was not the cause of the "lost decade" that I have ever heard. Observers that I have read say that it was the real estate bubble and their bank bailout's refusal to allow adjustment to market realities in valuations and interest rates.
A link to the Wall Street Journal's opinion page should seldom be modded informative. Their corporate partisan editorial writers make Bill O'Reilly look calm and reasoned.
Much of what is alleged to be "Medicare fraud" is regulatory entrapment using a maze of shifting rules and onerous reporting requirements. See the article: The Feds and Regulatory Abuse by Richard N. Fogoros, MD, for a look at the dark side of Federal healthcare regulation.
Plus nearly all the damage to the roads is from trucks carrying goods that could be carried by intermodal, containerized rail for 90%+ of their trips. We can subsidize the roads or the tracks for cargo, but rail is much, much cheaper and more energy efficient per ton-mile - the truckers are only competitive because they externalize the costs of the damage done to the roads and pass it off to taxpayers. Nevertheless there is still enough rail freight sharing routes with passenger rail to keep the tracks in poor shape that does not allow high-speed passenger service.
I think a high-speed passenger rail system plan ought to start building a separate set of tracks that freight cannot use. Technology has made some advances in the last century that it would be stupid not to use. Mag-lev is now economical, using aluminum rails and Hallbach permanent magnet arrays in the trains, with rubber wheels for speeds under about 20 mph.
I know what the terms mean and used them correctly; your ham-handed use of condescension is noted, as is your attempt to make the plain language "public trial" mean whatever powerful persons find convenient. Your use of scare quotes around "fair" is also revealing of your attitude toward justice and equity.
I was pushing your argument: "nothing about having more people watching makes anything more 'fair'" out to the point that its absurdity becomes evident.
So, you tacitly admit that at some point at or before the proceedings are closed entirely, allowing fewer spectators could compromise the rights of at least one of the parties, the right to a fair trial, that is, one which meets the Constitutional guarantees of a public trial.
How then can you assert that your bugbears "media meddling", "jury contamination", and "witness tampering", which could be prevented entirely by proceeding in camera, are not present whenever a trial is public? How can you claim that a more distorted, second-hand account of the trial that is bound to be conveyed when most people can only know about the proceedings via media accounts reconstructed from notebooks and sketchpads is going to reduce "media meddling"?
Do you really think that a direct video feed is not only going to have a greater audience than media portrayals, but such a greater audience that it will be hard to impanel a jury? Or that somehow the greater factual content of a direct feed is exceptionally dangerous - that any factual, accurate, complete airing that alleviates any part of the public's ignorance means some fantastic, overwhelming threat to jury impartiality?
Do you really think that witnesses are going to perjure themselves solely because they had potential access to others' testimony in the same case? Isn't it at least as likely that if they wanted to coordinate stories with others on the same side they would do so before the trial? Isn't that in fact what the lawyers of both sides are doing by interviewing their witnesses beforehand, asking leading questions based on the other witnesses' testimonies they have heard, and not calling witnesses whose testimonies do not fit with the witnesses they have selected to testify? The idea that further exposure to facts would have a corrupting influence on witnesses is curious when there is so much overt gaming of the system by the attorneys.
These phantasms of potential corruption are just a cover for your fear of public exposure of the real and customary corruption of these proceedings.
The trial isn't closed. There is still a record, the courtroom is still open to members of the public, and both the trial and the result are covered by the media.
A closed proceeding is one in which access is restricted, no record is made or the record is entirely sealed, and the media has no access to any information on the matter. None of that is true here.
Here we have on display a prime example of shyster sophistry. If it isn't completely closed, then it must be open - even if 99.9% of those who would otherwise be able to view the trial are practically excluded, even if it would cost thousands of dollars in travel expenses and perhaps be impossible to work into a person's schedule to have a chance to see the trial, even if the courtroom can only hold a few dozen people, even so, that's "open". And if a member of the public can't attend in person, then a second-hand, erroneous, sensationalized, and radically edited media account should be good enough for the hoi polloi. Or perhaps the official record, edited at the court's direction and lacking vocal tone, timing, postures and facial expressions should be good enough, although likely not cheap by any standards.
Because to a bar reptile like "Mr. Matticus", all that matters are legalistic assertions, conventional fictions, manipulative evasions of truth - legal fictions are his very stock in trade, and the spirit and purpose of the law and the truths of the real world are to his sort merely potential hazards to the fictions he conflates with law.
re: (b)
If neither side argues the right bit of the law, that does not absolve the judge of moral responsibility for applying the correct law sua sponte, particularly when equity or other rights would otherwise be harmed.
Furthermore, Constitutional issues take precedence over other laws and rules, such issues were legitimately raised, but the Circuit Court ignored them.
To predict what a given judge will do in a particular case, however, it is far more effective to look at the relative social, political, and financial standings of the parties in the eyes of the judge than at competing legal theories. This is particularly true in cases where the odds of an appeal being heard are low. A judge can come up with some plausible-sounding justification when required, which is surprisingly rarely - usually rulings are without any justification at all. The stuff taught in law schools and rendered in published cases is mostly window dressing for the sausage factory.
So by your reasoning all proceedings should be in camera? The Constitutional guarantees of public trials should not be whittled down until they can be brushed off like an errant bit of dandruff from an Oxxford suit.