As a practitioner, let me say that HIPAA is being fairly actively enforced. There are some fairly bone headed breaches from time to time, but there are bone headed privacy breaches in every industry.
I can tell you that there have been incredible unintended consequences. First, millions to billions have been spent (and are continuing to be spent) on HIPAA compliance. For the most part, this is money spent nominally on health care that is completely administrative in nature. Ever wonder where all of that 13% of the GDP spent on health care goes? A bunch of it is being spent on HIPAA compliance offices, with 4-6 FTEs being spent training, and doing paperwork. Not a terribly cost effective way of improving health care.
Second, everyone now is safety wired into the "don't tell anybody anything" position. If your spouse is in the hospital, and you do not have a designated HIPAA compliant health care proxy, you (by HIPAA rules) don't get to know anything, other than where she/he is. No diagnosis, no prognosis, not what happened, nothing. If he/she didn't or wasn't able to make the designation in writing on admission (i.e. was run over by bus) you will need to jump a bunch of legal hurdles to get the information released.
As a medical consultant, it is very hard for me to get information from people trying to refer patients to me. Too often I get the "I can't tell you that; HIPAA" line. Although, to be honest, this is a misinterpretation of the law, but many institutions have taken the view that "unless I have a piece of paper which explicitly states I can release information to you, I'm not telling you crap".
Remember, there are still large regions of the country where there is only cable or dial-up.
Don't forget that at least in the U.S. there are still plenty of places (about 20% or more of the population) who do not have any kind of access to terrestrial high speed data. The choices are either dial up (and given the usually bad quality of the rural lines expect speeds of 30kb or less) or satellite, which comes with a high initial cost of ownership, high monthly fees and bandwidth caps/fees. Oh, and latency from hell, so no FPS gaming for you.
Your point is very well taken about piracy driving certain markets. The demand for large capacity personal audio players and large capacity hard drives comes from (at least in part) pirated music, movies, and pr0n.
Yes, there are people (myself included) who can fill most of a 20 GB HDD player with music ripped from their own collection. However, a) I'm 40 years old, and have 20 years worth of CDs collected, and 2) I encode at a very high bit rate. There aren't very many 16 year olds who could fill a 30GB player with music they bought, either on CD or at $0.99 per track. But there are quite a few of them out there with players filled to the brim with music.
I do find it odd (any I think it has been noted before) that of all the industries effected by piracy, the pr0n industry seems to complain about it the least (or at least the most publicly). Maybe because they realize 1) that it does drive some of their sales, and that 2) most of the pirates wouldn't buy the retail version anyway.
The scary thing here is that the guy was stabbed for a friggin laptop. Rather unusual. Most thugs would much rather use intimidation and some shoving rather than lethal force. Especially for something like a laptop, only worth (to them) a few hundred bucks.
And, for the/.ers in SF, if a couple of mean looking dudes attempt to take your laptop, let them. Lets do the math here: Cost of laptop: $2500. Cost of EMS run, ED treatment and stabilization, night in a monitored bed, another night on the floor: About $30,000, conservatively. If things go a little bit sideways, add a trip to the OR, a stay in the ICU, and a few more days in hospital. Cost now: about $120,000-$200,000. Let the freaking thing go. And yes, you may have health insurance. But somebody has to pay. And hopefully, you have a rider on your homeowners/renters policy for your laptop.
One other funny thing. I enjoy how the guy made a point of saying that he had all his data. Yes, by God, I may have nearly bled out but but I have my favorite MP3s! Yes, we have our sense of proportion intact. Reminds me of the old joke about the yuppie who gets sideswiped getting into his BMW....
The Blackberry has become the latest in a long line of technology devices that some use to prop up a threatened sense of self worth. First, we had the pager. Then, when every plumber's brother had a pager, we moved to big, huge, analog cell phones. Then smaller digital cell phones. Now we have Blackberries and SmartPhones with push email.
Almost all the time when I recieve an email with the "Sent from my Blackberry...." it is in response to something quite inane, and easily could (and probably should) have waited until they were back at the office. But merely sending it fairly screams, "See, look at me! I'm so important that I can RSVP to the office party from my Blackberry!!"
Taking the Blackberry out at a meeting is sort of the newest method of corporate dominance display. See, I'm dominant over you, so I can check my Blackberry in this meeting, which I (being the alpha geek) decreed to be blackberry free.
Given the difficulties and limited appeal of push email, I don't think these will become as democratized as pagers (does anybody still use those anymore?) and cell phones have become. There will, however, become another item which will supplant the Blackberry as the corporate dominance display.
I, too, was extrodinarily umimpressed with the "expert" in child violence. In the last section IGN summarizes with "The psychology community is singular in its belief that playing violent videogames does have an effect on behavior.." They should have added "..in the absence of any credible evidence experimental, and despite epidemiologic evidence to the contrary."
The most recent meta-analysis (get it right IGN) provided only weak evidence for the anti-gaming folks, and meta analytic techniques are, at best, somewhat suspect and frought with opportunities to skew results. Overall, if a meta-analysis finds only weak evidence, there probabaly wasn't any evidence to begin with.
Notably (above) violent crime among teenagers has dropped about 70% in the last 20 years. (FBI violent crime statistics). Violent video games have incresed, well, incalculably (Error: Div0!). If the effect size was nearly as huge as psychologic community says it is, then MY community (epidemiology, population medicine) would have seen it already. It isn't there.
So (like the courts) I see no reason to cause First Amendment harm (real) to prevent danger to youngsters (potential harm), when there is a less intrusive (and better) solution: i.e. effetive parenting.
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As a practitioner, let me say that HIPAA is being fairly actively enforced. There are some fairly bone headed breaches from time to time, but there are bone headed privacy breaches in every industry. I can tell you that there have been incredible unintended consequences. First, millions to billions have been spent (and are continuing to be spent) on HIPAA compliance. For the most part, this is money spent nominally on health care that is completely administrative in nature. Ever wonder where all of that 13% of the GDP spent on health care goes? A bunch of it is being spent on HIPAA compliance offices, with 4-6 FTEs being spent training, and doing paperwork. Not a terribly cost effective way of improving health care. Second, everyone now is safety wired into the "don't tell anybody anything" position. If your spouse is in the hospital, and you do not have a designated HIPAA compliant health care proxy, you (by HIPAA rules) don't get to know anything, other than where she/he is. No diagnosis, no prognosis, not what happened, nothing. If he/she didn't or wasn't able to make the designation in writing on admission (i.e. was run over by bus) you will need to jump a bunch of legal hurdles to get the information released. As a medical consultant, it is very hard for me to get information from people trying to refer patients to me. Too often I get the "I can't tell you that; HIPAA" line. Although, to be honest, this is a misinterpretation of the law, but many institutions have taken the view that "unless I have a piece of paper which explicitly states I can release information to you, I'm not telling you crap".
Your point is very well taken about piracy driving certain markets. The demand for large capacity personal audio players and large capacity hard drives comes from (at least in part) pirated music, movies, and pr0n.
Yes, there are people (myself included) who can fill most of a 20 GB HDD player with music ripped from their own collection. However, a) I'm 40 years old, and have 20 years worth of CDs collected, and 2) I encode at a very high bit rate. There aren't very many 16 year olds who could fill a 30GB player with music they bought, either on CD or at $0.99 per track. But there are quite a few of them out there with players filled to the brim with music.
I do find it odd (any I think it has been noted before) that of all the industries effected by piracy, the pr0n industry seems to complain about it the least (or at least the most publicly). Maybe because they realize 1) that it does drive some of their sales, and that 2) most of the pirates wouldn't buy the retail version anyway.
The scary thing here is that the guy was stabbed for a friggin laptop. Rather unusual. Most thugs would much rather use intimidation and some shoving rather than lethal force. Especially for something like a laptop, only worth (to them) a few hundred bucks. And, for the /.ers in SF, if a couple of mean looking dudes attempt to take your laptop, let them. Lets do the math here: Cost of laptop: $2500. Cost of EMS run, ED treatment and stabilization, night in a monitored bed, another night on the floor: About $30,000, conservatively. If things go a little bit sideways, add a trip to the OR, a stay in the ICU, and a few more days in hospital. Cost now: about $120,000-$200,000. Let the freaking thing go. And yes, you may have health insurance. But somebody has to pay. And hopefully, you have a rider on your homeowners/renters policy for your laptop.
One other funny thing. I enjoy how the guy made a point of saying that he had all his data. Yes, by God, I may have nearly bled out but but I have my favorite MP3s! Yes, we have our sense of proportion intact. Reminds me of the old joke about the yuppie who gets sideswiped getting into his BMW....
The Blackberry has become the latest in a long line of technology devices that some use to prop up a threatened sense of self worth. First, we had the pager. Then, when every plumber's brother had a pager, we moved to big, huge, analog cell phones. Then smaller digital cell phones. Now we have Blackberries and SmartPhones with push email. Almost all the time when I recieve an email with the "Sent from my Blackberry...." it is in response to something quite inane, and easily could (and probably should) have waited until they were back at the office. But merely sending it fairly screams, "See, look at me! I'm so important that I can RSVP to the office party from my Blackberry!!" Taking the Blackberry out at a meeting is sort of the newest method of corporate dominance display. See, I'm dominant over you, so I can check my Blackberry in this meeting, which I (being the alpha geek) decreed to be blackberry free. Given the difficulties and limited appeal of push email, I don't think these will become as democratized as pagers (does anybody still use those anymore?) and cell phones have become. There will, however, become another item which will supplant the Blackberry as the corporate dominance display.
I, too, was extrodinarily umimpressed with the "expert" in child violence. In the last section IGN summarizes with "The psychology community is singular in its belief that playing violent videogames does have an effect on behavior.." They should have added "..in the absence of any credible evidence experimental, and despite epidemiologic evidence to the contrary." The most recent meta-analysis (get it right IGN) provided only weak evidence for the anti-gaming folks, and meta analytic techniques are, at best, somewhat suspect and frought with opportunities to skew results. Overall, if a meta-analysis finds only weak evidence, there probabaly wasn't any evidence to begin with. Notably (above) violent crime among teenagers has dropped about 70% in the last 20 years. (FBI violent crime statistics). Violent video games have incresed, well, incalculably (Error: Div0!). If the effect size was nearly as huge as psychologic community says it is, then MY community (epidemiology, population medicine) would have seen it already. It isn't there. So (like the courts) I see no reason to cause First Amendment harm (real) to prevent danger to youngsters (potential harm), when there is a less intrusive (and better) solution: i.e. effetive parenting.