If you forget your Adobe password, they send it back to you in plain text.

That's quality right there.

Took me a few reads to understand the last part of that sentence, due to missing punctuation.

This may have undermined your persuasive argument.

That is all true, but the days of "scientific management" are over, and research does not matter.

Managers believe that you achieve efficiency and greatness through gut feeling and tough talk and catchy slogans. They are not interested in learning otherwise, and 90% of them were never taught management, they just got promoted into it.

There are a few companies that will make sensible, evidence-based choices, but the only true fix is to work for yourself.

... and two new gaps created!

Doh.

I think that your response illustrates a very different approach and purpose -- in the US the computerised record is for billing, but in the UK the computerised record could simply be a description of symptoms and treatments.

There's no need for the UK to follow the medicine-as-a-profit-centre approach of the US.

To the delight of many dubious business types, the shredding of paper is very easy though.

I was going to add that it should not be beyond moderately difficult to put in place a secure backup and audit trail, but these guys can't even get the basic system off the ground.

Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool data modeller and corporate database guy, I wonder what the problem would be with throwing all of that data modeling and medical coding stuff away and just letting people write into the system what actually happened, exactly as they do with paper records. Some tagging for "this was a procedure" or "this was a test", but free text the rest of the way.

At least the information would then be accessible through a computer to far-flung locations (Norwich) in case it was needed there, it wouldn't be in some doctors squashed-spider scrawl, and it would be ultimately flexible. Of course it would not be as amenable to analysis and reporting, but it would be something.

Is this failure just the result of seeking a gold-plated solution?

>> the website has been largely derelict ... the forums overrun with spam ... the project was halted in 2009 ... not clear from the announcement whether the ISO available is the traditional build, or the version rebuilt around Linux.

Sounds great. I'll install it at once.

80kg of water is about 136m^3 (4,800 cubic feet) of steam, so you'd better make sure there's a window open cos that's the volume of a cube with sides of nearly 17ft.

I was a green card holder living in the US for ten years as the spouse of a USAF officer, and you're absolutely right about the immigration people.

My co-workers didn't believe that things were as bad as I said, until I spent a day trying to call the INS in Cincinnati on speaker phone. Nine hours of listening to a recorded message telling me that I was in a queue. I had to take the next morning off to drive down there from Dayton to wait in their office for 75 minutes in order to get a 10 second question answered.

Amusingly, they gave me a different answer to the consulate in Rome a couple of months later, so I ended up paying about $200 for some documents to be replaced there, and when I returned to the US at the end of that vacation I had to wait for two hours in immigration because both the Cincinnati office and Rome consulate gave me the wrong answers.

I'm done with the US -- never going back.

I completely agree, but the point of the patent is not to do something more effectively, or in any way better, but to protect your idea so that you can make money from it.

I guess that people stopped making money from printing unadorned works of Shakespeare quite some time ago, and have to find new ways of doing so. This just appears to be a way of linking existing OCR technology with book lookup and thence to multimedia -- none of them innovative, but the combination being a potential money maker.

>> In almost every way this film should have failed. But it didn't. Instead, it's considered a great masterpiece. Why?

Because people would be too embarrassed to admit that they found it slow-moving, impenetrable, and dull?

I just watch it for Leonard Rossiter -- Rigsby in space!

It's quite common to only accept submissions electronically, and it really takes only a second or two to delete them. A spell checker would be interesting but would trip up over books with a lot of dialect in them.

Oh you still get giant parcels of scribblings (or "kindling", as we call it) nevertheless.

Ah, but you're missing some crucial points -- that the primary role of a publisher is to actually make money, and that the most effective way to avoid losing money in publishing is to shutdown immediately and never publish another book.

Therefore I guarantee that the bin-toss method will make you more money than than 50% of publishing companies.

Celebrities get ghost writers to at-the-very-least correct their spelling etc, because the cost is covered by the guaranteed sales into the hands of the mouth-breathing hordes. It's not an expense worth going to for a book that is a gamble for the publisher.