My wife practices at a major medical center that has adopted this approach. Most of her patient population are non-English speaking immigrants that have no use for this piece of paper and so they tend to just throw them out anywhere convienent or leave them in the waiting room.

What's worse, is that my wife is required to give this to them at the end of their visit. This means that my wife spends almost the entire visit on the computer entering the notes instead of providing personal care to the patient. EMR sounds great in theory, but in reality it turns highly intelligent, highly educated individuals into data entry clerks. Great for the bean counters and the malpractice lawyers, lousy for the practitioners and the patients.

Well at least we don't have to worry about Google sending Slashdot a takedown notice for violating their patent!

Apparently this years most disruptive technology of the year is a virtual bar/avatar layer called Shaker slapped on top of facebook.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/and-the-winner-of-techcrunch-disrupt-is-shaker/

Because everyone knows that the real people around you are all losers and the best people are all elsewhere.

Sad, really sad.

Because of you Taco, one day "Slashdotted" will be an offical word in the Oxford dictionary!

FWIW - two years ago I left a job after 28 years to allow my wife to pursue a dream of hers. While departing was bittersweet, the change has proven to be the best thing I ever did.

Good Luck and enjoy the ride.

-Xanthos

Fired up chrome this morning on my linux box and it happily told me that I was running an obsolete OS and needed to upgrade.

I run a highly modified version of debian 5.x on that box that I 'm not going to mess with for the sake of running chrome 13.

Time to turn off the automated update check I guess.

I remember my Dad waking me up to watch the first Mercury launch on a blurry black and white tv in western Wisconsin when I was four. He wanted me to remember that moment and I always have. As a kid in the 60's I was facinated by the space program and followed it closely. I was sitting with my Dad again when Armstrong steeped on the moon.

Several years ago I was talking one night with my son who now lives in Orlando. He was outside walking around and noticed a strange glow in the sky and, after a moment, realized that he was seeing a Shuttle on its way to orbit. I can't begin to tell you what that meant to me, that my son had seen an actual spaceship.

I know that many people see NASA as some big money pit that provides little value, but they just don't get the bigger picture. Humans thrive on challenges. They are what moves us forward.

Face it, the government does have the resources to decrypt her drive. The DOJ is either just being lazy or have been told by one or more three letter agencies to bugger off because a mortgage fraud case just isn't worth their time. If I were the defense I would strongly push that the act of decrypting the drive is well within the governments capabilities and that the defendant should not be forced to perform labor that assists her antagonists.

Agreed. And you can get two out of three at the Flying Saucer chain in the southeast us with their kilted beer goddesses.

The contrast between Walker and another former Wisconsin governor couldn't be greater.

Having lived there for my first 50 years I was brought up learning all about the states progressive past. Walker is the states biggest embarassment since Joe McCarthy.

Better change the state motto from Forward to Backward.

some moron comes along with a point and shoot yourself in the head tool that turns a simple page into a morass of 50 gazillion separately downloaded code snippets.

And then they wonder why the page loads so slowly.

I'm going back to HTML 1.0

-Xanthos

Face it, the type of people who go into marketing have very little to offer this world. Their whole reason for existence is to hopefully sell something to somebody who might not otherwise buy it. The only redeeming aspect of marketing is that it is a non-violent sinkhole in which to drop money, vs say a war in some God forsaken desert.

Have you ever met a marketing/advertising person who actually liked people?

Lets help Google out here and describe what a secure solution should look like.

Do you follow Apple's walled garden approach and only run officially signed code?
Do you follow Msft's signed code approach where you warn but let them run anyway?
Do you download to a quarentine area and force the user to accept it to run it?

others?

Thank you for the true explanation of what is going on here. While I would personally welcome a new clean energy source, my guess is that if it truly existed, the alchmists would have discovered it long ago.

I am sure that the original engineering was perfectly fine, it was just outsourced to someone who "improved" it.

Yeah, it is real easy to get all snarky about COBOL. I have always hated it even though it was a popular language when I was in school (late 70's). My CS department had three separate non-overlapping courses you could take.

The thing is that just about any programmer, even if they don't know COBOL, could go in and change it. COBOL is readable. The record based functionality is simple to comprehend. Something written 30 years ago is still running because there is nothing wrong with it. It does what its supposed to do. It was the perfect solution to the most important business problems of its day, and that legacy is why it is still around while other languages of its era are not.

Should new programs be written in it? HELL NO!!!! The problem set to which COBOL applies is pretty well solved. The new problems require new solutions.

-Xanthos