If you need a quickie citation this is what you need. Make a new wiki article on something related or even a blog I suppose, make your statment, then cite your new article/blog in the old wiki article.Then cite the old wiki article in the new article! Voila instant citations! Hey, the PhDs have been doing this crap for generations, so it must be OK. Actually, this seems to really be a problem in that Wiki articles make a statement, media picks it up, they quote Wiki, Wiki quotes them. Instant fact.

Yeah, Wiki is on it's death bed for a lot of subjects as far as I'm concerned. As long as Wiki was open to editing by the world at large, I was confident that I was getting a range of opinions. That is in general what I want when I look for information. I can trust myself to ignore obviously biased or (what I consider) crackpot statements or unsupported statements. I like having access to a range of opinion and then can further research info I want before making an informed decision. Now, we have an elite core of editors who approve ... well, what they want to approve I guess. The information is no longer open, that makes it increasingly suspect. At best, wiki may be like an encyclopedia, at worst, Stalinist era propaganda. With the reputations of some editors (see "Slim Virgin" for example), I suspect that we are closer to Stalinist propaganda than anything else. I have already started to see bias and exclusions in a lot of the more interesting and charged topics and am starting to understand that Wiki is untrustworthy for those topics. These topics include politics, human rights, aspects of history, etc. On the other hand for simple topics, say looking up discussion of scholarly terms or concept, wiki remains pretty good. So, I suppose if I'm doing homework with one of my kids and need to review one of the properties of multiplication, Wiki is great. If I want a range of opinions on say Darfur or Gaza I'll look elswhere and teach my kids to do likewise. Shame, the concept of a democratic exchange of information was really tantalizing.

I have to agree, blocking ads is circumventing a micropayment. I try not to do that, at least to websites that I care about and feel are honest. Having said that, Madison avenue is insatiable. When I think back to when I was a kid, TV was free over the airwaves, commercials were ... reasonable. Today, I pay $90/m for basic dish service and suck down 20+ minutes of ads in a hour for medium popularity shows. I live out in the country where over the air service is bad. I don't have the choice to pay a small amount of money for just a couple of channels that I do actually watch.Talk about a bad deal. I'm told that if I am given the privilege of just paying for a couple of channels rather than a "package" all hell will break loose and all the small players in the industry will fail... I really think I'm being lied to, but whatever. I do understand that the advertisers/content providers will continue to pile advertising on until the system breaks (diminishing returns). Right? You have to maximize profits, which equates to putting in maximum advertising that the consumer will tolerate and still watch. So I do feel it is my duty to make my displeasure known by not visiting sites with excessive advertising. Popups, high volume audio, ads that obscure the page are all lethal to my viewing habits. I've wondered whether Ad blockers are a valid method of civil disobedience. If I don't visit a site because of advertising, the site may go away, especially the small players. On the other hand, with ad blockers, they see the traffic, so they know it's there, and have a chance to change their advertising plan... I'm probably rationalizing now though. As far as Mr. Murdoch goes, that *** manipulator can do whatever he wants. IMHO if he filed bankruptcy, the world would be better. I really stopped trusting WSJ after he picked it up. I don't really want his biased brand of so called news for free. He's just looking for a way to charge other news outlet, Fark, bloggers, etc for what he considers "his news". But all in all, the morals of using Ad Blocker are kinda hard, and made harder by a greedy, relentlessly progressive industry.

We are a contractor for the Veterans administration. The VA insists that we comply with privacy issues strictly. Any communications that have patient information must be sent on encrypted secure systems. No open email servers/hotmail/gmail/whatever is allowed. Failure to comply with the privacy (detailed in the out of control HIPAA set of rules and standards) is punishable both financially and by being banned from contracting with the US federal government. As an administrator, I have to remind physicians that if they are caught transmitting identifiable information of our patients over unsecured channels, it may cost us our contract and may result in their being banned from seeing medicare/medicaid patients. Anyhow, that's my two cents on utilizing gmail or such for sensitive information.

You forgot Government, local state or federal.

No, in the modern US medical system, the paperwork amounts to tons of paper. The manpower needed to maintain it; file new info, pull deceased patients is huge, for a large hospital, the space requirements are huge. The possibility of error (misfiling info, patients with similar name, married name changes, etc)is huge. From a legal point of view, you are probably more safe shutting the place down because EMR is down rather than trying to deal with a backup paper system. It's not best for the patients, but the medical/legal/government system has cared increasingly little about the individual human being for a while now. I say this as an employed experienced MD.

I do IT for a small multispeciality group. This story really points out some problems I've seen. We are in a small town, we have surges, brownouts, you name it. I occasionally have problems even though all my racks are behind decent APC UPSes/conditioners. Inevitably though, spring and fall we have storms and people fire up their AC and the power grid is for crap. I've tried to work with the utility company but they *deny everything*. At this point I am thinking of getting management involved and pulling together a group of merchants who are IT heavy and petitioning the utility directly or through the state. I do worry about the repercussions though. As far as EMR goes, we use redundant systems, offsite backup but with imaging we have well over a TB of data. If the system were to go completely fubar, I don't know what would happen. Critical info like allergic reactions, med lists, would be unavailable. We won't even go into billing. For a small four physician group like ours, we could make do I suppose. For a large hospital in a litigious part of the country? I don't know. I suppose the answer is updatable RFIDs in every citizen so that medical info can travel with and be available with the patient, right? Welcome to the future everyone.

In our business, wired predominates, we use gigabit ethernet for a bunch of reasons. 1) Reliability: We are in a old building, lots of steel and concrete. WiFi is a lot less reliable and a lot slower. I do use WiFi in places where we have mobile carts or where wire is hard to pull but WiFi remains a hassle. I see occasional dropouts, I have to put in and maintain multiple APs to cover poor signal regions. 2)Speed: We send many large files (medical images) during the work day. Gigabit wire handles these well, WiFi tends to choke. 3. Cost: Gigabit ethernet is built into every system/mobo, wireless is not. The concept of installing/maintaining all these APs and wireless cards is daunting in terms of my time and budget. Anyhow, this is just marketing spew from a marketing guy as far as I see. WiFi is complementary to our wired network, certainly not a replacement. I don't really see this changing in the next 2 years (2011) as quoted. Unless an outrageous new wireless tech comes out and is build into all business mobos/systems, in 2011 we will probably continue running predominantly wired ethernet.

That's one of the biggest arguments I've heard. That Microsoft products are a standard in the United States and schools are obliged to teach kids how to use the products that they will encounter in daily life rather than teach about outliers. Microsoft of course donates a lot to get schools and kids "hooked" on their products. See for example this older article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=108319&sectioncode=26 At home, I make it a point to use Open Office but I can't see arguing with the school system to include OO in the curriculum even though I hate the thought of mandatory "Microsoft Word" classes that my kids take. I really agree that the change has to come from home and business down to the schools but boy does Linux have some problems to overcome there too. Trying to help Linux acceptance, I have tried to move to Linux in my small business. Trying to buy Linux configured desktops however is still painful and seems to be slightly more expensive. We still have proprietary Windows based software. We may be able to move to a Windows remote desktop for the apps we can't bypass and move to Linux on the desktop. I keep on saying that the next batch of desktops I get will be Linux but it still has not happened. If XP becomes unavailable, that choice will be easier though :)

Well, this is not open source but free. I use and so far like Spiceworks. Spiceworks uses fairly unobtrusive IT related advertising. We are a small business, about 30 users, less than 1 question/day. Spiceworks has some nice tracking and monitoring features besides the helpdesk. Helps me keep track of errors, low disk space, new software installs, etc.

I think they just wanted to get their names in the press. Looks like callouses and a blister to me. I used to get stuff like that on the sides of my fingers after too many hours at the arcade. Well, here's their 15 minutes of fame.

Huh? What is the point of that rant? Microsoft owns XBox and they have the right to limit discussions that don't pertain to games. That's not targeting gays, that's running a business. If someone throws out details of their heterosexual sex life they should be banned likewise. What's the crap about Christianity besides? How does that tie into Microsoft and Xbox? Troll.

This is written by someone who lives and breaths profit and may be gunning for a Microsoft admin job. I am a small business owner and am looking at ways to use and support open source more and more. I for one am making my opinion made known with my wallet. Some days I just hate these clueless pundits.