Assuming you are actually a physician (this is the internet, after all), you really haven't looked into the available choices if you think this is the case. There are dozens of Ambulatory EHRs available at reasonable prices (well under the MU payouts). Since you have the good fortune of not being an inpatient care provider, some of these solutions are actually usable. When you consider training and a need to temporarily reduce patient load to accommodate implementation, it might be at break-even or even a noticeable loss, but once the "stick" part of the carrot-and-stick MU approach hits, you'll see the same loss or a greater one anyway. Of course, if you don't accept Medicare, then you are in a bit of a different situation. One thing you may be failing to consider is the ability of an EMR, when used properly, to catch charges at a rate much higher than human billing coders.

Patient portals are not a selling point. People do not care enough to use them. They sound great to everyone involved, but when the rubber meets the road no one cares. There are exceptions, of course, but in general people care about patient portals about as much as they do about personal health records (which also no one uses). When was the last time you heard someone say "I was going to go to Dr. X because a friend highly recommended him, but he doesn't have a patient portal so I'm going to Dr. Y." As for EPIC, the software is no better liked than any other. What they are _very_ good at is guiding customers through successful implementation. It is really a clever business model, they can more or less guarantee a successful rollout, thereby removing a major stressor from the CIO/CMIO's plate. To put it differently, what they are really selling is job security for EMR decision makers, and they are really good at it. Innovation is alive and well in ambulatory settings, where you'll find hundreds of vendors and some very cool products. On the inpatient hospital side, decision makers are too scared to deviate from what works, even if it works poorly. Even Partners Healthcare, an innovator in EHRs which has used a home-brew system for a long time, is now switching to EPIC. This would be great if EPIC wasn't a stale piece of software (written in M, lol) and if EPIC Corporation wasn't the biggest cheerleader for vendor lock-in on the entire planet.

"Seriously, it's not even HTML, it's HTML plus other frameworks (codecs, javascript, etc)." So what? Does this offend you on a philosophical level? W3C already tried the "pure" approach with XHTML, and it was universally hated. HTML5 might be more of a grab-bag, but it is a direct response to what developers actually want and need. "As much as flash is annoying, at least it's a real application and not a an ad-hoc collection of technologies making a misguided attempt to turn the browser into an application platform." HTML5 is designed to be a general purpose web client development platform, so I don't see how "ad hoc" is an appropriate description. And does Flash's status as a "real application" make it any less prone to bugs, any quicker to load, or any more portable than a "fake application?" The web browser is a real application, and HTML5 represents nothing more than a standard way of providing instructions to that application. I'm not sure why you think embedding an application within an application is a more legitimate or beneficial approach. I'm not suggesting there is no value to Flash, but perhaps we can agree that there is room out there for more than one way to develop a web application?

My first degree was in industrial engineering, so my vision of automation is pretty good. Yes, there is a need for support personnel (and, contrary to my sarcastic comment, this does entail more than sweeping the floors). They'll pay OK, but overall the salaries paid out from such a factory are minimal compared to the scale of the production being done. It's really a good thing, since lower costs do benefit consumers, but lacking a significant number of decent jobs does really alter the value equation of having a factory in your neighborhood/city/state/country, which is more the point I meant to convey: Yay for American manufacturing (in terms of output), but "not so Yay" in terms of dollars being injected into American homes.

...if you don't actually pay anyone except the huge firm that sells you the robots (which were probably made by other robots). So, while I admit this is an overly simplistic view, we get all of the industrial waste and hardly any jobs. I sure hope more companies do this! There's a park down the street that would sure look great if it were paved over and filled with widget-making robots so a couple hundred people could make 11 bucks an hour to sweep the floor.

Your marginalizing of Google's role in driving traffic to these websites and making it possible for user's to find content suggests that you have no background in - or even passing familiarity with - the field of information retrieval. Google provides a service, of real value, with very real technical merit, and profits off of that by placing ads on the results page. They are not appropriating content for this beyond that necessary to allow a user to decide whether or not a search result is relevant. Meanwhile, these French news outlets benefit from billions of click-throughs and anyone searching for French-language news benefits from being able to find it quickly. And of course neither the users nor the listed web sites have to pay a penny for this service. There is a good reason these nuts are alone in challenging this business model. Referrals from Google probably make up a huge portion of their web traffic, while searches for French news probably contribute a small fraction of 1% to Google's ad revenue. Let's see how the fallout from this fight affects each party.

For what it's worth, the NHTSA (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811206.pdf) continues to find (every time they repeat the study) that seatbelts are saving thousands of lives a year in the US alone. I would love to know how you've arrived at the conclusion that safety gains in cars are solely attributable to design improvements. And, while 20% may seem modest, you are failing to account for the steady increase in driver speed over that same time period. As for ABS, I'm not familiar with the literature, but I would submit that insurance companies probably don't give discounts for cars with ABS (a common practice, at least in my area) because they fail to improve driver safety. Strictly speaking, that strongly suggests only that ABS reduces the total economic costs to insurers, but I think it is pretty safe to use that as a proxy for the severity/incidence of crashes. And seat belts don't require roll cages to be effective. Are you under the impression that every accident is a gruesome scene involving a semi-truck side-swiping a VW bug? What percentage of accidents do you really think involves the roof crushing the driver during a violent rollover? And in what percentage of those do you think the driver was better off without a seatbelt?

Tens of thousands of people die in the US alone each year in car accidents. Many more are injured. Many more than that suffer some financial loss (even with zero insurance deductible, you will be paying a higher rate going forward). To improve on the status quo, you don't need cars to see through or around solid objects, nor do they need the intellect of an attentive human. We need cars whose drivers never fail to pay attention, don't act like they own the road, don't speed, don't get road rage, don't drink and drive, etc... Autonomous cars can do all of those things. People keep acting like autonomous cars need to be as good or better than the best human drivers, but they don't. They need to be better than the average human driver, and let's be honest: they're not going to have much problem with that requirement. I'm not sure what sort of automobile mecca some Slashdotters are living in, but where I live I don't go a day without seeing someone doing something stupid in a car. The nice thing about intelligent systems? They know their limitations. If the onboard systems cannot determine the appropriate action to take with very high certainty, they can alert the human in the cockpit and request that the human overrides the computer (pulling over in a safe spot or sending out an SOS if that override doesn't happen...such as might happen if the human has died). Someone earlier asked what might happen to an autonomous car in a blizzard. Was that seriously the best scenario you could think of? How about this: if the earth is blanketed in snow, an autonomous car won't drive through it. That's so stupid only a human would try it. I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are still a lot of issues to resolve, and a whole lot of testing to be done, before we're ready for autonomous cars to fill the roadways. However, I have a real hard time seeing how these issues somehow outweigh the current cost of crappy drivers in terms of lives, pain and suffering, time, or money. Autonomous cars make a ton of sense. It is only a matter of time before they hit the roadway on a limited basis (beyond the minor testing already going on in Nevada), and unless they suck, people will realize the world hasn't ended, the autonomous cars have not attacked them, and their daily commute is monotonous and annoying and thus not worth hanging on to, and sales will explode. If you hate the idea of autonomous cars, you are simply out of luck. Your best bet is to lobby for enabling legislation that stipulates a human-operated mode as mandatory, forbids two-way communication during driving (seriously, if this doesn't scare you, this must be the first story you've ever seen on Slashdot), and requires automakers to allow users to opt-out of features that would require sending their location data back to the automaker.

I second this. Authentication or not, someone will find a security hole and exploit it. Maybe someday this will be a great extension to autonomous car technology, but for now it isn't needed. After all, humans can't see around walls or through objects either, so it's not like it is impossible to safely navigate a car through a busy area without this ability.

They are "driverless cars," not "humanless cars." And even then, they aren't really driverless. I think there is close to zero chance that we'll see cars that do not require a human in the driver's seat with override capabilities, so driverless is a misnomer.

Telemedicine is already real, though still in its infancy. I'm not aware of any restrictions that say the remote monitoring device -- whether be a scale, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, etc... -- has to be stationary. In fact, all of the above are strictly measurement devices, and have no diagnostic value in a vacuum. Thus, I think the "not intended to diagnose, cure, prevent any disease" disclaimer applies. I'm not sure this would even fall under the FDA's jurisdiction in that case. We aren't talking about robot doctors or nurses...just taking existing functionality, already widely available, and packaging it in a more effective manner. Not that this guarantees smooth sailing, but it is not as dire a situation as you have painted. Whether or not any insurance company would reimburse the expense is another matter -- and one I think far more likely to tank the concept than getting approval to package the robot with devices that are already sold over-the-counter to consumers for use on themselves.

If the robot came with an attached blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, and a few other things, it could also be applied to telemedicine. Since getting to the doctor's office is a huge challenge for many disabled folks, this could be a great opportunity. The telemedicine thing has and is currently being done, so this would really just be enhancing the robot with functionality that has already been prototyped, tested, and, in some cases, already deployed. If we're going to do this, let's go for the gold. Picking things up and enabling better communication is a great start, but becoming an all-around health companion and lifeline would take this to the next level and perhaps help it see uptake outside of robot-loving Japan.

This is good news. I've studied bioinformatics, but the legal side of this is way over my head. Thanks for the insight.

If you read what I wrote closely, you would see that what you are suggesting is widely believed to be _not_ true for most non-coding genes. "Junk" DNA is alive and well, though the nice thing about science as opposed to religion is that you won't see a lot of crying if someone conclusively proves that every last nucleotide serves a purpose...but the weight of evidence doesn't support such a conclusion today.

In short: you're wrong. He tried homeopathy first...this is painstakingly detailed in his biography in the most revealing account of his illness and treatment available anywhere. He had a low-probability surgery to try and cure it after he realized the folly of trying homeopathy, but as expected it didn't work (hence: 'inoperable'). Also painstakingly detailed was the regret Steve Jobs took to the grave for having waited so long to try a modern medical approach.