And I hope you stay so lucky. I am a physician and know how all my local hospitals do things. Perhaps your hospital is different.

The fact of the matter is: medical records are becoming more and more shared between different institutions. One of the local hospital systems near me is buying a $50million system that will integrate all records from the hospital, ER, physician offices, and pharmacies all into a single database so that mistakes in prescriptions don't happen. The other three hospital systems near me are spending an order of magnitude more for even more complex systems.

Very soon (5 year horizon) those databases will be shared with whichever ER or office you go into around the country.

Hopefully the records at your local hospital say that you:
1 - Are not allergic to PCN, just intollerant.
2 - Received Amoxicillin without any side effects.

In your case, the issue is this: If you have an allergy listed to an antibiotic, the treating physician will put it into the electronic medical record. The next time you get an infection, the computer will cross check your allergies before allowing the physician to prescribe an antibiotic to you. The computer will not just disallow penicillin, but also all penicillin analogues (ie: amoxicillin, ampicillin, etc), and all cephalasporins (there's probably twenty or more of them) since they cross-react with penicillin allergies.

The one allergy will knock out two entire classes of antibiotics.

On the other side, when you have a documented infection with a bacterial agent, the laboratory will take the particular strain you are infected with and see which all antibiotics the strain is sensitive to. The physician will then prescribe the antibiotic which the strain is most susceptable to, thereby giving you the best chance of beating the infection.

Obviously if you cannot take that particular antibiotic due to a documented allergy (or potential cross-reaction), the physician will have to prescribe something not quite as effective.

There's another problem. People who are intollerant to one medication are generally intollerant to many medications. You have to make sure you don't have a lot of allergies listed or you will end up being treated for an infection with 'big gun' antibiotics with more serious side effects.

Most of the time the physician will not even tell you how potentially toxic the antibiotic is, as it's generally not a detail physicians talk about. I've had a couple patients with dimished hearing for several months (at least!) as they were prescribed gentamycin for a simple infection because they were allergic to simpler antibiotics.

As was said many times before: States' Rights. Are they ever not embarrasing?

Sometimes I wish the states had no rights, and everything was controlled centrally. Seems a more efficient way to go. And if you distrust the federal government that much, the state governments won't protect you anyway.

I'm watching a lot less over-the-air and cable TV compared to 10 years ago.

I'm watching a lot more DVDs and streaming videos.

All in all, it's probably a wash or slightly more watching stuff than a decade ago.

Yes. I have the option to buy a 25BM/s line. The price is ridiculously high, however.

Residents in my neighborhood shouldn't be considered as having broadband since just about no one pays that much for internet (except my one neighbor who works in IT from home, and he deducts it as a business expense).

Hmmm...

Since /. comments seem to last forever, how about encrypting your data, running it through uuencode, and posting it?

I've been burnt or nearly burnt with new tech over the decades and consider myself a bit of an early adopter.

4K and UHD are interesting ideas, but I'm really not interested in replacing my entire hardware investment (including the current HDMI cables in the walls) just for a better picture. (Though the improved colorspace is somewhat tantalizing.)

Also, I've just recently gotten comfortable buying bluray discs in any quantity since I know I can rip them to my home media server. What sort of advanced copyright protection are the newer formats going to have? How many years of having to rely on a dedicated player? (I've just detached my dvd player from my TVs and likely will detach the bluray players as well.)

I'm not a fan of the false moderation because it's so obvious that it will be rampantly misused. (ie: Jennifer changed her status to "In a committed relationship". Flag: FALSE!)

I like the moderations /. uses. Would be interesting if a similar system could be made for a social site, with moderation points, etc.

(I'm not an Apple fanboy, I think. Of the 8 computers in my house, only two are Apple hardware, and one of them is > 5 years old.) The rest are either Acer or System76.

A lot of people buy Apple hardware because it's a known quality and (relatively) easy to get fixed. You (probably) know you're going to pay a little extra, but you know the build quality is generally consistently good and if there are hardware issues you can take it into an Apple Store and get it fixed fairly quickly.

It's fine for people that buy PC hardware all the time to say that a particular brand or model is good price and excellent quality. Most people don't want to do that much research for a laptop or desktop. And many have burnt themselves with buying something expensive and had it go bad in a couple years or need to be troubleshooted over the phone or mailed back due to some obscure issue. Better to drag it to the local Apple Store for many.

'Capable of' and 'allowed to' are two different things. I agree that it will likely be a decade or more before they're allowed to roam around on their own.

Capable of roaming on their own may be here now or near future. When Musk announced the driverless mode Model S, he mentioned that on private roads it could theoretically be fetched by the owner using his phone app.

What if it ran over a dog while on a private road? You know someone will sue. Until liability for that is cleared up, I'm thinking the driverless feature will be purposely be disabled when there's no one in the driver's seat.

There are some issues in AI that need to be addressed in the near future.

Autonomous vehicles are essentially here. The question is liability when one of them gets involved in an accident.

You can imagine all the possible people potentially liable in that instance. The question is how liability will be split up amongst the parties.

Whether an automatous vehicle is programed to minimize passenger mortality vs. minimize pedestrian mortality, it's a no-win situation.

How about being a total 3D printing solution place?

Go there, use their computers to upload your 3D design, or rent space there to create a 3D design, print on their 3D printer, and come back in an hour for the printer output?

Is it that hard for them to find a niche?

The article should say: I used to write Linux kernel drivers and hate the direction systemd is taking it. Please support me by clicking on my rant and joining me in installing BSD on your router.

Seriously, I'm barely familiar with Linux as I'm just an end user, and I know well enough that I don't need an ask slashdot to figure out which OS I can put on a router which doesn't include systemd.

Because we Tesla Fanboys (I certainly count myself as one) understand that there's a big difference what Tesla does and what other car dealers do.

The secrecy in the price is what aggravates most car buyers. If I knew that I paid the same price for my BMW as everyone else who bought one this year, I would happily buy another BMW (if they made a full-electric that ran for 250 miles and had similar features to a Tesla, that is).

Tesla Fanboys also realize that Tesla is using the profits from their cars to build up the infrastructure for the supercharger network as well as pumping the money into R&D for the next couple Tesla models. After all, that's what Elon Musk said several years ago and the only thing he's wrong about is his slipping timeline.

And that's why we have code, rather than just compiling the comments. ;-)