We have a state pharmacy database which does that. However, the data is not supposed to be commercially available, AND it most definitely is not supposed to be hooked up to any kind of Federal system.

Feeds it to the goats and puppies, obviously.

My employer up until sixteen months ago did exactly that. Volume licensing would have saved them some money - not a whole lot of money, but some. But, the IT department was totally incompetent. Now that we've been bought out by a larger company, the IT department is far less incompetent, and we actually have machines that work, OS's that do what they are supposed to do, and something that passes for security. And, volume licensing.

Ditto your thoughts here. Wonder if MS even checked for such a possibility. I use a couple different VPN addresses routinely, and some others less routinely. I have no idea how many people use the same VPN's. Hundreds of thousands, maybe?

No, the destruction of nation-states (Libya, Syria, and Iraq) that created the conditions for ISIS to flourish are Clinton's responsibility. She was a policy-maker, not the policy-maker, but a policy-maker nonetheless who was in the room when these decisions were made.

Basic fact fail. The vote was 297-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. There were plenty of brave voices willing to stand up against the Iraq War. HRC was not one of them. She does not get a pass for that clusterfuck, nor any of the clusterfucks that occurred while she was serving in the Obama Administration.

Good for you. You're also adept at putting words into my mouth. But feel free to excuse away HRC's bad judgment if it makes you feel better.

Yeah, like those times when the Orange Order held their parades in Northern Ireland, celebrating victory in a battle over 300 years ago, where everyone had cake and ice cream went home with balloons.

No, wait, that's not right -- according to this for over 100 years people have been killed, seriously injured, homes and cars have been set ablaze, and bombs have been thrown around like footballs. In 1998, three brothers between the ages of 8 and 10 were murdered when their house burned to the ground from a thrown firebomb.

That was between two Christian groups and was over a parade.

Yaz

Stockholm syndrome got its name from a bank robbery that occurred in Stockholm; it has no real or perceived reference to Swedish soceity. Incidentally, that society is a social democracy and there's a huge difference between that and socialism by most definitions. Despite what you may have "learned" from cable news there's plenty of capitalism going on in Sweden....

What, like The Troubles (aka The Northern Ireland Conflict)?

Let's see -- sectarian violence between two Christian groups (Catholics and Protestants) who were divided on purely religious grounds, that lasted for at least 30 years, with over 3500 confirmed dead and over 47 000 wounded. Where in one year alone, there were over 1300 bombings (including suitcase bombs and car bombs in populated areas).

And while it somewhat "officially" ended in 1998, there have been over 100 deaths since that time.

So let's tally it up somewhat -- Christians showing up with guns blazing? Check. Christians hiding bombs? Check. Looks like I have something!

Either you're 12 years old and don't remember how Christian-on-Christian sectarian violence in Northern Ireland was a near daily news item, you're being deliberately obtuse, or you're a complete moron. I'll leave you to decide which one.

Yaz

Oh, by the way, your criticism of GWB, that he deposed a regime and created a power vacuum leaving an opening for Islamic extremists:

Did you pay attention to what we did in Libya? Or who the Secretary of State was while we were doing it?

Which part did you miss? The part where Senator Clinton voted in favor of the AUMF that authorized the Iraq War or the part where she served with an administration that made "regime change" in Syria national policy? Perhaps both?

You may be willing to stick your head in the sand and forget about the AUMF but I'm not. HRC was a policymaker when the seeds were laid for every problem that I outlined. She does not get a pass. Your knee-jerk defense of her suggests to me that you're a Democratic partisan and not worth taking seriously.

If she disagreed with the policy and had any backbone she would have resigned. Since she didn't we can conclude that she either agreed with the policy or she didn't have enough courage of conviction to resign. Neither one of those options suggests that she's fit to sit in the Oval Office.

Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.

There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
 

And of course, Tolkien was a linguistics geek himself, and the world of Middle Earth with all it's history was in fact created as a "teaching tool", or at least a learning tool. All the migrations of the Elves to and from the West, and the interactions between the Elves who returned and the Dark Elves (who never saw the light of the Two Trees) - all of that business - was a sandbox to think about how languages evolved.

By making his own languages, and his own history, he could think about how specific words would evolve, how they'd diverge as the populations lost contact, and then came back into contact, and so on. Plus, he liked to write poetry, and you can write some damn fine poetry if you make up the sounds of the words as you go (if you haven't heard the poems in LOTR read out loud by someone skilled, pick up a good audiobook - they are marvelous to hear).