Definitely not true. A stroke victim that goes to the wrong hospital (handling a stroke requires a special set of equipment and skills that not every hospital has) will have to wait for EMS to transport them to the right hospital. Now they've got the time it takes to transport them to the wrong hospital as well as the time it takes to transport them again to the right hospital working against them.

Citation? I've been in a couple automobile accidents and EMS was present within a few minutes. All depends on where you live.

Interesting, don't know if it's done or how EMS responds to this.

Yes, I know how expensive an ambulance ride is. It's all absurdly priced, but I guess you avoid the whole billing issue if you die before you even get there. This approach does come with its own set of drawbacks...

It's all a calculated risk, one way or the other. Most people don't understand all of the reasons for taking the ambulance, and so make this decision without all of the info.

Fair enough. Perhaps I should have said call 911 instead of an ambulance. Still might not address your point, and unfortunately I don't know the answer to your question...

This is definitely something to consider if you have the choice on where to live (I recognize that a number of people don't have that choice). I still picked a rural area.

Until the hospital is fined/sued for violating the patient's rights under HIPPA by leaving their medical records our for all to see...

I'll readily admit that storing the records in a computer isn't much safer, but it's less visible to most people.

If you had no idea what's going on, you call an ambulance; you do NOT drive someone to the hospital yourself. Here's why:
- You don't know if whatever is happening is going to get worse and if it does, you don't have the equipment on hand to deal with it.
- Not all hospitals are equal. The closest hospital may not be equipped to handle your emergency. My wife used to work in one such hospital and people have died because someone drove them in instead of calling an ambulance. Hospitals are rated by what kind of emergencies they can handle; some don't have a <insert specialist here> on call 24 hours a day...
- You don't know the current wait time at the hospital, the EMTs in the ambulance do.
- You can't communicate with the hospital to let them know what's coming, the EMTs in the ambulance can.

I could be wrong, (and I don't know much about mailman) but...

The lock being left behind is generally a file that mailman has created in the file system. Once the file is created, the kernel has no business deleting it. It should close the file and reclaim the file handle when mailman closes, but it shouldn't delete the file. Ideally, mailman would create the file in a section of the file system that is cleared on reboot (/tmp?), so this wouldn't be a problem...

Add to that the fact that most "modern" IDE's will automatically suggest member functions for an object and nobody even has to look at the API or any other type of documentation to really screw things up anymore!

The sad part is that I know I'm guilty of doing exactly this.

At least now I'm protected from myself; if vi has that capability I don't know how to use it...

I work a 9/80 now, and have for the last 3 years. I love it, and my employer definitely respects the off Friday (the boss is generally off as well!). The biggest disadvantage I've found is that the off Friday isn't really a day off; it's when you do things that you'd otherwise take sick/personal/vacation time to do (Doctor visits, take the car to the shop, etc).