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Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Posted by samzenpus from the paging-doctor-manners dept.
Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
Education

PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort 135

Posted by timothy from the inspiration-comes-from-many-places dept.
holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."
The Courts

JPL Background Check Case Reaches Supreme Court 112

Posted by timothy from the faster-boys-if-you-want-your-pay dept.
Dthief writes "A long-running legal battle between the United States government and a group of 29 scientists and engineers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has now reached the US Supreme Court." At issue: mandatory background checks for scientists and engineers working at JPL, which they allege includes snooping into their sexual orientation, as well as their mental and physical health.

Comment Re:Use the line to pull other lines into your outl (Score 1) 635

by talmage (#28209021) Attached to: You've Dropped Your Landline — Now What?

I have one of those phones. It's beige. It has a rotary dial. It works just fine, thank you. I got it from a friend who bought three on EBay.

If you're into that kind of thing, you might like SparkFun Electronics Bluetooth rotary phone and GSM rotary phone or ThinkGeek's retro Bluetooth handset.

Comment Re:There still was this thing called "copyright" (Score 1) 426

by talmage (#26878353) Attached to: Facebook's New Terms of Service

Precisely! The FB ToS permit FB to compete against you with your own intellectual property.

As a semi-pro photographer, I've made beautiful portraits for friends for free because I wanted to. When I read the FB ToS, I had to ask my friends to take down those portraits. No artist should have to compete against any company for sales of his own work. The FB ToS make that possibility quite clear.

Flickr and Picasa Web have better ToS. Their use of your work is strictly limited to promoting the web sites. They will stop using your work when you take it down.

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