While I agree with your premise that this is the perfect example of why we would want government to fund specific types of R & D, I'd argue that private industry is terribly interested in analytics and the ability to provide enhanced clinical decision support and measure previously unknown positive outcomes based on specific treatment protocols or inputs.

HIT companies have saturated the existing EHR market - competitive advantage will come from the ability to derive value from existing data.

Absolutely true! In addition, that needs to be a "fuzzy" five minutes, plus or minus a non-determinate amount of time to prevent further gaming of the system.

The solution is simple. The will to implement it is not there - too much money and special interest in HFT.

The word saboteur is French, I think.

Joda Time is brilliant.
It's a pleasure to use, and obviously was created by people who thought long and hard about it, and had suffered with the problems of the standard Java date/time libraries.

If you still use Date or Calendar, then check out Joda Time.

"Want to know how much my flat is worth and what I paid for it? Did I pay taxes last year, and if so, how much?"

Yes! Finally!

"it would just force these hypothetical dirty bomb enthusiasts to line the bomb container with lead"

A friend of mine works for a company making detectors for ports.

I said to him "But terrorists will just ship them in in lead-lined boxes", and he told me that that would cause a measurable drop in the background radiation which would trigger suspicions.

I once renamed shutdown.exe from the Windows resource kit to DONOTRUN.exe, and sent it in a mail round to the company (in the I love you/Melissa days), warning people in the subject, and message to NOT RUN THE ATTACHED attachment.

People then started coming to me complaining they'd lost work because their computer had shutdown.

It's amazing, it really is.

Urg. That ampersand in the URL makes me twitch. Surely that's not a valid part of the URL, unless it's in a list of parameters?

I set up my mother with Ubuntu, and she loves it. She appreciates the "tidiness" of the desktop, and the simplicity of it all.
I left her set up with the ability to sudo, but with the warning that "there be dragons", and to contact me.
I set up OpenVPN so I could always SSH on, and fix anything.

The only time I've ever had a problem was when my sister's Windows-using ex boyfriend tried to install something, and stuffed up the firewall rules. I simply talked her through sudo iptables ... and I popped on and fixed it. And then reminded her about the dragons.

Years of trouble-free computing.

I believe that Jason Bateman was in a recent documentary on this topic - seemed very factual, and you should probably consider his plan of action:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024432/?ref_=sr_1

-jd

Ambiguous pricing:

From the main page: 1.95c GB-Mo *
From the stats page: Storage Rates (USD) per GB * 30 Days Storage Charge (Client Node) 1.95c

Note the "USD" mentioned.

Make your mind up, and make it obvious. Either it's $1.95, or it's $0.0195. Personally, I wouldn't bother with the cents. At first, I thought, wow, $0.0195 per GB/month - that's really good.

This is like the Verizon maths problem all over again.

But what, other than brown urine is the effect? I mean, do you feel tired? How would someone know if they had damaged kidneys?

What happens when you do do something that strains your kidneys?

I'll get off your lawn.

Is it really a surprise that a failing business like Yahoo! would ignore its users in an attempt to make money?

Look, the obvious lesson here is that no business can be trusted to keep secrets. Also: Water is wet, fire is hot. Don't give out anything you don't want to get out there, no matter what some PHB promises you.