In answer to the question from the original post... I think there are no hearings about wired communication "monopolies" because there are a variety of wired providers nationally, even if only one or two of them service each domicile or office. There's still comparatively heavy competition in most markets for wired communications services. Wireless, on the other hand, utilizes a finite resource (EM spectrum) and the 4 remaining carriers are largely the only ones available in the US. If I move from Miami, Florida, to Miami, Ohio, I probably have the same options available to me. Virgin Mobile, Boost, Wal-Mart Mobile, etc. all lease their spectrum from one of the big 4, so they aren't true alternatives or competitors. Three providers (or really two providers since I don't count Sprint) controlling all of the cell network EM spectrum seems like a very bad idea. I think that's why Congress is more concerned about the wireless merger than the paucity of wired communications providers serving Podunk, Montana. Other thoughts on this?

The Slashdot search / feedback / submit story / login / join banner covers part of the text content on the page. When you hit page up or page down, the first line of the next page is hidden beneath that banner and you have to scroll up a few lines to see it. Very annoying. This happens on the latest Google Chrome and the latest Firefox on Windows 7, 64-bit edition. Please fix this CSS glitch! The content shouldn't appear beneath the top banner on the page!

Not all information was meant to be public. War is messy. International diplomacy is messy. Secrets are the currency of both effective war and international policy. Taking masses of secret documents, obtained illegally, and placing them online is not "freedom of the press." If the founders and operators of Wikileaks are so interested in freedom of information, why not post Assange's (and the other wikileaks operators') phone numbers, current locations, dates of birth, complete records of biometric data, family relationships, addresses and phone numbers of their family members, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, license plate numbers, etc. on the site? What does WIKILEAKS have to hide?

They're brave enough to post the secrets of others. Now they should post their own.

Freedom of the Press is wonderful... reprinting stolen, illegally obtained information that may (in the case of the Afghanistan war documents) put the lives of US Citizens at risk is an act of war. If this type of nonsense happened 30+ years ago, these server nerds would have been ERASED by the CIA.

Nowadays, everyone likes to play 5-star general quarterback from their Herman-Miller ergonomic chairs and question everything the government does. Everyone is suddenly an expert on diplomacy, war policy, etc. etc. The reason we have a government is to provide for the common defense of our nation, and to promote welfare within our country. This information does nothing to "educate" the public to help it make better decisions about the direction in which to take the country any more than the information about Wikileaks' operators would help believers of its misguided mission. It is a political stunt by a meek man who will forever spend his life on the run, and who will go down in history as the messiah of anarchists everywhere.

OK, I'm going to post the IP since it's been requested. According to Gmail, it was last accessed 3 hours ago from this IP. The IP address has been the same EVERY time it's been accessed, starting June 28, 2010. It traces to Cincinnati Bell's Fuse Network (a home internet service). I can't get anywhere with Cincinnati Bell's customer service. "Customer privacy rules," they say.

Here's the IP: 208.102 (DOT) 223.137
I split it up so auto-filters and bots wouldn't find it.

Thank you everyone and anyone who may be on the inside of 'Ma Bell who can help me track this thief down. I apologize if this is a TOS violation for Slashdot, but I am really at wit's end and have PROOF that this is the IP that's violating my account. I need your help.

I have no idea how to do any of this. What's worse - it was a Dell hackintoshed to run OS X, so it doesn't have Windows installed. I have no idea how to gain remote access to a Mac...

I got the IP tracked down to Fuse Network on Cincinnati Bell's home internet service. I'm not going to post the IP address here since that probably violates the TOS of Slashdot or something. I will try calling Cincinnati's police tomorrow, but with the size of the city - and the fact the crime took place in Indiana - i doubt I'll get anywhere.

Since this technology is still transistor-based, wouldn't it be susceptible to damage from an electromagnetic pulse, either from a high-energy radio frequency device or (less likely, I hope) a nuclear weapon? EM radiation can travel much farther than the actual blast radius, leaving these cards physically intact, but electrically unusable. If true, then why not stick with optical media such as a DVD or CD, which is more durable and offers similarly complex tamper protection (not to mention a larger capacity at a lower price)?

This looks like a solution in search of a problem.

Medicine: doctors already use laptops for exactly this. Doctors also do lots of data entry (note, scheduling tests, writing prescriptions, etc), so the ability to use a keyboard is required.
 
Last I checked, the iPad has a keyboard dock for data entry, so if you want to use a keyboard, that's not a problem. Also, the form factor is far more convenient for use at the bedside, plus it likely will fit in the average lab coat pocket (something many netbooks don't even do well due to their thickness). If Apple is so good at making innovative user interfaces, why not make an interface that makes doing the things you mentioned (ordering tests, writing prescriptions) as easy as if the doctor had a paper chart in front of them? Laptops also have an inferior screen to the iPad, ever since Lenovo stopped using the iPad's screen technology in their laptops.
 
  Manufacturing: to be useful on the manufacturing floor or shipping dock, it absolutely must have a camera/barcode scanner.
 
Not a problem - bluetooth compatible cameras and barcode scanners are available and are not very expensive. Ruggedizing an iPad like many medical companies have with the old Palm units (and adding a barcode scanner to them) for use in patient identification and blood glucose tracking shouldn't be very hard, but again, Apple hasn't partnered with anyone to make it happen or even suggest that it would be possible. They need to stop being so content with the affluent home user market and prepare a full-on assault in these left-behind markets.
 
Again - thinking INSIDE the box keeps you from seeing the true potential of these technologies, just like Apple.

I'm content with my own personal technology, but I am invested in some of these companies, so I look at it from that standpoint.

I see the big problem with both the MSI tablet and the iPad is that both are trying to be everything to everyone. Instead of showing how great the games or "Brushes" or the eBook reader are on the iPad for 30%+ of the launch event, I would have liked to have seen how Apple plans to expand into markets that have been relatively closed to them in the past.

Medicine: the iPad is uniquely suited to allow doctors and nurse practitioners to bring x-rays, CT scans, patient records, and more into the room with them - a laptop is too big and bulky, an iPhone / iPod touch too small. Show off an app that allows this to interface with a server in the office to store medical records on the fly, and I think they might have gotten the attention of physicians and hospitals.

Manufacturing: Great for live project / inventory status updating on the assembly line, at delivery point, etc.

Construction: Ruggedize and show how great it works as a tool for schematics, supply chain management, etc.

Instead, Apple is targeting this at the wealthy who need a new toy to fit somewhere between their Macbook and their iPhone on the spectrum of personal technology. I think that's why the iPad will fail - and MSI's solution will too, unless they partner in advance with companies that develop software actually used in service-related industries and focus on selling to a different crowd than the typical iPhone / Macbook owning home user.

I hope if I have the misfortune of requiring the services of EMS, you are not the individual dispatched to respond to my emergency. If you believe SecondLife has any place in the training of physicians, you obviously haven't used the simulation. Walking around in a virtual world "chatting" with patients will teach an individual nothing. If anything, it will harm students by dumbing down the medical environment to the point where the consequences of actions appear cartoon-like and unrealistic. As you astutely pointed out, there's nothing quite like performing chest compressions on a dying human being (I've had the misfortune of doing it many times in my brief medical school career). SecondLife cannot duplicate that. Hunting for a vein on someone who is bleeding out... where is SecondLife's simulation for that? Instead, it's designed to help students interview patients and diagnose diseases based on a set of prompts. Most patients don't present with those textbook symptoms. You're missing the entire category of physical diagnosis, too - no stethescope, no palpation. Heck, you can't even tell if the patient's pupils are dilated or their skin is dusky, clammy, cool, or hot. The body language, if any utilized, is exaggerated and unrealistic. The interview is carried out how... microphone and headset? While you look at a cartoon avatar on your computer screen. So much for realism. What's the point? To waste students' time and drum up publicity.

I'm tired of the publicity stunts. Medical education works. And for the record, I'm not surprised by your attitude. Virtually every EMT I've spoken with thinks they're God's gift to medicine; humility is not in your ride along duffel bag, I guess. Your experience riding around in an ambulance transporting grandma to her dialysis clinic every MWF, interspersed with the occasional "true" emergency makes you super-qualified to talk about in-hospital training... particularly in-OR training, which was specifically mentioned in the summary as a feature of this simulation.

1. Medical students do not perform "open heart surgery." Interventional cardiologists and cardiothoracic surgeons, who do perform surgery on the heart, have at a minimum 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 5 years of supervised residency training (where they are required to complete a large number of cases under the supervision - in the OR - of attending physicians who have years of experience in the field), and a year or two of specialized fellowship training. No. A simulator is not what I want the surgeon working on my heart to be trained on. I want him to have thousands of past surgeries on real people - both observed and performed under supervision - before he is allowed to fly solo and operate on me.

2. No simulator created in second life or any other "virtual realm" can accurately reproduce the complexity encountered in operating room or emergency situations.

3. If, as the article says, the idea is to teach students interviewing and diagnostic skills, they're doing this with both hands tied behind their backs: the basis of medical diagnosis is a thorough history and physical. The history is usually obtained through discussion with the patient... much of what is communicated is non-verbal and cannot be represented in Second Life. In fact, some studies estimate that more than half of human communication in a healthcare setting is communicated non-verbally. In addition, without the ability to actually touch the patient, listen to their heart, their lungs, palpate their abdomen or a wounded extremity or injured joint, their is no furtherance of physical diagnosis skills.

In short, this program is useless nonsense intended to capture media attention. It implies that the art and science of medicine can be simplified to the extent that all we need are computer simulations for people to become physicians. I can't wait until I hear about the daytime TV advertisements: "Stuck in a dead end job, need more money? Become a doctor - online! - in just 6 to 8 months through Kaplan College or University of Phoenix online! We'll teach you all you need to know through our SecondLife patient simulation system!"

You're welcome to see a doctor trained with these tools. I prefer a doctor who knows how to interact with real human beings in real situations and who has taken the time to read the books, perform the self-examinations, and complete the continuing medical education training necessary to be prepared "for [a] much greater scope of training." If you don't know enough of the science to be safe in real life - even as a third year medical student (when most schools permit their students to see patients full time) - and you need additional training in SecondLife to supplement your skills and keep you safe, I postulate that your medical school has failed in properly educating you... and they should lose their accreditation.

Lastly, I don't know what you think goes on in medical school, but there is rarely a situation in which real-life patient contact is either expensive or risky. Seeing a patient in the ER with chest pain... I know enough to get the attending... the nurses know enough to get the attending if I'm too dumb to do so... the unit secretary even knows enough to get the attending if both the nurses and I fail to pick up on something (and the secretaries usually have just a high school diploma). Risky situations tend to come later on - in residency. By that point, one would hope you've had enough real-life training under the close guidance and supervision of licensed physicians to be competent enough to know when to ask for help and admit you're in over your head. Then again, if you got your medical school training in SecondLife... who knows how you'll do.

I'm currently a 4th year medical student and can tell you from personal experience that nothing... absolutely nothing... can replace face-to-face training with real-life patients. SecondLife is a fun playground, but it's not a place to learn to practice the art of medicine or the scientific basis for diagnosing disease. Talking to virtual avatars or playing in a virtual OR is nothing like real life. For instance, in a real-life OR, you must vigorously scrub your hands for 2-3 minutes with special cleanser before you're clean to "gown up." When you're standing around waiting for the procedure to start, you have to have your hands crossed in front of you in a special position to avoid touching anything that isn't sterile, including your own face, sides of your gown, etc. Good luck reproducing these intricate details in Second Life.

Virtually every medical school in the US has a "patient simulator" laboratory where mechanical / robotic dummies are used to train future physicians. These labs also host "simulated patients," - actors, usually from the community, who are trained to play the part of a patient with a specific disease. It isn't cheap for schools to do this, but it's a lot more realistic to perform your first vaginal exam or rectal exam on a real person than in a SecondLife virtual world. Same goes for performing other aspects of the physical exam. How is a student to put their stethescope to the patient's chest, carotid arteries, abdomen, or back in order to arrive at a diagnosis when there is no mechanism to do so in SecondLife? These are things that must be experienced to learn.

If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.

All this will do is build barriers and put "blinders" onto future physicians. "It couldn't have been a heart attack - he didn't have left sided chest pain radiating to the arm and jaw. He had no shortness of breath! That's how I was taught MI's all present in Second Life!" Med schools need to stop cutting corners and trying to implement these ridiculous ways of trying to be "cutting edge." Want to be cutting edge? Implement a computerized medical record system that actually works - for starters - and institute a system by which patients evaluate their physicians in a publicly available forum so that we can see which docs should be doctors... and which shouldn't. That would do more for patient care than any of this Second Life nonsense.