And when they do decide to pull the plug, Sarah Palin will blame it on Obama and his death panels.

The dust will flow all around the rover, since there's no gravity ... on Mars?

An external bluetooth keyboard for a smartphone? Please. That is sooo 1982. If someone develops a reliable voice input system (i.e. so you can dictate your e-mails), bluetooth keyboards will be toast.

Actually, I don't think Denver weather is bad enough to cause this problem. For this to happen, you need very windy blizzard conditions combined with sustained periods of extreme cold. This sort of thing happens from time to time in Denver, but is much more common in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

To be fair, I think that the browser wars taught Microsoft that their tactics actually do work -- to an extent. They went from being a minor player to being the dominant browser, largely by bundling and incorporating IE into Windows. Enemies in the tech community are no match for compliant sheep in the non-tech community.

Firefox isn't dominant because Microsoft withdrew their tactics. Firefox is dominant because MSIE stinks. Time will tell if the same happens to Bing

To be fair, there are a significant number of conditions seen in the primary care setting for which the physical exam is of little or no value. Many conditions are diagnosed by the clinical interview alone. A responsible way to run this virtual clinic thing would be to treat only this set of conditions over the internet, and bring the rest into the clinic for an exam. Whether this is actually what takes place is another story.

For patients who have an established relationship with a primary care doctor, virtual clinics can be a valuable adjuvant in managing many chronic medical conditions between visits. This is particularly valuable in conditions for which some level of self-testing is available at home (e.g. hypertension, diabetes, chronic congestive heart failure). Incorporating the virtual clinic model into chronic disease management can even improve the management of such conditions beyond what can be achieved through regular face-to-face doctor visits. Telemanagement programs have long had success keeping CHF [congestive heart failure] patients out of the hospital, and moving such programs from the phone to the internet is a reasonable next step for computer-savvy patients.

Unfortunately, most acute conditions that are seen in the ER are a bit more serious, and tend to require some level of physical exam for proper diagnosis. Additionally, the management of most chronic medical conditions also requires some level of examination at regular intervals. If the goal of expanding access to primary care is to provide better chronic disease prevention/management and relieve ER crowding, the virtual clinic is unlikely to achieve those goals without coexisting access to face-to-face primary care. For this reason, while virtual clinics can (and will) become an important adjuvant in primary care, they cannot replace an established relationship with a primary care doctor.

prescription drugs = drugs you have to have a prescription to get

controlled substances = drugs determined to have significant abuse potential, and therefore subject to certain prescribing rules by the DEA (e.g. no refills, can't phone it into the pharmacy, some states require triplicate prescription paper, etc.) examples of controlled substances include narcotics, amphetamines, etc.

not every prescription drug is a controlled substance. in fact, most are not.

Why did you put "works" in quotes? Office 2003 still does, in fact, work. It works just fine.

A lot of people are still using Office 2003 because the number of new features that impact daily usage seems to shrink with every new release. Why upgrade when the version you have does everything you need it to, and the new version doesn't do anything you wish it did?

There's always someone who will benefit from [insert new feature here]. But for the rest of us, Office has suffered from a paucity of innovation since 1995. If anything, things have gotten worse -- e.g. they keep trying to make Microsoft Word "smart," but the result is a program that's too smart to be obedient and too stupid to do what you actually want it to do.

The writing's on the wall for Office. If the folks in Redmond don't figure out something reeeal soon, Office is toast.

This is only true in theory. The data is often not as rigorous as we would like it to be (e.g. ezetimibe, which was approved without any mortality data, whose efficacy is now being questioned). Meanwhile, many "off-label" uses are actually backed by very strong evidence, but no one [not even the FDA] bothers getting the "label" for the indication because the drug is already on the market. The various professional organizations that publish treatment guidelines tend to do a much better job of reviewing the evidence than the FDA does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSkT5XykJzo

Well, every generation has its candle burners and its lazy souls. The good ones are selected to succeed, and the lazy ones get fired or demoted to lesser companies or positions. Unfortunately, twenty years later the ones who have succeeded have a tendency to look around, see the incoming generation with its unselected mix of the hardworking and the lazy, and then prophesy the end of the world.

Part of the problem is that Vicodin/Percocet/Lortab/etc. are not always even correctly prescribed. For example, when you look up Vicodin in Epocrates (the most commonly used electronic drug reference), the dosing regimen comes up as:

1-2 tabs every 4-6 hours
Not to exceed 8 tabs in 24 hours

Most physicians just write the first line in the script. Very few medications come with a "Not To Exceed" line, because the maximum is usually built into the dosing and frequency, so most physicians are not accustomed to having to write a "Not To Exceed" line.

The resulting script, with the NTE line omitted, allows the patient to take 2 tabs every 4 hours, for a total of 12 tabs in a 24-hour period. For Vicodin, that is 6 grams of acetaminophen over 24 hours, which can be toxic. Unfortunately, MANY scripts for Vicodin are written this way. Fortunately, most patients don't take the max dose/frequency (especially when sleeping), and most patients have sufficient reserve function in their liver to handle 6g/24hrs of acetaminophen for a few days.

Either way, "1-2 tabs every 4-6 hours" is already too many parameters to juggle; "1-2 tabs every 4-6 hours not to exceed 8 per day" is a little absurd. Truthfully, the average Slashdot reader might be able to figure it out just fine; whereas, the average USA Today reader might struggle.

I would kindly suggest that Epocrates (and others) change their formulary to say "1-2 tabs every 6 hours," which would avert this specific problem, and protect patients who are in fact following directions -- they were just given the wrong damned directions. It would not, however, address the larger issue surrounding educating one's patients about potential toxicities and interactions with Tylenol...

Paramedics work within pre-defined protocols; the planning has been done in advance, so that it doesn't need to be done at the scene. However, a paramedic's job is to stabilize the patient, provide initial treatment, and get them to the hospital; medics generally do not provide definitive care.

On the other hand, if you are sedated in the ICU with multiple organ failure, you had better hope that you have a team of doctors who know how to formulate an appropriate treatment plan. In a medical ICU, the bulk of this planning typically does NOT take place at the bedside; it happens "behind the scenes."

Quickly assessing the situation and applying the right techniques works for certain tasks, but there are many other tasks that require careful, meticulous planning.