...even off-world, present terrible consequences for those of us on Earth (in this case, during development, test and launch). This world was better before the "Day of Trinity," would have been better without Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, et. al., and will be better after we follow the German lead to stop using nuclear fission for energy production. Harnessing nuclear energy was a bad idea at the start, and remains a bad idea today, for any purpose whatsoever. It's just too dangerous, especially with austerians limiting the budgets for development of safer approaches and methodologies.

"Like High School???" I never got OUT of high school (1957), ended up doing long-term, high-level (CxO) consulting to more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms. You can easily confuse education with learning. The school only matters to those who are so insecure they need to affiliate with some "tribe." I met a lot of them in my day; they decided they'd had the "Best education money can buy" and then they ended up having to take orders from the consultant who never went to college for their strategic direction. I've TAUGHT at a substantial number of universities, but never had the benefit/limitation of attending one.

Go read Fareed Zakarias' book ("In Defense of a Liberal Education") and learn how to THINK, to see behind appearances, to adapt and survive. Coding, Systems Analysis, SysAdmin are skills you can acquire. Unless you remain curious (Remember Grace Murray Hopper's slogan, "Born with Curiosity." If you don't know who GMH was, you're grossly undereducated.) you're stuck doing it the way you learned in a text book...which was obsolete by the time you got it.

The other most valuable thing you can do is select your mentors well. Mine are all gone, but Eli Hellerman (at C-E-I-R) was a godsend to me; he not only helped me learn about my chosen profession (at the time of the IBM 1401 and IBM 709), but he gave me a great kickstart on becoming a thinker, and an adult.

That first-tier, untrained, script-reading, non-English-speaking person on the other end of the line got up at 5:00 pm to be ready to go to work at 8:00 pm (their time), so they can be available on the front lines all night long...and for a wage that is comparable, in their economy, to that of your local McDonald's counter clerk. Have some compassion, and they'll get you through that hellish first tier. Then, when that's exhausted, you've earned the right to ask for escalation to the "next level"...if they even HAVE one (it's usually a transfer back to the U.S. for those higher tiers of erstwhile "Technical Support").

When you're done, find ways to terminate your relationship--if possible (here in rural America, my sole ISP is AT need I say more?). When enough customers start leaving (as I did in leaving AT&T's phone service recently), you'll starting getting solicitous letters begging you to let them help you. Ignore them. These are corrupt corporations, more interested in executive compensation than customer satisfaction. Get used to that, too, because that's why corrupt politicians keep getting paid to write laws that favor those very corporations.

In other words, it's a crappy world out there and revolution appears to be the only way these retarded executives will ever get the message. Hard, but true.

...by Glenn Greenwald, with copious facts, in The Intercept: https://firstlook.org/theinter...

Seems to go with the level of thinking about "women in the lab."

When I was overseeing the construction of my new home (2001), 100 MB/s cable was all the rage (1GHz was very new, and expensive), and I installed it after the house (exterior) was sheathed, but before (interior) drywall was put in. The cable loops from outlet-box to outlet-box through the studs, with lots of slack (in a loop) between the boxes. I also put in a "pull-cord" (heavy plastic twine) from each outlet-box to both its' neighbors, so I could pull replacement cable in the future. Those cords just droop down beside the outlet box, behind the drywall; remove the box, tie on the cable...go to the next box and pull the new cable (and a new "pull cord") through. I pulled the coax-cable for TV through the same path, to the same outlet boxes.

It turns out, 100 MB/s is plenty good for my computer business at home, although making copies of backups would be faster if I upgraded to 1GHz (or higher). Since backups are made while I sleep, I don't much care how long they take.

Good One!!!

Of course, if you make 100% off-line backups of every computer, every night, you can roll-back one or two days and be back in operation in less than an hour. BTW, this is another argument for keeping programs and data separated. I HATE "user profiles" in Windows for storing data adjacent to the O.S. We keep data elsewhere, so software can be restored without losing valuable data. (This happened just yesterday with a new software utility update that trashed the test system. We just rolled back to last-night's backup, then wrote to the vendor, and in our newsletter to clients, saying: Don't Use It!)

I love the way that the entire world-o'-geeks gets upset about a triviality. What prevents future *NIX releases from changing the "base date" to, say, 2010, and changing all the dependent modules to compute properly? Are there to be no future *NIX releases between now an 2038?

Are there programmers who, in their cleverness, have use primitive code that still relies on the older base date without reference to the underlying O.S.? Sure. But, change the base date soon, and all their bugs will appear LONG before 2038, but they'll be individual and isolated, and easily identified.

Geez. Much ado about NOTHING. This sounds more like an out-of-sync April Fool's joke than a serious problem...or, was that the original point?

Thanks for the meaningful contribution to the discussion of something that affect the health of every U.S. citizen.

Your ignorance of the issue is appalling. Yes, a single standard, so that vendors of software and equipment KNOW they can connect to existing systems without hassle and customization. The reason the HHS needs to do it, is a) they are the senior government authority with medical focus, and b) it needs to be open, not proprietary to be universally adopted.

I suppose, with your rationale, we should have dozens of different standards with conflicting rules over the header of a TCP/IP packet...as we DID have, in the old days, where there was no single IETF standard for such details, when each new vendor of a "network" technology invented their own rules (e.g., Novell), leading to internetworking chaos. Today, unless my Specialist Physician and my Primary Care Physician are using the exact same model and version EMR system, they can't exchange data except by exporting it all (e.g., to paper) and then re-importing at the other end. One standard for all that data, from MRI results to nurses' notes, would dramatically lower the cost of medical services across multiple providers.

Standards of this kind define how thing INTEROPERATE; it has nothing to do with the screen displays, or methods of input, or some theoretical (to quote you: ..."single standard" for medical records) overarching one-size-fits-all rule.

This is another example of government not doing their job. We have needed a single, comprehensive standard for the form and format of Medical Health Records (MHR) for a long, long time. They needn't mandate specific products, but those products should all comply with one, universal and constantly-updated standard. But, nooo! We have to let Republicans exercise their fantasy that government can't do it, it has to be the "private sector" (in other words, reward the people who pay them to sit on their hands instead of solving problems). What was once a rich and vibrant marketplace of products has narrowed down to one industry leader who does NOT have patient information reliability and quality on their list of priorities.

We should have seen thermometers and scales and manometers and oxygen-level gauges (all standard tests on any pnysician visit) automated to send the information to the currently-opened patient record in the examining room over secure WiFi a decade ago...insofar as I can see, there are still no such products. These Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software products (especially from the "leader") are designed to impose the maximum load on professional staff, because it's easier to code them that way. I'm surprised they aren't designed to require staff to use green-screen, text-only monitors!

So, yes, lawyers are making money. And, I'm glad those lawyers are starting to attack the EMR system providers. But the Department of Health and Human Services (and, truth be told, the Republicans who think that underfunding government agencies to cripple them is a good idea) are a root cause of the problems..

That's actually not true. There were three significant decisions in the same week, only one of them was about Title II (aka "Net Neutrality"). Another had to do with pre-empting state laws forbidding local communities from setting up their services...laws that were passed on behalf of telecomm lobbyists. I can cite from recent observation that a local Wireless ISP is, in fact, using two 1GB/s Comcast backhauls for servicing all their customers (in rural Northern California, where Comcast and AT&T have only spotty service). The third issue that week was they raised the definition of Broadband to be at least 25 Mb/s; below that is no longer considered "broadband" Internet access. Good decisions all, I assert.

For a meaningful answer, look up "dissembling" in any dictionary.

Your ignorance of the enabling legislation, the 1934 Communications Act, disqualifies your opinion and renders it trash.