I'm from Massachusetts and we call those things sand fleas as we'll. the ones we have are pretty small though, maybe pinkie nail size.

Self assembling alien nano-robots. I did a book report on it in middle school in 1989.

You are severely underestimating 2 year olds. My daughter figured out how to unlock the iPad, page around until she found netflicks, open it, find Curios George in the recently watched list, and start it playing. And this was when she was 18 months old. And yes we had to sharply curtail her iPad time. She's supposed to be learning to explore her world physically at this age, not zone out in front of a screen.

We do still let her play for a few minutes a day because it is good for her to learn the tech, but too much screen time is IMHO counterproductive at her age. Besides after an iPad session she's always a huge grump.

That's great if you live in the suburbs and have a garage where you can plug the car in in overnight. Until municipalities start installing metered outlets in on-street overnight parking spaces, electric is unfortunately impractical for millions of people.

That and the fact that the model S was 4x the price of my bottom-of-the-line Hyundai made it a non-starter for me.

They call it dub step now, gramps.

People charged with a crime often have a their movements restricted as a condition of their bail.

Are all firefighters paramedics? This is a legitimate question, I really don't know, but we were discussing videos made by a firefighter, not a paramedic per se.

Regardless, does the video of a guy kicking down your front door and dragging you out of a burning building constitute PHI? Is removing you from immediate proximity to physical danger a medical encounter?

IANAL, but I did work work as an SE in the medical world for 15 years at organizations that both acted as PHI clearinghouses for claims and clinical records as well as creating practice management software. In my experience the scope of HIPAA's privacy protections are a lot narrower than what slashdotters like to think.

This is one of those corner cases that raises some interesting questions, but like I said it's making a lot of assumptions to claim unequivocally that such a video would automatically run afoul of HIPAA. If there is anyone with first hand institutional experience in this arena, I'd be curious to hear of any similar cases. For example, where do security tapes recorded by hospital security land?

You are making the assumption that the firefighter is a HIPAA covered entity, and that the video of them performing their duty constitutes a medical record. Both of those are pretty big assumptions.

It depends. Some nail guns for use on concrete use an explosive cartridge to drive the fastener. I think that might qualify them under (a) above.

select a.* from table a where rownum >= 20 and rownum < 30

It's a little more complex in practice, but not too difficult once you know the idiom.

It's already well underway: http://openehealth.org/

This isn't unique to the government. When I was at my previous fortune-100 employer, they penalized smokers as well (actually what they did was raise the rates for everyone, but gave non-smokers a "discount"). It's not that uncommon. Additionally some places will hand out "fitness incentives" (i.e. penalize overweight people).

How about "high value individual"? That make you feel better? :)

That's not the point. No one is arguing that better safety is not an improvement over the past. The point is that when you confine a kid they act out more because there is less they can do.

My 20 month old goes stir crazy because she is still stuck in a rear facing car seat. Maybe when she was an infant she could entertain herself staring at the seat upholstery for an hour, but now she sure can't. So after she gets board of her books, toys, and dolls, we'll pass back an iPhone playing Finding Nemo in guided access mode.

So if they ever start putting a device in my car that disables the phone, I'll find out where it's located and take a hammer to it.

Knowing that the responsible party had a fine levied against them 30 years ago is scant comfort to the individual who ends up with cancer and the family that it bankrupts.