That's not the case at all. HIPAA makes a distinction between covered entities (usually hospitals, doctors, insurance companies), business associates (people providing services for covered entities such as medical coding, transcription, IT services, etc.) that require access to protected health information, and everyone else who isn't allowed to access protected health information. If a covered entity loses or discloses protected health information, or is breached, that entity is responsible for fines under HIPAA, which are being levied regularly. e.g. http://www.healthcareitnews.co...

There is a law, it's called HIPAA. Healthcare organizations are very cognizant of HIPAA and do work to avoid breaches of healthcare data. The Department of Health and Human Services does hand out significant fines for breaches. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy... Additionally, for large breaches, healthcare organizations are required to notify prominent news media, which arguably has a larger financial impact than the fines themselves.

The idea of the Nest is that it's going to do something that most people aren't good at doing, which is programming their thermostats. Tech geeks aren't the target market. We already programmed our thermostats and for the most part they work relatively efficiently. It's for my crazy aunt who doesn't have a programmed thermostat and can recoup that $250 by letting some silly device do it for her. There are also smart added benefits like being able to check on the house remotely when you're out of town to make sure the furnace hasn't failed and your pipes are frozen, etc.

I think cars are a good analogy. I have to find a source for this, so, of now I'm talking out of my rear end, but I believe cars have held steady in price according to inflation. This is counter to most technology which tends to go down, like TVs. The reason is that the technology of the car has been continually improving to match. So, they haven't gone down in cost asa percentage of an average person's income, but that average person gets much more in a car today than in the past. They are crazily more safe, get much better mileage, have comfort features, etc. I think this would be similar. A smart light switch today costs around $50. It's way more than a dumb light switch, but doesn't require any extra wiring and does loads more. You probably can't justify the cost of a system like this based on electricity savings, but for some people, they may be able to justify the cost based on convenience and features. Advances like Intel is making, may tilt that in favor of vein more cost competitive.

I do want my fridge online. We went out of town once and the kids didn't shut the freezer all the way and it ran and also spoiled all the food. At the very least, we could have known and arranged to have someone go close it.

I'd love for the motion sensor in the hallway outside my door to correlate with my alarm clock and know that I just got up, and then kick on the coffee maker. Technology is supposed to make life easier, and this will help it do that.

It's more than that, and it's silly little things we haven't thought about. Granted, we can do some of this already, but I had a use case this last week. I have a really hard time getting up in the morning when it's dark out. They make sunrise alarm clocks, but I think it would be nice to have the bedroom lights slowly dim up to simulate a sunrise and gently wake me up. (This is possible with current home automation tech)

It might be nice to have a light sensor in my gutters that warns me if a downspout is clogged or they need cleaning before my annual fall cleanup. I have a whole house humidifier and when it gets to -10 like this week, it needs to be turned down or I get condensation on the windows. Smart things can do that for me. These are all things that ubiquitous computing can do, and that's pretty cool.

The only caveat to situation three is that there are sometimes dynamic tensions that are good for business, and it's good to recognize when that is happening. The SLAs need to be based in a business reality. A board member or someone else may insist on an SLA that doesn't actually need to be met for the business to grow and be profitable. They pulled the number out of their rear end. You may have a lot of work, and you can "never get caught up", but the business is humming along, and things are generally going fine. You are probably adequately staffed, but some IT people tend to feel over worked in those cases, because they are shooting for "all the work to be done". If you ever hit a point where all the work is done, look out, you're likely looking at cuts soon.

130 Desktops and max of 28 logical servers and you need 3 windows systems administrators!? Cross train the IT manager or programmers, or contract with a local outsourcing team to provide backup. I've found small local IT services shops can do basic systems management at a reasonable cost, and work well when paired with a knowledgeable person on the client side. You be the smart guy, and leverage a local services team who probably have a CCNA, Windows Server admin, SAN admin, etc. on staff.

The average IT spend as a percent of revenues is around 2-2.5%. That varies depending on industry (tech industry is much higher upwards of 4%), but it's a good starting point. I'd look at where you are at now as a benchmark. As others have mentioned, you need to make a business case. What projects are being delayed, by how much time, and what is the effect. If the effect is that the company misses $200k in revenue or increases production costs, you can probably make a case for additional help. If the effect is the floor manager gets grumpy because he really would like this thing, you probably aren't going to get additional help, nor should you.

The response email from LG implies the original author agreed to the access when he accepted the terms of service. That would likely stand, for now, in the US. I'm not sure if it would fly in the UK.

If they're good, they're going to identify frequent high-G jerking when she looks up and realizes she's in another lane. They'll catch her slamming on the breaks frequently because she wasn't paying attention, etc. If there is any industry who can crunch data and find the outliers, you can actually trust the insurance industry. That's why they were so good at identifying people with a high likelihood of future medical illness and not give them health care.

Particularly the marketshare among teens and young-20s who Facebook is losing.

Cucumbers and eggplant are a significant source of pretty much zero vitamins and minerals. I wonder if they are particularly robust in the scorched soil because they require relatively few nutrients ... ?

I believe the producers actually have an interface to upload this content. So, this is really a publisher/producer issue. I strongly suspect Apple didn't do this alone, or with all their own money. AMC was looking at a class action, and I think they would have lost. Now, we'll see if Amazon follows suit.

You're 20 minutes may be unimportant, but some of us travel quite a bit. Many people travel weekly, with two legs each way. Let's use 15 minutes to make it simple. That's 15 minutes up, 15 minutes down, twice, each way. That's 2 hours a week. Assume you're a road warrior and travel 40 weeks a year and you've wasted 2 working weeks waiting for this. I'd appreciate those two weeks back if it turns out those electronic devices don't do a darned thing to the plane.