From the GGP:

From the article:

That's what I considered "the situation". In hindsight, I see that the GGP was probably referring strictly to the diversion.

More from the article:

You're right, it doesn't specifically say anybody was turned down, though it honestly seems a silly conclusion that an emergency room at a major University hospital wouldn't have incoming ambulances between 1 and 3 AM, as this is not a slow period for ER workers at ANY hospital.

I also don't think this article was sensationalist. "Brief" would be the word I chose to describe it.

My mistake though, I'll readily admit that the GGP may have read the article and I was the one mistaken.

You didn't read the article did you?

The outage started Monday afternoon, after half a day of operating normally the paperwork backlog forced them to divert ambulances to other hospitals, but they still took walk-in patients.

Really? My first thought was about the insurance companies and billing. Then I read the article (silly me!) and have come to the shaky conclusion (there's not much info in the article) that it's really just a matter of not having enough staff to manually write things down when the database goes down. Something everyone here should at least peripherally understand.

Sorry to step on your rant. BTW, how could you come to the conclusion that it's just the government and not the insurers that want access to patient data? You weren't just trolling were you?

Only if the goal of society is to keep you safe and snug your whole life (you know, safe until you die). It's not, there's a balancing act being performed. Sometimes life is a little more dangerous (though not necessarily in the case we're discussing, your strawman is rather hollow) because someone else is free to do something interesting. You have to balance the positive and negative.

One final thing, the GP suggested treating the two substances the same, and you're trying to negate him or her by (poorly) implying a balance in the substances effects on society? WTF?

It's the black market price hike that makes these substances as expensive as they are, not production costs.

Many drugs literally cost more than gold per unit of weight. With a legalized production/distribution system you could sell a kilogram of cocaine for significantly less than the price of a gram on the streets today. That extremely high price is the cause of both the petty theft and the terrorist-organization connections to the drug world. A separate (but related) contributing factor to the drug "problem" is that many people get their first contacts within the black market from purchasing cannabis, thus facilitating access to other illegal substances.

Prohibition-like laws are the cause of some problems and inflate others dramatically, but are ultimately ineffective in their stated purpose as evidenced by the ease of procuring drugs in this country. Fail/Fail policy.

You'll find that the Federal government takes it upon itself to legislate anything that could possibly have anything to do with money, and use the commerce clause to do it.

A dirty trick, yes, but that's the mechanism they use.

... something about Tetris with plants...

That's what I was thinking too. Doesn't the law in the U.S. read such that attempting to bypass ANY security in place on a computer system, no matter how weak, is a crime? If Wikimedia could show that the same edit pattern was being done by the same computers (or possibly even users, I don't know) by proxying around the blacklist, wouldn't that be proof of an attempt at security circumvention?

Software As Punishment

I don't want to specify which portion of management, because I really don't know. My best guess would be a scenario such as follows:

Astronaut: Hey, I want to bring some DVDs
Item Allowance Person: That should be fine.
Astronaut: Is there anything that can play it?
Item Allowance Person: Well, the laptops have DVD drives...

So I completely agree that WHOSE failure of management it was is undetermined, but it seems sloppy to me. To clear the air, I'd like to point out that the rantishness evident in my post was actually inspired by the people posting (like the poster threaded 2 above my original post) who seem to be of the opinion that there are more important things to be doing up there than watching a movie. I find that short sighted and unempathetic in the extreme.

And on a personal note, nice sig.

You're assuming an "average", but that is an incorrect assumption. The way I view news is via multiple sources, a "weighting function" (I trust some sources more than others, due to past accuracy rates), and google (to find out more about the relevant subjects that I don't already know). I certainly don't count how many sources are saying one thing and how many are saying another, then letting the winner define reality; equally silly is the notion that the truth is someone in the "center" of the news opinion columns.

Multiple sources add to the information available (unless they are all just AP copies) for me, as an intelligent being, to contemplate. Even if the information is noise I'm able to add to my knowledge of the subject at hand and/or my future weighting of sources.

Mmmm, I dunno, to complete a comic book collection maybe?

I'm not advocating child abuse in any way, just pointing out the obvious.

So what about the International Telecommunication Union? Has the ITU ever had any political disputes that were leveraged over a certain party?

It seems to me (though my perspective is limited) that the telephone network is pretty well internationally compatible. And on the topic of politicization, what ever happened to the .sex or .xxx domain? I thought that was a great example of politic butting its nose into the internet.

The way I see it is NASA is sending a small workforce out to a completely desolate location on a days-long mentally exhausting assignment, being in full control of what they can and cannot take. To not provide adequate provisions for the crew to relax properly and gain some enjoyment is a failure of management. These aren't robots in a factory we're talking about, they are people in a very small place they cannot leave for any reason (under penalty of horrible, horrible death), they NEED to be able to relax (by their own standards, not yours or mine) in order to do their job properly (and not die).

Apollo 1 and the shuttle disasters prove just how right you are. This absolutely should have been checked as soon as the DVDs were cleared to go up. I think it is very fortunate that the problem caused by missing this detail wasn't actually a crisis, this time.