...and it's the coder's best friend.

I was sort of assuming, when they mentioned in-the-field access to the system, they were going to develop some kind of iPhone app, like the stuff mentioned the other day.

So you're saying you don't want them to have backups of their systems?

Not being a facebook user I would find it amusing if a meteor took out their data center today and the site can't be restored on account of the ToS not allowing them to keep backups.

As in many cases with updated contracts (not even sure a ToS counts as a real contract), this is mostly just the paper being adjusted to reflect reality.

In addition to all the other reasons already outlined, it's because TV stations broadcast in the tens of thousands of watts--their electric bills are unbelievably high. To do both analog and digital side-by-side would bankrupt many many stations.

Just heard an interview with the photographer on NPR. It's semi-off-topic in that it doesn't have to do with the medium used for photographs but still an interesting piece I think. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99353598

Nonsense. There are thousands of hospitals alone and perhaps they all have single-system record keeping, but I doubt it. To take a famous example, the Cleveland Clinic is local to me, they employ about 800 IT staff; I know for a fact they have a cadre of Oracle DBAs as well as a team of SQL Server DBAs. I also know for a fact they have 200+ production databases throughout their organization--most of which contain patient records of some sort.

However my family doctor employs 0 IT staff. She uses commercial off-the-shelf software to manage her records, having gone digital a couple years ago. Yes, there's a database in there somewhere, but no DBA. And she still has tens of thousands of paper folders with paper records in them and no plan to digitize them--and don't forget this plan requires such records to be digitized. The logistics of doing such a thing for tens of thousands of single-doctor practices nationwide are staggering.

Again, I think it's a great project and we'd get way more than $100B back out of it in a generation, but if anything they underestimate the size of the project. I'm not saying it's complex, it's just huge and labor intensive.

Because they don't have any notion of interoperability and because an individual practitioner (or hospital, for that matter) won't realize any direct cost savings.

But interconnected health systems are key to patient well-being and cross-the-board cost savings. Health care specialists are great for fixing localized problems, but if my cardiologist and my dentist don't talk about my prolapsed mitrial valve, I can get an infection and drop dead sometime between having a mouth full of cotton and spitting into the little sink you can never quite reach from the chair. (OK, maybe not that fast but you get the point I hope.)

This is a big idea initiative that can benefit our society so greatly in so many ways it's staggering (consider the medical research possibilities of mining such a database, not to mention the possibility of genuine customer care). This is the kind of thing that government has to do because private industry has no motivation.

The problem is that precious few people around here (including me) would want to get involved doing technical work for the government. I have a feeling it won't be as easy or as cheap as they seem to think, even though at its heart it's a really easy (if labor-intensive) project, because a lot of the high-grade nerds can't stand the way government does things.

I used to work for a software company that provided automated telephone operator software. Among their clients was a small local phone company that provided pay phones to the SCDC for use in prison. Well, I shouldn't say "pay phones" exactly, they provided the ruggedized husks of pay phones without coin boxen and with the coin acceptors removed or welded shut. This was because the only kind of call allowed in prison is an outbound collect call of 5 minutes' duration. In theory. The prisoners would do an unbelievably competent phreaking job and we had to patch the software that controlled these phones every three to six months on account of new ways the prisoners would find to get around the calling restrictions. My favorite was where the prisoner would say something incoherent when prompted for a name that the phone switch would present to the call recipient. After a few tries they would often get someone gullible to accept the charges, and then they would somehow get this random person to set up a 3-way call with the person the prisoner really wanted to talk to, and have the whole thing billed to the random person's phone. Way back in the day, they used to use live human operators to set up the collect calls. The humans were slightly easier to take advantage of than the automated system that replaced them, and more likely to sue their employer for subjecting them to phone conversations with prisoners.

Birds use wind whenever possible to save their own energy. Altamont Pass is a migratory choke point in part because of the reliable high wind. Here in Ohio the prevailing winds are actually northeasterly in the fall and winter and from the southwest in the spring and summer. The fall winds help push the migratory birds south and the spring winds help them get north again.