That is completely and totally wrong. The NSA has been wiretapping every single US citizen for the past decade. This is well known. And Bush started it. Obama is only making it bigger. Now the NSA has to build a new, gigantic data center out west to house all the data they're collecting.

I don't mean to say that I would drive drunk because I didn't have alternatives. If I know I'm going somewhere I might be drinking, I always go with someone else. One should always have a designated driver. Though, as many have pointed out here, it's cheaper to stay in and drink. And that's true. But under these proposed rules, one to two drinks at dinner would put you over the limit. Go to Outback, have a steak and a Big Bloke draft beer and you're DUI. That seems unreasonable to me. But it wouldn't be if we had decent public transportation.

This right here. Floridian here as well and public transportation is non-existent. Cabs only come when you call them. They don't just roam around. And they are extraordinarily expensive. You would pay upwards of $10-$15 per mile. The closest restaurants that are decent where I live are about 10 miles away. $50 for a ride home?

If we had decent public transportation. I would be all for making any alcohol consumption before driving illegal. But we don't live in a world where that is possible. But the truth is, DUI or no, public transportation saves lives. Getting in your car, even sober, is the most dangerous thing you do each day. And even if you are the safest driver on the planet, the other guy who t-bones you in an intersection isn't. Building a rich public transportation system will save countless live from just everyday traffic accidents, not just DUI related accidents. And it would facilitate stricter driving laws.

"Should civil rights be defined differently for each state?"

Absolutely not. No state should be able to withhold civil rights. Especially when other states grant full rights. Further, Civil Rights shouldn't be up for ballot measures or public vote. If Jim Crow laws and black Civil Rights had been up for public vote, we wouldn't be where we are now. We would still be segregated. In case many forget, the government had to send in the military to enforce school de-segregation. And I fully support that. No state or city or any sort of municipality should have any right to deny civil rights. And if it takes the military to force it, then so be it. I want to see the day the military is sent to enforce equal marriage rights. Then, perhaps people will understand that we are in a Civil Rights battle that is no different from that of the 1960s.

And apparently the poster that you are replying to doesn't understand how the US Constitution works.

States can makes what laws they like, as long as they don't interfere with Federal law, or the US Constitution. Put simply, a state cannot make a law that violates Federal Law. And the SCOTUS has the authority, granted by the US Constitution, to rule on such matters.

I don't know if this is the case everywhere, but here in FL, Nextels were carried extensively by LEOs, Fire, Ambulance, first responders, etc., so when there was a major emergency (hurricane, whathaveyou) the Nextel network gave priority to those users and anyone else who also used Nextel was basically SOL.

Trying to reach your loved one who might be in the path of the storm, and one of you uses Nextel? Forget about it. You're not getting through.

I'm also going to echo others here and say that the loss of pay phones is seriously problematic, especially for disaster/emergency situations.

The worst one of all that is the forum sites that seem to do nothing but mirror other forums sites. Out of one page of google resutls, all of them are completely different forums that have the exact same thread. It makes no sense. Or bullshit sites like Experts Exchange or others where you see the exact question you are searching for, but have to pay to view the thread. My assumption is that they're just repeating back your question to you to make it look like the have the answer to get your money. Forums have become a mess. And now that so few people actually use forums, it's impossible to get any answers. I'm with you. I miss usenet.

They used to be such a respected company with bulletproof hardware. Anyone still have any of the old Laserjets around? Because, damn, those were fine printers. Their computers and servers were great. Their managed switches rivaled Cisco. Now, they're just a bunch of squabbling babies, wrapped up in office politics and too busy to focus on actually running a technology company.

Apparently few people here realize what these places actually are. You drive around any Florida town right now (I'm a Florida resident), and you see on nearly every corner, a "Internet Sweepstakes" or "Internet Cafe". These aren't the internet cafes of old that we remember where you can pay for an hour to surf the web. They are gambling estabilishments that exploit a loophole in gambling law. They only call themselves "internet cafes" to make it seem innocuous. These places have also become a turn-key, get-rich-quick scheme. That's why you see so many blighting the landscape. They're trash. Pure trash. And they're taking advantage of loopholes hoping no one will notice. I for one am glad for the proposed ban. Now if we can only ban check cashing and payday loan places, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.

Exactly. I've seen in a number of offices where they have an older practice management/scheduling system or one particular EMR and want to either implement an EMR or move to another one. I have so far see only one EMR company that can properly (well, most of the time) import patient info from one system to the new one. Most of them don't do this at all (either import or export). I've been told in several demo meetings "There's no way to import, you just simply have to run your old EMR concurrently with the new one until your data retention laws say you can do away with it."

Irrelevant. They are *my* records. Not yours. Not the doctor's. If I ask for a copy of them, then you have no right to refuse or to charge for them.

Greed. Pure and simple. That is what has killed electronic medical records.

It's anywhere from $60,000 - $100,000 for an EMR system. And if your EMR of choice doesn't do practice management, you have to spend another $10,000 - $20,000 for that.

The big promise of EMR is data portability. And here's the big secret that no one seems to be talking about: the data *is not portable*.

If I have ABC Company's EMR and you have DEF Company's EMR, I cannot export a patient chart, send it to you and then you import it. You cannot connect to my EMR and get charts for patients I refer to your clinic. So there is no universal patient chart that follows you where ever you go.

Plus, if you *do* have some other electronic system that has to interact with your EMR (say a pathology system or a perscriptions system) you have to pay *both* companies typically $10,000 *each* to do an HL7 link between to two systems. And even then, the link between the systems is spotty at best and half the time doesn't work.

A company that has very little in the way of technology wants to transition to EMR. So they have to spend $30,000 - $40,000 just for the computer hardware (workstations, servers, printers, scanners, routers, switches, etc.) and then another $60,000 - $100,000 for their EMR and practice management needs. THEN, the users have to be trained. I do IT and primarily work with medical offices and sugrical centers. I can tell you that doctors *do not want* to learn how to use computers and software. The office employees fight it, everyone fights it. Eventually they give up and don't use it and let $100,000 worth of hardware and software go to waste because they become too frustrated to use it, it slows them down exponentially and it hasn't made anything easier or more portable. I have seen so many offices basically throw money down the toilet on these EMRs. They get them, and within a month they can't stand them and just go back to paper charts. Not to mention how much they get in the way of patient care. My wife recently went to see the doctor. The doctor was hunched over her computer the whole time and seemed more concerned with making a typo than with paying attention to my wife. Paitent care is suffering greatly.

THEN, the EMR companies want to hold back common sense features and charge you tens of thousands of dollars to implement them. One office I worked with had a web-based EMR and the doctor wanted to be able to recieve faxes right into the EMR. They said sure, you can do that. She asked if they could download and print out the faxes if they needed to. The company told them that yes, they could, but that was an extra feature that would cost $10,000.

Vendor Lock-in is not just something that they strive for, it is the very *core* of the EMR landscape right now.

EMR is a complete and total failure and you can lay that failure squarely at the feet of the greedy bastards who sell it.

The problem with ebooks is DRM. When your entire library can be wiped out on a whim by Amazon or Barnes & Noble, there's no guarantee that your books will still be there tomorrow. Not only that, but they're not portable, you can't use them as you see fit. You're beholden to draconian rules regarding something *you purchased* but can't actually use as though you own it.

When DRM goes away and we can use our books as we see fit, and a court has ruled that no company can delete your books because they fucked up some publishing deal, or becuase they think your accout is "suspicious," then ebooks will be viable. Until then, physical books will be the only way to go.

The Atom processor is, IMO, the reason for the downfall of the netbook. Not to mention the fact that 7-10" screens are barely usable. A 11.6" screen with a decent processor (at least 2.0 Ghz i3), and a usable amount of ram (at least 4 GB) and it would have made a fantastic netbook. But Atom processors are so painfully underpowered, that using the machines was painful. My netbook died and I had to temporarily use a 10 year old Pentium 4 laptop with 256 MB of RAM, and that machine was WAY more powerful than my 1.6 Ghz, 2 GB RAM netbook.

Then you had that ridiculous Windows 7 Starter edition that was extremely crippled as an operating system. Pick any Linux distro and it was far superior to Windows on netbooks by miles.

Now you have these companies who didn't market and didn't properly build netbooks trying to go the other direction with Ultrabooks, which aren't much more powerful than netbooks, but cost 4 times as much. I simply will not pay $1,000+ for a machine with a 1.5 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM just because it's slim and pretty.

Exactly. Eventually, they'll make the shopping lens part of some big meta package, like they love doing, and if you try to uninstall it, it will also uninstall your entire desktop environment. Like they used to do with so many packages. If you tried to uninstall evolution, it would uninstall the entire gnome-desktop. It's better to simply pick a distro that respects your freedom and doesn't force you to have something installed that you don't want.

98 SE was better. I've not been a fan of the NT line. I wish they had kept DOS as the base and just updated it. Even if they stopped calling it DOS and caled it Windows Core, or something, made it multi-user and multi-tasking. I like keeping an OS' base system abstracted from the GUI. It just makes sense.