Thank you. I was aware that they were in technical compliance, but I was not aware that Azure had started offering the business associate agreement. The link below seems to indicate that AWS is still "looking into" the matter, but I haven't found anything conclusive that says they will offer it. Needless to say, I'm starting a project immediately to begin an Azure deployment for my organization.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=444933

This will be revolutionary for the healthcare industry.

Let me explain for those of you who have never dealt with HIPAA. HIPAA requires that an entity possessing protected healthcare information(PHI) keep that data safe and secure. Additionally, any outside entity coming in contact with PHI must sign a business associates agreement also agreeing to keep any PHI in their possession safe. None of the major cloud players will sign such agreements, which means any PHI can't go into the cloud. This means any practical deployment of say a hadoop cluster to reduce the process time of a large ETL job isn't feasible.

Now there is a tiny loophole in that encrypted PHI isn't treated as PHI at all. This means we can pass data through cloud services to backup for example, but doing any manipulating of the data is impossible due to the fact that as soon as you decrypt it, it's PHI and that's a big no-no. And this is where we lead back to homomorphic cryptography being revolutionary for the world of healthcare data.

You wouldn't download a movie that falls apart after 8 uses would you?

I love how you automatically assume there will be no...oh wait, nevermind.

On the topic of handing out t-shirts, maybe we can makeup some dumb ice-breaker game using old slashdot memes.

By userid, lowest to highest would be the most fair IMHO.

Of a Beowulf Cluster?

It's gone.

The reminders thing doesn't worry me as much as how do I recognize a group of internet nerds I've never met before?

You work for Apple or Samsung?

"Among the largest breaches reported was TRICARE Management Activity, the Department of Defense's health care program, which reported 4.9 million records lost when backup tapes went missing."

Submitter should have dug a little bit further. TRICARE was the agency where the records originated, but SAIC was the "business associate" that actually lost the records belonging to TRICARE.

the Nexus Qcat?

It isn't perfect, but I've been on Cricket for almost two years now and have been happy. You can complain all you want about not having all of the features you want, but the big players won't change their game until enough of us switch to a carrier not out to completely goatse us.

"You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content."

This is a feature right?

I've noticed this as a growing trend. Generally the reasoning behind such things is people are far less likely to outright lie on a linkedin profile where former co-workers and classmates will also see it than on a resume that is only read by a hiring manager and HR.