This is a good idea for people that are close to having to go to a nursing home. The monitoring system will show when they can't take care of themselves any more. This could be months or even years. A good nursing home costs an arm and a leg and your first born child, while staying home is much cheaper, and a small victory every day. What ever they are going to charge for monitoring is still less than a good nursing home.

I use Pivoxy to do the same thing. It just works.

About 8 seconds of rocking in Bridport Vermont, about 30 miles south of Burlington Vermont

Maybe I am burning some karma here, but perhaps you should look at this as a teachable moment! I have worked with programmers like you, and it wasn't pretty. If you teach someone a better way to code something, everybody wins. If you just want to feel superior in your programming skills then nobody gets ahead. Just telling someone that they write shitty code and then not helping them understand why is just wrong.

I got hired at a well known company about a year before y2k. I had been programming about 10 years, and loved it. When I got there, I found out that the better developers had formed a 'club' and most new hires were not invited. In this case, When some of the 'club' were managers, that meant that after y2k the long knives came out. The 'club' members were smart, but petty and vindictive. It just took me a year to find this out. I don't think anything in the article would have helped.

The problem is that all that the manual paper work for each patient is enormous, because it covers all blood tests, all doctors and nurses observations, and little things like patient supplies. All this paper work has to be entered into the computer when it comes back up so that the billing cycle can run. Even a couple of hours of downtime can slow patient care down, and you need the a lot of staff to enter all the manual paperwork when the computer comes back up. When you think that a simple blood test may have 20+ values you see that this may be a problem.

I think that the real reason that hospitals don't go to electronic records is this: doctors want their notes in the chart handwritten so when something goes wrong they can say that the scribbled notes were read wrong by the nurses. This helps when the doctor is sued. The computer makes all notes legible.

The main reason I have satellite radio is for my car, not my home. Saying that the internet is just as good misses the point.

I can relate to Joe Kissell's pain. My worst job ever was a programming job where I was the only introvert in a group of extroverts. My supervisor, a massive extrovert, wanted everyone to use IM. The problem was that for the group, IM meant March Madness, pro football, baseball, golf, but rarely work. I could not concentrate on a problem for more that 5 minutes before the IM client would chime. When I turned it off to get work done, I was 'not a team player' and 'not friendly'. Soon I was cut out of all conversation, and then it was get rid of the guy who won't play along. I left, and found a better job where they understand my work style.