And the unwashed masses still think HIPAA is spelled "HIPPA"

They're required by law to provide you with the records you are requesting. X-ray data is considered part of your medical record, and legally you are the owner of it. Not sure if you actually had this discourse, or if it's hypothetical, but if it's the former, you should probably remind them of that fact. Then again, I don't know if dentistry is subject to the same regulations as hospitals / other health care providers, but I would assume so. What I said definitely applies to hospitals.

Also, HIPPA != HIPAA.

I see, thanks for making that clarification.

"Amazon has physical operations in 17 states in which the company and its employees enjoy the fruits of local taxes -- police and fire protection, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that make its operations possible. Yet Amazon skirts tax collection in most of these places through clever legal tricks." But, the sales tax would not be paid to those states where said employees reside, it would go the state where the customer resides. And, the employees of Amazon in those 17 states ARE paying tax (income, property, etc), Amazon is paying taxes (wages, business, etc).

In my experience (which is almost all in healthcare IT, a particularly stressful brand of IT when your users are always screaming the mantra "patient care issue, patient on the table!", even when the IT issue has nothing to do with the actual patient's care), the managers are mostly on call all the time. So even if they're not the ones doing the break-fix during a downtime, they are always getting paged at 2am for systemwide outages affecting other areas, other applications, etc. And no matter who on our team gets the page for an issue, if there is a downtime that our team is affected by, they're running communications with leadership, etc. I know it's not always like that everywhere, but in healthcare IT it seems to be the norm. So I'd rather NOT be a manager for that reason, right now I have my two weeks on call, then eight weeks off, but managers are mostly on call all the time.

Amused to Death: http://jacket.subtonic.jp/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/amused-to-death.jpg

P.S. sorry for the poor formatting, i guess firefox is the culprit? also, here is the link I forgot: http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/07/08/magazine/1154680995049.html

Do you know if there is such a thing as "mild" WS? After reading this post, and then reading some articles and info online about WS (including a very good NY Times article from '07 which I'll link to below), I'm beginning to think someone close to me might have this. This individual has always seemed a bit strange socially since childhood, had learning disabilities, ADD, a slightly strange-ish facial appearance (low nasal bridge), etc. Also very socially open yet oblivious to the sorts of intonations and cues that the articles all speak of. Trusting of everyone, often to a fault. Late to start speaking. Hearing problems as a child (they initially thought possible autism). Eventually they settled upon ADD and prescribed Ritalin. I believe this person still takes it and is 26 years old. Basically, they have most of the symptoms, but in a mild form. Is there such a thing? Is this usually diagnosed by a medical doctor, or by a psychologist?

Can Hamachi accomplish this? Just connect to the same Hamachi VPN and then you have access to everything - remote desktop client, VNC, SMB shares, etc?

+1000

I have been on /. since it launched (yeah, back then we nerds were quite resistant to ever creating logins for sites, hence my non-low account ID). And it seems in the last 6 months or so it's been going this way - I have gone to reading it in Google Reader and also have Gizmodo and Engadget in there as well. It seems like at least a third of the posts lately are just regurgitated from Giz and Engadget, a day or so later.

My thought is that the internet has grown so huge, that /. can't compete with sites that have pageviews hundreds of times higher, and this is their way of sucking in some extra pageviews.

The content on here has definitely changed. I still find some engaging comment threads, but it just seems like the truly geeky content has gotten watered down with posts about new products, jokes, etc.

Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.

And, our attention spans have gotten so short, that spending a half hour reading an article about a distributed network cracking the latest encryption algorithm gets pushed under the three posts about new cell phones. And a simple yet brilliant idea is no longer brilliant, it's just expected from middle management in the outsourced development sweatshops.

Given that this is Verizon (and every other US provider that is sure to follow suit), who says there will be a real live human on the support line? It takes about 10 levels deep of automated menus just to get to a human, then you still get transferred all over PBX hell until you get to someone who may be able to help, and usually end up getting disconnected in the process. Not to mention that VZW doesn't even staff the phones during non-business hours except for tech support. And if you finally do manage to get someone, they are usually rude AND incompetent.

This sounds like utter hell, my own worst nightmare. I mean, something like this might actually force me to go outside!

That is simply, purely not true.

I know many people who work for Perot Systems that are full-time, non-contract employees. Maybe the ads you saw were for contract positions, but your statement that they ONLY hire contract employees is simply false.

8. Increased consumption of Kleenex and lotion

Brown Noise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise

(not to be confused with the infamous "Brown Note": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note )

Pink Noise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise