I'm way behind on posting a new Open Comment Thread. But here it is, with somewhat updated graphic for the age of Trump.
Plenty of people are brilliant in some areas and downright stupid in others. When you're a teenager, it's merely more common. Take George Hotz, age 17, iPhone cracker.
The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday on his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.
"That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."
Bono Buys Palm. Truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.
Dude, that red piece of crap you got there better run Palm OS.
Newt Gingrich penned -- or maybe used a computer to write -- this damning piece about how horribly behind the health care industry is in the area of information technology. Unbelievable.
Every major industry has taken advantage of the information revolution— except health care. It is a 1950s model of administration, epitomized by a ballpoint pen, a clipboard, and rows and rows of paper medical records. This backwardness undermines both the quality and efficiency of care.
The Institute of Medicine has reported that preventable medical errors kill up to 98,000 Americans every year, and medication errors alone make another 1.5 million Americans sick. Since 2000, American workers have seen an 87 percent increase in premiums—a rate four times faster than the growth of wages over the same period.
The migration to a modernized, interconnected health care system is inevitable. We can see doctors, hospitals, and other providers investing in new technology every day. But we must accelerate the process. Taxpayers, employers, and their employees cannot afford to carry our broken system for much longer. Too many lives are lost and too much money is wasted by tolerating an obsolete and antiquated system. Health information technology, combined with consumer engagement, is a powerful formula that can tear down the old order and create a better health system. And to get there, we need continued bold leadership—from every stakeholder in health care.
That's an appropriate lead-in for this TIME article about parents inflicting their own sense of cool on their progeny. I found it at the car dealership whilst performing remedial winterization a few days back. The long faces of the other NE Ohio patrons were glued to the gloomy weather reports on the lobby TV and they were probably wondering why I was laughing so hard. (I even had them photocopy it for me which helped to take the sting out of the bill, oy....) Excerpt:
Full disclosure: I have two young sons, and if anything, Pollack gets my experience unsettlingly right. I live in Brooklyn, which along with the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles is the apparent epicenter of the hipster-parent movement. When one of my kids requests the Magnetic Fields on the iPod, I swell with pride as fathers of another era did when their sons completed touchdown passes. And if it's easy to criticize Pollack's preciousness, it's because, like a good, self-aware Gen Xer, he does it for you. "I wonder," he writes, "what Ariel Dorfman, Primo Levi and Arthur Koestler, men who wrote memoirs about actual struggle, would think about the genre of whiny new-parent hand-wringing."
I've told commenters to my blogs that I'm pretty liberal about what they write in the comments, but start mentioning my kids names there and see how long they stay up. In my view, you can't complain about child molestors if your blog readers know their names and ages and where they're going to school. People need to learn how to discuss things in general terms and save the rest for private email discussions.
