Greetings,
A short while ago, I just thought of yet another reason to preserve
computer equipment, particularly that which is the most durable.
While doing some research for someone else pertaining to application
service providers (ASPs) - which I don't like, I began thinking of
things mentioned by Sun and Microsoft that give me the creeps: the
thought of programs, applications, operating systems and, worse yet,
one's own data, aacessed by, and stored somewhere on, the Internet,
not locally. A user would have no control over one's files. If
enough people will be foolhardy enough to fall for the marketing hype,
and begin using "network appliances" instead of computers, 10, 20, or
30 years from now, will home computers with local mass storage even be
sold, or be legal to own, for that matter? After all, we know what
mindless sheep most people appear to be when it comes to following the
herd and not thinking for themselves.
BTW, what I've been researching is the danger of the use of ASPs for
medical claims processing, and when one begins digging into this, one
begins to see the commercial and governmental interests involved in
people's medical records, and it's not nice. There's the problem with
non-objective medical information presented by web sites such as
WebMD/Healtheon (which also want to process medical claims as ASPs)
due to conflicts of interest who have advertisers and shareholders to
consider. For those in the US, some may be surprised when they learn
the realities of HCFA and the HIPAA, and how much privacy they stand
to lose by laws promoted by certain politicians (including the
president) as increasing privacy, when they really do just the
opposite - not to mention the temporary moratorium on national IDs for
everyone to be used for medical purposes, ...then there's the work
towards the creation of a national database for medical records. I
won't even begin to touch on such areas as the commercial and
governmental influences involved with the A.M.A. (no wonder many
physicians don't belong to it!) and conflicts of interests that affect
nonpprofit web sites such as Intellihealth (look into its connections
with Aetna, and what Aetna has done to people's health with it's HMOs)
and Medem. Before anyone flames me, please look into this yourself if
you value your health and the confidentiality of your medical
records... then express your concerns to your physician.
--
R. D. Davis
rdd_at_perqlogic.com
http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd
410-744-4900
Received on Sun Jul 30 2000 - 10:44:20 BST