Another reason to preserve systems

From: Charles P. Hobbs <transit_at_lerctr.org>
Date: Sun Jul 30 11:17:00 2000

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, R. D. Davis wrote:
>
> 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.

Those things do kind of bug me. At least I wouldn't be too happy if
I couldn't get to my files because someone else's server/router/backbone
went down.

"Make personal computers illegal"?!?! Sure, go ahead. It worked so
well with guns and drugs...You can have my PC when you pry my cold
dead fingers off the mouse.

>
> 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

Privacy/confidentiality, like copyright, is dying. I'm not sure
what, if anything, can be done in the long run.

I mean, one of these days, someone's going to make a machine that
can read other people's thoughts. What will we do then?
Received on Sun Jul 30 2000 - 11:17:00 BST