Tag Archives: government

Pitfalls with digital health records

April 8, 2009

The more I hear about digital national health records, the more I worry about them with regards to security. Various interpretations of the new legislation in the 2009 Stimulus bill could mean anything from implementing something like SAFEHealth, a decentralized system, to something like Google Health, which would centralize medical records. I expect that a decentralized system will not be what the government will choose. Proper usage of a decentralized system would be fine, but removes a lot of the [...]

What does it mean to be un-American?

March 3, 2009

After reading the Wikipedia article on the subject, which doesn’t really give a definition of what un-American should mean, I figured I might try to think about it myself. What defines being American? Since it only really concerns the government at the present time, it should be fairly easy to define. American We are free from enslavement by the government, and each other (well, unless we screw up, in which case the government can enslave us in prison). We embrace [...]

When is democracy viable?

July 4, 2008

As I’ve been reading various books, an idea keeps popping up. Suddenly radio playlists, MTV, and A&R guys aren’t the all-powerful gatekeepers anymore. At long last the music industry is becoming a democracy. In our governmental systems, we elect representatives to make decisions for us, sending them to Washington to write bills, oppose bills, pass bills, or veto bills. We ideally find candidates who will make similar decisions to those we ourselves would make. We elect them in a process [...]