466 karma · joined December 7, 2016
I don't know a lot about the inner workings of Medical Objects or the third one, HealthLink. I just hope their interoperability discussions end up being fruitful.
I know many practices use eFax though, even though it uses email and hence is against accreditation standards. Small one- or two-practitioner clinics don't have the means to trudge through the RACGP's information security standards like we do.
I did trial a local Australian eFax competitor who offered a fax-to-my-server-via-SFTP method, and was accredited with several government health agencies. The PDF image quality sucked so badly though, I couldn't run with it. Illegible. Even if it worked well though, it's still just faxes as image files, which is painful. OCR doesn't look like it'd help much, even before you think about doctors handwriting.
I've got 30 practitioners and I need incoming messages to be directed to their respective inboxes in the practice management system so we don't all go crazy.
Email and fax-to-email services are generally frowned upon by the relevant medical accreditation boards, as they consider these to be insecure unless PGP is used. Email addresses have the ease of use and interoperability that fax numbers have, but PGP throws that right out the window.
Beyond the technical discussion, I remember reading that fax is considered "secure" from a regulatory/legal standpoint because fax lines are subject to wiretapping laws just as a regular phone line is. An email however, sent in plain text, can be legally read by anyone along the line who has the authority to do so. No surprises there, we know what GMail does.
What we've ended up with in Australia is a trio of internet-based secure messaging systems which have only just recently been in discussions about interoperability between themselves. I believe two of them are just end-client software which automates the PGP encryption/decryption of a given email address that you register, sending and receiving directly from your practice's clinical management system. Uptake has been kinda miserable. Until the systems are interoperable and have a large centralised directory of all health practitioners in the country, uptake will remain low. It's also only for medical practices and hospitals. It doesn't cover all the crap we get from legal and insurance firms.
Other legal issues are also stymieing progress. I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later.
And so, we fax and get faxed. And it sucks.
Moving from Göttingen to Heidelberg was an easy €200 per month rent increase for similar accommodation. The latter is certainly more scenic, but you pay for that with tourists, noise, etc.
Having said all that, there are plenty more university towns to choose from - but I've only lived in those two specifically myself. In both, the low cost of living is assisted by being able to walk or cycle everywhere around them, negating the need to own a vehicle. I only spent money on public transport if the weather was particularly bad, or when traveling long distance/with luggage.
Works well, I moved away from Tiny Tiny RSS to this and am pretty satisfied.
From the mainland government's perspective, that country is the People's Republic of China, governing from Beijing. For Taiwan, that country is the Republic of China, currently governing from Taipei having fled the mainland. The civil war has never officially ended, and each lays claim to the others territory as the rightful owner.
This is the basis of the "One China Policy" that you might read about every now and then. The vast majority of countries around the world switched to recognising the PRC instead of the ROC many decades ago, and the PRC offers financial incentives for doing so, which matters to small countries, notably in the Pacific. They also threaten the opposite for anyone who recognises the ROC instead, or more recently, any entity that lists Taiwan as anything other than part of China.
Airlines were recently threatened by the PRC for listing Taiwan as a separate country instead of a region - I believe most capitulated. This is the key argument you are looking for at least in the context of corporations such as Apple, who seems to think they're big enough to stand up on this one. Qantas on the other hand, backed down immediately.
Beyond corporations though, more generally, it is not so much about China claiming sovereignty over Taiwan - it is about the opposite being the case as well. At the point where Taiwan renounces its claim on the mainland, China will consider it the first official step on the path to Taiwan's independence. It has repeatedly said that this is a red line it will not allow Taiwan to cross without a forceful response. Another red line, for example, being Taiwan's possession of nuclear weapons.
I believe Taiwan could have declared independence in the 1990s and come out on top in any military confrontation with the PRC. However, there was not enough support amongst the population at the time[1] - most people considered themselves "Chinese" as opposed to "Taiwanese". That is now starting to reverse, but IMO Taiwan is no longer in a position to successfully defend itself if the PRC decides to act. The US has given no guarantees it would defend Taiwan in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence.
So to sum up: Taiwan is not treated as a normal independent country by most entities because the PRC has enough clout (economically and militarily) to threaten those who wish to do so.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/0...
You can "decriminalise" something either by eliminating the entire piece of legislation, or by amending it to remove the criminal act within it. In the case of the latter, that leaves open the option of replacing it with other words that might indicate civil penalties. If that happens, that is still decriminalisation, and would be distinct from legalisation.
Importantly, like the US, UK and Australia, India is a "Common Law" nation. That means court rulings set binding legal precedents which can only be overruled by higher courts or actual legislation introduced later. In short: A judgement becomes law.
This is opposed to "Civil Law" societies (most of the rest) where court rulings do not set legal precedent, and might only be "persuasive" to other judges in other cases. Plenty of exceptions depending on the country, which court, etc. but that's a general overview.
Perhaps for people from Civil Law countries it would be odd to hear that a court has legalised something.
A shame, I'm really keen to spruce up some old 50x50px forum icons from where I used to hang around back in the early naughties.
One thing I learned about the city from quite early on was just how huge a figure this man was. I spent the first month there in an AirBnB across the road from the marketplace that bore his name. A Mexican friend of mine, also a chef, would not stop raving about the time he had spent living there and what this man could do. A huge loss for Lyon, but what he's left them with will be of benefit for years to come.
Don't get me wrong, stuff is happening[1], but not at the rate it should be in a country with the properties you've mentioned.
[1] - http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/australia-s-largest-so...
Having lived there a few years I was astounded at the lack of fly screens, given that there are just as many mozzies and other bugs flying around there in summer as there are back home in Australia. But in Oz, pretty much every window on every house has a fly screen.
I think I saw two or three in my entire time in Deutschland. So I know they're available, but I don't get why they're so unpopular.
I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone asks for help, I know I have some sway.
I'm just waiting for Quantum to land on Android, because I know enough of them will have issues with the current version and I want to skip over those problems to leave a good first impression.
Though even as a Sydney-sider, I don't consider Canberra to be a small town. Not after living in German university towns for the last 5 years with pops <150k.
Having said all that, Canberra is an example of how Australia has (once) planned out a charter city and had it succeed. However I am not sure we can do it again without the federal government being as deeply committed as it was in overseeing its own future seat.
The problem with Australia is that too little thought was given to making viable cities outside of the state capitals. I would love to live in a smaller town but my partner needs a major STEM research university to work at. Europe has such universities in small towns, but Australia does not. Everything is too concentrated in the capitals.
Was your experience all within the inner city?
The rest of my street is now on HFC NBN but my house is an outlier, still waiting on additional work. Been waiting since May, I suspect it'll take until the next May.
With 3 people in the house, going from 3 mbit to 25 or 50 will make a pretty huge difference to us. Probably about as much as when we first jumped from 56k to 256k ADSL 15 years ago.
Speed is not a huge issue if you're happy to leave your simulation running overnight anyway, or if you have the option to just throw more and more cores at the problem (or in our case, both). The goal is to get your papers published. Code developing/interpreting/debugging time is generally far more serious an obstacle to that goal than simulation speed. I was the only developer there. Everyone else in the group coded on an almost daily basis, but none of them considered themselves programmers, and very few of them actually learn about good programming practices. They're biophysics researchers.
Having not worked in Python much before I was also pretty pleased to find that, having determined that I needed to use Dijkstra's algorithm for path-finding and then working out the smallest Standard Deviation between certain sets of data points, Python came with libraries to do both of those things off the cuff. It's just so easy, I can see why it has a favoured place in this field.
Firefox's "top sites with pinning" does only some of this, and is clunky. Every Fx Speed Dial extension I have tried is similarly lacking in some way or another.
The tutorial uses the Full encryption option, which does encrypt the data between your origin server and Cloudflare. You might be thinking of their flexible SSL option?
[EDIT] I might add that for anyone not using GitHub Pages as per the tutorial, they'll need additional steps to get Full SSL working with Cloudflare. It's not effortless.
It's... not a sophisticated system. It misses some major stories, gives me a few false positives, and of course lots of duplicates from differing sources.
But compared to what I had before (basically, nothing) it's a million times better.
For past news the only one I have been able to use is The Guardian's API, which is free for non-profits such as my Suitocracy project. It's... not great, but it's something. A start.
Needless to say, Wells Fargo has pretty much been filling its own page in ways that no other company has been able (with the exception of Uber): https://suitocracy.com/company/wells-fargo
Seeing it all laid out like that really makes me wonder how it still gets by with so few consequences.
It seems to me that if we were to change Facebook from its own platform to an XMPP- or email-style federated network, then such a network would have to be constructed in the first place.
Not saying it can't (or shouldn't) be done, but I do believe it is a more complex example than Standard Oil or Bell. We've also got international borders and regulations in the mix.
It's one thing to have multiple search or email providers, but how many companies can afford the investment for a new silicon fabrication plant? Or to construct a new airliner that meets our reliability and safety needs? Some industries seem to require immense sizes for the entities to be viable at all.
And when it comes to Facebook, I mean, we can't split this up like we did with Standard Oil. People want to be connected. Not unless we mandated some kind of social networking standard that could federate...