BIG BROTHER -- Another reason to preserve systems

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(a)perqlogic.com http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd 410-744-4900