Smith, Todd wrote:
>
> I believe in the power of
> open-source, but even if open-source offered zero functionally increase but
> offered a 1/1000th percent stability increase then I have coworkers who
> might be able to get more then 3 hours sleep before being paged out again.
>
WE face this every minute of every day with thousands of
deployed MS desktop OS's, but it doesn't seem to have the
same impact on the users of those OS's.
>
> I know this next statement is violently inflammatory and for that I
> apologize. However, I am starting to believe that patient confidentiality
> and whole doctor-patient privilege system is a prime source of problems for
> healthcare.
>
I used to think this way. But you need to spend time with
the legal experts, because such exposure is primarily a
financial risk issue. Building systems is largely a '
reasonable man' issue, where reasonably is not defined by
engineers, it's defined by courts! No one can get to 100%,
not even the triply redundant space programmes. So just how
far do you go? Given that we, in the west, live in a
society dominated by economic organizations, there will come
a time while engineering your way to 99.9999% that money
will become involved and you will have to stop. My
experience is, that time comes a lot earlier than I would
have expected based on just engineering feasability.
