Interesting read.

Now can somebody please fix the horrible volume sliders on everything.

This looks really tasty. Have you ever tried adding a chocolate graham or Oreo cookie (minus the filling) type crust to it?

Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.

I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn’t trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.

Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.

Thank you for writing this. Small typo: focued (focused).

I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/

Noted!

Thanks for the guidance, I was checking out those gift boxes!

Yep. It sucks. My doc joked that we all have rocks in our heads, har har.

It can sometimes be treated with a simple technique (more info below, also mentioned in the article above). When it works, it brings amazing relief.

Unfortunately it doesn’t always work. An ENT specialist can help you with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver

Thank you for posting this! There is a local spices place I really like, but they have stopped producing almost everything. They’re down to a couple of blends.

Is there a go-to herb, spice, or blend from Penzeys you’d recommend for holiday gifts?

Marco reading Wikipedia: awkwardly takes a sip of water.

As usual the problem is people will bitch about it… but then they will do it anyway. We always forget that voting by keeping our wallets closed is a powerful defense against bullshit like this.

Techmoan has entered the chat.

You’re right to point out the problem. Using a rhetorical tone was a bit sarcastic / condescending, so I mirrored it.

I think it’s a question of perspective. Your doctor faxing something to a pharmacy or specialist is archaic at this point, and I agree it’s not great. If they are using FOIP and not POTS, one would hope it’s encrypted with TLS or something (if it’s not, it’s possibly a HIPAA violation if there’s PHI in the FAX). But the blast radius is pretty small.

I suppose if a hacker compromised a hospital system’s FOIP they could harvest a lot of medical records that way. But at that point, they are already in and they’d likely be more interested in fatter & juicier targets on the network. Bigger datasets with less effort (versus pulling from a trickle of FAXes going in and out).

Bottom line: yes, FAX is dumb, and it’s a problem but it’s very small compared to other things.

Actually I do know that. Pharmacies, too. You do know they are not FAXing giant datasets with millions of patients in them, right?

Having permission to access to the HIPAA-protected dataset is only the first hurdle. You also need a medically valid or claim processing reason to look at individual patient records within that dataset. People have gotten into trouble by not respecting this. Doctors and other providers are not going to just poke around in the data for fun. Too little to gain for too much risk.

HIPAA is far from perfect, but it does do a decent job of protecting data at rest and in transit. If a bad actor like a hacker manages to get a copy of it, the sensitive stuff will be encrypted.

We handle HIPAA data at my job, and we all take it very seriously. There’s annual training required, and a reporting process for violations. Nobody is looking at anything unless they really need to.

Large corporate health insurance providers are another problem. They of course do have access to it, and I am sure they abuse the privilege for data mining and scheming on claims denial strategies and so on. But that’s a political and enforcement issue not an issue with HIPAA itself. They are violating HIPAA and getting away with it because they are a powerful lobby.

I’ve always heard those are bad for the pipes.

The Ann Coulter of fishes.

Yeah, I always glove up when I clean out the p-traps under the sinks. The smell is the worst part.

All of it, like alopecia? Or male pattern baldness? Or none my damn bidness?