Quicksilva thoughts...

With America being one of the world's 'superpowers' you would expect it to be leading the world in healthcare, which it does in research and treatments. However, unlike the National Health Service treatment is rationed to those without healthcare insurance.

Patients who cannot afford the expensive insurance premium are left to either fund their medical costs out of their pocket or turn to the public funded services but have little hope of survival for diseases like cancers that require expensive medicines with the soaring cost of treatment.

Gone are the days of ambulances refusing to pickup an unconscious patient until they have found an insurance card (only due to legislative change), now there is hope that fair, equal treatment will be available for all through these reforms providing new hope to millions.

The only downside to President Obama's proposals is that his proposals will be part paid for by reducing public expenditure, by introducing an electronic records system and cutting the payments that hospitals currently receive for treating uninsured patients in emergency rooms.

With the electronic records system sounding very similar to the NHS National Care Record System (NCRS), it will be interesting to see whether the States are able to succeed where the NHS has failed in keeping the costs from spiralling and delivering on time.

Quicksilva thoughts...

Nurse Janet has updated her status: "Can’t wait to finish work and go home to update my blog."

Compelled by the desire to inform the world of our daily movements, we immerse ourselves in the inescapable community of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Since the creation of next generation Web 2.0 applications, the aforementioned websites have become an integral part of our lives, with many accessing their virtual lives by means of work I.T resources. It may not then come as a revelation that these sites are fast becoming the channel for network security breaches and data compromise within the NHS.

Widely used online applications will inherently present new avenues and opportunities for the malicious to attack sensitive areas using backdoors within our own networks; this unfortunately will not be a deterrent to the user who has more pressing matters to Tweet about. Just as with P2P, if people want to access their profile they will do so regardless of the attached risks. It is therefore safe to assume that as your nurse nips off to poke all of her online buddies it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have your heart monitor running on the network.

Quicksilva thoughts...

I don't know about anyone else but this headline grabbed me straight away!

I know it's not likely to happen in my lifetime but wouldn't it be bliss... no traffic jams, no need to plan your journey times, spend hours in a hot and stuffy car wishing you were anywhere but in the blasted thing going nowhere fast.

Well those days will be all over with this high speed pod like transportation - you will be where you need to be, hassle free and relaxed.

I know I'm dreaming but come on you've gotta agree it would be nice, right?!

Quicksilva thoughts...

Millions of people no longer search for something on the internet, they Google it. The fact that the name Google has now become a verb shows Google’s dominance in this field.

Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to tip the balance has led to the introduction of visual search to the Bing search engine. A picture might say a thousand words but we’ll have to see if they are the words I was searching (I meaning "Binging") for.

Quicksilva thoughts...

It's amazing how much we take our broadband for granted these days. Yet we complain about how slow it is or that we don't have a reliable connection.

Times are tough in South Africa, a country which has the slowest broadband around yet its well known that South Africans have to pay very high prices for their broadband. Currently their preferred method of transfers is "High Speed Pigeon Drive Attachment".

For some reason (I suppose to prove a point), an IT company in Howick, South Africa, decided to see which was faster: a carrier pigeon with a 4GB USB flash drive onboard, or the leading ADSL Service from Telkom.

At any rate, they release the pigeon and started the upload.

The pigeon, Winston, arrived at the destination (60 miles away) within an hour, following which the data transfer took another hour to complete. At that point, the ADSL update was at a whopping 4%. Ah, newfangleness. You are forever being shown up by the old school.

Telkom claims it isn't responsible for the slow speed... but if they're not, who is?