in reply to thesystemisdown

Fax is also HIPPA compliant, email is not.


Yeah I just love having my cancer diagnosis sent in plaintext over copper wire such that anyone with a dollar store audio recorder and physical access to the wire can intercept. If there's one thing 19th century data transmission tech is known for, it's security and privacy.

Is it too much to ask that hospitals use the literally decades old AES standard for sending medical data?

This entry was edited (Monday 7 July 2025, 23:11)
in reply to Link

Re: What old technology are you surprised is still in use today?


Probably a case of legislative inertia and tried-and-true practices. It's also a thing that's mostly limited to the US, I feel like. I want to say many other Western countries have digital systems in place (maybe not the BEST digital systems, but something better than fax).

Fax is not end-to-end encrypted. Not even sure it's encrypted in transit. But it is also something that doesn't rely on a third party provider storing all your data indefinitely and then losing it all in a data breach. Of course, that doesn't stop people from hooking up to a virtual fax service that might store info on a server... but still...

in reply to monovergent

I found if the pot makes solid contact with the electric elements the electric can actually heat up water faster than gas. But if the bottom of your pan isn't flat or the element is warped, they are really, really, really slow.

My experience has been with gas (fast), electric resistive with exposed and warped elements (slow), electric resistive with a glass top (fastest).

This entry was edited (Tuesday 8 July 2025, 01:36)
in reply to lettruthout

This entry was edited (Tuesday 8 July 2025, 13:56)
in reply to Jakeroxs

This entry was edited (Wednesday 9 July 2025, 06:47)
in reply to lettruthout

I like cooking with fire. Temperature changes (especially reduction of heat) are much faster than resistive electric, and when cooking on an unfamiliar stove, it's easy to tell what's going on; I don't have to guess what "6" means on a dial because I can look at the fire and see.

Both the awareness that gas stoves are a significant source of pollution (mostly nitrogen oxides) and availability of induction are fairly recent and not universally distributed. I'd accept the pollution for a better cooking experience than resistive electric, but induction is pretty compelling all things considered.

in reply to TheImpressiveX

  1. Vasectomies (+ birth control pills)
  2. animal testing for human research.
  3. I'm sure that anyone working in a hospital can cough up a few dozen more.

RISUG has been invented in 1978,
is reversable, cheaper, zero side effects,
and with so far 0% failure rate when implemented properly,
Vasalgel, an improvement on RISUG by having a longer shelf-life,
has been invented around 2015.

So this stuff has been invented in the same year Star Wars hit the theaters,
had gone through all trials multiple times with flying colors,
and instead we use knives and pills with large side effects.

If any invention could be been ubiquitous in use at a much earlier stage,
then this would be it.
It could and should have been widely used by the 1980's.

For animal testing we have 3D printed human tissue.
So why test on animals if your question is "Does this stuff work on human tissue?"
The answer you'll be getting is whether or not it works on mice.
Mice are not human.

This entry was edited (Tuesday 8 July 2025, 13:30)
in reply to folaht

As I was thinking of getting a vasectomy, you got me curious. But it is still in clinical trials according to Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revers…

For the animal trials: we could cut them down by a lot, but experimenting on tissue is not the same as on a full body and its complex system.

in reply to TheImpressiveX

This entry was edited (Tuesday 8 July 2025, 15:05)
in reply to Stepos Venzny

"To be fair, some of the characters started running the cables underground in those populated areas."

"Oh, that makes sense. So they probably have those marked and don't have to worry about them?"

"Mostly. They don't actually mark them, and most characters don't know where they are. If they need to dig, they have to find them each time. Sometimes they forget to find them first."