Retour sur les sites médicaux en ligne

Bonjour…..tel un disque gravé (style 33 tours et non un cd avec des informations précieuses), je reviens sur un sujet. Le 19 octobre, j’écrivais sur la nécessité des professionels à l’ère numérique.

Aujourd’hui en lisant BNA, j’ai constaté que la préoccupation de la médecine en ligne semblait aller au-delà de l’ordre des médecins, jusqu’à la Commission Européenne. En effet, selon un article sur ZDNet, la Commission Européenne veut introduire des normes de qualité minimale quant aux sites offrant des conseils médicaux ou pharmaceutiques.

Malgré le fait que je considère qu’il soit important de ne pas suivre de faux conseils médicaux et je comprends bien la problématique soulevée par les commandites de compagnies pharmaceutiques qui fondent des conseils offerts, je conçois difficilement la solution pratique pour la Commission Européenne. Comment croyez-vous qu’il soit possible pour la Commission d’instaurer, et surtout d’assurer le respect de normes de qualités minimales des sites Web de conseils médicaux???

La question est lancée

Bubble tea

Ok, no blog yesterday, it means I worked more right? Well kinda… I did read two very interesting articles though, including one that made the connection between privacy and DRM, arguing that a architecture to protect private info is essentially a DRM where control is in the hands of an individual. I’m glad because I was expressing that idea in my thesis and I felt like a weirdo because I had seen no one making that connection that clearly before. I’d link to the articles but I forgot my briefcase and the articles at Make’s place yesterday night. I think I had too much pi jiu (chinese beer) with dumplings and a very local version of mapo dofu. which brings me to the main topic of this post: bubble tea!

My task is easy: Memepool has a post on the topic. You can buy it online, it’s apparently a phenomenon. I don’t really know about that, but it sure is popular in southern china. Had it for the first time in Chengdu (ok, not really south) and brightblue made me discover that I had been missing the boat for a couple years because it’s quite easy to find in Montreal. I really like the honey dew kind.

[via Memepool]

Sims to protest against McDo

While it seems most comments over at /. over this story are.. well typical. But the linked article about virtual manifestation in a virtual world is interesting.

From the legal point of view, how are behaviors of avatars treated in relation to their « owner »? Diffamation, vandalism, annoying behavior, can those be sanctioned? Freedom of expression and association? Do those exist in a virtual world ? Is the owner of the server all powerful? Should he then be responsible?

Sound ridiculous, but then fighting over virtual domain names seemed ridiculous at one time too.

Inline linking

For all of you who went through numerous sleepless nights trying to figure out the exact legal status of image search engines such as the one offered by Google, fear no more, we have received the long awaited answer from our superior leader.

MEC winter stuff

On my last order, I forgot to add something. Ok, what I really want is this puppy, but for the 3x price difference, I’ll settle pour la marque maison.

Can’t wait for the trails to open!

Yeah, so basically, if anyone is ordering anything, let me know so I can piggy back: the free shipping deal is over. (I wonder if I’ll ever find a girl who’d want to have her wedding list at MEC… hey, I know someone who did)

Did anyone notice the pile of old concrete slabs by the store’s construction site? I wonder what they’ll end up doing with those. Anyways, the artist rendering on the website was clearly made by someone who never saw the actual site… It includes trees and grass… Two things that don’t exist between l’Acadie and the train tracks Yet it ignores the surrounding monstrous stores.

This time, movie piracy is « like terrorism »

Australian IT reports that Rick McCallum is at it again.

STAR Wars producer Rick McCallum told a Melbourne audience that the fight against P2P swapping of films was as important as the war on terrorism.

Wow… if VCR was just the Boston Strangler, imagine what Ossama can do for the movie industry…

Piracy is bad. Fine. Point taken. But smell the coffee: in the 80’s, people now could watch movies at home and you didn’t figure out a way to make a buck out of it until the courts told you to stop whining and to deal with it. And you’re better off with it now.

Now people can watch movies without even going out to the videostore. No inventory to maintain, bandwitdh is cheap, pirating movies is even more a pain in the butt than copying VHS tapes ever was, people won’t bother (except for bragging rights) if they have an alternative. No need for it to have foolproof security, just simple and convenient.

Oh, and back to terror-stuff: I happened to catch an old Rambo on TV the other night. Funny how the Afghan freedom fighters were the good guys then when they were blowing up the russians. And how many movies were made exploiting that theme. I’m not even going into the Disney-taking-Stevenson’s-Pirates-to-the-big-screen deal. Are pirates the good or the bad guys now? Does it depends who gets the loot?

Smarty Pants

New MT extension thingie

Most normal, mentally stable individuals do not take notice of proper typographic punctuation. Many design and typography nerds, however, break out in a nasty rash when they encounter, say, a restaurant sign that uses a straight apostrophe to spell “Joe’s”.

Who said I was normal? I’m installing this… Now I wonder if it will deal correctly with the french style «guillemets»

[Via A Frog in the Valley]

700-year-old picture of ‘Mickey Mouse’

How’s that for a first publication? Can’t wait to see the St-Christopher Copyright Extension Act extend retroactively to the 14th century!

What appears to be a 700-year-old picture of Mickey Mouse has been discovered on a church fresco in Austria.
[…]
« It is most likely to be a drawing of a beaver or a weasel. »

[…]
However, Carinthia’s tourism office is already thinking of ways to cash in on the sketch.

Siggi Neuschitzer, manager of the Malta Tourism Association, said: « The similarity of the painting to Mickey Mouse is so astounding that the Disney concern could even lose its world-wide copyright licence.

« Our Mickey Mouse is 700 years older than Disney’s and we will get it legally examined. »

Dream on!

[via Ananova’s quirkies]