A similar thing happened to me as a seller. I saw that one of my old textbooks was selling for a nice price, so I listed it along with two other used copies. I priced it $1 cheaper than the lowest price offered, but within an hour both sellers had changed their prices to $.01 and $.02 cheaper than mine. I reduced it two times more by $1, and each time they beat my price by a cent or two. So what I did was reduce my price by a few dollars every hour for one day until everybody was priced under $5. Then I bought their books and changed my price back.

This is a combination of posters not understanding what the technology is used for and the tech guy exaggerating the urgency of the situation.

Remote cardiac monitoring isn't for people who are imminently going to die of catastrophic heart attacks or who risk dropping into a fatal arrhythmia (wonky heart rhythm). In fact, there isn't even solid evidence that it saves lives. What it is used for is investigating patients who have vague symptoms which might be related to transient changes in their heart beat.

These are people who come to their doctor at the age of 54 and say "I felt my heart beating really quickly and felt kind of faint" or "I felt kind of dizzy and then passed out. It's happened twice in the last month." The more traditional way to investigate these patients are with what's called a Holter monitor, as alluded to by a previous poster. These are little belt packs you carry around while wired-up and that record your ECG for 24-48 hours at a time. The main weakness? You said it: the device only has a 24-48 hour windows to capture the weird, often rare, rhythm.

There are different ways remote cardiac monitoring systems report their results and I'm not sure which this particular company was using, but it doesn't really matter. Some of them only report weird stretches, others only report events when the patient says they're feeling symptom X, others are reporting continuously.

Take-home message: this is not life-or-death data. When doctors (at least those who are allowed to keep practicing) think a patient needs critical cardiac monitoring, they admit them to hospital.

This was a tech guy, looking to jump the queue by trying to raise a red flag because his servers were being used for--OMFG!--cardiac monitoring. A lot of my doctor buddies use similar strategies when they're caught speeding by the police. "I just got called in to the hospital!"

…to see a patient with a really nasty rash.

Years back, I used to be an FSF member. Not that I liked the GPL much (in fact, I mostly use the Apache License), but they raised important issues, and had a track record of investing into fine software (GNU) that I benefitted from a lot.

However, their campaigns were getting so off-target, that much of my sympathy dwindled, and I ended my membership. Childish 'anti' advertising, such as 'BadVista' and DDoSing Apple's genius bars (gee, that's will convince anyone who was visiting an Apple Store) only made the whole free software movement look bad, childish, and unsocial. To this day, they seem to put their energy into almost hilarious campaigns (Windows 7 sins? Seriously?).

This open letter is on the mark, their current course only marginalizes the FSF and part of the FLOSS community. Whatever happened to relying on your own strengths, rather than caricaturizing the competition?

A few points i would like to remind everyone who criticizes rms.

1) rms is a radical guy. You cannot change that. He fights for what he thinks is right. He is not the kind of person you can ask to censor himself.

If he thinks u.s goverment is to blame for 9/11, no matter how saying it in a lecture seems childish, he will say it.

If you invite rms for a lecture, he is coming with his radicalism. That is to be expected. You cannot invite rms and expect steve jobs.

2) rms is a practical guy. stop acting like he's a mad man who knows nothing. He started GNU, wrote emacs, glibc, gcc and probably others. He created the concept of free software and wrote a license as good as GPL to defend it.

He also managed to gather a community around this very crazy idea of free software.

3) rms doesnt want people only to use free software. he wants people to value their freedom, and as a result of that, use free software.

It doesnt really matter if whole world uses android instead of ios. The point is, these days, most people involved in open source community, do not even care about free software and the freedom it offers.

Most people are interested in technological advancements or affects of an open source project on market. None of them are concerns for rms.

And, what i said above is just what i interpreted from his actions and are not facts.

The opposite scenario (sort of), from Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker:

One day earlier in his career Dall was in the market to buy (borrow) 50 million dollars. He checked around and found the money market was 4 per cent-4.25 per cent, which meant he could buy (borrow) at 4.25 per cent or sell (lend) at 4 per cent. When he actually tried to buy 50 million dollars at 4.25 per cent, however, the market moved to 4.25 per cent-4.5 per cent. The sellers were scared off by a large buyer. Dall bid 4.5. The market moved again, to 4.5p per cent-4.75 per cent. He raised his bid several more times with the same result, then went to Bill Simon’s office to tell him he couldn’t buy money. All the sellers were running like chickens.

“Then you be the seller,” said Simon.

So Dall became the seller, although he actually needed to buy. He sold 50 million dollars at 5.5 per cent. He sold another 50 million dollars at 5.5 per cent. Then, as Simon had guessed, the market collapsed. Everyone wanted to sell. There were no buyers. “Buy them back now,” said Simon when the market reached 4 per cent. So Dall not only got his 50 million dollars at 4 per cent but took a profit on the money he had sold at higher rates. That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

To me, the site has gotten a lot less informative and interesting since the votes have been hidden. The voting numbers really help me understand what people are thinking: how strong the consensus is, how much support there is for dissenting opinions. Without that data, at least for me the value of the discussion here is significantly reduced.