"Spring Break"

I am very excited for Spring Break to say the least, however I don't know if you can truly call it the latter. The only break it provides is from the usual flow of classes, we can't truly relax like on our "true Winter and Stummer breaks." These are the breaks where we have no midterms to study for or paper's to write, just relaxation and time spent at home or exploring the unknown. This Spring Break is more closely associated with the break in classes before Finals, you know just a little extra time to catch up on reading and study. However, with this semester chaos I'll take any break I can get.

Google: Health Records?

Google will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand patients from the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered for an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service. The advantage is the easy access to their own medical records and the simplifying of transferring medical records when changing doctors. The dangers are however great, placing your most personal information on the net is an invitation to hacker's. If I were approached with the opportunity to take part in this trial, I would respectfully decline because I do not completely trust the security of the internet just yet. Also, since Google is in the business of making profits like any other firm, I am curious to know how they plan on making this profitable for themselves. I mean are they just doing us a service?

THE RICH GET RICHER

In the NBA, the Western conference is considered the better conference, and with the recent trade news instead of the East gaining ground the West is instead pulling further and further ahead. In the East there are maybe four legit NBA title contenders such as The Celtics (with the best record in the league), Cavs, Magic, Pistons and the rest of the conference is filled with mediocracy. In the West virtually all the teams are playoff contenders. The top 8 ranked teams from each conference make the playoffs, in fact if u moved the 9th, 10th and 11th ranked teams from the west to the East they would be ranked 6th, 7th and 8th respectively making them playoff teams. The West has since added Shaq (Phoenix Suns), Pau Gasol (Lakers) and Jason Kidd (Mavericks), talk about the rich gettin richer.

Wiretaps

I was aware of the "wiretap law" and initially after 9/11 I didn't it. I guess that was in a time when everyone was sort of ant-terror tho. After reading the article it seems that the government has gone too far. Telecom allowing the government to tap their customers lines with judicial warrants is an outright invasion of privacy. But I guess the message being sent is privacy can be compromised for the ultimate goal of thwarting terrorism.

Gene Nichol

I feel that it was a huge mistake on the BOV's part to get rid of President Nichol. In his tenure here the amount of applicants have gone up as well as diversity. I saw President Nichol last week just walking around near my dorm, and he came right up to us and we held a nice conversation. His approach-ability is one thing that I admire about him as well as his integrity. He came up with a proposal to give full rides to in-state students who's families make less than $40,000. So he's a good guy. The BOV doesnt like some of the things he did like removing a cross from a building, which he did to make it welcomed to all religions and allowing the Sex worker's art show here, which he did because he didnt wanna violate our rights to see it and its a student sponsored event, which soldout so some people evidently wanted to see it. I just don't get it, I guess current students opinions don't really count for much here @ W&M.

Network Neutrality

The article is pushing for Congress to make decisions regarding the future of internet technology more public. The writer says that when net neutrality was voted on, not everyone even knew what it was, which makes me think that perhaps it should be more publicized. After all Congress does represent "WE THE PEOPLE".