This Is Your Business, Virtually. Video conferencing has long been hyped as the corporate killer app, but the technology has been glitch-prone and expensive. A revamped 'telesuite' at New York's venerable Waldorf-Astoria is a baby step into a virtual future. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]

I remember the old times, when we were all playing with the first phone and video conferencing applications, the quality was awful but, hey, we were connected at 14.4Kbs, or maybe 28,8Kbs, we could not expect more, right?

Well, now I have at least 10 times more bandwidth, but apparently the problem has not been solved. What's up?

Now, I want to use video vonferencing, and I don't want to may phone bills to place long distance calls, but I cannot find an application that works for me. Here's what I need:

• Must work on MacOS X 10.2
• Must extist a verion for Windows or be compatible with some other app working on Windows.
• Does not have to be free, but I want to test it before buying
• If it works trough firewalls it would be much better, but I can live with "full-peer only"

Anything out there?

$400 a month.

Prescription drugs cost a lot. Yesterday I refilled just one of my must-have prescriptions, the kind of stuff I have to take for the rest of my life or else I die. I have health insurance, for now, but the co-pay is pretty high. I asked what it would cost if I didn't have insurance. $400 per month. And that's just one drug. How do people pay for this? How does the government justify going to war in Iraq. Where are the priorities. If Bush had to pay $400 per month for one drug, out of his own pocket, I can't imagine he'd have too much bandwidth left for Saddam Hussein.

[Scripting News]

In Italy nobody pays prescription drugs, especially if they are life-saving. In the same way nobody pays for any kind of treatment (including gender change!) in public hospitals. The average quality of national healthcare is pretty good, I work with a lot of doctors and even if they continuosly struggle between budgets and patients, they still manage to do a great work.

We might not have high quality hotel-like bedrooms in most hospitals, but the fact that anybody, no matter how rich or poor, can access free healthcare is in this country is something that from time to time I give for granted and then I realize that I shouldn't.