The Register Debates

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Debates

Welcome to The Register Debates in which we pitch our writers against each other, and you – the reader – decide the winning side.

Assumed consent is the right approach for sharing healthcare patients’ data, beyond their direct care

The debate around the benefits of sharing medical data for the greater good versus individual’s expectations of confidentiality and consent, has become heated to say the least over the last year and a half. But if consent is not just assumed, but informed, do we all stand to benefit? Our contributors serve up their own prescriptions, but you get to decide.

Technology widens the education divide - Yes or No?

The pandemic has highlighted the increasing importance of technology within education – and shown what happens when policy makers and education authorities get things wrong. But is this just a question of access, or are there other factors we need to consider? Our contributors take to their keyboards to thrash out the issues.

Containers will kill virtual machines

Should you migrate your services and applications to containers, or are virtual machines good enough? Is containerization an overkill and just for the likes of Google and Amazon, or are virtual machines a blunt tool unsuitable for modern software deployment?

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Hackers are friends not foes, says Alyssa Miller in this opening argument for our latest debate

Consolidating databases has significant storage benefits, therefore everyone should be doing it

Proponents claim storage consolidation means less storage, which means lower costs. Naysayers argue storage consolidation may actually increase costs and can be hugely complex. Where is the benefit?

Artificial intelligence in the enterprise is just yesterday's dumb algorithms rebranded as AI

Is this artificial intelligence genuinely useful, does the technology as it stands today have a place in the enterprise, or is it simply a cynical marketing turn to dress up previous algorithms as intelligent?

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