Today's print Wall Street Journal (no free web version) mentions how one's medical history "leaks" into a credit report. If you havent paid a medical institution in full, on time, then your payment history goes on your report. The size of the payment and the recipient can indicate if you have something cancer or AIDS, etc. Plus, there have been cases where medical info has been entered directly into the credit report by a creditor. But claims some credit agencies try to eliminate these. (Like yeah).
So some life insurance companies will now obtain your credit history to look for these clues. The WSJ article mentions a 1993 court case over a mortgage company denying a mortgage over medical info on a credit report. The complaintant had a life threatening condition.
With credit cards, mortgages, auto insurance, life insurance, medical insurance, car rental agencies, and airlines and the government now looking at these databases, it can make me a bit paranoid.
Last week the news said airlines were looking at the credit agency and medical insurance reports of every passenger.
People with low credit scroes were flagged for additional scrutiny. I guess because these are easy databases to access, not because they are informative.
Standard college course work is pretty much learning formulas. Until I had to implement math/physics in grad school research, I didnt deeply understand them. I wonder if there are good books on math and physics for game developers? I saw some good books at SIGGRAPH last week on computer algorithms for game developers covering some of math and physics. When you actually *do* some of this stuff, then you learn it better.
If you combined a cafeteria and a vending machine,
what would you get? They AUTOMATS lasted from 101 years ago in New York and they lasted 70 years until the dominance of the fast food restaurants. The two death reasons I read on google is that (1) these did not suburbanize into drive-by restaurants, and (2) didnt serve burger-shake-fries menu.
Many Australians take year-offs to explore the world a couple time in their lives- during and after the university and after raising their families. So do many Europeans. I guess this partly cultural and partly economic. Americans are on an economic treadmill of student loans, consumerism, and retirement planning. These are lesser concerns in countries with more "civilized" economic systems.
I am all for the continuing mechanisation of life's boring chores as long as this doesnt mean serious economic dislocation. For example, mechanised farming reduced the effort to provide food from 80% of the population in 1800 to 2% today. Tractors, fertilizers, petroleum, and more recently computers, GPS and biotech all have contributed. Bring on A.I. and robots!
But our economic system in the US alternates between periods of 80-hour weeks and unemployment. I figure with a reasonably secure job I could live my parents' 1950s lifestyle working only two days a week. However, ever-increasing consumerism and uncertain future makes me fell like I have to continue working more than full time (when I can get the work). Some of the happiest times in my life were as a college student when I was dirt-poor and had the life of stimulating liesure.
When the Transcedental Meditation people were really aggressive in the late 1970s, they convinced a number of organizations- corporations, schools, prisons, etc.- to hold their classes.
The objections were cost and complaints about church-state separation.
(TM is a version of Hindu/Yoga meditation simplified for the masses. Several celebrities embraced it in the 1960s. It acquired aspects of MLM self-improvement business tactics in the US.)
Before 1950 the military used compute ballistic tables using scores of women punching numbers on adding machines. Many of these became the first programmers of ENIACS and the like.
Then it was first taught in business schools, perhaps tainted by its secretarial connections. MIT and Stanford didnt allow undergrads to major in CS until the 1970s, because it was thought to be a second-class discipline. People snuck in through math, EE, or biz-school. MIT still doesnt have a pure CS department- it still part of EE. However, the first required EE course is their version of Computer Science 101.
The L visas are for transfering employees to the US in the same company, e.g. a programming shop with branches in both the US and India.
Unlike HB1, L-1 has no quota or time-limit;
L-1 has no salary floor;
L-1 has no reporting requirment, though HomeLand Security is trying to track them;
L-1 do not require advertising with the US first.
The "Grid" prescibes a standard way of connecting distributed computers for large-scale computing. Sort of like the InterNet didnt really take off until more than 20 years after its inception, when http and browsers became standards.
BSG followed TV's long tradition of cloning and imitating successful movies. In this case it copied the immensely successful first Star Wars movie and its FX innovations.
TV SciFi was pretty successful up to the mid-1960s with Outer Limits, Star Trek I, Jetsons, Twilight Zone, and even the cheesy Lost in Space. However they were very expensive to produce. Then along came the death of technological utopiaism that followed WWII and culminated in the Moon landing. Big science was seen as evil- pollutors and war-promoters.
The doppler method, conducted from the surface of
the earth is limited to about 3 meters a second.
This limits it to large planets and/or planets that orbit quickly, i.e. close-in. Thats why most of the 110 or so planets discovered this way are "wierd", very large, or very close to their Sun so they orbit in weeks. Jupiter is too small and too far out to be generate a detectable wobble.
Space-based woble methods may give a lot more detectibility because they avoid atmospheric blurring. Also a new satellite called "Kepler" will look for planetary eclipse transits. These can be quite rare. Kepler plans to watch the same patch of the sky for five years with a 350 megapixel camera looking for eclipses.
There are prototypes of eyeglasses with a lightpen laser scanner that draws images directly on your retina. This could display large images with a tiny device.
There are lab prototypes of "flexible" computer screens, e.g. e-ink, organic LCDs, etc., that could rolled up into a pencil-size tube or folded into a pocket. "Mission to Mars" movie and "Earth Final Conflict" TV show used these.
For those who didnt see or forgot, Minority report exploited two inventions: (1) "e-ink" or "paper-ink", i.e. video on just about any surface- walls , cereal boxes, newspapers, etc.
(2) biometric ID, mainly IRIS, to detect who was walking by and tailor a message for them.
These have great potential for 24/7 spam just about everywhere.
My memory may be fuzzy, but I thought I heard of cellphone app that vibrates a pager if you have matching search profiles with cell phone holders within a certain distance. I also heard of a pager toy in Japan that does this too.
(What happen to "good old" flirting?)
Mars missions are planned at least five years in advance. The 2006 and 2008 ones are being developed. So the Columbia disaster has little immediate impact
MicroSoft pre-announces vaporware so that it can co-opt the initiatives of a competitor. Remember Windows was announced in 1984 to compete with Apple and other MSDOS GUIs like QuarterDeck. But it took MS nine years to deliver an usable version (3.1).
The case of "MRIs on demand" shows the problem of ambiguous medical tests. There are firms all around the country that will perform and interpret a thorac MRI for as little as $500. Typically they find find dozens of "anomalies", that are probably harmless. However, it may cost thousands to track these down, including in some cases biopsies. Especially since the people who voluntarily solicit these MRIs are worry-worts in the first place. Medical economists suggest that test with lots of false-positives are economically counterproductive in an already expensive medical system.
Is that the tentative title of the next episode? Very few action actors can keep on going for 20-30 years. Its time for Ford to go into graceful retirement or play grandpa roles.
They're bloated, sloppy, and aimless.
Some competition whould do them good.
Albeit, much of NASA's woes are due to a Congress
that cant make up its mind.
StarTrek transporters and information
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
The 27 years of Star Trek have been ambiguous about whether teleportation was a conversion to information and reconstructed at the other end,
or conversion into some other form of matter-energy that could be transmitted. The difference is crucial, for the information case has philosphical issues such as copies, identity, and manipulative change.
The "official" Next Generation handbook weaseled the explanation was "both". Items like food replication and holodeck material was low resolution patterns of non-living matter. Whereas human beings went though some high resolution transmission that was not information, so they could not be "resurrected" from death, nor copied, etc. Some mumble-jumble about special quantum states in living matter that was not "information".
Despite the kludge, there were dozens of transportor subplots that sure acted like information paradoxes, such as duplicated actors. My favorite was when Scotty survives 75 years as a castaway by putting himself into a perpetual transporter loop.
Slashdot Mirror
Today's print Wall Street Journal (no free web version) mentions how one's medical history "leaks" into a credit report. If you havent paid a medical institution in full, on time, then your payment history goes on your report. The size of the payment and the recipient can indicate if you have something cancer or AIDS, etc. Plus, there have been cases where medical info has been entered directly into the credit report by a creditor. But claims some credit agencies try to eliminate these. (Like yeah).
So some life insurance companies will now obtain your credit history to look for these clues. The WSJ article mentions a 1993 court case over a mortgage company denying a mortgage over medical info on a credit report. The complaintant had a life threatening condition.
With credit cards, mortgages, auto insurance, life insurance, medical insurance, car rental agencies, and airlines and the government now looking at these databases, it can make me a bit paranoid.
Last week the news said airlines were looking at the credit agency and medical insurance reports of every passenger. People with low credit scroes were flagged for additional scrutiny. I guess because these are easy databases to access, not because they are informative.
Standard college course work is pretty much learning formulas. Until I had to implement math/physics in grad school research, I didnt deeply understand them. I wonder if there are good books on math and physics for game developers? I saw some good books at SIGGRAPH last week on computer algorithms for game developers covering some of math and physics. When you actually *do* some of this stuff, then you learn it better.
If you combined a cafeteria and a vending machine, what would you get? They AUTOMATS lasted from 101 years ago in New York and they lasted 70 years until the dominance of the fast food restaurants. The two death reasons I read on google is that (1) these did not suburbanize into drive-by restaurants, and (2) didnt serve burger-shake-fries menu.
Many Australians take year-offs to explore the world a couple time in their lives- during and after the university and after raising their families. So do many Europeans. I guess this partly cultural and partly economic. Americans are on an economic treadmill of student loans, consumerism, and retirement planning. These are lesser concerns in countries with more "civilized" economic systems.
I am all for the continuing mechanisation of life's boring chores as long as this doesnt mean serious economic dislocation. For example, mechanised farming reduced the effort to provide food from 80% of the population in 1800 to 2% today. Tractors, fertilizers, petroleum, and more recently computers, GPS and biotech all have contributed. Bring on A.I. and robots!
But our economic system in the US alternates between periods of 80-hour weeks and unemployment. I figure with a reasonably secure job I could live my parents' 1950s lifestyle working only two days a week. However, ever-increasing consumerism and uncertain future makes me fell like I have to continue working more than full time (when I can get the work). Some of the happiest times in my life were as a college student when I was dirt-poor and had the life of stimulating liesure.
When the Transcedental Meditation people were really aggressive in the late 1970s, they convinced a number of organizations- corporations, schools, prisons, etc.- to hold their classes. The objections were cost and complaints about church-state separation.
(TM is a version of Hindu/Yoga meditation simplified for the masses. Several celebrities embraced it in the 1960s. It acquired aspects of MLM self-improvement business tactics in the US.)
Before 1950 the military used compute ballistic tables using scores of women punching numbers on adding machines. Many of these became the first programmers of ENIACS and the like.
Then it was first taught in business schools, perhaps tainted by its secretarial connections. MIT and Stanford didnt allow undergrads to major in CS until the 1970s, because it was thought to be a second-class discipline. People snuck in through math, EE, or biz-school. MIT still doesnt have a pure CS department- it still part of EE. However, the first required EE course is their version of Computer Science 101.
The L visas are for transfering employees to the US in the same company, e.g. a programming shop with branches in both the US and India.
Unlike HB1, L-1 has no quota or time-limit;
L-1 has no salary floor;
L-1 has no reporting requirment, though HomeLand Security is trying to track them;
L-1 do not require advertising with the US first.
The "Grid" prescibes a standard way of connecting distributed computers for large-scale computing. Sort of like the InterNet didnt really take off until more than 20 years after its inception, when http and browsers became standards.
So are are SGI MIPS-based workstations are dinosaurs.
BSG followed TV's long tradition of cloning and imitating successful movies. In this case it copied the immensely successful first Star Wars movie and its FX innovations.
TV SciFi was pretty successful up to the mid-1960s with Outer Limits, Star Trek I, Jetsons, Twilight Zone, and even the cheesy Lost in Space. However they were very expensive to produce. Then along came the death of technological utopiaism that followed WWII and culminated in the Moon landing. Big science was seen as evil- pollutors and war-promoters.
The doppler method, conducted from the surface of the earth is limited to about 3 meters a second. This limits it to large planets and/or planets that orbit quickly, i.e. close-in. Thats why most of the 110 or so planets discovered this way are "wierd", very large, or very close to their Sun so they orbit in weeks. Jupiter is too small and too far out to be generate a detectable wobble.
Space-based woble methods may give a lot more detectibility because they avoid atmospheric blurring. Also a new satellite called "Kepler" will look for planetary eclipse transits. These can be quite rare. Kepler plans to watch the same patch of the sky for five years with a 350 megapixel camera looking for eclipses.
Large stars- a few times more massive than the sun- evolve and die quickly, sometimes in less than a billion years.
There are prototypes of eyeglasses with a lightpen laser scanner that draws images directly on your retina. This could display large images with a tiny device.
There are lab prototypes of "flexible" computer screens, e.g. e-ink, organic LCDs, etc., that could rolled up into a pencil-size tube or folded into a pocket. "Mission to Mars" movie and "Earth Final Conflict" TV show used these.
For those who didnt see or forgot, Minority report exploited two inventions: (1) "e-ink" or "paper-ink", i.e. video on just about any surface- walls , cereal boxes, newspapers, etc. (2) biometric ID, mainly IRIS, to detect who was walking by and tailor a message for them. These have great potential for 24/7 spam just about everywhere.
My memory may be fuzzy, but I thought I heard of cellphone app that vibrates a pager if you have matching search profiles with cell phone holders within a certain distance. I also heard of a pager toy in Japan that does this too. (What happen to "good old" flirting?)
Mars missions are planned at least five years in advance. The 2006 and 2008 ones are being developed. So the Columbia disaster has little immediate impact
MicroSoft pre-announces vaporware so that it can co-opt the initiatives of a competitor. Remember Windows was announced in 1984 to compete with Apple and other MSDOS GUIs like QuarterDeck. But it took MS nine years to deliver an usable version (3.1).
The case of "MRIs on demand" shows the problem of ambiguous medical tests. There are firms all around the country that will perform and interpret a thorac MRI for as little as $500. Typically they find find dozens of "anomalies", that are probably harmless. However, it may cost thousands to track these down, including in some cases biopsies. Especially since the people who voluntarily solicit these MRIs are worry-worts in the first place. Medical economists suggest that test with lots of false-positives are economically counterproductive in an already expensive medical system.
When have they had an original idea the past 25 years?
Is that the tentative title of the next episode? Very few action actors can keep on going for 20-30 years. Its time for Ford to go into graceful retirement or play grandpa roles.
They're bloated, sloppy, and aimless. Some competition whould do them good. Albeit, much of NASA's woes are due to a Congress that cant make up its mind.
The 27 years of Star Trek have been ambiguous about whether teleportation was a conversion to information and reconstructed at the other end, or conversion into some other form of matter-energy that could be transmitted. The difference is crucial, for the information case has philosphical issues such as copies, identity, and manipulative change. The "official" Next Generation handbook weaseled the explanation was "both". Items like food replication and holodeck material was low resolution patterns of non-living matter. Whereas human beings went though some high resolution transmission that was not information, so they could not be "resurrected" from death, nor copied, etc. Some mumble-jumble about special quantum states in living matter that was not "information".
Despite the kludge, there were dozens of transportor subplots that sure acted like information paradoxes, such as duplicated actors. My favorite was when Scotty survives 75 years as a castaway by putting himself into a perpetual transporter loop.