A friend of mine who does some professional photography takes some really cool pictures while "draining". There are a lot of neat places down there!
Yes there are.
But you can die in the drains - and it can happen very quickly.
Sewer gas is mostly methane but may include hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Improper disposal of petroleum products such as gasoline and mineral spirits can add to the fun. [freely adapted from the Wikipedia]
According to various sources, 1,494,500. While that is a bit low when considering the 3 year span, it still is a pretty large number of kids who wouldn't have gotten any shot at technology otherwise.
This is how it breaks down:
Deployments of 300,000-500,000 units: Peru Uruquay Deployments of at least 100,000 units: Rwanda Deployments of at least 50,000 units: Argentina Columbia Mexico
The remaining laptops have been shot-gunned across the globe. 2,000 units here. 5 to 10,000 units there. Never enough landing in any one place to be more than a curiosity.
OLPC claimed to have found in Linux, OSS, Sugar and a constructivist philosophy of education a universal - teacher-proof - solution for the grade school child.
But from this vantage point, I would have to argue that:
It can't be a coincidence that OLPC's only solid anchorage is in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
An individual comes into an unauthorized posession of a development prototype.
He lifts a phone left behind at a bar.
Anyone who witnessed the incident would have called him a thief.
Individual politely asks Apple if they want it back. Apple denies existence of property.
He shops the prototype phone around to Wired, etc.
He quotes a price that makes it perfectly clear he knows that the phone is hotter than a stove.
He has the number of the employee who was issued the phone but never calls it.
Instead, he covers his ass by claiming to have called a low-level tech support number out of the Cupertino Yellow Pages.
What he does not do - as California law demands he must do - is surrender the phone to the police.
Individual sells property to Gizmodo.
He has no right to sell the phone. Gizmodo has no right to buy the phone. To disassemble the phone. To use the phone for any other purpose than to contact the owner or dial 911.
Gizmodo was immediately exposed to the charge of knowingly dealing in stolen goods.
It edged very close to a plausible charge of extortion.
And that scenario only makes up, what, about 80% of the passenger car miles driven in North America?
How do you define a commuter run?
Does it include a side trip to the loading dock at Sears?
Picking up your kids on the way home from school? The first demands cargo space, the second passenger space.
On thing is clear:
The commute is not optional.
Buffalo NY this week has been wilting with temperatures in the mid-90s - and humidity to match. Come winter and conditions can turn artic.
If the I-190 bridges over Grand Island close, your run home north from Buffalo has effectively doubled. Not good if you have already burned through the better part of that 50 mile quickie charge-up.
It isn't enough for the electric car to perform well on the test track. It has to perform reliably on the street. It has to cope well with the unexpected.
Time published a long "To Do" list from one of Edison's journals - things like finding a solution for the problem of the long distance telephone call decades before the invention of the vacuum tube.
An invention of that sort has a real and immediate impact.
It is commercially viable - and on paper at least - a realistic and obtainable goal for a late 19th century industrial lab.
If you're a camcorder manufacturer, chances are you're using H.264 (and paying licensing fees to do so) precisely because it's convenient for people to upload to YouTube
The moving image has the power to raise the dead.
To take you back in time.
The camera isn't about fame - it's about family. It's about the most intimate and precious of memories.
YouTube is an afterthought. YouTube is nothing.
As Google and other companies break the cycle by convincing people that the format will come into common support, manufacturers will be more willing to jump on board, bringing consumers with them.
All Google has to offer at the moment is trans-coded video that doesn't appear too visibly degraded. Big Whoop.
Except that in the US at least, the only one of those things that use it is BluRay.
...and every camcorder among the 40,000 items you'll discover in a quick search of Google Shopping for H.264 video.
YouTube receives 24 hours of amateur video every minute of every day - and inevitably more and more of that video will be H.264 recorded at 720p or 1080i.
We DO NOT license reproductions in the following circumstances:
Anyone wanting to put together a product/compilation for sale to the public (this includes all retail stores, market stalls, etc); Any compilation/product to be created for branding, promotional or training use; A DJ or any other person wishing to use a sample of a commercially released sound recording in their mix or any person wanting to create mix-tapes or remixes; The reproduction of sound recordings for use in a film, DVD or video; The use of sound recordings for theme music, promos or in a dramatic context in television productions; The reproduction of sound recordings for use in any advertisements or commercials; The reproduction of sound recordings for use as "walking on" or "walking off" music at seminars or conferences; Music for use at wedding ceremonies or other public events; Any person wanting to make a "back-up" copy of their album, CD or cassette; Any person wishing to make a copy of a sound recording for a friend; Any person wanting to set up a business where the customer details which sound recording they would like on a CD and the business puts the required sound recordings onto a CD and sells the product to the customer. This is considered the retail sale of a compilation CD; Any person who wants to set up a business where they convert sound recordings into another format for customers (e.g. converting vinyl records into CD format for customers; ALL reproductions of sound recordings downloaded from unauthorised internet sites; Podcasts or other online uses.
Maximum prison term: Less than 10 years but 5 or more years. Maximum Fine: $ 250,000 Maximum Supervised Release Term: 3 years. Special Assessment on Conviction: $ 100
Federal A: Life or Death Federal E: More than 1 year but less than 5 years.
Since 1790, the Coast Guard has served as America's principal "law of the sea" agency. Originally established by Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Marine, the Coast Guard began with the mission of enforcing import tariffs. Since then its maritime-security responsibilities have expanded exponentially...to include the enforcement of all federal laws at sea--from stopping terrorists and pirates to enforcing vessel-safety regulations and fisheries conservation laws to interdicting drug and migrant smugglers.Missions - Maritime Security
I take from this that you don't live within 1000 miles of a body of water deep enough to float a rubber duckie.
Northeast Regional Power Outages 1965-2010
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We've even had the East Coast power grid, which includes part of the midwest and Canada fall down, allegedly related to some idiot using Microsoft products in mission critical situations.
1965 Nov 9 Northeast Blackout Cascading series of transmission line overloads traced to safety relay at Niagara's Adam Beck station. (human error)
In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report states that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, putting a strain on high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting) which later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
Computer failure
A software bug known as a race condition existed in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system. Once triggered, the bug stalled FirstEnergy's control room alarm system for over an hour. System operators were unaware of the malfunction; the failure deprived them of both audio and visual alerts for important changes in system state. After the alarm system failure, unprocessed events queued up and the primary server failed within 30 minutes. Then all applications (including the stalled alarm system) were automatically transferred to the backup server, which itself failed at 14:54. The server failures slowed the screen refresh rate of the operators' computer consoles from 1-3 seconds to 59 seconds per screen. The lack of alarms led operators to dismiss a call from American Electric Power about the tripping and reclosure of a 345 kV shared line in northeast Ohio. Technical support informed control room personnel of the alarm system failure at 15:42.
2003 Sept 29 (Hurricane Isabel)
2005 Dec 19 (ice storms)
2006 July 17-18 (severe thunderstorms)
2006 Oct 12 "October Surprise" (lake-effect snow storm, Buffalo, NY)
Not one of the - world's great - power outages on the Wikipedia's list is linked in any way to Microsoft or Windows.
On Tuesday, FAA officials had insisted that the more than three-hour system shutdown posed no safety risks. But they acknowledged Wednesday that they were investigating five incidents in which planes lost the required separation distance during the first 15 minutes of the communications breakdown. In two cases, large airliners -- a UPS cargo plane and a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Southern California airports -- came much closer to small corporate jets than federal guidelines allow, requiring at least one pilot to take corrective action. FAA officials repeated Wednesday that they did not believe lives were ever at risk. The agency's radio system in Palmdale shut itself down Tuesday afternoon because a technician failed to reset an internal clock -- a routine maintenance procedure required every 30 days by the FAA. Then a backup system failed, also as a result of technician error, officials said. The radar system in Palmdale, contrary to what some FAA and union officials had said Tuesday, did not shut down. FAA officials said they had known for more than a year that a software glitch could shut down radio communications and were in the process of fixing it. In the m
Re:So you are taking Economist seriously.
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do, depending on what their backers need as policy at any given period. Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
The Economist has been around since 1843.
It is anchored in a classically liberal and centrist tradition - and has never been particularly well-known for boot-licking.
Too often when visiting here I find evidence that the eternally adolescent geek simply can't accept that there can be a principled opposition to his own set beliefs.
ROFL, wow, interesting take... the south favoured slavery, not because they were filthy bigots who felt Africans were inferior, but simply because the poor bastards "required the extra labor for agriculture".
The abolition of slavery moved very slowly even in the North.
The percentage of colonists - all races and both sexes - who arrived as slaves, prisoners, or more or less voluntarily indentured servants, was around 1/3.
1777 Vermont Republic (constitution) 1780 Pennsylvania "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery" Frees adult children of slaves born after 1780. 1783 Massachusetts (judicial decision - state constitutional law) 1783 -1784 New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island (children of slaves) (statute) 1799 -1804 New York, New Jersey (children of slaves) (statute) 1817 New York - emancipation for all slaves on July 4, 1827 1827 New York Children born of slaves between 1799 and 1827 are indentured until age 25 (females) or age 28 (males) 1847 Slavery ends in Pennsylvania. Those born before 1780 are freed - perhaps 100 surviving.
From the beginning, the plantation South was raising labor-intensive, non-edible, non-perishable, crops for the export trade. It was one of the few sources of hard currency - gold and silver - the colonies possessed. Which matters if you are seriously bent on waging a war against Great Britain.
The summary is a strange reading of these applications.
You were expecting anything better? On Slashdot?
The "Wearing Your Health on your Sleeve" invention, for example, has two apparent target markets. The first is unreliable patients (e.g., an unconscious patient or those with Alzheimer's or other mental health issues that make it difficult for the patient to accurately self-report medical information). This is basically a fancy version of a MedicAlert bracelet.
The medical alert function has been a staple of Sci-Fi for generations.
It is something the military has always wanted badly.
Insurance companies love segregating people into different risk pools so that they can charge high risk customers more money.
The calculated risk is what an insurance company is all about. It's why your insurance premiums are lower than the Phantom Fireworks store just across the state line.
The profit motive is very powerful, and insurance companies, like all corporations, are amoral entities.
The mutual insurance company - or co-op - still has to generate enough income to meet its projected obligations and maintain a reserve for strategic and tactical reserve for emergencies.
The bankruptcy of his insurer is not an attractive option for the policy holder.
To me, the idea that people are thinking of this kind of thing is what this story is about.
Why call it creepy?
If video games - like Wii Fit - demand or encourage strenuous physical activity, shouldn't they be calibrated for the player's age, physical and mental condition?
The doctor, coach or trainer in the real world needs to be alert to signs of stress. He needs to be aware of the environment - temperature and humidity, for example.
Otherwise one of his best players may collapse and die on the field:
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine who does some professional photography takes some really cool pictures while "draining". There are a lot of neat places down there!
Yes there are.
But you can die in the drains - and it can happen very quickly.
Sewer gas is mostly methane but may include hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Improper disposal of petroleum products such as gasoline and mineral spirits can add to the fun. [freely adapted from the Wikipedia]
Methane is something to be feared:
Two kids among five killed by methane gas
According to various sources, 1,494,500. While that is a bit low when considering the 3 year span, it still is a pretty large number of kids who wouldn't have gotten any shot at technology otherwise.
This is how it breaks down:
Deployments of 300,000-500,000 units: Peru Uruquay
Deployments of at least 100,000 units: Rwanda
Deployments of at least 50,000 units: Argentina Columbia Mexico
The remaining laptops have been shot-gunned across the globe. 2,000 units here. 5 to 10,000 units there. Never enough landing in any one place to be more than a curiosity.
Deployment of XO laptops
OLPC claimed to have found in Linux, OSS, Sugar and a constructivist philosophy of education a universal - teacher-proof - solution for the grade school child.
But from this vantage point, I would have to argue that:
It can't be a coincidence that OLPC's only solid anchorage is in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
It is proprietary, centralized, bloatwared, closed, and bandwidth intensive.
maybe a non-crashy linux client will be your savior.
There are about 500 million Skype accounts.
40 million or so people using the service on any given day. Skype
You don't "dial out" to stress-test the technology - you dial out in the hope that someone will be there to answer your call.
He lifts a phone left behind at a bar.
Anyone who witnessed the incident would have called him a thief.
Individual politely asks Apple if they want it back.
Apple denies existence of property.
He shops the prototype phone around to Wired, etc.
He quotes a price that makes it perfectly clear he knows that the phone is hotter than a stove.
He has the number of the employee who was issued the phone but never calls it.
Instead, he covers his ass by claiming to have called a low-level tech support number out of the Cupertino Yellow Pages.
What he does not do - as California law demands he must do - is surrender the phone to the police.
Individual sells property to Gizmodo.
He has no right to sell the phone. Gizmodo has no right to buy the phone. To disassemble the phone. To use the phone for any other purpose than to contact the owner or dial 911.
Gizmodo was immediately exposed to the charge of knowingly dealing in stolen goods.
It edged very close to a plausible charge of extortion.
Apple involves the authorities.
and was well within its rights to do so.
Something like 83% of Moz's funding comes from Google. There's nothing much to suggest that Moz is ready for the day when Google pulls the plug.
And that scenario only makes up, what, about 80% of the passenger car miles driven in North America?
How do you define a commuter run?
Does it include a side trip to the loading dock at Sears?
Picking up your kids on the way home from school? The first demands cargo space, the second passenger space.
On thing is clear:
The commute is not optional.
Buffalo NY this week has been wilting with temperatures in the mid-90s - and humidity to match. Come winter and conditions can turn artic.
If the I-190 bridges over Grand Island close, your run home north from Buffalo has effectively doubled. Not good if you have already burned through the better part of that 50 mile quickie charge-up.
It isn't enough for the electric car to perform well on the test track. It has to perform reliably on the street. It has to cope well with the unexpected.
Nokia or Murtazin?
Time published a long "To Do" list from one of Edison's journals - things like finding a solution for the problem of the long distance telephone call decades before the invention of the vacuum tube.
An invention of that sort has a real and immediate impact.
It is commercially viable - and on paper at least - a realistic and obtainable goal for a late 19th century industrial lab.
If you're a camcorder manufacturer, chances are you're using H.264 (and paying licensing fees to do so) precisely because it's convenient for people to upload to YouTube
The moving image has the power to raise the dead.
To take you back in time.
The camera isn't about fame - it's about family. It's about the most intimate and precious of memories.
YouTube is an afterthought. YouTube is nothing.
As Google and other companies break the cycle by convincing people that the format will come into common support, manufacturers will be more willing to jump on board, bringing consumers with them.
All Google has to offer at the moment is trans-coded video that doesn't appear too visibly degraded. Big Whoop.
Don't you need Douglas-Martin sunpower screens to power the thing
What you need is a conveyor belt that won't snap at 100 mph under maximum load.
What you need is a system with interlocks that never allow more than a 3 mph differential between lanes.
Except that in the US at least, the only one of those things that use it is BluRay.
YouTube receives 24 hours of amateur video every minute of every day - and inevitably more and more of that video will be H.264 recorded at 720p or 1080i.
And there's almost two billion chinese trying to make hardware that doesn't infringe pattens so they can sell obscenely cheaper here in the west.
The manufacturer's license for H.264 is $0 - for sales of 100,000 units or less each year.
20 cents a unit - for sales of 100,001 to 5 million units a year.
10 cents a unit - for sales above 5 million a year.
With an "Enterprise Cap" of $5 million a year.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
The Korean Samsung Group - for comparison - has about a quarter of a million employees and annual revenues of $170 billion.
For now at least.
You have to be realistic.
H.264 isn't just about the cell phone phone and the web.
It's a broadcast, cable and sattelite video standard, a Blu-Ray standard. It is deeply entrenched in industrial and security video.
A search of Google Shopping for "H.264" will return 40,000 hits.
There are 847 AVC/H.264 Licensees
The Asian industrial giants like Mitsubishi are very well represented.
Let's hope the primary schools are up to date with their ARIA license fees!"
Never let a fact get between a geek and his meme.
ARIA doesn't take money from the primary schools. ARIA licenses recorded music for commercial use in pubs, restaurants, dance halls and so on.
Licensing FAQs - What sort of sound recording reproductions is ARIA able to license?
We DO NOT license reproductions in the following circumstances:
Anyone wanting to put together a product/compilation for sale to the public (this includes all retail stores, market stalls, etc); /product to be created for branding, promotional or training use;
Any compilation
A DJ or any other person wishing to use a sample of a commercially released sound recording in their mix or any person wanting to create mix-tapes or remixes;
The reproduction of sound recordings for use in a film, DVD or video;
The use of sound recordings for theme music, promos or in a dramatic context in television productions;
The reproduction of sound recordings for use in any advertisements or commercials;
The reproduction of sound recordings for use as "walking on" or "walking off" music at seminars or conferences;
Music for use at wedding ceremonies or other public events;
Any person wanting to make a "back-up" copy of their album, CD or cassette;
Any person wishing to make a copy of a sound recording for a friend;
Any person wanting to set up a business where the customer details which sound recording they would like on a CD and the business puts the required sound recordings onto a CD and sells the product to the customer. This is considered the retail sale of a compilation CD;
Any person who wants to set up a business where they convert sound recordings into another format for customers (e.g. converting vinyl records into CD format for customers;
ALL reproductions of sound recordings downloaded from unauthorised internet sites;
Podcasts or other online uses.
First off, build a list of local electricians and plumbers, and the name of whomever is going to sign off on this house
Talk to your wife.
Talk to your bank. Your lawyer. Your real estate agent. Your insurance company.
This project of yours may have no re-sale value.
The equity you build in your home is an important part of your estate planning.
Take the time to get to know your neighbors - otherwise you will be dodging pitchforks from the day you begin.
We all grow older - and "cool" doesn't age well.
Ugly doesn't age well.
That is why the home buyer avoids the awkward, the eccentric, the physically demanding. Why he pays for comfort even at the cost of some efficiency.
architecture: turned upside down
Class D Felonies:
Maximum prison term: Less than 10 years but 5 or more years.
Maximum Fine: $ 250,000
Maximum Supervised Release Term: 3 years.
Special Assessment on Conviction: $ 100
Federal A: Life or Death
Federal E: More than 1 year but less than 5 years.
Classes of offenses under United States federal law
Since 1790, the Coast Guard has served as America's principal "law of the sea" agency. Originally established by Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Marine, the Coast Guard began with the mission of enforcing import tariffs. Since then its maritime-security responsibilities have expanded exponentially...to include the enforcement of all federal laws at sea--from stopping terrorists and pirates to enforcing vessel-safety regulations and fisheries conservation laws to interdicting drug and migrant smugglers. Missions - Maritime Security
Coast Guard
Because we all can't be seamen!
I take from this that you don't live within 1000 miles of a body of water deep enough to float a rubber duckie.
We've even had the East Coast power grid, which includes part of the midwest and Canada fall down, allegedly related to some idiot using Microsoft products in mission critical situations.
1965 Nov 9 Northeast Blackout Cascading series of transmission line overloads traced to safety relay at Niagara's Adam Beck station. (human error)
1977 July 13 New York City Blackout of 1977 (Lightning strikes take out four transmission lines)
1998 January (ice storms)
1999 July 5 (Boundary Waters-Canadian Derecho)
2003 August 14 Northeast Blackout of 2003
In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report states that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, putting a strain on high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting) which later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
Computer failure
A software bug known as a race condition existed in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system. Once triggered, the bug stalled FirstEnergy's control room alarm system for over an hour. System operators were unaware of the malfunction; the failure deprived them of both audio and visual alerts for important changes in system state. After the alarm system failure, unprocessed events queued up and the primary server failed within 30 minutes. Then all applications (including the stalled alarm system) were automatically transferred to the backup server, which itself failed at 14:54. The server failures slowed the screen refresh rate of the operators' computer consoles from 1-3 seconds to 59 seconds per screen. The lack of alarms led operators to dismiss a call from American Electric Power about the tripping and reclosure of a 345 kV shared line in northeast Ohio. Technical support informed control room personnel of the alarm system failure at 15:42.
2003 Sept 29 (Hurricane Isabel)
2005 Dec 19 (ice storms)
2006 July 17-18 (severe thunderstorms)
2006 Oct 12 "October Surprise" (lake-effect snow storm, Buffalo, NY)
List of notable wide-scale power outages
Not one of the - world's great - power outages on the Wikipedia's list is linked in any way to Microsoft or Windows.
On Tuesday, FAA officials had insisted that the more than three-hour system shutdown posed no safety risks. But they acknowledged Wednesday that they were investigating five incidents in which planes lost the required separation distance during the first 15 minutes of the communications breakdown.
In two cases, large airliners -- a UPS cargo plane and a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Southern California airports -- came much closer to small corporate jets than federal guidelines allow, requiring at least one pilot to take corrective action. FAA officials repeated Wednesday that they did not believe lives were ever at risk.
The agency's radio system in Palmdale shut itself down Tuesday afternoon because a technician failed to reset an internal clock -- a routine maintenance procedure required every 30 days by the FAA. Then a backup system failed, also as a result of technician error, officials said.
The radar system in Palmdale, contrary to what some FAA and union officials had said Tuesday, did not shut down.
FAA officials said they had known for more than a year that a software glitch could shut down radio communications and were in the process of fixing it. In the m
Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do, depending on what their backers need as policy at any given period. Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
The Economist has been around since 1843.
It is anchored in a classically liberal and centrist tradition - and has never been particularly well-known for boot-licking.
Too often when visiting here I find evidence that the eternally adolescent geek simply can't accept that there can be a principled opposition to his own set beliefs.
ROFL, wow, interesting take... the south favoured slavery, not because they were filthy bigots who felt Africans were inferior, but simply because the poor bastards "required the extra labor for agriculture".
The abolition of slavery moved very slowly even in the North.
The percentage of colonists - all races and both sexes - who arrived as slaves, prisoners, or more or less voluntarily indentured servants, was around 1/3.
1777 Vermont Republic (constitution)
1780 Pennsylvania "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery" Frees adult children of slaves born after 1780.
1783 Massachusetts (judicial decision - state constitutional law)
1783 -1784 New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island (children of slaves) (statute)
1799 -1804 New York, New Jersey (children of slaves) (statute)
1817 New York - emancipation for all slaves on July 4, 1827
1827 New York Children born of slaves between 1799 and 1827 are indentured until age 25 (females) or age 28 (males)
1847 Slavery ends in Pennsylvania. Those born before 1780 are freed - perhaps 100 surviving.
Abolition of slavery timeline
From the beginning, the plantation South was raising labor-intensive, non-edible, non-perishable, crops for the export trade. It was one of the few sources of hard currency - gold and silver - the colonies possessed. Which matters if you are seriously bent on waging a war against Great Britain.
All mobile phones have tradeoffs in antenna design in order to look pretty, because people don't like visible external aerials.
External antennas get bent or broken.
The summary is a strange reading of these applications.
You were expecting anything better? On Slashdot?
The "Wearing Your Health on your Sleeve" invention, for example, has two apparent target markets. The first is unreliable patients (e.g., an unconscious patient or those with Alzheimer's or other mental health issues that make it difficult for the patient to accurately self-report medical information). This is basically a fancy version of a MedicAlert bracelet.
The medical alert function has been a staple of Sci-Fi for generations.
It is something the military has always wanted badly.
Insurance companies love segregating people into different risk pools so that they can charge high risk customers more money.
The calculated risk is what an insurance company is all about. It's why your insurance premiums are lower than the Phantom Fireworks store just across the state line.
The profit motive is very powerful, and insurance companies, like all corporations, are amoral entities.
The mutual insurance company - or co-op - still has to generate enough income to meet its projected obligations and maintain a reserve for strategic and tactical reserve for emergencies.
The bankruptcy of his insurer is not an attractive option for the policy holder.
To me, the idea that people are thinking of this kind of thing is what this story is about.
Why call it creepy?
If video games - like Wii Fit - demand or encourage strenuous physical activity, shouldn't they be calibrated for the player's age, physical and mental condition?
The doctor, coach or trainer in the real world needs to be alert to signs of stress. He needs to be aware of the environment - temperature and humidity, for example.
Otherwise one of his best players may collapse and die on the field:
dies of heat stroke
That's a fair question to ask.
Particularly for the very young or very old, or anyone with a complex medical history, a diabetic, for example.