I've used my family's "nickname" -- rather than a long cumbersome Southern three-part name with a Roman numeral trailing it -- since about age five. Nothing in the world except my Social Security card and birth certificate had the long form.
Until this year when the PeopleSoft company took over my employer's staff database, and had to change everyone's name on record (they say because it has to match the Social Security database).
So Blue Cross simply terminated the health record file (close to three decades worth of records) attached to the name I've been using, discarded it, and created a new file under the Social Security file name -- with of course the same SSI number.
So they bounced a bunch of medical bills reporting "that subscriber terminated his health care coverage." Although they claim they do use the SSI as their internal identifier so they shouldn't have thrown the files away. And they told my medical practitioner's office to discard the old files as well -- and they did, the pea-brains -- and opened new empty files for the new SSI-official name Congress now insists I use.
Keep your own medical history as I have done -- else I'd have no health records.
You worry about an online game? Trying to get your life back after your identity is stolen by your government. Or maybe it's not the government, but PeopleSoft claims that's the reason they did it. Or maybe it's Blue Cross, but they blame PeopleSoft.
It's happened to other people I know too -- blindsided them as well when their files went away.
I respect the need to watch what you're allowed to say; I hope the Navy didn't hold anything back when they settled an earlier lawsuit, a year ago, maybe less -- I thought this had been dealt with and everyone now understood that the super-sonar had been clearly associated with deaths among cetaceans.
I don't know if the mechanism was ever established.
I remember there was some suggestion that it triggered nitrogen bubbles in the deep dive condition ("the bends" set in at an ascent rate that the animals have been save using). I don't recall much more than that.
There's plenty on the public record. It always puzzles me when people still insist there are no facts when they've been made public and agreed on, as with the super-sonar effects.
Just wondered what else might be known and not disclosed.
I recall a submarine officer telling a group of people one time about how they'd listen to whales until they got tired of hearing them, then crank up the active sonar to maximum and "blow them out of the area" -- big laugh -- that would have been eight or nine years ago, in the Atlantic. The new sonar's way louder, and as you point out, doesn't attenuate much around the world when it's in a layer that keeps reflecting it.
I remember another recent story about using super-loud acoustic emitters to focus on incoming torpedos and explode them at a safe distance -- and there's this trick for "beaming" sound being used in vending machines (!) and other places -- I guess there are a lot more uses for acoustic energy out there.
But yeah, it's always seemed to me that there must be better ways than loud active sonar to keep track of what's going on. Probably the first country to figure out what the whales are talking about will be able to tune in to more accurate and precise descriptions of where the submarines are than any human methods can provide, if there are still whales to pay attention.
Hmmm, maybe we _should_ all practice, one day a year, the old system of store-and-forward. Pull out the modems, pull out the dialup numbers, pull out the text-only interfaces.
I wonder if anyone ever wrote an ASCIIsemaphore interpreter.
As cheap as hardware is these days, we could probably put a mechanical semaphore network up -- line of sight, with telescopes and image recognition software -- in a few weeks.
1) What does he know that he can tell usabout electrical potential differences along the cable, both crossing Earth's magnetic field lines and between upper atmosphere and ground? I think yet another short tether test is anticipated soon by satellite, I recall the first one failed. I know quite a few methods are used to trigger lightning now, from rocket-carried wires to lasers ionizing a column of air.
2) Where can we invest?
3) Wouldn't a branching structure like a suspension bridge -- several orbital counterweights somewhat separated, crosslinked, and several sea level contact points -- be safer than a single cable, spread out to protect against the random meteor or space debris impact, lightning strike, aircraft strike, or structural flaw?
4) When I lived in Seattle in the early '70s, before Starbucks, there were good coffee houses all over the place. Does anyone besides Starbucks sell coffee in his neighborhood now?
There's nothing in the laws of physics requiring that lawbooks or the people who use them be located within the jurisdiction they apply to. Plenty of legal work is outsourced now -- how do you think all those bizarre patents get written up and filed? And more to come. Think about who administers your Workers' Compensation claims.
A pharmacist in India could fill your prescription in Poughkippsie. A layer of telecom for reading the prescription, and running the machine that picks the pills off the shelf and bottles and labels them before dropping them into the delivery slot.
Most health plan authorization decisions are being made now by some low-paid worker with some English language competence, with a rulebook and no medical training, just comparing the diagnosis number on the examination report with the health plan's list of lowest-cost average-person treatments.
I know a doctor who, working in an emergency room, gets chewed out all the time by the ER staffing company manager (there are only a few, it's all outsourced) -- because he insists on seeing that the lab or X-ray reports he ordered come back and are properly interpreted before he sends people home.
His manager looks better with a much faster turnaround time and more bodies moved through. And if the treatment was wrong, maybe they'll come back, and that's a whole 'nother round of billings.
See:
American Academy of Emergency Medicine
http://www.aaem.org/ The Rape of Emergency Medicine. PDF, online and Palm (PDB) versions.
The outsourced ER management company routinely does triage on the people in the ER waiting room -- according to how many pricey examinations their plan will pay for -- and sees them first. While on the other end of the phone line is that health plan worker trying to approve the fewest tests. It's a race to maximize mediocrity.
> the application still has some issues regarding coordinate > conversions.
And the application is to direct what kind of hardware? Cruise missile, maybe?
ISSUES???
Oh, wonderful.
I remember hearing a guy in the Strategic Air Command joke that they just targeted time zones, but at least they remembered the shape of the planet made a difference.
For military purposes, assuming a flat Earth is scary.
> imagine more computing power in a head-sized device > than exists in all the human brains alive today
Imagine the steps getting there -- computing power in head sized devices that is as smart as everyone alive today, therefore multiplying the odds of screwing up the world by being as smart as everyone alive today has been.
I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side.
And the computers don't have that deeply ingrained _need_ to breathe, drink clean water, walk in the woods.
> # It's their own damn fault. If you are silly enough...
The age of reason is limited at both ends of the human life span. Below perhaps 7 years old, and above some indefinite age that could be as low as retirement age or could be past a century, human beings don't always have sufficient judgment to distinguish scams and high risk situations.
The argument that "it's their own damn fault" is a license to prey on those who aren't as clever as the predator.
Is "social Darwinism" still a morally credible approach?
Pornzilla: Porn surfing redefined. Pornzilla is a collection of tools for surfing porn with Firefox. These bookmarklets and extensions make it easier to...
www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/
Illegal piracy is illegal. The same activity authorized by a letter of marque is privateering.
The USA in its early years benefited greatly by its ability to use letters of marque instead of maintaining a standing navy. Similarly, it benefited for a very long while by refusing to honor the copyright laws of European nations.
See also the history of the Cherokee Nation in regard to the United States's laws regarding land ownership.
Everything done legal and according to the law, and we know we have the law on our side -- we have the receipts.
Consider this and dig through the Fire Marshals web site for a lot of interesting info on fires caused by consumer electronics.
A GFCI detects faults _to_ground_ but will not trip to stop a little arc between hot and neutral that can still start a fire.
Arc Fault Interrupters are new technology. Know about this stuff, it's significant.
[PDF] NASFM Science Advisory Committee Recommendations Regarding Arc Fault... Typical conditions where arc faults may occur include damaged wires by... The most serious of these conditions (in terms of arc-fault related fire risk)...
Let's hope they figure out with complete certainty what the rules are for making prions -- and then nobody does it.
Otherwise we've got an Ice-9 problem.
I hope the folks making artificial proteins have thought long and hard about proteins that make themselves -- and what defines them. Meanwhile don't lick your fingers, kids.
'Mad ewes' give birth to BSE lambs
* 27 August 2005
* Debora MacKenzie
* New Scientist Magazine issue 2514 QUOTE New evidence from an experimental flock raises the possibility that the disease may have spread among Europe's sheep populations.
Sheep develop a disease similar to BSE (mad cow disease) if they eat infected cattle tissue. Now Sue Bellworthy and colleagues at the UK's Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) have shown that BSE can also be inherited in sheep. They report that two ewes experimentally infected with BSE in 2000 gave birth to lambs in 2003 that died of BSE this year (The Veterinary Record, vol 157, p 206). It is the first confirmation of "vertical" transmission from mother to lamb before or during birth - something suspected but never proved in cattle.
Feeding cattle remains to sheep was banned in the European Union in 1994, and any sheep infected that way should have died by now. But the new finding means that BSE could have passed... END QUOTE
Mars was closest to the Sun (perihelion) in its orbit on August 30, 2003.
The nitwits will claim it's so bright in the evening sky because the sun is hotter, or something like that. Bogus. Bo-o-o-o-gus
Mars has a much more elliptical orbit than Earth.
When the "sun's getting hotter" nitwits start ranting that it must be so because look how RED and BRIGHT Mars is, late September and October 2005 -- chuckle.
Here's a picture of the orbits, with years marked:
Crew confusion found in Athens plane crash By Don Phillips International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005 PARIS The crew members of a Cypriot airliner that crashed Aug. 14 near Athens became confused by a series of alarms as the plane climbed, failing to recognize that the cabin was not pressurizing until they grew mentally disoriented because of lack of oxygen and passed out........ neither the German pilot nor the young, inexperienced Cypriot co-pilot could speak the same language fluently, and each had difficulty understanding how the other spoke English, the worldwide language of air traffic control.... The plane had a sophisticated new flight data recorder that provided a wealth of information.... At 10,000 feet, or 3,000 meters, as designed, an alarm went off to warn the crew that the plane would not pressurize........
At 14,000 feet, oxygen masks deployed as designed and a master caution light illuminated in the cockpit. Another alarm sounded at about the same time on an unrelated matter, warning that there was insufficient cooling air in the compartment housing avionics equipment.
The radio tapes showed that this created tremendous confusion.... the crew at over 14,000 feet would already be experiencing some disorientation because of a lack of oxygen.
During this time, the German captain and the Cypriot co-pilot discovered they had no common language and that their English, while good enough for normal air traffic control purposes, was not good enough for complicated technical conversation in fixing the problem....
We have a problem with self-esteem in this business. There's way too much of it.
I've gone behind the counter at some "computer repair" company to find work benches with NO static mats and NO grounding straps.
Staffed by utterly self-assured young people who had somehow gotten out of high school, who consistently believed that they had never "blown" anything by handling it.
Kids with no clue whatsoever how a semiconductor works -- or that the name means it has a threshold at which it changes from conducting to insulating, and the little incremental damage to components adds up slowly and unpredictably.
I remember reading about physicists who tried shipping accelerometers, to test how well package handling companies deal with packages (30g's accelerations recorded).
I wonder if anyone's loaded up a computer with a little self-powered covert hidden box with a system that records static spikes during "repair" -- any tech journalists, give it a try.
Slashdot Mirror
So, there's another one ten times as large out there, according to the Bible's logic?
Dammit, quit trying to write headlines that will succeed in tricking me into clicking this guy's links when there's nothing there yet.
A future promise of a picture is not a picture.
So, what sticker will they be using on the case?
"Apple Seed Inside" maybe?
I've used my family's "nickname" -- rather than a long cumbersome Southern three-part name with a Roman numeral trailing it -- since about age five. Nothing in the world except my Social Security card and birth certificate had the long form.
Until this year when the PeopleSoft company took over my employer's staff database, and had to change everyone's name on record (they say because it has to match the Social Security database).
So Blue Cross simply terminated the health record file (close to three decades worth of records) attached to the name I've been using, discarded it, and created a new file under the Social Security file name -- with of course the same SSI number.
So they bounced a bunch of medical bills reporting "that subscriber terminated his health care coverage." Although they claim they do use the SSI as their internal identifier so they shouldn't have thrown the files away. And they told my medical practitioner's office to discard the old files as well -- and they did, the pea-brains -- and opened new empty files for the new SSI-official name Congress now insists I use.
Keep your own medical history as I have done -- else I'd have no health records.
You worry about an online game? Trying to get your life back after your identity is stolen by your government. Or maybe it's not the government, but PeopleSoft claims that's the reason they did it. Or maybe it's Blue Cross, but they blame PeopleSoft.
It's happened to other people I know too -- blindsided them as well when their files went away.
War of Worldcraft, I think this is.
I respect the need to watch what you're allowed to say; I hope the Navy didn't hold anything back when they settled an earlier lawsuit, a year ago, maybe less -- I thought this had been dealt with and everyone now understood that the super-sonar had been clearly associated with deaths among cetaceans.
I don't know if the mechanism was ever established.
I remember there was some suggestion that it triggered nitrogen bubbles in the deep dive condition ("the bends" set in at an ascent rate that the animals have been save using). I don't recall much more than that.
There's plenty on the public record. It always puzzles me when people still insist there are no facts when they've been made public and agreed on, as with the super-sonar effects.
Just wondered what else might be known and not disclosed.
I recall a submarine officer telling a group of people one time about how they'd listen to whales until they got tired of hearing them, then crank up the active sonar to maximum and "blow them out of the area" -- big laugh -- that would have been eight or nine years ago, in the Atlantic. The new sonar's way louder, and as you point out, doesn't attenuate much around the world when it's in a layer that keeps reflecting it.
I remember another recent story about using super-loud acoustic emitters to focus on incoming torpedos and explode them at a safe distance -- and there's this trick for "beaming" sound being used in vending machines (!) and other places -- I guess there are a lot more uses for acoustic energy out there.
But yeah, it's always seemed to me that there must be better ways than loud active sonar to keep track of what's going on. Probably the first country to figure out what the whales are talking about will be able to tune in to more accurate and precise descriptions of where the submarines are than any human methods can provide, if there are still whales to pay attention.
Can you say more, specifically, without being dragged off and shot?
Published reports?
Unpublished but available if we asked for them? Classified?
Anything the Navy should have disclosed in the prior lawsuit, but didn't?
I realize that being a whistleblower can be risky.
> before the Internet
...
What, you weren't using FidoNet?
Hmmm, maybe we _should_ all practice, one day a year, the old system of store-and-forward. Pull out the modems, pull out the dialup numbers, pull out the text-only interfaces.
I wonder if anyone ever wrote an ASCIIsemaphore interpreter.
As cheap as hardware is these days, we could probably put a mechanical semaphore network up -- line of sight, with telescopes and image recognition software -- in a few weeks.
Plan ahead for outages
1) What does he know that he can tell usabout electrical potential differences along the cable, both crossing Earth's magnetic field lines and between upper atmosphere and ground? I think yet another short tether test is anticipated soon by satellite, I recall the first one failed. I know quite a few methods are used to trigger lightning now, from rocket-carried wires to lasers ionizing a column of air.
2) Where can we invest?
3) Wouldn't a branching structure like a suspension bridge -- several orbital counterweights somewhat separated, crosslinked, and several sea level contact points -- be safer than a single cable, spread out to protect against the random meteor or space debris impact, lightning strike, aircraft strike, or structural flaw?
4) When I lived in Seattle in the early '70s, before Starbucks, there were good coffee houses all over the place. Does anyone besides Starbucks sell coffee in his neighborhood now?
There's nothing in the laws of physics requiring that lawbooks or the people who use them be located within the jurisdiction they apply to. Plenty of legal work is outsourced now -- how do you think all those bizarre patents get written up and filed? And more to come. Think about who administers your Workers' Compensation claims.
A pharmacist in India could fill your prescription in Poughkippsie. A layer of telecom for reading the prescription, and running the machine that picks the pills off the shelf and bottles and labels them before dropping them into the delivery slot.
Most health plan authorization decisions are being made now by some low-paid worker with some English language competence, with a rulebook and no medical training, just comparing the diagnosis number on the examination report with the health plan's list of lowest-cost average-person treatments.
I know a doctor who, working in an emergency room, gets chewed out all the time by the ER staffing company manager (there are only a few, it's all outsourced) -- because he insists on seeing that the lab or X-ray reports he ordered come back and are properly interpreted before he sends people home.
His manager looks better with a much faster turnaround time and more bodies moved through. And if the treatment was wrong, maybe they'll come back, and that's a whole 'nother round of billings.
See:
American Academy of Emergency Medicine
http://www.aaem.org/
The Rape of Emergency Medicine. PDF, online and Palm (PDB) versions.
The outsourced ER management company routinely does triage on the people in the ER waiting room -- according to how many pricey examinations their plan will pay for -- and sees them first. While on the other end of the phone line is that health plan worker trying to approve the fewest tests. It's a race to maximize mediocrity.
http://www.lcurve.org/
If you don't understand this, you don't understand free-as-in-commercial speech.
> the application still has some issues regarding coordinate
> conversions.
And the application is to direct what kind of hardware?
Cruise missile, maybe?
ISSUES???
Oh, wonderful.
I remember hearing a guy in the Strategic Air Command joke that they just targeted time zones, but at least they remembered the shape of the planet made a difference.
For military purposes, assuming a flat Earth is scary.
Imagine your SEC 10-K filing with AdWords up and down the margins.
Oh, yeah, this will be popular.
> imagine more computing power in a head-sized device
> than exists in all the human brains alive today
Imagine the steps getting there -- computing power in head sized devices that is as smart as everyone alive today, therefore multiplying the odds of screwing up the world by being as smart as everyone alive today has been.
I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side.
And the computers don't have that deeply ingrained _need_ to breathe, drink clean water, walk in the woods.
Why should they care, even if they do get smart?
> # It's their own damn fault. If you are silly enough ...
The age of reason is limited at both ends of the human life span. Below perhaps 7 years old, and above some indefinite age that could be as low as retirement age or could be past a century, human beings don't always have sufficient judgment to distinguish scams and high risk situations.
The argument that "it's their own damn fault" is a license to prey on those who aren't as clever as the predator.
Is "social Darwinism" still a morally credible approach?
Pornzilla: Porn surfing redefined. Pornzilla is a collection of tools for surfing porn with Firefox. These bookmarklets and extensions make it easier to ...
www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/
http://www.freeplayenergy.com/index.php?section=pr oducts&subsection=freechargeportable
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract /161/2/136
Summary -- it's hard to tell.
Yes, you've figured it out.
Illegal piracy is illegal. The same activity authorized by a letter of marque is privateering.
The USA in its early years benefited greatly by its ability to use letters of marque instead of maintaining a standing navy. Similarly, it benefited for a very long while by refusing to honor the copyright laws of European nations.
See also the history of the Cherokee Nation in regard to the United States's laws regarding land ownership.
Everything done legal and according to the law, and we know we have the law on our side -- we have the receipts.
Legislature -- writes laws, including laws that set up and empower regulatory agencies.
h tml?terms=regulatory%20agency&url=/topics/administ rative.html
Regulatory agency -- set up by law, empowered to write regulations that put the law into effect.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/search/display.
Consider this and dig through the Fire Marshals web site for a lot of interesting info on fires caused by consumer electronics.
... Typical conditions where arc faults may occur include damaged wires by ... The most serious of these conditions (in terms of arc-fault related fire risk) ...
_ sources/docs/Doc.pdf
A GFCI detects faults _to_ground_ but will not trip to stop a little arc between hot and neutral that can still start a fire.
Arc Fault Interrupters are new technology. Know about this stuff, it's significant.
[PDF] NASFM Science Advisory Committee Recommendations Regarding Arc Fault
www.firemarshals.org/mission/residential/ignition
Let's hope they figure out with complete certainty what the rules are for making prions -- and then nobody does it.
5 144.300
...
Otherwise we've got an Ice-9 problem.
I hope the folks making artificial proteins have thought long and hard about proteins that make themselves -- and what defines them. Meanwhile don't lick your fingers, kids.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg1872
'Mad ewes' give birth to BSE lambs
* 27 August 2005
* Debora MacKenzie
* New Scientist Magazine issue 2514
QUOTE
New evidence from an experimental flock raises the possibility that the disease may have spread among Europe's sheep populations.
Sheep develop a disease similar to BSE (mad cow disease) if they eat infected cattle tissue. Now Sue Bellworthy and colleagues at the UK's Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) have shown that BSE can also be inherited in sheep. They report that two ewes experimentally infected with BSE in 2000 gave birth to lambs in 2003 that died of BSE this year (The Veterinary Record, vol 157, p 206). It is the first confirmation of "vertical" transmission from mother to lamb before or during birth - something suspected but never proved in cattle.
Feeding cattle remains to sheep was banned in the European Union in 1994, and any sheep infected that way should have died by now. But the new finding means that BSE could have passed
END QUOTE
Mars was closest to the Sun (perihelion) in its orbit on August 30, 2003.
- earth-orbit.jpg
The nitwits will claim it's so bright in the evening sky because the sun is hotter, or something like that. Bogus. Bo-o-o-o-gus
Mars has a much more elliptical orbit than Earth.
When the "sun's getting hotter" nitwits start ranting that it must be so because look how RED and BRIGHT Mars is, late September and October 2005 -- chuckle.
Here's a picture of the orbits, with years marked:
http://www.kidscosmos.org/kid-stuff/graphics/mars
> since when
That behavior is on the short list of reasons why primitive humans may have tolerated and encouraged wild dogs to hang around, they clean up shit.
Check the phrase "shit-eating grin" for more info about dogs' habits in this regard
Among other examples ....
.... neither the German pilot nor the young, inexperienced Cypriot co-pilot could speak the same language fluently, and each had difficulty understanding how the other spoke English, the worldwide language of air traffic control. ... ... ... ....
.... the crew at over 14,000 feet would already be experiencing some disorientation because of a lack of oxygen.
Crew confusion found in Athens plane crash
By Don Phillips International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005
PARIS The crew members of a Cypriot airliner that crashed Aug. 14 near Athens became confused by a series of alarms as the plane climbed, failing to recognize that the cabin was not pressurizing until they grew mentally disoriented because of lack of oxygen and passed out....
The plane had a sophisticated new flight data recorder that provided a wealth of information.
At 10,000 feet, or 3,000 meters, as designed, an alarm went off to warn the crew that the plane would not pressurize.
At 14,000 feet, oxygen masks deployed as designed and a master caution light illuminated in the cockpit. Another alarm sounded at about the same time on an unrelated matter, warning that there was insufficient cooling air in the compartment housing avionics equipment.
The radio tapes showed that this created tremendous confusion
During this time, the German captain and the Cypriot co-pilot discovered they had no common language and that their English, while good enough for normal air traffic control purposes, was not good enough for complicated technical conversation in fixing the problem....
Thank you.
We have a problem with self-esteem in this business. There's way too much of it.
I've gone behind the counter at some "computer repair" company to find work benches with NO static mats and NO grounding straps.
Staffed by utterly self-assured young people who had somehow gotten out of high school, who consistently believed that they had never "blown" anything by handling it.
Kids with no clue whatsoever how a semiconductor works -- or that the name means it has a threshold at which it changes from conducting to insulating, and the little incremental damage to components adds up slowly and unpredictably.
I remember reading about physicists who tried shipping accelerometers, to test how well package handling companies deal with packages (30g's accelerations recorded).
I wonder if anyone's loaded up a computer with a little self-powered covert hidden box with a system that records static spikes during "repair" -- any tech journalists, give it a try.