Very nice pointers. I also recommend the other two intro ML courses at Ga Tech on supervised and unsupervised learning (that precede the reinforcement learning course you recommended). IMHO these three are perhaps the most comprehensive and in-depth video intro to ML available.
Another great resource is the intro to ML video series (course) from Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon. His textbook remains my favorite intro to ML for those who aren't math whizzes.
Geneticists like Church know a lot about gene blueprints, less about their expression, a lot less about development, and they know absolutely nothing about ageing or disease. Their work doesn't touch on 95% of disease in any way, including ageing (a phenomenon that is unrelated to genetics).
Church should be ashamed for spouting such clueless hyperbolic fantasy. My respect for him just dropped through the floor. He's just another snake oiler.
Traditionally, gov't misconduct are redressed through lawsuits and repeated judicial decisions and appeals, until a high court ends the cycle. In the slow motion days of horses and buggies this process used to work reasonably well. But today, with the high speed prosecutorial activism of modern US presidents (from both parties), and the rapid rise of new police technology, this sort of crap has spun out of control. The appeals process simply takes much too long (years or decade). By that time a whole new round of activism and spy tech has arrived and been abused, and The Rule of Law falls even further behind.
Obviously adding more kangaroo courts like FISA to deter presidential/police abuses before they arise doesn't work. So what will?
Of course what makes this racket even worse, there's been nothing new in the field of Linear Algebra for over 100 years. A textbook written in 1915 would be just as usable as one written today.
The mission of this aircraft is idiotic. If we use this thing to bomb Russia or China we get nuclear war. Period. As such, the mission of any long range stealth bomber's can be achieved equally well by our simply nuking ourselves. Since we already can do that now, let's cut the USAF budget by $60B and declare "Mission Accomplished".
I also think he's unlikely to adopt a new device, but if he already wears a watch and you can switch it for one of the new smart watches, that might work.
The watch would have to do three things:
1) Generate an audible reminder when it needs to be recharged. You could write an app that measures battery charge and when low, the watch shouts in a loud female voice (travels farther than a male voice) that the watch needs to be plugged in for recharge.
2) Navigate to and from the dining room. This will NOT work with GPS, which requires a clear line of sight to the satellite. But you might be able to combine a timer that knows the interval between each turn with the inertial sensor in the watch to tick off the seconds betqween turns as long as he is moving. If he stops, the timer should stop. That might work pretty well in reporting when to turn. The watch could show an arrow to point out the desired direction and a voice that speaks "turn here" and then say aloud the direction and maybe even say how much distance / steps (or time) to the next turn.
This nav mode should be easy to turn off, perhaps verbally or with big control buttons on the display (on / pause / end).
3) Be a watch. It should look like whatever timepiece is preferred and legible, digital or analog, in whatever color combo works best.
Finally I would emphasize, despite your best efforts, this person almost certainly will not use the device. Few at that age like electronic gadgets, even when their brains are fully operational. If you do this, it will largely be for your own peace of mind, to help you feel like you did your best to help.
In the last couple of months of my 80 year old mother's life, I built a nice little web portal for her laptop that would help her navigate her favorite radio station, TV channel, web sites, and a TV guide. But she never used it. Good luck.
Agreed. Playboy also brought glamor photograpy to a fine art form. Pompeo Posar, Richard Fegley, Suze Randall, Kem Marcus and others rewrote the book on representing the ideal female figure. Their artistry refined our awareness of fashion's evolution through the years (and their readers' journey to adulthood). In their case, they captured not merely styles of attire but the female form itself, in presentation, fitness, demeanor, and more.
Yes, much of the magazine's appeal was superficial, but for perhaps 40 years its writing ably reflected and refocused the deep changes that befell America's postwar mores and priorities, especially among adult males, and it seldom failed to entertain and illuminate in doing so. No magazine since has earned a comparable iconic status for either gender of reader. Credit Mr Hefner for that. No small feat.
The fact that Playboy's heyday also accompanied the women's revolution of the 1970s made its role as social observer all the more central to the discussion. Fortunately the magazine also attracted many of the best writers of the day, making its contribution to the discourse more than merely a feast for men's eyes.
Farewell dear female fantasy. Your simpler times may be lost but they're not forgotten.
Born in 1921, Roddenberry's lower middle class childhood must have made him deeply aware of the importance of money and jobs and the hardships that arose from their absence. In inventing a new world order for StarTrek, no doubt he wanted to turn our attention away from such age old Earth-based strife to instead focus upward and outward... to be starry eyed.
Likewise, the timing of the StarTrek series made it a child of the 1960's. It aired only 3 years after the death of Kennedy's Camelot. And it co-ocurred with major reforms like Johnson's Great Society (and Vietnam) and King's civil marches. And only 20 years had passed since the global destabilization that was WWII (and the counter culture engendered by Kerouac and Ginsburg). Hopeful change was in the air.
Repeatedly, StarTrek's episodes dealt with many of the 'social rethink' topics that dominated the 60's (racism, the Vietnam War, democracy and constitutionalism, Nazism and its postwar, totalarianism, rule of law, NASA's race to the Moon, etc). Short term thinking and corporatism had yet to overwhelm America's world view. Thus in 'looking beyond' to seek 'a better world' sought by so many in that post WWII generation, money and the status quo were very much something to rise above.
Thus it was natural for the man and his fantasy world to put worldly travails like money and the trials of a job far behind them. But as to the viability of StarTrek's post-scarcity economic model... that's a fantasy of another color entirely.
Yes. Exactly. In fact, whenever a regulatory authority is involved, the process of tuning the car to be compliant with regulations is *always* thoroughly documented and revision controlled, usually as a rule of law, just so "he said, she said" can't happen. That's because everyone involved at VW knows the rule of law may send them to jail, and revision control is proof that they complied (or cheated). Like any car company VW surely makes extensive use of safety audit trails during crash testing. I don't believe for a minute that emissions testing doesn't also leave an formal audit trail. These are *Germans* after all.
In the pharmaceutical space, also highly legally regulated, there are lots of strictures and audit trails of 1) what must be done, 2) how it must be done, and 3) many confirmations that for each product, all of this *was* done, both how and when. And a small army of people are required to sign off on each step, well up the chain of command. The price for noncompliance is being fired, fines, jail time, and the company may pay billions in litigation if the drug injures, especially if staff hid tox data.
If an emissions regulatory compliance process was not in place at VW or no official externally audited revision history was kept, then the blame sits squarely at the top of the company, with C-suiters alone. It's they who will go to jail -- unless they can bluff their way past the law.
This latest finger pointing is just an attempt by VW to cut their losses politically or in the court of public opinion. Legally, Mr Horn is screwed.
The similarity of the name 'Seastar' to Connection Machines' dataparallel programming language C* can't be an accident. But C* needed to run in shared memory or at least atomic synchrony on low latency distributed memory in order to preserve consistency. And of course, it needed SIMD algorithms (do the same op concurrently on a large pool of data) or it could add no value over using C.
I hate to admit what you say seems to be true at all big corporations. At the giant pharma where I work I've seen less and less S/W innovation take place internally in the past decade. This has had two big side effects: 1) all our best computing have left, and 2) so has all the interesting work.
There's no longer any interest or even tolerance among managment for novelty or invention in-house (AKA risk). Skill development focuses on the project management side only; no tech. All IT has to be done externally, from data mining to software dev to app integration to sys admin. Nothing is done in-house anymore except invitation of external S/W vendors and external integrators and support, then monitoring their progress until the system is installed. A year-end accomplishment is check-boxed and all worker bees hum with one voice, "Booyah".
Ten years ago computing was different. May IT RIP.
What we really need is a "Hot or Not" bot. The camera could automatically zoom in and out and make comments on ugly dress, lack of style, and bad genes.
...look at the source. The caption of the article's main photo tells it all:
"The directors of the FBI, CIA, NSA, NGO, DIA, and NRO stand for a group picture with Fox News' Catherine Herridge (second from left) and executives of INRA and AFCEA at the conclusion of their panel discussion at the Intelligence & National Security Summit in Washington on September 10."
The supersilly quotes were directed at Fox News viewers. They were never intended to be taken seriously.
1) A camera programmed to identify objects then speak the label aloud is NOT sentient. It isn't even AI. It's computer vision technology from around 1995. An Amazon Fire phone can do far better and nobody claimed it was sentient either.
2) This pair are terminal Master's students in "Professional Studies" and "Software Engineering", not "AI researchers". Clearly their future lies in advertising and politics, not AI.
Blame the Motherboard author. Nothing to report here. Move on.
I know more about nonhuman studies than clinical, but according to the US HHS (who runs FDA), the breakdown of costs are these:
- $15k/patient for phase I - $20k/patient for phase 2 - $25k/patient for phases 3 and 4
The cost of the average trial:
- phase 1: $4 million - phase 2: $13 million - phase 3: $20 million - phase 4: $20 million
Some phase 3 trials can be larger and last longer than average, like 20,000 patients over 5 years. Obviously at the average cost of $25k/patient, such a trial would cost $500 million, well over the average. In fact, a long study can greatly increase the per patient cost as well.
Because multiple trials are run in each phase for each drug, these trial costs are multiplied.
The principal cost in any trial are the medical procedures (~25%): drug administration, tests (lab, imaging, biopsy, etc), exams, etc. These are repeated multiple times on each patient during each trial to monitor changes in both efficacy and safety.
These costs are set by FDA regulatory standards and the medical laws of each country where the trial is performed. Of course if you want approval for your drug in another country, you must comply with all their rules as well, often repeating studies using their residents (e.g. Japan).
This 2012 Forbes article by Avik Roy offers further insight on why clinical trial costs are rising:
I do work in pharma, and your sequence of steps sums up the process nicely.
I'd add that for every drug that succeeds, roughly another 20 fail, often after 5 or 10 years of development and costs incurred. That's why the estimated development cost of each new drug is widely acknowledged to be a minimum of $1 billion US (though most cite $2B as the norm). However after you include the cost of all failed drugs, the cost of producing each drug that succeeds effectively rises to between 4 and 5 billion. This is why each new drug needs to be a big selling blockbuster. It has many mouths to feed.
Obviously open software and volunteerism has their work cut out for them if they are to make drugs affordable. But I *would* be curious to know where their advocates believe these forces could have significant impact. It'd have to be in the clinical trial phase, where 80% of cost is incurred.
(BTW, to compute the net average cost of each new drug, you divide pharma company annual R&D budgets by the number of approved drugs/year. Matthew Herper of Forbes has covered this topic extensively, as has pharma chemist chemist Derek Lowe in his blog "In the Pipeline").
Yes. Clinical trials are famously expensive -- no less than $100 million US for any drug that is not fast tracked, which reduces development time (and cost) by no more than half.
In general only untreatable mortal diseases like cancer or infection can fast track a drug. The other 95% of drugs go through probably 5 years of compound identification, tuning, and testing, then 5 years of preclinical trials in multiple animal species, then another 5 years in humans before approval. (Yes, that's about 15 years.)
The last phase of development (clinical trials) is unavoidably very expensive (80% of the overall cost). And no amount of free software or volunteerism is going to change that appreciably. Even now, all patient participants in clinical trials are already volunteers.
The cost of a new drug lies in planning, testing, write up, peer review, and great gobs of regulatory oversight and process. Open source cannot change that.
Nonsense. Why should all pharmas conspire to raise the cost of clinical trials? Why would the FDA agree to this? Why would every other country and their version of 'FDA' play along, when a single dissident would cause such a house of cards to crash instantly?
As it happens, I *do* work at a giant US pharma, so I know how unworkable such a scheme would be.
Agreed. The novelty and utility of not having to own a car will more than compensate for the added inconveniences that the fleet owners will require when they first arrive on the market.
Adter all, something like 4 million people now make their living driving cars and trucks and buses. They and their unions will put up a hell of a fight against automation. Fleet owners will have to bend backwards to allay the many threat scenarios proposed. Validation of driver ID and car passenger is a very small bump in the road.
I think the TSA is an effective counterargument to your overconfidence that people will accept that risk. Requiring the removal of belts, shoes, watches, and anything steel shows the absurd lengths bureaucrats will go to when overreacting to threats, even very rare ones. I'm sure the giant corporations behind AV cars will be comparably risk averse. After all, should someone actually deliver a bomb in such a car, they could see an immediate end to their entire business, or such a severe curtailment, stockholders could lose faith and sell off.
No, the adoption of AV cars will be gradual and become easier as everyone learns their limits. Initially, the rules for their use will be stricter. As the tech and infrastructure improves, their use will broaden and more variatons will be permitted.
For instance, I'm sure children will not be able to ride unattended until the system gets a few million miles under its belt. The same is likely for unattended package delivery. All it takes is one bomb in one tunnel...
Actually, I think the parent poster is right. AVs can be set up so that the customer can't send the car to a destination. In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car who can answer authentication questions en route.
Also, when renting the car, probably you will be required to show a preregistered ID, and perhaps a message will be sent to your cell phone requiring further authentication responses.
No. I think AV cars *can* be made acceptably secure. But it'll be a little tricky and sometimes annoying, requiring some of the conventions we use now when renting a car.
Slashdot Mirror
Very nice pointers. I also recommend the other two intro ML courses at Ga Tech on supervised and unsupervised learning (that precede the reinforcement learning course you recommended). IMHO these three are perhaps the most comprehensive and in-depth video intro to ML available.
Another great resource is the intro to ML video series (course) from Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon. His textbook remains my favorite intro to ML for those who aren't math whizzes.
The paper:
https://www.sciencemag.org/con...
A short article and interview with Lake:
http://www.ibtimes.com/say-hel...
Geneticists like Church know a lot about gene blueprints, less about their expression, a lot less about development, and they know absolutely nothing about ageing or disease. Their work doesn't touch on 95% of disease in any way, including ageing (a phenomenon that is unrelated to genetics).
Church should be ashamed for spouting such clueless hyperbolic fantasy. My respect for him just dropped through the floor. He's just another snake oiler.
Traditionally, gov't misconduct are redressed through lawsuits and repeated judicial decisions and appeals, until a high court ends the cycle. In the slow motion days of horses and buggies this process used to work reasonably well. But today, with the high speed prosecutorial activism of modern US presidents (from both parties), and the rapid rise of new police technology, this sort of crap has spun out of control. The appeals process simply takes much too long (years or decade). By that time a whole new round of activism and spy tech has arrived and been abused, and The Rule of Law falls even further behind.
Obviously adding more kangaroo courts like FISA to deter presidential/police abuses before they arise doesn't work. So what will?
Larson: $279
http://www.amazon.com/Elementa...
Poole: $274
http://www.amazon.com/Linear-A...
Williams: $206
http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-...
By contrast:
Strang: $66
(Intro to Linear Algebra, 4e, 2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Introduc...
But also:
Strang: $322
(Linear Algebra and its Applications, 4e, 2005)
http://www.amazon.com/Linear-A...
Of course what makes this racket even worse, there's been nothing new in the field of Linear Algebra for over 100 years. A textbook written in 1915 would be just as usable as one written today.
The mission of this aircraft is idiotic. If we use this thing to bomb Russia or China we get nuclear war. Period. As such, the mission of any long range stealth bomber's can be achieved equally well by our simply nuking ourselves. Since we already can do that now, let's cut the USAF budget by $60B and declare "Mission Accomplished".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sun Trust Bank
Fifth Third Bank
Crestar Bank
Farmer's Bank
National Bank of Commerce
Central Carolina Bank
Florida Community Bank
And their close partners:
Grand American Road Racing
Coca Cola
Atlanta Braves
I also think he's unlikely to adopt a new device, but if he already wears a watch and you can switch it for one of the new smart watches, that might work.
The watch would have to do three things:
1) Generate an audible reminder when it needs to be recharged. You could write an app that measures battery charge and when low, the watch shouts in a loud female voice (travels farther than a male voice) that the watch needs to be plugged in for recharge.
2) Navigate to and from the dining room. This will NOT work with GPS, which requires a clear line of sight to the satellite. But you might be able to combine a timer that knows the interval between each turn with the inertial sensor in the watch to tick off the seconds betqween turns as long as he is moving. If he stops, the timer should stop. That might work pretty well in reporting when to turn. The watch could show an arrow to point out the desired direction and a voice that speaks "turn here" and then say aloud the direction and maybe even say how much distance / steps (or time) to the next turn.
This nav mode should be easy to turn off, perhaps verbally or with big control buttons on the display (on / pause / end).
3) Be a watch. It should look like whatever timepiece is preferred and legible, digital or analog, in whatever color combo works best.
Finally I would emphasize, despite your best efforts, this person almost certainly will not use the device. Few at that age like electronic gadgets, even when their brains are fully operational. If you do this, it will largely be for your own peace of mind, to help you feel like you did your best to help.
In the last couple of months of my 80 year old mother's life, I built a nice little web portal for her laptop that would help her navigate her favorite radio station, TV channel, web sites, and a TV guide. But she never used it. Good luck.
Agreed. Playboy also brought glamor photograpy to a fine art form. Pompeo Posar, Richard Fegley, Suze Randall, Kem Marcus and others rewrote the book on representing the ideal female figure. Their artistry refined our awareness of fashion's evolution through the years (and their readers' journey to adulthood). In their case, they captured not merely styles of attire but the female form itself, in presentation, fitness, demeanor, and more.
Yes, much of the magazine's appeal was superficial, but for perhaps 40 years its writing ably reflected and refocused the deep changes that befell America's postwar mores and priorities, especially among adult males, and it seldom failed to entertain and illuminate in doing so. No magazine since has earned a comparable iconic status for either gender of reader. Credit Mr Hefner for that. No small feat.
The fact that Playboy's heyday also accompanied the women's revolution of the 1970s made its role as social observer all the more central to the discussion. Fortunately the magazine also attracted many of the best writers of the day, making its contribution to the discourse more than merely a feast for men's eyes.
Farewell dear female fantasy. Your simpler times may be lost but they're not forgotten.
Born in 1921, Roddenberry's lower middle class childhood must have made him deeply aware of the importance of money and jobs and the hardships that arose from their absence. In inventing a new world order for StarTrek, no doubt he wanted to turn our attention away from such age old Earth-based strife to instead focus upward and outward... to be starry eyed.
Likewise, the timing of the StarTrek series made it a child of the 1960's. It aired only 3 years after the death of Kennedy's Camelot. And it co-ocurred with major reforms like Johnson's Great Society (and Vietnam) and King's civil marches. And only 20 years had passed since the global destabilization that was WWII (and the counter culture engendered by Kerouac and Ginsburg). Hopeful change was in the air.
Repeatedly, StarTrek's episodes dealt with many of the 'social rethink' topics that dominated the 60's (racism, the Vietnam War, democracy and constitutionalism, Nazism and its postwar, totalarianism, rule of law, NASA's race to the Moon, etc). Short term thinking and corporatism had yet to overwhelm America's world view. Thus in 'looking beyond' to seek 'a better world' sought by so many in that post WWII generation, money and the status quo were very much something to rise above.
Thus it was natural for the man and his fantasy world to put worldly travails like money and the trials of a job far behind them. But as to the viability of StarTrek's post-scarcity economic model... that's a fantasy of another color entirely.
Yes. Exactly. In fact, whenever a regulatory authority is involved, the process of tuning the car to be compliant with regulations is *always* thoroughly documented and revision controlled, usually as a rule of law, just so "he said, she said" can't happen. That's because everyone involved at VW knows the rule of law may send them to jail, and revision control is proof that they complied (or cheated). Like any car company VW surely makes extensive use of safety audit trails during crash testing. I don't believe for a minute that emissions testing doesn't also leave an formal audit trail. These are *Germans* after all.
In the pharmaceutical space, also highly legally regulated, there are lots of strictures and audit trails of 1) what must be done, 2) how it must be done, and 3) many confirmations that for each product, all of this *was* done, both how and when. And a small army of people are required to sign off on each step, well up the chain of command. The price for noncompliance is being fired, fines, jail time, and the company may pay billions in litigation if the drug injures, especially if staff hid tox data.
If an emissions regulatory compliance process was not in place at VW or no official externally audited revision history was kept, then the blame sits squarely at the top of the company, with C-suiters alone. It's they who will go to jail -- unless they can bluff their way past the law.
This latest finger pointing is just an attempt by VW to cut their losses politically or in the court of public opinion. Legally, Mr Horn is screwed.
The similarity of the name 'Seastar' to Connection Machines' dataparallel programming language C* can't be an accident. But C* needed to run in shared memory or at least atomic synchrony on low latency distributed memory in order to preserve consistency. And of course, it needed SIMD algorithms (do the same op concurrently on a large pool of data) or it could add no value over using C.
Sounds like a misnomer to me.
I hate to admit what you say seems to be true at all big corporations. At the giant pharma where I work I've seen less and less S/W innovation take place internally in the past decade. This has had two big side effects: 1) all our best computing have left, and 2) so has all the interesting work.
There's no longer any interest or even tolerance among managment for novelty or invention in-house (AKA risk). Skill development focuses on the project management side only; no tech. All IT has to be done externally, from data mining to software dev to app integration to sys admin. Nothing is done in-house anymore except invitation of external S/W vendors and external integrators and support, then monitoring their progress until the system is installed. A year-end accomplishment is check-boxed and all worker bees hum with one voice, "Booyah".
Ten years ago computing was different. May IT RIP.
What we really need is a "Hot or Not" bot. The camera could automatically zoom in and out and make comments on ugly dress, lack of style, and bad genes.
A Turing Test for the 21st century.
Extremely? No. Dismayingly? ...
...look at the source. The caption of the article's main photo tells it all:
"The directors of the FBI, CIA, NSA, NGO, DIA, and NRO stand for a group picture with Fox News' Catherine Herridge (second from left) and executives of INRA and AFCEA at the conclusion of their panel discussion at the Intelligence & National Security Summit in Washington on September 10."
The supersilly quotes were directed at Fox News viewers. They were never intended to be taken seriously.
1) A camera programmed to identify objects then speak the label aloud is NOT sentient. It isn't even AI. It's computer vision technology from around 1995. An Amazon Fire phone can do far better and nobody claimed it was sentient either.
2) This pair are terminal Master's students in "Professional Studies" and "Software Engineering", not "AI researchers". Clearly their future lies in advertising and politics, not AI.
Blame the Motherboard author. Nothing to report here. Move on.
I know more about nonhuman studies than clinical, but according to the US HHS (who runs FDA), the breakdown of costs are these:
- $15k/patient for phase I
- $20k/patient for phase 2
- $25k/patient for phases 3 and 4
The cost of the average trial:
- phase 1: $4 million
- phase 2: $13 million
- phase 3: $20 million
- phase 4: $20 million
Some phase 3 trials can be larger and last longer than average, like 20,000 patients over 5 years. Obviously at the average cost of $25k/patient, such a trial would cost $500 million, well over the average. In fact, a long study can greatly increase the per patient cost as well.
Because multiple trials are run in each phase for each drug, these trial costs are multiplied.
The principal cost in any trial are the medical procedures (~25%): drug administration, tests (lab, imaging, biopsy, etc), exams, etc. These are repeated multiple times on each patient during each trial to monitor changes in both efficacy and safety.
Here's a thorough accounting from US HHS:
http://aspe.hhs.gov/report/exa...
These costs are set by FDA regulatory standards and the medical laws of each country where the trial is performed. Of course if you want approval for your drug in another country, you must comply with all their rules as well, often repeating studies using their residents (e.g. Japan).
This 2012 Forbes article by Avik Roy offers further insight on why clinical trial costs are rising:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ar...
Pharmas must play by these rules, but they don't write them. Lawmakers do that.
I do work in pharma, and your sequence of steps sums up the process nicely.
I'd add that for every drug that succeeds, roughly another 20 fail, often after 5 or 10 years of development and costs incurred. That's why the estimated development cost of each new drug is widely acknowledged to be a minimum of $1 billion US (though most cite $2B as the norm). However after you include the cost of all failed drugs, the cost of producing each drug that succeeds effectively rises to between 4 and 5 billion. This is why each new drug needs to be a big selling blockbuster. It has many mouths to feed.
Obviously open software and volunteerism has their work cut out for them if they are to make drugs affordable. But I *would* be curious to know where their advocates believe these forces could have significant impact. It'd have to be in the clinical trial phase, where 80% of cost is incurred.
(BTW, to compute the net average cost of each new drug, you divide pharma company annual R&D budgets by the number of approved drugs/year. Matthew Herper of Forbes has covered this topic extensively, as has pharma chemist chemist Derek Lowe in his blog "In the Pipeline").
Yes. Clinical trials are famously expensive -- no less than $100 million US for any drug that is not fast tracked, which reduces development time (and cost) by no more than half.
In general only untreatable mortal diseases like cancer or infection can fast track a drug. The other 95% of drugs go through probably 5 years of compound identification, tuning, and testing, then 5 years of preclinical trials in multiple animal species, then another 5 years in humans before approval. (Yes, that's about 15 years.)
The last phase of development (clinical trials) is unavoidably very expensive (80% of the overall cost). And no amount of free software or volunteerism is going to change that appreciably. Even now, all patient participants in clinical trials are already volunteers.
The cost of a new drug lies in planning, testing, write up, peer review, and great gobs of regulatory oversight and process. Open source cannot change that.
Nonsense. Why should all pharmas conspire to raise the cost of clinical trials? Why would the FDA agree to this? Why would every other country and their version of 'FDA' play along, when a single dissident would cause such a house of cards to crash instantly?
As it happens, I *do* work at a giant US pharma, so I know how unworkable such a scheme would be.
Of course, the guard will be a robot too.
Agreed. The novelty and utility of not having to own a car will more than compensate for the added inconveniences that the fleet owners will require when they first arrive on the market.
Adter all, something like 4 million people now make their living driving cars and trucks and buses. They and their unions will put up a hell of a fight against automation. Fleet owners will have to bend backwards to allay the many threat scenarios proposed. Validation of driver ID and car passenger is a very small bump in the road.
I think the TSA is an effective counterargument to your overconfidence that people will accept that risk. Requiring the removal of belts, shoes, watches, and anything steel shows the absurd lengths bureaucrats will go to when overreacting to threats, even very rare ones. I'm sure the giant corporations behind AV cars will be comparably risk averse. After all, should someone actually deliver a bomb in such a car, they could see an immediate end to their entire business, or such a severe curtailment, stockholders could lose faith and sell off.
No, the adoption of AV cars will be gradual and become easier as everyone learns their limits. Initially, the rules for their use will be stricter. As the tech and infrastructure improves, their use will broaden and more variatons will be permitted.
For instance, I'm sure children will not be able to ride unattended until the system gets a few million miles under its belt. The same is likely for unattended package delivery. All it takes is one bomb in one tunnel...
Actually, I think the parent poster is right. AVs can be set up so that the customer can't send the car to a destination. In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car who can answer authentication questions en route.
Also, when renting the car, probably you will be required to show a preregistered ID, and perhaps a message will be sent to your cell phone requiring further authentication responses.
No. I think AV cars *can* be made acceptably secure. But it'll be a little tricky and sometimes annoying, requiring some of the conventions we use now when renting a car.