So, how much volume does a typical eye have, 1 cubic inch or so? Seems like you could shoe-horn a CCD, battery and UWB transmitter into that (just available UWB chips put out less than 1 milliwatt for a 10 meter range, so obviously you'll crank that down to about 24-30 inches). That way, no wires. Still, the signal processor is still one to two chip generations away from being implantable, at least. To say nothing of power concerns.
But damn if this isn't cool.
Re:Solar Cells on the ROOF, not in the desert
on
The Future in Gear
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· Score: 1
It's all about the wattage. If you take all light from the sun, you get about a kilowatt per square meter (sunny day, equator). Then check that full-spectrum photocells are %12 efficeint at best.
But, look into a research company named Borealis, they had those Cool Chips mentioned a while back. They are also working on something called a Photon Chip, which promises to be a more efficeint converter of light to power.
It's the only way to raise the bar of survival.. one new industry destroying technology per month, please.
One new revolution in thinking a year, at least.
If the world of our children is even slightly recognizable, we need to do more.
No, I'm not kidding and this is not a troll or flamebait. Get all the whacky tech out there and into production, if it really exists. Crush all existing dominant systems, and then in a year or so, crush the new ones that arose.
The more challenging the world is, the greater the expectations we place on ourselves, the higher our performance.
Does it get any more obvious that the people ostensibly hired to protect us are out for nothing more than lining their own pockets? C'mon, this kind of crap is sooo 1996.
How do you argue with rhetoric? You don't. You laugh at it, you demonstrate it's fallacies, and you look at who appointed this asshole (and people like 'em) to where they are at, for THEY are the ones with something to gain.
Seems to violate the idea of "no unreasonable search or seizure". So any old cop who doesn't like me can just get a wiretap on my phone and see what's up?
Of course they can. The law means what they say it means, these days. Who cares about the Constitution any more?
I recall the Bush talking, back some months ago, about how the Constitution is "not a suicide pact". Guess what, it is. It's a governmental suicide pact. Like it or hate it, it's the program by which our country is supposed to run, for the greatest liberty for the greatest number of people. Since Congress hasn't declared any sort of war, much of what's been going on recently is illegal. You cannot declare war on an action or a thing, only a country (War on Drugs! War on Terrorism!).
What would happen if everyone in government just stayed home for a week? Everyone in the country, for a day? That might get the message out.
Take a multivitamin just to cover deficiencies, and then wait. 500 calories a day below your expenditure = 1 pound a week weight loss. I've lost 12 pounds in six weeks, I feel just fine, and I'm eating nothing but fast food. But hey, don't take my word for it, try it.
Well, I agree with you, mostly. I also accept the Turing Test assumption, but I also acknowledge that it merely puts us back where we started as far as real knowledge of conciousness goes.. I have to take it on faith that others around me, who appear to evince intelligence, are experiencing conciousness as I am.
I think that an AI may first arise when we begin to mimic the processes and attributes of our own brains. A neuron is simple (relatively), ten billion of them in a network, is not. But neither am I one hundred percent certain that we fully understand them yet.
Evolutionary hardware exploits *all* aspects of the environment it evolves in, I would put it to you that in order to fully grasp the brain, we must fully understand physics. Yes, we have a large amount of knowledge currently, but no one is seriously claiming it is complete. So, to the extent our knowledge of physics is incomplete, I submit that so too will our understanding of conciousness and intelligence be similarly incomplete, as an upper limit on potential understanding.
of what intelligence is NOT. But, we knew that already, didn't we? I had thought the expert system craze had died the true death in the mid-eighties.
More informatively, ALICE only grows when her creator adds new rules, becoming at best a pale shadow of an intellect as it *was*, at a point in time. Intelligence is more than rules, or at least, intellect uses rules we haven't even begun to understand. And yet, most of us think.
Ah well.. knowing what a thing is not is almost as useful as the reverse.
A Foundry in every kitchen combined with this new metal which can be formed and cast at low tempratures.
So, I can now make highly accurate metal parts in my home with zero machining or finishing stages.
Combine that with a computer controlled mill to make the wax images for the ceramic molds, and I can now build anything that the properties of the metal will support.
Technology kicks so much ass. And marketing-speak sucks donkey nuts.. what ARE the properties of this metal? How thick does it have to be to be used as a gun-barrel? Rigidity? mmm.. sigh.
Dispite everything about how India's poor cannot afford the device, $200 for a 32M/24M Flash StrongArm PDA with a 320x240 display is really very good. In fact, add a USB->9pin Serial adaptor to it, and the sky's the limit for the hobbyist looking for a cheap machine to run his projects.
I remember it fondly. For two years I was a total addict, buying, selling, trading, playing. Had a nice little collection going after a while.
Then... it ceased being fun. The exact moment was when I realized that I was playing a guy who, just from what he walked in with, must have spent a minimum of $5000.00 on cards and who had asked around about what sort of deck I was playing. Can you say death?
It broke down to this: A decent deck builder, with access to every card in the game, would (over many games) kick the ever' lovin' crap out of the guy who didn't own it all. Instantly, I was done.
This online version is different how? Oh, you can cheat now. No thanks, I'll pass.
No cooperation, no participation, this is war.
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 1
War for our freedom, that is. Since when is DRM good for the people? Oh, you don't think it is? Then why all the talk about "PKI-aware Lindows", etc?
We must fight against this bullshit now, completely, or in ten years you'll be able to do exactly Jack and Shit if it's not in accordance with the DRM system. That is, legally. Then we get into turning normal behavior (repairing my system from the DRM damage) becoming a federal offense (circumvention of copy protection device).
Look, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And the level of control that Microsoft is going for now, seems to show they have their users firmly in the crosshairs.
Please, tell me this won't have all that much of an effect, that it won't really matter in the long run.. then pull the other one.
Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?
Legacy leftover, mostly. Every few years, new possibilities show up, and that usually requires a reworking of the existing system. This happens on any platform, it's just that M$'s is going to be very visible and extremely painful.
Why can't my computer protect me from distractions by screening phone calls and e-mails, and why can't it track me down when I'm out of the office or forward things to me automatically?
As for phone call management, it's only a matter of integration. As for email, well.. don't you use a system which can dump your email into different folders based upon a matching rule?
Why can't our computers arrange conference calls and online meetings for us?
Or, "Why can't our computers do all non-thinking tasks for us?".. For the same reason that it took decades to get good, reliable voice recognition to the desktop, code that does smart things is *hard* to create.
Why is it so hard for a soccer mom to set up a simple Website and e-mail group to keep people informed about who's driving and who's bringing treats?
Uh, if setting up an email group is currently thought of as "hard", then perhaps the notion of a general purpose home computer is passed, as the average user is either too stupid or too busy to learn how to use it properly. I'll simply point out that my hard may be your easy, and pandering to the lowest common denominator is why I no longer watch television.
Why can't I tap into all my stuff at home or at work from any device that's mine, and have it just be available because it knows I'm me?
Because there doesn't exist a "perfect" security system, and the penality for failure of said system, is multiplied by the number of things which use it. I beat one system, and I can access everything? Woohoo! Mass home-office integration is itself a security risk by definition.
Why can't I read digital versions of magazines on my portable computer that look the way they're supposed to look?
What's your dot pitch? Oh, you mean layout and coloring.. LaTeX for all?
Finally, I would like to point out that the "futuristic" films you mention, in addition to featuring widespread integration, also commonly include the plot device of the uber-cracker taking control of large portions of said systems and running amok with them. No security system is infallible, and the number of things it protects directly relates to the perceived value in breaking it. No thanks, I'll continue to remember my short list of ten passwords.
.. but you should know the language you are using well enough to be able to simulate what's going to happen in your head. Yes, it takes a lot longer, and you have to double and triple-check things, but it's a good skill to have.
Make of this what you will. I've read much of his book, especially the chapter on AI, where he essentially breaks down all the analytical functions of the mind to large sets of encoded Fourier transforms. It's interesting, and I'm trying to think of even a reasonable software implementation to test his idea.
But off hand, it sounds implausible. Doesn't mean it isn't true, it just sounds hokey. But, I don't mind spending some time in verification.
If you trade one for the other, you get neither. If you have to violate the Constitution in order to save it, then we might as well tear the thing up, because it has all been in vain.
Good arguments, and I do agree, if any civilization reached the point of Von Neuman probes, we'd have been smashing them up for axe heads in the neo lithic age. Assuming FTL anything isn't possible. Assuming FTL anything is possible with reasonable energy costs.
But where does that leave us? All alone in a large galaxy? Possible, yes. Likely? I would have to disagree. But my disagreement is just based on intuition and gut feeling, it could very well turn out that yes indeed, we're alone.
I have an alternate notion for you: What if signals are being blocked? It's a simple engagement of probability, which is more unlikely, that we are all alone, or that we're surrounded but being shielded? It's not an answerable question, not without already having evidence of a second civilization.
As to shielding mechanism, light years of hydrogen gas exist between the stars. What if some of it, just around stars, is being slightly ionized? That makes it a crappy plasma, a plasma is conductive, a conductive sheath will block RF (Faraday cage). It's just speculation, but I'd like someone who has actually studied physics to try to answer it.
Certainly, our progress has been astounding, and were there any others like us, we should either be them, or be their probes. I don't feel like a probe, and our fossil record is pretty good, so..
But hold a on a moment. What if reality is far stranger than we know? As you quite rightly point out, our knowledge has been rapidly improving for only ten thousand years. Is it really so hard to imagine that we're in for new understandings that will make what we now know look like the rantings of Ptolemy? What I am saying is that there might be no real *need* to travel space en mass, were our knowledge and insight greater.
The real question is, will this new understanding develop before we blaze through the universe, or not? Perhaps it will catch us when we're only half-way through the process of colonization.
I only offer this as food for thought, I don't claim special knowledge, only the observation that at times in history when everyone was "so sure" they knew The Way Things Are, it was often later shown to be a simple misunderstanding.
Anyone remember and have handy the link that described microbes living on the active control rods of nuclear fission plants? Tell me again how dangerous radiation is to life?
Chemosynthetic life on the ocean floor, microbes in clouds, suggestive spectra from nebulae pointing to possible DNA.
Certainly, it might take far longer for complex life to develop in extreme environments, but if it's a stable extreme environment, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
Also, we're finding large Jupiter classed planets in and around other suns now. If ours is any indication, might there not be moons bathed in enough heat / rf to fuel a form of life orbiting around them?
It's nice to dream people, but face it - there's no way in hell that there's going to be anything more than a few "us too!" missions to the moon in the next 30 or 40 years. Some of us will probably be dead from some dumbass terrorist attack by then anyway. So why the hell care? Better to spend some time with your family and appreciate what we've got down here on Earth than try to spend a vacation on a godforsaken ball of rock and dust.
So why the hell care? Why indeed. Here's a small list, submitted for your approval:
1. Population
It's growing, and it's not stopping. Even if you do not subscribe to all the doom and gloom predictions, at some point, we're going to need room.
2. Factionalism
The greater the number of people, the greater diversity. At some point, diversity increases to the point where a sub-group feels it is no longer a part of the parent culture and wants to go it's own way. Well, they aren't making land anymore. And with today's technology, local descisions have global consequences, and that's just getting worse. So if I, as ruler of small random contry A, do something that one of my neighboors doesn't like, I'm left with few options: war or accomodation. So as the number of cultures and sub-cultures increases, the reasons for war also increase.
3. Technology
Deliberately putting yourself into a harsh environment is going to make demands on you, and on your creativity. Many problems will get solved, because they have to be. These techonologies will trickle out to every group a space-fairing society has trade with.
So sure, I'm making assumptions and guesses.. just like you. I look at human history, and I see struggle, adaptation, bloodshed and warfare, all over scarce resources. And I look into space, and I see resources without end.
I see posts here advocating robotic not human explorations.
I see posts here encouraging passing laws to prevent certain uses of celestial real estate.
Earth laws don't apply off earth, since ain't none of it anyone's territory.
Therefore, if one can get there and live, by default it's yours until someone comes along to kick you off of it.
And I tell ya, given the choice of living in space (with all it's cramped, dirty, dangerous conditions) or here on earth, I'd still take space. Call it an extreme anti-social attitude, but I just don't like %95 of humanity, and would rather not share air with 'em if I've got a choice.
Robotic probes are damned useful, got to figure out where to plant the mining charges and there's no reason why I should risk my ass in that process. Oh, you want me to preserve the pristine condition of this here ball 'o' rock? Sure thing pardner, just ship me a hundred tons a month of water and we'll call it a deal.
This is the golden age for scientific exploration, as far as contamination is concerned. One major breakthrough in fundamental physics, one world-shattering 'Eureka!', and we're off this rock. Your clock is ticking.
Okay, I've got a few ideas that can make this cheaper, easier to use and set up, and only by sacrificing the ability to play in non-designated areas (getting rid of GPS is part of this).
Cheap, droppable beacons:
A small transceiver and battery in a rugged housing (with dirt spike? velcro?) that you place in designated areas, that correspond to beacon points on your world map. 400ft outdoor range can be had fairly cheaply, 100ft indoor.
The beacons fire off in series, and each beacon must be within range to hear the last one.
The gear: Throw out the GPS, inclinometer and digital compass, replace with three antenna on seperate axis mounted somewhere on the user. Use the signal from the beacons to precisely triangulate X, Y, Z and orientation in space, and send position updates to the control system as usual.
Sound workable? Next, one would want a cheap hand-held LIDAR system to generate quick scans of areas, and then go in and touch 'em up by hand later. Okay, so the LIDAR notion is kind of pushing the idea of 'cheap', but hey, gotta dream.
Summation: informed consent is a good thing; some level of protecting idiots from themselves is also important, especially since most of us don't have domain knowledge in roller-coaster design. Safety vs car is apples-to-oranges, hence we should require, for example, 99th percentile Gs/time and jerk/time graphs, just like we have "SAR" for cell phones, for which no one actually knows safety parameters... By this logic, however, we should grade food establishments, make them post their grades, but never shut someone down for an F...
And that's not a bad idea. I have no business telling you what you can and can't do. If you want to go eat at "Mama's Fat Grill" with it's F- rating, that's your funeral.
It is my opinion that, if the risks are known, that you will do what is best for yourself, even if that is engaging in risky behavior.
I have a question. Not knowing an extreme amount of detail of the similarities between laser diodes and normal LED's, I'm not sure if this is a crazy notion or not, but here goes:
They have 3600W laser diode arrays in a one cubic inch packaging (with integral coolant hoses!), and they achieve this by laying down diodes at 200 micrometer spacings.
Why couldn't you accomplish the same trick with normal LED's?
Slashdot Mirror
But damn if this isn't cool.
But, look into a research company named Borealis, they had those Cool Chips mentioned a while back. They are also working on something called a Photon Chip, which promises to be a more efficeint converter of light to power.
One new revolution in thinking a year, at least.
If the world of our children is even slightly recognizable, we need to do more.
No, I'm not kidding and this is not a troll or flamebait. Get all the whacky tech out there and into production, if it really exists. Crush all existing dominant systems, and then in a year or so, crush the new ones that arose.
The more challenging the world is, the greater the expectations we place on ourselves, the higher our performance.
Stability is for evolutionary dead ends.
How do you argue with rhetoric? You don't. You laugh at it, you demonstrate it's fallacies, and you look at who appointed this asshole (and people like 'em) to where they are at, for THEY are the ones with something to gain.
Of course they can. The law means what they say it means, these days. Who cares about the Constitution any more?
I recall the Bush talking, back some months ago, about how the Constitution is "not a suicide pact". Guess what, it is. It's a governmental suicide pact. Like it or hate it, it's the program by which our country is supposed to run, for the greatest liberty for the greatest number of people. Since Congress hasn't declared any sort of war, much of what's been going on recently is illegal. You cannot declare war on an action or a thing, only a country (War on Drugs! War on Terrorism!).
What would happen if everyone in government just stayed home for a week? Everyone in the country, for a day? That might get the message out.
Calculate your BMR here, and eat less than that a day.
Take a multivitamin just to cover deficiencies, and then wait. 500 calories a day below your expenditure = 1 pound a week weight loss. I've lost 12 pounds in six weeks, I feel just fine, and I'm eating nothing but fast food. But hey, don't take my word for it, try it.
I think that an AI may first arise when we begin to mimic the processes and attributes of our own brains. A neuron is simple (relatively), ten billion of them in a network, is not. But neither am I one hundred percent certain that we fully understand them yet.
Evolutionary hardware exploits *all* aspects of the environment it evolves in, I would put it to you that in order to fully grasp the brain, we must fully understand physics. Yes, we have a large amount of knowledge currently, but no one is seriously claiming it is complete. So, to the extent our knowledge of physics is incomplete, I submit that so too will our understanding of conciousness and intelligence be similarly incomplete, as an upper limit on potential understanding.
More informatively, ALICE only grows when her creator adds new rules, becoming at best a pale shadow of an intellect as it *was*, at a point in time. Intelligence is more than rules, or at least, intellect uses rules we haven't even begun to understand. And yet, most of us think.
Ah well.. knowing what a thing is not is almost as useful as the reverse.
So, I can now make highly accurate metal parts in my home with zero machining or finishing stages.
Combine that with a computer controlled mill to make the wax images for the ceramic molds, and I can now build anything that the properties of the metal will support.
Technology kicks so much ass. And marketing-speak sucks donkey nuts.. what ARE the properties of this metal? How thick does it have to be to be used as a gun-barrel? Rigidity? mmm.. sigh.
"Pointy" bullets are referred to as Spitzer rounds.
If you shave the corners off the back of a bullet, so it looks like \_/, it's referred to as a Boat-tailed round.
And yes, you can mix these two, to have a "Boat-tailed Spitzer round". Gets you %5 less wind resistance, that's about it.
Dispite everything about how India's poor cannot afford the device, $200 for a 32M/24M Flash StrongArm PDA with a 320x240 display is really very good. In fact, add a USB->9pin Serial adaptor to it, and the sky's the limit for the hobbyist looking for a cheap machine to run his projects.
Then... it ceased being fun. The exact moment was when I realized that I was playing a guy who, just from what he walked in with, must have spent a minimum of $5000.00 on cards and who had asked around about what sort of deck I was playing. Can you say death?
It broke down to this: A decent deck builder, with access to every card in the game, would (over many games) kick the ever' lovin' crap out of the guy who didn't own it all. Instantly, I was done.
This online version is different how? Oh, you can cheat now. No thanks, I'll pass.
We must fight against this bullshit now, completely, or in ten years you'll be able to do exactly Jack and Shit if it's not in accordance with the DRM system. That is, legally. Then we get into turning normal behavior (repairing my system from the DRM damage) becoming a federal offense (circumvention of copy protection device).
Look, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And the level of control that Microsoft is going for now, seems to show they have their users firmly in the crosshairs.
Please, tell me this won't have all that much of an effect, that it won't really matter in the long run.. then pull the other one.
Legacy leftover, mostly. Every few years, new possibilities show up, and that usually requires a reworking of the existing system. This happens on any platform, it's just that M$'s is going to be very visible and extremely painful.
As for phone call management, it's only a matter of integration. As for email, well.. don't you use a system which can dump your email into different folders based upon a matching rule?
Or, "Why can't our computers do all non-thinking tasks for us?" .. For the same reason that it took decades to get good, reliable voice recognition to the desktop, code that does smart things is *hard* to create.
Uh, if setting up an email group is currently thought of as "hard", then perhaps the notion of a general purpose home computer is passed, as the average user is either too stupid or too busy to learn how to use it properly. I'll simply point out that my hard may be your easy, and pandering to the lowest common denominator is why I no longer watch television.
Because there doesn't exist a "perfect" security system, and the penality for failure of said system, is multiplied by the number of things which use it. I beat one system, and I can access everything? Woohoo! Mass home-office integration is itself a security risk by definition.
What's your dot pitch? Oh, you mean layout and coloring.. LaTeX for all?
Finally, I would like to point out that the "futuristic" films you mention, in addition to featuring widespread integration, also commonly include the plot device of the uber-cracker taking control of large portions of said systems and running amok with them. No security system is infallible, and the number of things it protects directly relates to the perceived value in breaking it. No thanks, I'll continue to remember my short list of ten passwords.
.. but you should know the language you are using well enough to be able to simulate what's going to happen in your head. Yes, it takes a lot longer, and you have to double and triple-check things, but it's a good skill to have.
But off hand, it sounds implausible. Doesn't mean it isn't true, it just sounds hokey. But, I don't mind spending some time in verification.
If you trade one for the other, you get neither. If you have to violate the Constitution in order to save it, then we might as well tear the thing up, because it has all been in vain.
But where does that leave us? All alone in a large galaxy? Possible, yes. Likely? I would have to disagree. But my disagreement is just based on intuition and gut feeling, it could very well turn out that yes indeed, we're alone.
I have an alternate notion for you: What if signals are being blocked? It's a simple engagement of probability, which is more unlikely, that we are all alone, or that we're surrounded but being shielded? It's not an answerable question, not without already having evidence of a second civilization.
As to shielding mechanism, light years of hydrogen gas exist between the stars. What if some of it, just around stars, is being slightly ionized? That makes it a crappy plasma, a plasma is conductive, a conductive sheath will block RF (Faraday cage). It's just speculation, but I'd like someone who has actually studied physics to try to answer it.
Certainly, our progress has been astounding, and were there any others like us, we should either be them, or be their probes. I don't feel like a probe, and our fossil record is pretty good, so..
But hold a on a moment. What if reality is far stranger than we know? As you quite rightly point out, our knowledge has been rapidly improving for only ten thousand years. Is it really so hard to imagine that we're in for new understandings that will make what we now know look like the rantings of Ptolemy? What I am saying is that there might be no real *need* to travel space en mass, were our knowledge and insight greater.
The real question is, will this new understanding develop before we blaze through the universe, or not? Perhaps it will catch us when we're only half-way through the process of colonization.
I only offer this as food for thought, I don't claim special knowledge, only the observation that at times in history when everyone was "so sure" they knew The Way Things Are, it was often later shown to be a simple misunderstanding.
Chemosynthetic life on the ocean floor, microbes in clouds, suggestive spectra from nebulae pointing to possible DNA.
Certainly, it might take far longer for complex life to develop in extreme environments, but if it's a stable extreme environment, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.
Also, we're finding large Jupiter classed planets in and around other suns now. If ours is any indication, might there not be moons bathed in enough heat / rf to fuel a form of life orbiting around them?
So why the hell care? Why indeed. Here's a small list, submitted for your approval:
1. Population
It's growing, and it's not stopping. Even if you do not subscribe to all the doom and gloom predictions, at some point, we're going to need room.
2. Factionalism
The greater the number of people, the greater diversity. At some point, diversity increases to the point where a sub-group feels it is no longer a part of the parent culture and wants to go it's own way. Well, they aren't making land anymore. And with today's technology, local descisions have global consequences, and that's just getting worse. So if I, as ruler of small random contry A, do something that one of my neighboors doesn't like, I'm left with few options: war or accomodation. So as the number of cultures and sub-cultures increases, the reasons for war also increase.
3. Technology
Deliberately putting yourself into a harsh environment is going to make demands on you, and on your creativity. Many problems will get solved, because they have to be. These techonologies will trickle out to every group a space-fairing society has trade with.
So sure, I'm making assumptions and guesses.. just like you. I look at human history, and I see struggle, adaptation, bloodshed and warfare, all over scarce resources. And I look into space, and I see resources without end.
I see posts here encouraging passing laws to prevent certain uses of celestial real estate.
Earth laws don't apply off earth, since ain't none of it anyone's territory.
Therefore, if one can get there and live, by default it's yours until someone comes along to kick you off of it.
And I tell ya, given the choice of living in space (with all it's cramped, dirty, dangerous conditions) or here on earth, I'd still take space. Call it an extreme anti-social attitude, but I just don't like %95 of humanity, and would rather not share air with 'em if I've got a choice.
Robotic probes are damned useful, got to figure out where to plant the mining charges and there's no reason why I should risk my ass in that process. Oh, you want me to preserve the pristine condition of this here ball 'o' rock? Sure thing pardner, just ship me a hundred tons a month of water and we'll call it a deal.
This is the golden age for scientific exploration, as far as contamination is concerned. One major breakthrough in fundamental physics, one world-shattering 'Eureka!', and we're off this rock. Your clock is ticking.
Cheap, droppable beacons:
A small transceiver and battery in a rugged housing (with dirt spike? velcro?) that you place in designated areas, that correspond to beacon points on your world map. 400ft outdoor range can be had fairly cheaply, 100ft indoor.
The beacons fire off in series, and each beacon must be within range to hear the last one.
The gear: Throw out the GPS, inclinometer and digital compass, replace with three antenna on seperate axis mounted somewhere on the user. Use the signal from the beacons to precisely triangulate X, Y, Z and orientation in space, and send position updates to the control system as usual.
Sound workable? Next, one would want a cheap hand-held LIDAR system to generate quick scans of areas, and then go in and touch 'em up by hand later. Okay, so the LIDAR notion is kind of pushing the idea of 'cheap', but hey, gotta dream.
And that's not a bad idea. I have no business telling you what you can and can't do. If you want to go eat at "Mama's Fat Grill" with it's F- rating, that's your funeral.
It is my opinion that, if the risks are known, that you will do what is best for yourself, even if that is engaging in risky behavior.
They have 3600W laser diode arrays in a one cubic inch packaging (with integral coolant hoses!), and they achieve this by laying down diodes at 200 micrometer spacings.
Why couldn't you accomplish the same trick with normal LED's?