if you can use replicators to instantly manufacture anything and holodeck to believably simulate any experience... then why would you fly to other stars (or continue innovating)?! I personally would spend all my time in the holodeck, and reality can go **** itself.
And that's how the Borg got started. It's cheaper and more fun to jack your eyepiece directly into the holodeck than mess around with costumes and emitters.
Combine that with a deadman switch that releases the code unless you check in.
So, um. This deadman switch will presumably not be in your house, otherwise it will get turned off when the snipers turn up. So it's up in the Cloud somewhere?
Which means you just uploaded the encryption key to your super-secret encrypted file to a server you don't control. And your ISP probably are mandated to keep packet logs of all your net traffic. So the government just talks to them, finds out the IP address of your remote server, talks to the hosting company, drops all the servers you host.. and there goes your deadman switch.
(Of course they can't guarantee that they find your deadman in time, but you can't guarantee that they can't. How good a gambler are you?)
That way, not even torture can get you to reveal the secret.
That's nice. Now you get tortured to death and you can't even get them to stop it. And they walk away free because you don't even have the thing they think you have. Win-win, I guess?
Go read the "Wool" Omnibus from Amazon now, by Hugh Howey or something. The prequel is... not as good. The above line is a fair condensation of those 400 pages, but the Wool Omnibus is good.
I second, third and fourth this. Go read it right now. (Think, um... City of Amber meets Doctor Strangelove as told by George Orwell and Stephen King... and that's pretty much Wool. It's your basic "cosy catastrophe nuclear bunker last refuge of humanity ark" story. Only not cosy, at all.)
It's a heck of a read, and the premise is probably only a paranoid nightmare from a sick brain.
Probably.
But then I remember that actual people who thought themselves sane built nuclear weapons, were perfecty prepared to burn the entire world down to protect their ideology, and that those same kind of people still train to use them, and I throw up in my mouth a little.
Oh, I'm sorry, this is the persecution complex. Have a nice day, and don't go out that door- that's the Pit of 1,000 Youtube Commenters. Best you don't let them see you, they haven't been fed yet. Mind the chainsaws! Bye now! We'll be seeing you!
And as long as you keep them chained up, avoid their whip-stings, and don't look at all those bright lights in the sky, I'm sure everything will be perfectly okay.
Unfortunately that chart doesn't work for any kind of ingested radioactive substance, and it's kind of disingenous for Randall to present it as if it's a meaningful comparison. There's plan radiation, and then there's radioactive contamination in dust, liquid or aerosol form, and the second one is the gift that keeps on giving.
IANAhealthphysicist, but I can read Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot more radiation damage to your cells if you eat or breathe in a radioactive particle than if you sit next to the same number of bequerels on the bench, because your body can incoporate the radioactive emitter directly into your cells for the entire rest of its (maximum of bioactive and radioactive) lifespan, and your skin won't screen out the alpha radiation like it does for an internal source. Iodine-equivalents are pretty nasty since although they have a half-life on the order of days, if they get inside you they dump all that radiation into your thyroid, which is not a good place to have it. Long-term, Radioactive strontium is the worst because it replaces calcium and so binds directly to your bone marrow, which is not good for leukemia. And potassium-equivalents are in the mid range, with a half-life on the order of months to years and they are bioavailable, but not permanently so. As far as we know.
Oh, and a lot of those last have been dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, and are now inside fish. Do they bioaccumulate up the food chain? We're not really sure, but we'll probably find out. It's a wonderful science experiment!
tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.
Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid
And don't forget that in the Microsoft enterprise-backend administration world (which appears to be following a tech trajectory diametrically opposed to the shiny-flashy-broken all-Surface-no-substance Windows 8 world), there is a very strong trend back toward the console, via Powershell.
Things go round and round and round again, but even on Windows, the command line endures and conquers.
By the way, Powershell does some things much, much better than any current command shell on Linux. When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects? (And Powershell objects are pretty neat, they're not just raw.NET objects - they're dynamically reconfigureable-at-runtime things much more in the old Smalltalk spirit than anything that came after C++). Ruby would probably do it, if someone could add piping support to it and hack up the libraries to make it interface with all the various incompatble object OS and object systems under the Linux/X hood.
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
About how well we treat each other, I suppose; hit and miss.
Well then, we'll just have to hope that they miss us more than they hit.
We have established that the brain is the interface between person and physical reality, but that is it. And it is not complete.
Yes.
There's an interesting textbook called Irreducible Mind released in the last few years which details the multitude of evidence acquired over the last century and a half that something very interesting and strange is going on with the mind-brain interface, and that not only is it not established that the mind is the same thing as the brain, but that it's pretty well established that the mind, whatever it is, can exist decoupled from the brain, and can under some circumstances (and quite possibly a lot more commonly than that) access information that there is no physical model for the brain being able to access.
Yes, this stuff is weird. Yes, it's often onsidered taboo to research. Yes, it's very hard to "scale up" and make behave in industrial settings. But it appears to be real, and it has a lot of implications for the computational and simulationist approaches to general artificial intelligence.
(Mainly, that it doesn't look like even simulating the physical structure of the brain will get any further toward simulating an actual human mind than modelling a person's house would get us close to simulating that person. If the brain is shaped by the mind, and not the other way around, then sure, you'll see correlations, you may even be able to infer behaviour from physical structure - as you would be able to guess my personality if you looked at my house. But that finite physical structure will not be the mind, because the mind/inhabitant is much larger than the brain/house and contains much unexpressed detail. Quite possibly an infinite amount of detail. We simply don't know what the mind is yet, but we are starting to get a picture of what the mind isn't.)
That unelected officials are prone to spending vast sums of other peoples money on boondoggles is practically a cliche at this point
How about those crazy Eurocrats, eh! All with their unelected science officials making science funding decisions and all! It's like a madhouse! With scienceing! A mad sciencehouse!
So, um. Completely unrelated question - which ballot is it that the project administrators with funding authoritiy over at DARPA, NASA, the National Institute of Standards, the Department of Energy, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation, stand on again?
If scientists persist in trying to play God with projects like this, they are going to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Death, and Petulance.
Shan't play your pocklips! Shan't! It's smelly!
Mars pocklips has red snow! Venus has smulfic acid rain! Andromeda's parents bought her a whole glacksy to smash! Your pocklips is a silly little wet, silly, smelly one, and, and and it smells!
It defines no width for the text, allowing a single column to go right across the monitor for a maximized window.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Seriously, this is something I actually want. If I want text to be in a column, I can resize my browser window so it's smaller. I get really frustrated with today's website schemes which render all the text inside a tiny column on my huge landscape monitor. I have all that space for a reason - why does the website designer think their idea of a readable layout is better than mine? I'm the one who's actually reading it.
Unfortunately, the traditional Marxist-Lenist mechanics of winning a violent revolution tends to make achieving actual socialism difficult.
First you have to get a few billion people murderously angry with their neighbours and sisters and brothers; then you have to set up a centralised command-authority to make all those murderously angry people kill the right people and not the wrong ones, and train them how to kill efficiently and without moral qualms; then you have to deploy that command authority to take a burned out, smoking wreck of a world filled with well-trained, still murderously angry but now hungry killers, and make them not kill you. Easiest way to do that is to intimidate them by being really nasty, nastier than the old government they got angry enough with to overthrow.
Congratulations! Now you've got a world filled with smoking wreckage and scared, emotionally scarred angry people who are good at lying to your face so you don't kill them, but who still remember how much better things were before the revolution and the civil war. And now you get to use those people to create an open, loving, honest, trusting society where everyone does things for everyone else out of the goodness of their heart.
If a replicating machine can produce anything at will, the obvious first step is to have them produce more replicating machines.
Yes, we've had those for a few billion years; they're called lifeforms. They run on water and sunlight, and put together they make this wondrous technological fabric we call an ecosystem.
Hey, guess what! We already live in an entire post-scarcity nanotech-run planet! And yet, somehow, we still seem to want stuff. And our assemblers often run amok and compete for feedstocks, or try to eat us.
Why do we think that crude low-resolution self-assemblers that run on metal and plastic and electricity are going to be significantly more efficient or tractable to design and deploy than the bio-nanotech we already have?
Our economy is a giant high pass filter. Things that happen too rapidly directly affect day to day life. slow changes are not really noticeable.
This is an important point and is true not only of the economy but many other complex systems, including the environment, cities, and climate. Slow changes are fine; fast changes cause stress, and the faster the change the worse the trauma.
This is also true when we look at history. It doesn't go in a straight line, it goes in bursts of disruption and adaptation. Many of the major suck-points in history, that we look back at and think of as normal for that time, weren't in fact normal - they were traumatic responses to abnormal periods of rapid change. Dickensian London with its rapid influx of industrial workers into suddenly growing cities; times of war, plague and crop failure; the period of huge migrations that crashed the Western Roman Empire. All of these were changes that stressed a social system beyond its adaptation points and eventually provoked a new adaptation - but not without major grief.
Tapping your chest with a bullet won't hurt. Getting hit by that bullet at the speed of sound, will give you a very bad day. It's all in the kinetic energy, the speed of the change.
We go to asteroids and the moon and we *fucking mine that shit*
And once we have it, what do we do with it?
Getting space ore down to Earth in a rocket cargo hold will pay off only if it's solid gold/platinum, last I checked the ballpark numbers.
De-orbiting entire asteroids the cheap way is not particularly fun for those near the impact site.
Leaving it in space for colonists to build with literally begs the question: what would be the economic reason those people to live in space? To mine more stuff so they can build more homes for more miners? That's a nice pyramid scheme, but we can already run those cheaply on Earth.
You do it because the engineering will only happen if it is needed. We'll never figure out how to live in a hostile radiation-blasted vacuum if we aren't even trying.
And we want to live in a hostile radiation-blasted vacuum.... why, exactly?
Take an image of the workstation running XP, convert it to a virtual machine. Take your new Windows 7 Machine, load up VMWare.. and tada.. you're running in a more secure, easy to manage virtual XP environment which you can keep protected and unchanged for years to come.
Might work if there's no hardware involved. If there is... I'd give 50-50 odds that even under VMware it will still fail.
These people don't write these things to standards. That's the whole problem. If they did it'd already just work under Windows 7 and wouldn't need virtualising.
Prevent those few computers that are running the program from touching the Internet in anyway. No networking services, web, email,... or anything else. Make them strictly one function standalone devices.
Yep, that's the only real solution. There are some cases where virtualisation simply doesn't work, and that's when you just have to bite the bullet, give them a physical XP box, and yank the wall cable.
And hope nobody ever accidentally plugs one in, ever.
No need to upgrade to new software, it should run on Win7. There are multiple ways to configure compatibility.
"Should" is most certainly not "will". There's a piece of somewhat exotic medical hardware I have the misfortune of knowing which has drivers which only work on XP - mostly because it uses an extremely cheap and badly designed anti-piracy dongle. And no, it does not run on Windows 7 with compatibility mode, and no, it does not run in Virtual PC either. Because dongle.
(Because when a piece of hardware costs $10,000 and up, and the software which connects to it is utterly useless without that expensive hardware - because it's basically just a dial showing a readout - of course a practical use of programer time is to add an extra pointless $1 anti-piracy hardware component to stop the millions of free copies which will soon flood the intertubes. Sigh.)
Anyway, tldr, yes, this is a huge problem in medical (or any special-purpose, critical-path) software. It's written by a hybrid of Ebenezer Scrooge and Bizarro Iron Man. Exorbitantly expensive, cheaply written, full of edge cases and bugs, hugely dependent on the manufacturer's support whims, will only run or be supported on extremely vanilla OS, and built without any concept of security or ability to work with a patching plan.
And then there's actual "security" software, that runs cameras and such, and if anything that's worse.
Slashdot Mirror
the Prius (the 2012 version, at least) still feels reasonably fast to me once PWR mode is enabled.
The Prius has an onboard Pressurised Water Reactor? No wonder it gets such good driving range.
atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed
if you can use replicators to instantly manufacture anything and holodeck to believably simulate any experience... then why would you fly to other stars (or continue innovating)?! I personally would spend all my time in the holodeck, and reality can go **** itself.
And that's how the Borg got started. It's cheaper and more fun to jack your eyepiece directly into the holodeck than mess around with costumes and emitters.
Combine that with a deadman switch that releases the code unless you check in.
So, um. This deadman switch will presumably not be in your house, otherwise it will get turned off when the snipers turn up. So it's up in the Cloud somewhere?
Which means you just uploaded the encryption key to your super-secret encrypted file to a server you don't control. And your ISP probably are mandated to keep packet logs of all your net traffic. So the government just talks to them, finds out the IP address of your remote server, talks to the hosting company, drops all the servers you host.. and there goes your deadman switch.
(Of course they can't guarantee that they find your deadman in time, but you can't guarantee that they can't. How good a gambler are you?)
That way, not even torture can get you to reveal the secret.
That's nice. Now you get tortured to death and you can't even get them to stop it. And they walk away free because you don't even have the thing they think you have. Win-win, I guess?
Go read the "Wool" Omnibus from Amazon now, by Hugh Howey or something. The prequel is... not as good. The above line is a fair condensation of those 400 pages, but the Wool Omnibus is good.
I second, third and fourth this. Go read it right now. (Think, um... City of Amber meets Doctor Strangelove as told by George Orwell and Stephen King... and that's pretty much Wool. It's your basic "cosy catastrophe nuclear bunker last refuge of humanity ark" story. Only not cosy, at all.)
It's a heck of a read, and the premise is probably only a paranoid nightmare from a sick brain.
Probably.
But then I remember that actual people who thought themselves sane built nuclear weapons, were perfecty prepared to burn the entire world down to protect their ideology, and that those same kind of people still train to use them, and I throw up in my mouth a little.
an end-of-the-world complex
... You mean like Mount Weather or Raven Rock?
Oh, I'm sorry, this is the persecution complex. Have a nice day, and don't go out that door- that's the Pit of 1,000 Youtube Commenters. Best you don't let them see you, they haven't been fed yet. Mind the chainsaws! Bye now! We'll be seeing you!
what exactly does finding the plants do for us?
Well, they're probably a great source of oil.
And as long as you keep them chained up, avoid their whip-stings, and don't look at all those bright lights in the sky, I'm sure everything will be perfectly okay.
Scanadu's Scout, "the first Medical Tricorder" could be another Trek-inspired innovation that will make the world a better place.
They have a tricorder? Well that's it. The gloves are off. Listen up everybody - we're going to a quadcorder.
Might as well program the next Mars rover in PHP.
Now that's just silly. Of course something mission-critical like a space probe won't be running PHP.
It'll be running jQuery on node.js.
what do you mean the latency from our data center on Pluto is lousy? look at the cost savings we get from the free cooling!
Radiation Chart
Unfortunately that chart doesn't work for any kind of ingested radioactive substance, and it's kind of disingenous for Randall to present it as if it's a meaningful comparison. There's plan radiation, and then there's radioactive contamination in dust, liquid or aerosol form, and the second one is the gift that keeps on giving.
IANAhealthphysicist, but I can read Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot more radiation damage to your cells if you eat or breathe in a radioactive particle than if you sit next to the same number of bequerels on the bench, because your body can incoporate the radioactive emitter directly into your cells for the entire rest of its (maximum of bioactive and radioactive) lifespan, and your skin won't screen out the alpha radiation like it does for an internal source. Iodine-equivalents are pretty nasty since although they have a half-life on the order of days, if they get inside you they dump all that radiation into your thyroid, which is not a good place to have it. Long-term, Radioactive strontium is the worst because it replaces calcium and so binds directly to your bone marrow, which is not good for leukemia. And potassium-equivalents are in the mid range, with a half-life on the order of months to years and they are bioavailable, but not permanently so. As far as we know.
Oh, and a lot of those last have been dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, and are now inside fish. Do they bioaccumulate up the food chain? We're not really sure, but we'll probably find out. It's a wonderful science experiment!
tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.
Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid
And don't forget that in the Microsoft enterprise-backend administration world (which appears to be following a tech trajectory diametrically opposed to the shiny-flashy-broken all-Surface-no-substance Windows 8 world), there is a very strong trend back toward the console, via Powershell.
Things go round and round and round again, but even on Windows, the command line endures and conquers.
By the way, Powershell does some things much, much better than any current command shell on Linux. When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects? (And Powershell objects are pretty neat, they're not just raw .NET objects - they're dynamically reconfigureable-at-runtime things much more in the old Smalltalk spirit than anything that came after C++). Ruby would probably do it, if someone could add piping support to it and hack up the libraries to make it interface with all the various incompatble object OS and object systems under the Linux/X hood.
That's like saying the "only thing" that's keeping human beings from walking on Mars is a lack of ambition.
Well, two things. Lack of ambition and the Therns.
(And the Mysterons, and the Ice Warriors, and the Tripods, and whatever the hell it was that UMC dug up on Phobos...)
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
About how well we treat each other, I suppose; hit and miss.
Well then, we'll just have to hope that they miss us more than they hit.
We have established that the brain is the interface between person and physical reality, but that is it. And it is not complete.
Yes.
There's an interesting textbook called Irreducible Mind released in the last few years which details the multitude of evidence acquired over the last century and a half that something very interesting and strange is going on with the mind-brain interface, and that not only is it not established that the mind is the same thing as the brain, but that it's pretty well established that the mind, whatever it is, can exist decoupled from the brain, and can under some circumstances (and quite possibly a lot more commonly than that) access information that there is no physical model for the brain being able to access.
Also take a look at Extraordinary Knowing which documents much of the same material but in a more newbie-friendly way. Still scientific, just not as heavyweight.
Yes, this stuff is weird. Yes, it's often onsidered taboo to research. Yes, it's very hard to "scale up" and make behave in industrial settings. But it appears to be real, and it has a lot of implications for the computational and simulationist approaches to general artificial intelligence.
(Mainly, that it doesn't look like even simulating the physical structure of the brain will get any further toward simulating an actual human mind than modelling a person's house would get us close to simulating that person. If the brain is shaped by the mind, and not the other way around, then sure, you'll see correlations, you may even be able to infer behaviour from physical structure - as you would be able to guess my personality if you looked at my house. But that finite physical structure will not be the mind, because the mind/inhabitant is much larger than the brain/house and contains much unexpressed detail. Quite possibly an infinite amount of detail. We simply don't know what the mind is yet, but we are starting to get a picture of what the mind isn't.)
That unelected officials are prone to spending vast sums of other peoples money on boondoggles is practically a cliche at this point
How about those crazy Eurocrats, eh! All with their unelected science officials making science funding decisions and all! It's like a madhouse! With scienceing! A mad sciencehouse!
So, um. Completely unrelated question - which ballot is it that the project administrators with funding authoritiy over at DARPA, NASA, the National Institute of Standards, the Department of Energy, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation, stand on again?
If scientists persist in trying to play God with projects like this, they are going to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
War, Famine, Death, and Petulance.
Shan't play your pocklips! Shan't! It's smelly!
Mars pocklips has red snow! Venus has smulfic acid rain! Andromeda's parents bought her a whole glacksy to smash!
Your pocklips is a silly little wet, silly, smelly one, and, and and it smells!
Waaaaaa!
It defines no width for the text, allowing a single column to go right across the monitor for a maximized window.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Seriously, this is something I actually want. If I want text to be in a column, I can resize my browser window so it's smaller. I get really frustrated with today's website schemes which render all the text inside a tiny column on my huge landscape monitor. I have all that space for a reason - why does the website designer think their idea of a readable layout is better than mine? I'm the one who's actually reading it.
Revolution; and then true socialism
Unfortunately, the traditional Marxist-Lenist mechanics of winning a violent revolution tends to make achieving actual socialism difficult.
First you have to get a few billion people murderously angry with their neighbours and sisters and brothers; then you have to set up a centralised command-authority to make all those murderously angry people kill the right people and not the wrong ones, and train them how to kill efficiently and without moral qualms; then you have to deploy that command authority to take a burned out, smoking wreck of a world filled with well-trained, still murderously angry but now hungry killers, and make them not kill you. Easiest way to do that is to intimidate them by being really nasty, nastier than the old government they got angry enough with to overthrow.
Congratulations! Now you've got a world filled with smoking wreckage and scared, emotionally scarred angry people who are good at lying to your face so you don't kill them, but who still remember how much better things were before the revolution and the civil war. And now you get to use those people to create an open, loving, honest, trusting society where everyone does things for everyone else out of the goodness of their heart.
Good luck!
If a replicating machine can produce anything at will, the obvious first step is to have them produce more replicating machines.
Yes, we've had those for a few billion years; they're called lifeforms. They run on water and sunlight, and put together they make this wondrous technological fabric we call an ecosystem.
Hey, guess what! We already live in an entire post-scarcity nanotech-run planet! And yet, somehow, we still seem to want stuff. And our assemblers often run amok and compete for feedstocks, or try to eat us.
Why do we think that crude low-resolution self-assemblers that run on metal and plastic and electricity are going to be significantly more efficient or tractable to design and deploy than the bio-nanotech we already have?
Our economy is a giant high pass filter. Things that happen too rapidly directly affect day to day life. slow changes are not really noticeable.
This is an important point and is true not only of the economy but many other complex systems, including the environment, cities, and climate. Slow changes are fine; fast changes cause stress, and the faster the change the worse the trauma.
This is also true when we look at history. It doesn't go in a straight line, it goes in bursts of disruption and adaptation. Many of the major suck-points in history, that we look back at and think of as normal for that time, weren't in fact normal - they were traumatic responses to abnormal periods of rapid change. Dickensian London with its rapid influx of industrial workers into suddenly growing cities; times of war, plague and crop failure; the period of huge migrations that crashed the Western Roman Empire. All of these were changes that stressed a social system beyond its adaptation points and eventually provoked a new adaptation - but not without major grief.
Tapping your chest with a bullet won't hurt. Getting hit by that bullet at the speed of sound, will give you a very bad day. It's all in the kinetic energy, the speed of the change.
We go to asteroids and the moon and we *fucking mine that shit*
And once we have it, what do we do with it?
Getting space ore down to Earth in a rocket cargo hold will pay off only if it's solid gold/platinum, last I checked the ballpark numbers.
De-orbiting entire asteroids the cheap way is not particularly fun for those near the impact site.
Leaving it in space for colonists to build with literally begs the question: what would be the economic reason those people to live in space? To mine more stuff so they can build more homes for more miners? That's a nice pyramid scheme, but we can already run those cheaply on Earth.
You do it because the engineering will only happen if it is needed. We'll never figure out how to live in a hostile radiation-blasted vacuum if we aren't even trying.
And we want to live in a hostile radiation-blasted vacuum.... why, exactly?
Take an image of the workstation running XP, convert it to a virtual machine. Take your new Windows 7 Machine, load up VMWare.. and tada.. you're running in a more secure, easy to manage virtual XP environment which you can keep protected and unchanged for years to come.
Might work if there's no hardware involved. If there is... I'd give 50-50 odds that even under VMware it will still fail.
These people don't write these things to standards. That's the whole problem. If they did it'd already just work under Windows 7 and wouldn't need virtualising.
Prevent those few computers that are running the program from touching the Internet in anyway. No networking services, web, email, ... or anything else. Make them strictly one function standalone devices.
Yep, that's the only real solution. There are some cases where virtualisation simply doesn't work, and that's when you just have to bite the bullet, give them a physical XP box, and yank the wall cable.
And hope nobody ever accidentally plugs one in, ever.
Shouldn't that work?
It should! But it probably won't.
No need to upgrade to new software, it should run on Win7. There are multiple ways to configure compatibility.
"Should" is most certainly not "will". There's a piece of somewhat exotic medical hardware I have the misfortune of knowing which has drivers which only work on XP - mostly because it uses an extremely cheap and badly designed anti-piracy dongle. And no, it does not run on Windows 7 with compatibility mode, and no, it does not run in Virtual PC either. Because dongle.
(Because when a piece of hardware costs $10,000 and up, and the software which connects to it is utterly useless without that expensive hardware - because it's basically just a dial showing a readout - of course a practical use of programer time is to add an extra pointless $1 anti-piracy hardware component to stop the millions of free copies which will soon flood the intertubes. Sigh.)
Anyway, tldr, yes, this is a huge problem in medical (or any special-purpose, critical-path) software. It's written by a hybrid of Ebenezer Scrooge and Bizarro Iron Man. Exorbitantly expensive, cheaply written, full of edge cases and bugs, hugely dependent on the manufacturer's support whims, will only run or be supported on extremely vanilla OS, and built without any concept of security or ability to work with a patching plan.
And then there's actual "security" software, that runs cameras and such, and if anything that's worse.