Are you pretending that geniouses born to poor families - now - have access to higher education?
I was top 1% percent my SAT - I didn't continue because our family couldn't afford it. So let's dispense first with the idea that we are currently sending our brightest to school.
I am suggesting sending the brightest from EVERY family (Maternal).
But I'm talking serious support - best schools etc. We start with one per family. If we still have money after that - then we support two per family and so on.
The point is not to encourage gaming the welfare system by overpopulation. Democracies have a genuine susceptability to favoring overpopulation and overdependancy because every fertilized seedpod can vote.
Democracies therefore must avoid social support systems or they will lose the support of the high achievers - who will object to being forced to support their overproductive and non-contributing peers.
Problem: Too Many people - not enough higher education.
Free Market solution: - Let rich parents buy their kids education.
Problem with Solution 1. Soon all the education and wealth will be in the hands of a single royal dynasty of the perpetually rich families.
Sol2: Communism: let every child have equal access to equally inferior education.
Problem with Sol 2: All the good jobs move to germany where they have better education - even its its only for a few.
My Suggestion: In addition to those who can pay - add at least one child from every family. This ensures fair access for everyone without encouraging overpopulation - which of course any kind of welfare encourages.
Kiev - if I still lived there - would be showing its true colors just now. It is called the green city because it has more trees per population than any other city. At the same time my now cousin is in the hospital for routine check-up as the child concieved by a chernobyl survivor. Kiev is nice - but I prefer slighly less eastern cities - Warsaw, Budapest, Ljubljiana perhaps in that order.
Communal access to common resources works for exactly one generation - after that - the purse goes to the man with the most kids - the smart ones with fewer kids realize its a bad deal - and opt out - ie for private school - and the majority of kids get the inferior resources.
One solution is one free pass per woman. In other words - the smartest child of any one woman gets a free pass to higher education. This ensures that no family is shut out of the american dream. One doctor or lawyer in every family would ensure an adequate standard of living for a good many others - a good example - seed money for the next generations education - a family business, and good connections for everyone.
uh - leave your furniture in your parents attic - won't be needing it where you're going.
Want a desk - include it.
Need a bed - draw it in - curvilinear shapes and all.
The extruded house saves on TCO by including all the fixins - gardening - flower pots - perimiter fences - dog houses - furniture stoves - even the refrigerator in large part can be CC.
I think the Beowolf referance and book cluster is absolutely hillarious - especially as it is not unrealistic.
But all the jokes seem to miss the more interesting trend which is the use of ink jets to create active circuits.
I understand oleds have been printed - here it seems some logic and memory have been created - RFID is a means of empowerment as well as communication.
When can I start printing my own cool sh*t with my HP printer (6 unique ink wells)
What I want is an electronic form that allows people to enter simple data and get it back.
Before I start in - I developed a flight controller which can coordinate many planes safely using ant colony alg which is particularly suited to small computers / small planes - if you ever build 20 UAV.
But you have identified the essential use - which is a hackable light computer.
I would guess there are a good many computing application waiting for a solar powered device capable of communication which can be programmed - run common utilities and is cheap. Some pda come close but they carry a lot of interface baggage (display keyboard).
The wireless (insert your favorite USB device here) is one class.
Beyond competant - I know I don't want my business spending our development time inventing a custome server when we could pick this up and focus on what makes our company better than others.
Light based displays are not hard on your eyes, default full throttle all white backgrounds are hard on your eyes. - Like Slashdot.
Reflective surfaces have some interesting properties - for example, they tend to autoadjust to the ambient light levels and color - thus always appearing neutral in color and density. - This could be a property of emmitor displays.
In the end - LEDS have a potential for the least power consumption - because no back - or ambient light source is required. However, a reflective screen as you suggest is really a solar powered screen - which is a great way to get power into the computing equation.
At the risk of hyperbole, this is far from trivial. Amazon may have found friction on what has otherwise proved to be a glass pyramid - web based sales. In short, curiosity and tax fraud (that 6% you're _supposed_ to send your home state when you buy out of state) aside, what persistant arguments exist for mail-order sales over brick and mortar sales? The dot com bomb has put the lie to most theories of effeciency, overhead, convienence and yada ya, but Amazon may be onto a shortcut to India here.
for the sake of argument - let's assume the reasonable. Artist guild will defend the interests of artists by filing a class action suit, but then offer a settlement in which signatory artists are compensated a per character royalty not far from Google's model in which small excerpts are returned free, and click through to larger passages result in royalties. At this point the metaphor is common to MP3 etc in which you can order the whole album or just the pages you need. The ability to order a segment of a referance book will largely increase the market for such works - whereas fiction will benefit from more targeted exposure.
This is a seachange because it presents a persistant argument for buying online - exponentially better information and pay-as-you go access to referance materials.
Of course you're right. But implementing high level features in low level languages is an organizational approach which allows for maximum flexability at every turn, and that flexability includes low-level susceptabilities.
Java is not an alternative to C. In all likleyhood the JVM is written in C. Java is an organizational arrangement in which high level features - such as GUI - use a more carefully restricted interface to the hardware. Thus security concerns such as Buffer overflow can be a concern for the few people who design JVM, rather than a continual concern for those who create the software people touch.
I would suggest that the reason you -can- write holes into Java has more to do with MS embrace and extend than the core assumptions of VM java.
The challenge of educating a growth population is mathematical.
Lets say you need two teachers for every 30 students.
If those 30 students have 28.5 parents, that means you need 7% of your adult population to be teachers - manageable.
If those 30 students have 6 parents average (families with 5 kids) Then 50% of the adults are probably in the home raising preschoolers, and you need 60% of the remaing adult population to be teachers.
Don't count on it. High growth kids are educated at the expense of families with low growth. It's Axiomatic.
In the first two paragraphs, i feel you missed an important complexity. Importing labor is good for those that import, and less good for the status quo, the voting population, and the future stability of the region.
(2) Even developed nations have huge populations of Women-Oppressors largely imported.
No Fire Safety law is going to prevent multi-family dwellings. (reduce by.03% maybe)
Final point: immigration increases population - right fully agreed - at the expense of stability. Better really wold be for civilized countries to build robots and ship them to over-developed countries. And try to reverse the immigration trend thereby. This could improve regional stability, improve relations (by creating a higher quality of life in Iraq, we avoid war?) and wouldn't threaten jobs. Underdeveloped countries are already on foriegn aid, welfare, UN support, expatriot money-grams, and muslim international aid assitance, so the shift to welfare would go unnoticed.
Actually, the alternative to automation has often been cheap imported labour. Germany did this after the war. It continues to dominate agriculture in this country. England etc . ..
The problem and difference between Robots and Imported labor, is that People produce more people, and people from poorer countries produce many more people.
It is therefore fundamentally impossible to build a higher average standard of living by importing chheap labor. It is only possible to create more people, of which the priviledged minority grows in number while it remains the same per capita. Thus growth is mistaken for progress.
Automation on the other hand directly improves the quality of life, and to an extend puts negative pressure on the previous problem.
In the end, Automation is a good thing - using automation to create more welfare is a bad idea. Personally, I agree with Jesus when he say the poor you will have always. Perhaps this can be understood mathematically as: There will always be people who will procreate at the least opportunity and ensure their own perpetual poverty. I don't see a benefit in lifting the cap on the live-to-bear-children cultures on this planet. If poverty is the only thing that will restrict their growth, I recommend it.
The interesting point that you raise is that wealth, beyond subsistence, is a competative reality. To be considered sexy in a world with automated McDonalds may require peacock feathers of a color you and i can't imagine at the moment.
The problem is that in women-supressive cultures, sexy doesn't matter. Women exist to make little voters. Their opinions and choices are limited, and either directly or indirectly force is used to procreate them. This removes the peacock definition of sexy, and replaces it with what you descibe as a single room, which for some, is enough for three familes.
Free birth control suggests that women have a choice.
What is actually happening in europe is a cultural invasion. In Germany, the turks reproduce faster than the germans, In England, indian familes are enhancing their vote, and so on and so forth. Optional birth control is an invitation to be out-voted by those with lower requirements for reproduction.
Given Human Nature, specifically the tendency to respond to free time and food abundance to procreate, Welfare is not a sustainable model. In some cases, and for brief spurts of time, we have seen welfare levels high enough to meet western standards of living, but "welfare generations" have trimmed down long term welfare even here. The status of global welfare on the other hand has always been just enough to keep the wars localized, if the warring gets bad enough that civilized (population controlled) countries are affected, we rachet up the welfare a notch, but presumably only until the warring dies down. Iraq will be an example. how long will we pour money into that sinkhole after the global threat dies down - several pico-seconds or one election which ever is longer i suspect.
The lesson is that welfare or rather the lack of welfare is a default population constraint, without which, the demand will grow to consume the supply. People, like all other things biological, are programmed to grow given adequate resources. Add to this that some religions, mostly ones which treat women as chattel, encourage growth up to 5 times faster than average. Welfare in a democracy therefore quickly means the subordination of women as mere vote producing machines.
Idea, give every person alive today a single vote, and let them share it (divide it) with their kids if they choose to have them.
Given this logic, there is a rule, which is the more jobs replaced by Robots, the cheaper a robot must be to compete with an out of work laborer. Given this, robotics will only advance during periods of high employment. And in some cases, the cost of maintenance of robots would overcome the cost of hiring devalued workers, and so we could see fits and starts where fleets of robots are abandoned when it is cheaper to hire people than to change the batteries.
This is what stock brokers call slippage. that is the difference in the value of a given labor market before you design and build the robot and the value of that market once robots are introduced. (in the case of stocks, the price goes up as you buy a lot of shares because you reduce the supply)
If coal miners are being paid more than they could possible live on, there will be high slippage because the coal miners if given no choice, will work for bread before starving. (let's ignore the fact that they will also create a huge market for security as displaced workers try to sabatage the bots)
This suggests that robotics will be constrained to either a. a minority of jobs by number (such as welding jobs where the number of job affected doesn't disturb the market catastrophically - ie enough to break the union) or b. low wage jobs with minimal slippage (the value of cleaning a floor is already as low as it could go).
The one place robotics could be applied benefitially is to education. It is hard to have to much education.
So how do you avoid specific overpopulation in a 100% welfare state where specific overpopulation means that specific groups which currently encourage high yield families will in the end control any democracy?
Usually these groups are less-educated, less informed, tend toward radicalisms, and cultural isolation. This it seems is the threat of high welfare.
The author suggest giving families $25k for every child. This would remove the current constraint on women-as-chattel cultures (in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant) which is desperate poverty (Caused by overpopulation) and in 20 years the vote would be controlled by churches with high-growth policies.
Population control and the tendency of women-as-slaves cultures to dominate democracies must go hand in hand with child based subsides.
I would rather have the money in the hands of a few people, than to turn over all control to a generation of (insert high-population growth culture here)
Education is what occurs when you restrict population growth. Quality of life requires education. Encouraging overpopulation is not self-destructive, but it will lessen the average quality of life. In a conservative to-each-their-own economy, it will lessen your quality of life the most. In the authors 25K per child economy, it will have the reverse effect - benefitting the man who's quiver is full at the expense of those less virile.
According to latest article smap works for big business, which pays $20 dollars per "interested" party for Home Loans for example.
Solution: ruin the market by creating bots to answer spam?
The Bot creates email addresses which when spammed, reply by clicking, then auto-fill the corresponding web site. This would ensure Banks a steady supply of dead end leads at $20 a pop. It won't take long for them go back to cold calls.
Without subtracting at all from these advantages of scale, why do we not see more in the way of growth for practical robots?
For example, once it was clear that a dot matrix color printer was "the thing". HP and others created a superior solution in a matter of years.
I would suggest that a printer is no more a complicated project than a useful robot such as irobots vacuum cleaner.
But it seems to me that robots are so task specific that it's difficult to create economies of scale - a computer on the other hand can do many different things without being constructed differently - likewise a printer etc . ..
What will the killer robot application do? It seems split between really difficult things like navigating a distant planet, dangerous things like mine clearing, or tedious things like vacuuming a room.
The question might be - how do we raise the standard of living by the introduction of a mass produced robot?
It occurs to me that a. dangerous jobs don't affect the quality of life very much - and the dark side of automatic lawn mowers is unemployment of the unemployable.
Robots don't suffer from high technical costs - the advancement of robotics is mired in social issues.
Isn't it unlawful to benefit fro a crime. If MS has been convicted of antitrust violations - you get that point.
Now, I guess that the distribution of patents doesn't relate to the criminality of the holder, but in gerneral principle, how can MS use the law in one hand and flaunt it with the other. If this is going to be a band of pirates, let's get to swashbuckling - if we're going on the other hand to make rules, let's keep it as fair as possible.
good point. $80 buys you a provision patent on Search Term Filtering. A method for processing query terms as a means to preventing children from indecent or otherwise inappropriate materials.
I would suggest some prior art here. I developed an entry suggestion system in 1994 or 95. In my system I looked for a correlation between the previous answers to other questions, and then offered a pull down of ranked choices.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you pretending that geniouses born to poor families - now - have access to higher education?
I was top 1% percent my SAT - I didn't continue because our family couldn't afford it. So let's dispense first with the idea that we are currently sending our brightest to school.
I am suggesting sending the brightest from EVERY family (Maternal).
But I'm talking serious support - best schools etc. We start with one per family. If we still have money after that - then we support two per family and so on.
The point is not to encourage gaming the welfare system by overpopulation. Democracies have a genuine susceptability to favoring overpopulation and overdependancy because every fertilized seedpod can vote.
Democracies therefore must avoid social support systems or they will lose the support of the high achievers - who will object to being forced to support their overproductive and non-contributing peers.
Before you paint me into a box . . .
Problem:
Too Many people - not enough higher education.
Free Market solution: - Let rich parents buy their kids education.
Problem with Solution 1.
Soon all the education and wealth will be in the hands of a single royal dynasty of the perpetually rich families.
Sol2:
Communism: let every child have equal access to equally inferior education.
Problem with Sol 2:
All the good jobs move to germany where they have better education - even its its only for a few.
My Suggestion:
In addition to those who can pay - add at least one child from every family.
This ensures fair access for everyone without encouraging overpopulation - which of course any kind of welfare encourages.
Kiev - if I still lived there - would be showing its true colors just now. It is called the green city because it has more trees per population than any other city. At the same time my now cousin is in the hospital for routine check-up as the child concieved by a chernobyl survivor.
Kiev is nice - but I prefer slighly less eastern cities - Warsaw, Budapest, Ljubljiana perhaps in that order.
Communal access to common resources works for exactly one generation - after that - the purse goes to the man with the most kids - the smart ones with fewer kids realize its a bad deal - and opt out - ie for private school - and the majority of kids get the inferior resources.
One solution is one free pass per woman. In other words - the smartest child of any one woman gets a free pass to higher education. This ensures that no family is shut out of the american dream. One doctor or lawyer in every family would ensure an adequate standard of living for a good many others - a good example - seed money for the next generations education - a family business, and good connections for everyone.
uh - leave your furniture in your parents attic - won't be needing it where you're going.
Want a desk - include it.
Need a bed - draw it in - curvilinear shapes and all.
The extruded house saves on TCO by including all the fixins - gardening - flower pots - perimiter fences - dog houses - furniture stoves - even the refrigerator in large part can be CC.
Think built in rain barrels for catching water.
etc
AIK
Agreeing in part - dissenting in part.
I think the Beowolf referance and book cluster is absolutely hillarious - especially as it is not unrealistic.
But all the jokes seem to miss the more interesting trend which is the use of ink jets to create active circuits.
I understand oleds have been printed - here it seems some logic and memory have been created - RFID is a means of empowerment as well as communication.
When can I start printing my own cool sh*t with my HP printer (6 unique ink wells)
What I want is an electronic form that allows people to enter simple data and get it back.
AIK
It's war when a nation (land - laws - people) attacks the military infrastructure of another nation.
Terrorism occurs when a non-nation (missing one element) attacks a nation Or when non-strategic infrastructure is attacked.
You are right.
The comentary here is drool.
Before I start in - I developed a flight controller which can coordinate many planes safely using ant colony alg which is particularly suited to small computers / small planes - if you ever build 20 UAV.
But you have identified the essential use - which is a hackable light computer.
I would guess there are a good many computing application waiting for a solar powered device capable of communication which can be programmed - run common utilities and is cheap. Some pda come close but they carry a lot of interface baggage (display keyboard).
The wireless (insert your favorite USB device here) is one class.
Beyond competant - I know I don't want my business spending our development time inventing a custome server when we could pick this up and focus on what makes our company better than others.
I see the benefit here is the appliance - and oddly - the high likelyhood that the help will not screw it up.
Anyone can screw over a computer - reformat - install a video game - insert a virus.
An appliance should be immune to that - and simply turn on.
The cost savings is over time - when this works and works and works.
This is absurd,
Light based displays are not hard on your eyes, default full throttle all white backgrounds are hard on your eyes. - Like Slashdot.
Reflective surfaces have some interesting properties - for example, they tend to autoadjust to the ambient light levels and color - thus always appearing neutral in color and density. - This could be a property of emmitor displays.
In the end - LEDS have a potential for the least power consumption - because no back - or ambient light source is required. However, a reflective screen as you suggest is really a solar powered screen - which is a great way to get power into the computing equation.
AIK
At the risk of hyperbole, this is far from trivial. Amazon may have found friction on what has otherwise proved to be a glass pyramid - web based sales. In short, curiosity and tax fraud (that 6% you're _supposed_ to send your home state when you buy out of state) aside, what persistant arguments exist for mail-order sales over brick and mortar sales?
The dot com bomb has put the lie to most theories of effeciency, overhead, convienence and yada ya, but Amazon may be onto a shortcut to India here.
for the sake of argument - let's assume the reasonable. Artist guild will defend the interests of artists by filing a class action suit, but then offer a settlement in which signatory artists are compensated a per character royalty not far from Google's model in which small excerpts are returned free, and click through to larger passages result in royalties. At this point the metaphor is common to MP3 etc in which you can order the whole album or just the pages you need. The ability to order a segment of a referance book will largely increase the market for such works - whereas fiction will benefit from more targeted exposure.
This is a seachange because it presents a persistant argument for buying online - exponentially better information and pay-as-you go access to referance materials.
AIK
Of course you're right. But implementing high level features in low level languages is an organizational approach which allows for maximum flexability at every turn, and that flexability includes low-level susceptabilities.
Java is not an alternative to C. In all likleyhood the JVM is written in C. Java is an organizational arrangement in which high level features - such as GUI - use a more carefully restricted interface to the hardware. Thus security concerns such as Buffer overflow can be a concern for the few people who design JVM, rather than a continual concern for those who create the software people touch.
I would suggest that the reason you -can- write holes into Java has more to do with MS embrace and extend than the core assumptions of VM java.
AIK
The challenge of educating a growth population is mathematical.
Lets say you need two teachers for every 30 students.
If those 30 students have 28.5 parents, that means you need 7% of your adult population to be teachers - manageable.
If those 30 students have 6 parents average (families with 5 kids) Then 50% of the adults are probably in the home raising preschoolers, and you need 60% of the remaing adult population to be teachers.
Don't count on it. High growth kids are educated at the expense of families with low growth. It's Axiomatic.
In the first two paragraphs, i feel you missed an important complexity. Importing labor is good for those that import, and less good for the status quo, the voting population, and the future stability of the region.
.03% maybe)
(2) Even developed nations have huge populations of Women-Oppressors largely imported.
No Fire Safety law is going to prevent multi-family dwellings. (reduce by
Final point: immigration increases population - right fully agreed - at the expense of stability. Better really wold be for civilized countries to build robots and ship them to over-developed countries. And try to reverse the immigration trend thereby. This could improve regional stability, improve relations (by creating a higher quality of life in Iraq, we avoid war?) and wouldn't threaten jobs. Underdeveloped countries are already on foriegn aid, welfare, UN support, expatriot money-grams, and muslim international aid assitance, so the shift to welfare would go unnoticed.
Actually, the alternative to automation has often been cheap imported labour. Germany did this after the war. It continues to dominate agriculture in this country. England etc . . .
The problem and difference between Robots and Imported labor, is that People produce more people, and people from poorer countries produce many more people.
It is therefore fundamentally impossible to build a higher average standard of living by importing chheap labor. It is only possible to create more people, of which the priviledged minority grows in number while it remains the same per capita. Thus growth is mistaken for progress.
Automation on the other hand directly improves the quality of life, and to an extend puts negative pressure on the previous problem.
In the end, Automation is a good thing - using automation to create more welfare is a bad idea.
Personally, I agree with Jesus when he say the poor you will have always. Perhaps this can be understood mathematically as: There will always be people who will procreate at the least opportunity and ensure their own perpetual poverty. I don't see a benefit in lifting the cap on the live-to-bear-children cultures on this planet. If poverty is the only thing that will restrict their growth, I recommend it.
AIK
The interesting point that you raise is that wealth, beyond subsistence, is a competative reality. To be considered sexy in a world with automated McDonalds may require peacock feathers of a color you and i can't imagine at the moment.
The problem is that in women-supressive cultures, sexy doesn't matter. Women exist to make little voters. Their opinions and choices are limited, and either directly or indirectly force is used to procreate them. This removes the peacock definition of sexy, and replaces it with what you descibe as a single room, which for some, is enough for three familes.
Free birth control suggests that women have a choice.
What is actually happening in europe is a cultural invasion. In Germany, the turks reproduce faster than the germans, In England, indian familes are enhancing their vote, and so on and so forth. Optional birth control is an invitation to be out-voted by those with lower requirements for reproduction.
Robotic welfare fuels this problem.
Given Human Nature, specifically the tendency to respond to free time and food abundance to procreate, Welfare is not a sustainable model. In some cases, and for brief spurts of time, we have seen welfare levels high enough to meet western standards of living, but "welfare generations" have trimmed down long term welfare even here. The status of global welfare on the other hand has always been just enough to keep the wars localized, if the warring gets bad enough that civilized (population controlled) countries are affected, we rachet up the welfare a notch, but presumably only until the warring dies down. Iraq will be an example. how long will we pour money into that sinkhole after the global threat dies down - several pico-seconds or one election which ever is longer i suspect.
The lesson is that welfare or rather the lack of welfare is a default population constraint, without which, the demand will grow to consume the supply. People, like all other things biological, are programmed to grow given adequate resources. Add to this that some religions, mostly ones which treat women as chattel, encourage growth up to 5 times faster than average. Welfare in a democracy therefore quickly means the subordination of women as mere vote producing machines.
Idea, give every person alive today a single vote, and let them share it (divide it) with their kids if they choose to have them.
Given this logic, there is a rule, which is the more jobs replaced by Robots, the cheaper a robot must be to compete with an out of work laborer. Given this, robotics will only advance during periods of high employment. And in some cases, the cost of maintenance of robots would overcome the cost of hiring devalued workers, and so we could see fits and starts where fleets of robots are abandoned when it is cheaper to hire people than to change the batteries.
This is what stock brokers call slippage. that is the difference in the value of a given labor market before you design and build the robot and the value of that market once robots are introduced. (in the case of stocks, the price goes up as you buy a lot of shares because you reduce the supply)
If coal miners are being paid more than they could possible live on, there will be high slippage because the coal miners if given no choice, will work for bread before starving. (let's ignore the fact that they will also create a huge market for security as displaced workers try to sabatage the bots)
This suggests that robotics will be constrained to either a. a minority of jobs by number (such as welding jobs where the number of job affected doesn't disturb the market catastrophically - ie enough to break the union) or b. low wage jobs with minimal slippage (the value of cleaning a floor is already as low as it could go).
The one place robotics could be applied benefitially is to education. It is hard to have to much education.
AIK
So how do you avoid specific overpopulation in a 100% welfare state where specific overpopulation means that specific groups which currently encourage high yield families will in the end control any democracy?
Usually these groups are less-educated, less informed, tend toward radicalisms, and cultural isolation. This it seems is the threat of high welfare.
The author suggest giving families $25k for every child. This would remove the current constraint on women-as-chattel cultures (in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant) which is desperate poverty (Caused by overpopulation) and in 20 years the vote would be controlled by churches with high-growth policies.
Population control and the tendency of women-as-slaves cultures to dominate democracies must go hand in hand with child based subsides.
I would rather have the money in the hands of a few people, than to turn over all control to a generation of (insert high-population growth culture here)
Education is what occurs when you restrict population growth. Quality of life requires education. Encouraging overpopulation is not self-destructive, but it will lessen the average quality of life. In a conservative to-each-their-own economy, it will lessen your quality of life the most. In the authors 25K per child economy, it will have the reverse effect - benefitting the man who's quiver is full at the expense of those less virile.
AIK
According to latest article smap works for big business, which pays $20 dollars per "interested" party for Home Loans for example.
Solution: ruin the market by creating bots to answer spam?
The Bot creates email addresses which when spammed, reply by clicking, then auto-fill the corresponding web site. This would ensure Banks a steady supply of dead end leads at $20 a pop. It won't take long for them go back to cold calls.
AIK
Without subtracting at all from these advantages of scale, why do we not see more in the way of growth for practical robots?
.
For example, once it was clear that a dot matrix color printer was "the thing". HP and others created a superior solution in a matter of years.
I would suggest that a printer is no more a complicated project than a useful robot such as irobots vacuum cleaner.
But it seems to me that robots are so task specific that it's difficult to create economies of scale - a computer on the other hand can do many different things without being constructed differently - likewise a printer etc . .
What will the killer robot application do? It seems split between really difficult things like navigating a distant planet, dangerous things like mine clearing, or tedious things like vacuuming a room.
The question might be - how do we raise the standard of living by the introduction of a mass produced robot?
It occurs to me that a. dangerous jobs don't affect the quality of life very much - and the dark side of automatic lawn mowers is unemployment of the unemployable.
Robots don't suffer from high technical costs - the advancement of robotics is mired in social issues.
Isn't it unlawful to benefit fro a crime. If MS has been convicted of antitrust violations - you get that point.
Now, I guess that the distribution of patents doesn't relate to the criminality of the holder, but in gerneral principle, how can MS use the law in one hand and flaunt it with the other. If this is going to be a band of pirates, let's get to swashbuckling - if we're going on the other hand to make rules, let's keep it as fair as possible.
AIK
good point.
$80 buys you a provision patent on Search Term Filtering. A method for processing query terms as a means to preventing children from indecent or otherwise inappropriate materials.
I would suggest some prior art here.
I developed an entry suggestion system in 1994 or 95. In my system I looked for a correlation between the previous answers to other questions, and then offered a pull down of ranked choices.