These guys are looking to replace the typical help desk operator, frequently a person who can barely speak American, who is working from a script, and who is giving help to Americans. If that is the human model you have to beat to declare true AI, we probably had it years ago.
It is unlikely you'll read about it in Jane's 10 years after. 18 months after, it's intelligence will be doubled. 18 months after that, again. That may be the last 18 month long generation. It will quickly be intelligent enough to contribute to the design of it's next generation and start rapidly accelerating Moore's law. i.e. a true AI, initially created through accurate and faithful reverse engineering of the human brain, will be able to bootstrap its way through an ever accelerating evolutionary curve. In ten years time, the world will be changed in ways truly beyond our imagination because the intelligence making the change will be beyond our comprehension.
In my experience, a lot of the speed loss over time is because I like to keep up with the latest apps. More features = more resources = slower speed. I've also found that the resources taken up by antivirus and antispyware apps are continuously growing. The net effect is that rebuilding your machine will help, but it won't usually return you to where you were in the beginnning unless you rebuild with the app versions you had in the beginning. And, of course, that wouldn't be wise when it comes to your antivirus and antispyware software. Ultimately, it will always take a new machine to get the speed back and sometimes a new operating system version whose memory and process allocation has been retuned to the more modern application payload.
Actually, you're missing the point of profit. Profit percentage is virtually meaningless. What matters is profit dollars. Dell is still making far more profit than Apple because they have vastly larger sales quantities. The fact that Apple doesn't have the same degree of sales can be interpreted as an indication that their profit percentage per unit is too high for the value delivered and that consumers are showing that by not buying as many units. If they lowered their profit per unit, their sales might increase disproportionately causing an increase in overall profit dollars while profit percentage is decreasing. This would be good.
Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Junction points, at least the ones created by the utility referred to, are in fact hard directory links. You can mount any directory from any NTFS volume as a directory at any point in any NTFS volume's tree, not just whole partitions.
I have used junction.exe many times to save a lot of reorganization by mounting a directory from one volume onto another when the other is full and there is no unallocated space to add. For example, you can move directories from "c:\Program Files" to "d:\Program Files" and then create junctions under "c:\program files" to the ones on d:. This will result in the associated programs running as if they had never been moved without any reinstallation.
at least not to the government rep quoted in the article. He's basically arguing that the FBI has been treating cell phone calls as a public forum when he indicates that cell phone users do not have an "expectation of privacy". This meshes with the idea that they seem to believe that they don't need a wire tap order or warrant to legally listen in on cell phone calls. I think that they believe that the only time these orders/warrants come into play is when they have to look back on a call using the operator's records in cases where they did not have equipment of their own in place tracking this supposedly public signal.
I personally expect privacy on any person to person communications device regardless of what the technology holes in the device may be and believe that to be a reasonable expectation. Basing the expectation on the reality of the technology rather than the will of the people as they seem to will never work. No technology is fully secure.
This issue has nothing to do with the patriot act. The no "expectation of privacy" argument is completely independent of that act.
The problem here is not one of underclassification, its one of overclassification. We are classifying things to a level beyond which our theories are solid enough to prove. Thus, as we discover and understand more, we face the problem of having wrongly taught generations of people who now protect what they "know" because, after all, they never teach anything wrong in school.
Unless they can come up with a concise definition that doesn't sound like someone is simply trying to justify their historical bias, perhaps we should just solve this by dropping the word "planet". We could just make everything a satellite and perhaps go the one step further of including the largest body it orbits. So, all of the planets become solar satellites and our moon becomes a mere Earth satellite.
From an an article [sfgate.com] at SFGate.com last Wednesday, "Google's deal with NASA Ames will be a long-term lease of at least 60 years that would allow the company's rent payments to be plowed back into the campus for improvements, real estate sources said."
It seems odd at least for a company whose motto is "do no evil" to negotiate a deal in which the rent paid on public property is turned around to their 100% benefit rather than being used for something like offsetting other tax payer funded costs at NASA Ames.
Perhaps their motto should be "do no evil that any of our competitors wouldn't do in the same situation."
They are looking for the one company that can get 1 million+ of these into the market quickly. Hobbyists and sub 100 thousand copy apps are unlikely to even be worth considering. The problem comes in the need to build a manufacturing facility to handle millions of these things in order finally recoup development and make costs reasonable. You can't finance such an operation through hobbyist ideas. You have to have solid big business partners with dead on, low risk, mass market applications.
From Information Week dated Sept 5, 2005 "businesses spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on Unix servers. Sales of high-end machines (priced at $500,000 and more) grew around 20% in the second quarter, while sales of midrange servers ($25,000 to $500,000) grew more than 15%".
If only I could lose like that.
Its also interesting that of the companies controlling "more than 90% of the Unix market", HP, IBM and Sun, only Sun seems to be mentioned at all in this forum. Slashdotters apparently need to open their eyes to the fact that there is a vast market for systems beyond desktops and hobby servers.
because most users run as root despite being smart enough to know its safer not too. For the same reason New Orleans didn't have category 5 safe levees, most users spend a lot of their time running as root. Its simply easier to take the risk and, unless your system is critical, getting taken down once in a while just represents an opportunity to clean up. Especially in America, we like our freedom and we are risk takers. Its in our blood.
NASA may be shooting for 2012 to launch the first CEV, but they set the hard date at 2014. In government work, that means something like 2018 just to get to Earth orbit, certainly not 2012.
This appears to be shaping up to be a race between NASA and private enterprise. SpaceX has stated intentions to pursue manned flight with their Falcon 9. Interestingly, the fairing size on the Falcon 9 is 5.2 meters, just.3 meters shy of the capsule size that NASA is planning. Don't know what NASA's planned weight it though. The Falcon 9 is only shooting for 12 tons. The Falcon 9 is scheduled for first launch in the 2007 time frame. They appear to have a solid, realistic plan and will likely be able to offer cargo ferrying to the ISS at a price level competitive with or even under the Russians in the 2008 time frame. That could easily put them on track to develop a crew capsule capability by 2014.
And SpaceX isn't the only team looking at putting crews into orbit in the 2010-2015 time frame. A true race seems to be developing and NASA may not even be in it.
The risks of not being able to do something when you need to, of losing time due to not being able to install the right tool for a task without a prolonged wait, of requiring a large staff of people working on overhead budgets to maintain machines in ways that reduce a user's flexibility to better their processes, etc. are not only extremely high but usually realized risks on a frequent basis for those who work with locked down machines and rely on IT departments for installation. For laptop users who may be out of the region supported by their IT department when a need hits, these risks are increased. Too many times, I've seen those with the centralized IT religion justify the placement of large monetary and time burdens on those trying to do the business of a company without adequate risk / benefit analysis and usually by trumpeting a worse case scenario that has little chance of actually happening or that, if it happened, would not equal the true impact of their "solution".
An interesting example was the early effects of antivirus tools. In the 90s when antivirus tools started to be deployed in the big corporations in mass, the tools were immature, interfered with the operation of many programs, and consumed about 1/3 of the machine's bandwidth. It was very simple to show that the average time lost across an engineering organization was around 2 to 3 man-weeks per year per individual. There was also the loss of paying for and deploying the antivirus software and the loss of earlier than necessary upgrades to hardware because of the impact of the antivirus software on the performance of every program you ran. And yet, few of us had ever been hit by a virus. Accepting a hit that took down a large portion of the company for a couple days a year would have been far more cost effective. And actually, at least in my case, it would likely have been no real impact since it would have just replaced one of my periodic system-wide rebuilds anyway. Many companies could stand to benefit hugely from a periodic shutdown and cleanup of their systems anyway. Often, this is just what is needed to purge legacy issues that one can't get permission to fix due to the impact of a downtime on users.
with the right trick which may or may not be what they used here. When you have a dual core or even just a hyperthreaded processor, you can get Windows XP to have sub microsecond response times for a single process by locking that process to one of the cores (whether real or virtual, doesn't matter) and forcing all other processes to the other. Windows still runs fine on the other core. I saw this trick presented at a conference by someone who was working on a budget and had to interface to real time flight hardware. One of my engineers implemented and verified it before I even got home. It was really very simple and a useful trick for someone needing to have very quick response times from a single process.
but reinventing it. By moving this capability into the OS instead of hosting it as a parallel OS on the same kernel, they will gain performance and increase integration.
This is actually just one more example of an acceleration of rumors of Longhorn features. The rumors were that Longhorn would be able to run Unix applications and, specifically, x86 Linux binaries without recompilation. It looks now like at least a portion of that capability will appear in SP2 for Win 2003 Server a full year before Vista release.
At best, the reality is that this will force a shift to Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional at $449/copy or even worse, one of Adobe's creative packages that run in the $1100 range but at least offer more than just a publisher and is thus closer to being an office competitor. A very small percentage may shift to OpenOffice, but most government users want a packaged commercial product that dominates the market (if it doesn't, its not the mainstream choice that fits their comfort zone), and that they can order preinstalled on their PC.
As is typical in Massachusetts, this is just another idealistic excuse to increase costs so that they can increase taxes.
Programming has become nothing more than a basic skill like reading, writing, and arithmetic that almost everyone needs to have. Its expertise in a domain that turns programming into something really useful. By itself, its worth very little.
Ted Turner is proposing this through a team of paid minions. It is very typical of his radical ideas that would coop people up in anthills (cities) and return the west to the animals (apparently, we don't count as such).
Sysadmins pressed MS into the strategy of releasing bug fixes on a scheduled monthly basis so that they wouldn't have to be dealing with them continuously through the month. It only makes sense for everyone else to use the same day for the same reason.
Maybe this will increase the rate of application of other patches. People will essentially be reminded of the day when the MS patches automatically arrive and come to know that that is the day that they should check for patches on all of their other products that don't use such a clean patching system.
The problem is that by the time the law has enough specifics, it is too complex to apply. You're shooting for utopianism/perfectionism in the law and in the end, end up with nothing as we pretty much have today. For all of our laws, we're really far more lawless than ever before because common sense can no longer apply and cases that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes are allowed to drag on for days, weeks, or even months.
As for weaseling out, its far easier to weasel out of something written in hundreds or thousands of pages of laws and precedences than a paragraph or two to be interpreted by those closest too the situation.
And I'm not sure how you can get more inconsistent than the current system.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, certainly doesn't apply here. People just need to realize that the fix isn't more law, it's returning the judgement of peers to the system, not because the judgement of peers is perfect, but because its better on average, can adapt to unique situations without legislation by corrupt politicians, and vastly cheaper.
Or maybe it would mean that people would rise up and change copyright and patent law. I don't think that stupid laws could survive so well in a society with real penalties.
An important thing I left out include a belief that laws should be very general and very short and that interpretation of the applicability of the law should be on a case by case basis by a jury of peers who are not interested in precedence. No two situations or communities are ever 100% alike, so precedence should be meaningless. Once again, there would be injustices in a system like this, but my belief is that there would be fewer. Attempts to make a perfect system generally end up far less perfect than systems that accept and accomodate imperfection.
If Antartica were truly colonized into a large scale community, this share and share alike attitude wouldn't work. Nations are formed because people naturally tend toward valuing their cultural and political diversity which cannot be maintained without borders and separation. Without separation along cultural and political boundaries, we'd turn into a featureless mass of devolving beings.
Every system will have imperfections and even injustices. The current system allows massive amounts of injustice to go unpunished and still frequently punishes those that aren't guilty. 100s of people die due to just the direct effects of crime for every single death sentence handed out. I just believe that the average injustice dealt to society as a whole would go down if a system like I described was in effect.
In the specific subject area here, not millions, but billions of dollars would be saved if hacking was very aggressively punished. The multiple billions of dollars that we spend on antivirus software and on hardening software under development represent work that had to be performed. If there is just one workplace or job related death for every billion dollars of work performed, hackers are already killing people. Crimes with economic impact do result in deaths. All this would do is shift the balance of the deaths back to where it belongs.
It would also be good to add the cost of your defense into the cost of your crime if you lose in the trial. That would make it very risky indeed for rich people to spend a few million getting off for relatively minor crimes.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes, there are far worse things that don't get the death penalty, but those are wrongs too. Personally, I think it would be as fair if not more fair than the current systems if we came up with economic based standards. Put a number on the very generalized value of a life. Base it on something simple like the typical payout in accidental death due to an airline crashing. If that is $2.5 million, then just say that any crime or accumulation of crimes that you commit that causes more costs than the value of your life gets the death penalty. Of course, murder, since the person killed would have the same value as you, would get the death penalty. Manslaughter would too. Maybe then people would be more careful about stupidities like drinking and driving. The stupid woman that ran away to avoid her wedding and didn't have the courtesy to at least phone the authorities and stop the theft of their services in looking for her would get death too. Good riddance. In essence, this would move us back to punishment instead of reform. Its time for that move as reform has been rather thoroughly been proven to not be statistically viable.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys are looking to replace the typical help desk operator, frequently a person who can barely speak American, who is working from a script, and who is giving help to Americans. If that is the human model you have to beat to declare true AI, we probably had it years ago.
It is unlikely you'll read about it in Jane's 10 years after. 18 months after, it's intelligence will be doubled. 18 months after that, again. That may be the last 18 month long generation. It will quickly be intelligent enough to contribute to the design of it's next generation and start rapidly accelerating Moore's law. i.e. a true AI, initially created through accurate and faithful reverse engineering of the human brain, will be able to bootstrap its way through an ever accelerating evolutionary curve. In ten years time, the world will be changed in ways truly beyond our imagination because the intelligence making the change will be beyond our comprehension.
In my experience, a lot of the speed loss over time is because I like to keep up with the latest apps. More features = more resources = slower speed. I've also found that the resources taken up by antivirus and antispyware apps are continuously growing. The net effect is that rebuilding your machine will help, but it won't usually return you to where you were in the beginnning unless you rebuild with the app versions you had in the beginning. And, of course, that wouldn't be wise when it comes to your antivirus and antispyware software. Ultimately, it will always take a new machine to get the speed back and sometimes a new operating system version whose memory and process allocation has been retuned to the more modern application payload.
Actually, you're missing the point of profit. Profit percentage is virtually meaningless. What matters is profit dollars. Dell is still making far more profit than Apple because they have vastly larger sales quantities. The fact that Apple doesn't have the same degree of sales can be interpreted as an indication that their profit percentage per unit is too high for the value delivered and that consumers are showing that by not buying as many units. If they lowered their profit per unit, their sales might increase disproportionately causing an increase in overall profit dollars while profit percentage is decreasing. This would be good.
Junction points, at least the ones created by the utility referred to, are in fact hard directory links. You can mount any directory from any NTFS volume as a directory at any point in any NTFS volume's tree, not just whole partitions.
I have used junction.exe many times to save a lot of reorganization by mounting a directory from one volume onto another when the other is full and there is no unallocated space to add. For example, you can move directories from "c:\Program Files" to "d:\Program Files" and then create junctions under "c:\program files" to the ones on d:. This will result in the associated programs running as if they had never been moved without any reinstallation.
at least not to the government rep quoted in the article. He's basically arguing that the FBI has been treating cell phone calls as a public forum when he indicates that cell phone users do not have an "expectation of privacy". This meshes with the idea that they seem to believe that they don't need a wire tap order or warrant to legally listen in on cell phone calls. I think that they believe that the only time these orders/warrants come into play is when they have to look back on a call using the operator's records in cases where they did not have equipment of their own in place tracking this supposedly public signal.
I personally expect privacy on any person to person communications device regardless of what the technology holes in the device may be and believe that to be a reasonable expectation. Basing the expectation on the reality of the technology rather than the will of the people as they seem to will never work. No technology is fully secure.
This issue has nothing to do with the patriot act. The no "expectation of privacy" argument is completely independent of that act.
The problem here is not one of underclassification, its one of overclassification. We are classifying things to a level beyond which our theories are solid enough to prove. Thus, as we discover and understand more, we face the problem of having wrongly taught generations of people who now protect what they "know" because, after all, they never teach anything wrong in school.
Unless they can come up with a concise definition that doesn't sound like someone is simply trying to justify their historical bias, perhaps we should just solve this by dropping the word "planet". We could just make everything a satellite and perhaps go the one step further of including the largest body it orbits. So, all of the planets become solar satellites and our moon becomes a mere Earth satellite.
From an an article [sfgate.com] at SFGate.com last Wednesday, "Google's deal with NASA Ames will be a long-term lease of at least 60 years that would allow the company's rent payments to be plowed back into the campus for improvements, real estate sources said."
It seems odd at least for a company whose motto is "do no evil" to negotiate a deal in which the rent paid on public property is turned around to their 100% benefit rather than being used for something like offsetting other tax payer funded costs at NASA Ames.
Perhaps their motto should be "do no evil that any of our competitors wouldn't do in the same situation."
They are looking for the one company that can get 1 million+ of these into the market quickly. Hobbyists and sub 100 thousand copy apps are unlikely to even be worth considering. The problem comes in the need to build a manufacturing facility to handle millions of these things in order finally recoup development and make costs reasonable. You can't finance such an operation through hobbyist ideas. You have to have solid big business partners with dead on, low risk, mass market applications.
From Information Week dated Sept 5, 2005 "businesses spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on Unix servers. Sales of high-end machines (priced at $500,000 and more) grew around 20% in the second quarter, while sales of midrange servers ($25,000 to $500,000) grew more than 15%".
If only I could lose like that.
Its also interesting that of the companies controlling "more than 90% of the Unix market", HP, IBM and Sun, only Sun seems to be mentioned at all in this forum. Slashdotters apparently need to open their eyes to the fact that there is a vast market for systems beyond desktops and hobby servers.
because most users run as root despite being smart enough to know its safer not too. For the same reason New Orleans didn't have category 5 safe levees, most users spend a lot of their time running as root. Its simply easier to take the risk and, unless your system is critical, getting taken down once in a while just represents an opportunity to clean up. Especially in America, we like our freedom and we are risk takers. Its in our blood.
NASA may be shooting for 2012 to launch the first CEV, but they set the hard date at 2014. In government work, that means something like 2018 just to get to Earth orbit, certainly not 2012.
This appears to be shaping up to be a race between NASA and private enterprise. SpaceX has stated intentions to pursue manned flight with their Falcon 9. Interestingly, the fairing size on the Falcon 9 is 5.2 meters, just .3 meters shy of the capsule size that NASA is planning. Don't know what NASA's planned weight it though. The Falcon 9 is only shooting for 12 tons. The Falcon 9 is scheduled for first launch in the 2007 time frame. They appear to have a solid, realistic plan and will likely be able to offer cargo ferrying to the ISS at a price level competitive with or even under the Russians in the 2008 time frame. That could easily put them on track to develop a crew capsule capability by 2014.
And SpaceX isn't the only team looking at putting crews into orbit in the 2010-2015 time frame. A true race seems to be developing and NASA may not even be in it.
The risks of not being able to do something when you need to, of losing time due to not being able to install the right tool for a task without a prolonged wait, of requiring a large staff of people working on overhead budgets to maintain machines in ways that reduce a user's flexibility to better their processes, etc. are not only extremely high but usually realized risks on a frequent basis for those who work with locked down machines and rely on IT departments for installation. For laptop users who may be out of the region supported by their IT department when a need hits, these risks are increased. Too many times, I've seen those with the centralized IT religion justify the placement of large monetary and time burdens on those trying to do the business of a company without adequate risk / benefit analysis and usually by trumpeting a worse case scenario that has little chance of actually happening or that, if it happened, would not equal the true impact of their "solution".
An interesting example was the early effects of antivirus tools. In the 90s when antivirus tools started to be deployed in the big corporations in mass, the tools were immature, interfered with the operation of many programs, and consumed about 1/3 of the machine's bandwidth. It was very simple to show that the average time lost across an engineering organization was around 2 to 3 man-weeks per year per individual. There was also the loss of paying for and deploying the antivirus software and the loss of earlier than necessary upgrades to hardware because of the impact of the antivirus software on the performance of every program you ran. And yet, few of us had ever been hit by a virus. Accepting a hit that took down a large portion of the company for a couple days a year would have been far more cost effective. And actually, at least in my case, it would likely have been no real impact since it would have just replaced one of my periodic system-wide rebuilds anyway. Many companies could stand to benefit hugely from a periodic shutdown and cleanup of their systems anyway. Often, this is just what is needed to purge legacy issues that one can't get permission to fix due to the impact of a downtime on users.
with the right trick which may or may not be what they used here. When you have a dual core or even just a hyperthreaded processor, you can get Windows XP to have sub microsecond response times for a single process by locking that process to one of the cores (whether real or virtual, doesn't matter) and forcing all other processes to the other. Windows still runs fine on the other core. I saw this trick presented at a conference by someone who was working on a budget and had to interface to real time flight hardware. One of my engineers implemented and verified it before I even got home. It was really very simple and a useful trick for someone needing to have very quick response times from a single process.
but reinventing it. By moving this capability into the OS instead of hosting it as a parallel OS on the same kernel, they will gain performance and increase integration.
This is actually just one more example of an acceleration of rumors of Longhorn features. The rumors were that Longhorn would be able to run Unix applications and, specifically, x86 Linux binaries without recompilation. It looks now like at least a portion of that capability will appear in SP2 for Win 2003 Server a full year before Vista release.
At best, the reality is that this will force a shift to Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional at $449/copy or even worse, one of Adobe's creative packages that run in the $1100 range but at least offer more than just a publisher and is thus closer to being an office competitor. A very small percentage may shift to OpenOffice, but most government users want a packaged commercial product that dominates the market (if it doesn't, its not the mainstream choice that fits their comfort zone), and that they can order preinstalled on their PC.
As is typical in Massachusetts, this is just another idealistic excuse to increase costs so that they can increase taxes.
Programming has become nothing more than a basic skill like reading, writing, and arithmetic that almost everyone needs to have. Its expertise in a domain that turns programming into something really useful. By itself, its worth very little.
Ted Turner is proposing this through a team of paid minions. It is very typical of his radical ideas that would coop people up in anthills (cities) and return the west to the animals (apparently, we don't count as such).
Brings new meaning to "We need more power, Scotty!"
Sysadmins pressed MS into the strategy of releasing bug fixes on a scheduled monthly basis so that they wouldn't have to be dealing with them continuously through the month. It only makes sense for everyone else to use the same day for the same reason.
Maybe this will increase the rate of application of other patches. People will essentially be reminded of the day when the MS patches automatically arrive and come to know that that is the day that they should check for patches on all of their other products that don't use such a clean patching system.
The problem is that by the time the law has enough specifics, it is too complex to apply. You're shooting for utopianism/perfectionism in the law and in the end, end up with nothing as we pretty much have today. For all of our laws, we're really far more lawless than ever before because common sense can no longer apply and cases that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes are allowed to drag on for days, weeks, or even months.
As for weaseling out, its far easier to weasel out of something written in hundreds or thousands of pages of laws and precedences than a paragraph or two to be interpreted by those closest too the situation.
And I'm not sure how you can get more inconsistent than the current system.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, certainly doesn't apply here. People just need to realize that the fix isn't more law, it's returning the judgement of peers to the system, not because the judgement of peers is perfect, but because its better on average, can adapt to unique situations without legislation by corrupt politicians, and vastly cheaper.
Or maybe it would mean that people would rise up and change copyright and patent law. I don't think that stupid laws could survive so well in a society with real penalties.
An important thing I left out include a belief that laws should be very general and very short and that interpretation of the applicability of the law should be on a case by case basis by a jury of peers who are not interested in precedence. No two situations or communities are ever 100% alike, so precedence should be meaningless. Once again, there would be injustices in a system like this, but my belief is that there would be fewer. Attempts to make a perfect system generally end up far less perfect than systems that accept and accomodate imperfection.
If Antartica were truly colonized into a large scale community, this share and share alike attitude wouldn't work. Nations are formed because people naturally tend toward valuing their cultural and political diversity which cannot be maintained without borders and separation. Without separation along cultural and political boundaries, we'd turn into a featureless mass of devolving beings.
Every system will have imperfections and even injustices. The current system allows massive amounts of injustice to go unpunished and still frequently punishes those that aren't guilty. 100s of people die due to just the direct effects of crime for every single death sentence handed out. I just believe that the average injustice dealt to society as a whole would go down if a system like I described was in effect.
In the specific subject area here, not millions, but billions of dollars would be saved if hacking was very aggressively punished. The multiple billions of dollars that we spend on antivirus software and on hardening software under development represent work that had to be performed. If there is just one workplace or job related death for every billion dollars of work performed, hackers are already killing people. Crimes with economic impact do result in deaths. All this would do is shift the balance of the deaths back to where it belongs.
It would also be good to add the cost of your defense into the cost of your crime if you lose in the trial. That would make it very risky indeed for rich people to spend a few million getting off for relatively minor crimes.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes, there are far worse things that don't get the death penalty, but those are wrongs too. Personally, I think it would be as fair if not more fair than the current systems if we came up with economic based standards. Put a number on the very generalized value of a life. Base it on something simple like the typical payout in accidental death due to an airline crashing. If that is $2.5 million, then just say that any crime or accumulation of crimes that you commit that causes more costs than the value of your life gets the death penalty. Of course, murder, since the person killed would have the same value as you, would get the death penalty. Manslaughter would too. Maybe then people would be more careful about stupidities like drinking and driving. The stupid woman that ran away to avoid her wedding and didn't have the courtesy to at least phone the authorities and stop the theft of their services in looking for her would get death too. Good riddance. In essence, this would move us back to punishment instead of reform. Its time for that move as reform has been rather thoroughly been proven to not be statistically viable.