Interesting. As a portion of the cost of a launch for a interplanetary mission, that's almost trivial. The overall cost could end up much less if the containment and other technologies don't overly kill the cost.
You're right, its not about the crusades, it started long before that. Even then, the crusades were at least initially only a response to their expansionist invasions which were driven by the written policies of their religion. And the only reason they want you to leave them alone is that it makes their Koran commanded expansionist agenda easier if you don't resist.
You sir, were apparently born blind and deaf in addition to your cowardice. Too bad you'll probably never look back to see if there was a reply to your anonymous attack.
But, it is about religion because religion is the base of his power. Power exists only in the presence of followers. His true motivations are irrelevant because he is irrelevant. If Bin Laden wasn't over that power base someone else would be. This particular power base will always find a leader with some reason, not necessarily genuine, to fight the "infidels". The power base must be changed. One way to do that is to give a political institution, democracy in this case, more power than the religious institution.
Al Qaeda and the many other organizations that are part of the general Muslim extremist organization are not anti-democracy, anti-US, or anti-UK. They are anti infidel. They fight because they believe that it is their god given responsibility to convert or kill all infidels until the world is one uniform Muslim society. Their other excuses are irrelevant because if they didn't have the ones they have, they'd make others. This is what is called an "irreconcilable difference".
As for your side note, the Chinese are infidels too. And they are already being attacked by and fighting these same extremists in their eastern territories. They've been far more ruthless at it than we have and done a far better job covering it up.
These "terrorists" are well supported by a vastly larger system that refuses to police itself. If you kill every single one of them, even with zero injury to others in the system, more will simply rise to replace them. True change cannot occur without change in the system. Since the support system's basis of power is not hatred but a rational(ized) decision that those of us not in the system are infidels and do not have a right to live, that change will be difficult. The supposedly peaceful leadership of the support system must change. That can only occur with a mass rising of the silent majority that have been driven into the system by fear of its leaders. One step in that is to eliminate the worst leaders. Another is to force a political system into being that has the potential of providing protection from the religious system and is not terrorist itself. None of it is easy because the mythology put into place to protect the leadership is extensive and deeply ingrained. And for the same reason, it will be a long battle. Decades at least.
Also, Iraq is just a minor (though certainly related to the development and support of terrorists) piece in the problem. It is a beachhead in a battle that is a part of a vastly larger war that can have no end except the elimination of the philosophy that infidels shouldn't exist or an elimination of the infidels. Since ideas can never be eliminated in a population so large and we are rapidly reaching the technological point where even a single motivated idealist can end us all, as a devoted infidel who dislikes door #2, I sincerely hope the war never ends.
We were hit several times before the twin towers and didn't respond in any credible way. By your logic, the twin towers should have never been hit.
In fact, these aren't bullies. Bullies have no agenda other than too bully. If you are not Muslim, you are an infidel. These so-called terrorists have pledged to either convert or kill you in the name of their God. They have been fighting this war for over a thousand years and aren't going to stop now if we just take it on the chin.
I say "so-called terrorists" because, though their tactics are that of terrorists, that is merely the tactic of the day. There have been many others in the past and will be others in the future.
Taking it in the chin will do and has done no more than cause these guys to take more and more aggressive punches. When you have decided that your enemy does not have a right to live on this planet, you see it as laughingly stupid when they are so arrogant as to ignore you and take it on the chin and you joyfully kill with less concern as to your own safety. After all, your job has become oh so much easier.
Probably not exactly by this mechanism, but undoubtedly, there is a means of passing adjustments to environment on to our children. You don't need "science" to see that physical differentiation amongst peoples, differences that had extremely low occurrences before the differentiation, happens to quickly to be due to Darwinian selection. There has to be either a mechanism by which the parent's physical adjustments to extremes in their environment is being passed on or one by which adjustments that the parent does not have are caused in the children in response to the same extremes. In other words, their is an undiscovered adaptation "kit" that is being employed.
It is also becoming more obvious that there is a lot more "nature" learning going on in the brain than we previously thought. Recent experiments in which mathematical algorithms were used to decode information from more than one individual without change in the algorithms hold great potential for answering the question "when I see blue and you see blue, do we really see the same thing". If relatively high level mental faculties can be passed on, and there is some means by which environmentally induced adaptations can be made to the next generation, it would go a long way to explain things like radical differences in average population IQ (actually, more of a reallocation of mental resources towards the things that we revere as "IQ" today) that have been observed over the last 130 or so years.
An area that I think has the most potential (it fits best with what would solve the problem) and has had little exploration is the possibility of these adjustments occurring in the womb as opposed to at fertilization. Obviously, since only two cells are passed on from the parents, eggs and sperm are created after fertilization. There is thus a time, even in the case of eggs, for adjustments to be made to the genome after fertilization.
Note, that this still fits within the Darwinian concepts with only a minor adjustment. The adjustment is simply to include non-random mutations in the equation. This would in fact speed evolution up and increase its effectiveness.
I'd agree with you that science may be able to provide a physical map of a brain's neural connections, though I think the chances are small. The connections are very small and complex. It may even be that the precise gaps and arrangements of the connections are important.
I disagree that that would be enough to provide a working map. There is a lot more to the function of each neuron than just its physical connections. I believe we'd find it necessary to model each neuron's unique internal physical and chemical structure as well in order to truly duplicate the brain's programming.
Unlikely. First, what they are saying here is that there is no clock. The brain is fundamentally analog in both state and TIME. To "simulate" it using computer algorithms would likely require finely stepped integrators for every connection of every neuron and every chemical pathway. Even the modeling of the blood flow and its nutrients is likely critical to a successful simulation of the thought process in some way. Its not at all like a normal computing problem. Its more like computing physics. We'd need processors like the new PhysX chip though vastly more sophisticated. I'm thinking that a high fidelity of all of the connections of a single neuron in real time would likely take a full chip.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that we'll even be close to understanding how to teach the simulation if we created it. I'd put better odds on the creation of some sensing technology that could fully map the physical connections and the electrochemical state of every neuron and other component involved in thought (does anyone really think we know all of the components?). And I'd still place those odds very low.
And what if we could simulate it... should we? It is likely that we'd create many insane intelligences in the process, either because we didn't duplicate the processes close enough, didn't put in all of the instinct portions of the brain that actually have much more to do with true intelligence than the thinking portions, didn't provide the inputs that they were designed to have, or tried to improve on a analog machine with a complexity level far beyond modern math's ability to balance. And, whether or not its true, many would call them life. Turning them off would likely be considered the same as killing them. The ethical dilemmas that would come about are tremendous.
Well, they used to have extended family. Of course, now that we're so much more civilized, they have television and social security. My how we've improved.
Anyone know what the 55lbs of depleted uranium in each blade tip called out on the drawing at http://www.cartercopters.com/first_proto.html is for? I can imagine that they needed the centrifugal force to keep the blades rigid regardless of wind flow over them, but why go all the way to depleted uranium? Seems it would limit the producibility a bit.
It is precisely the misunderstanding that eminent domain is for the public good that is the problem. "good" is an extremely open end term.
Eminent domain is for public use as in public not private use. When the government claims something by eminent domain, it should be for direct usage, not to hand over to a non-public entity. Business usage of land, even for businesses that cater to the general public, is private use. And selling land is not using it.
In general the government is only supposed to do this stuff when the value to the community outweighs the harm to the individual.
Wrong. In general the government is only supposed to do this for "public usage". Public usage was supposed to mean direct usage by the government for public purposes, not resale to private individuals or corporations who have the government officials in their pockets.
And for those who can't figure why the liberals on the court went for this one, its because the modern liberal leadership are largely rich elitists who have decided that they know what is best for everybody, should be in charge because it is best for us, and deserve the rewards of royalty. Turning land into strip malls and businesses for their peers gain is one of the larger reward systems they have. In addition, its very socialistic for government to have powers of this nature.
This is just one more step in a slide that was probably irreversible a century ago, but it is sad to see it happen.
Just set aside a state. It would be better than destroying several states with coal mining. The waste problem is not a matter of not having ways to dispose of it. Its a matter of not having the will. And, once again, its a problem that has been heightened by nuclear mythology.
must strike fear. All that we know of the effects of atomic bombs came from our government. Our government has a vested interest in enhancing the fear factor of the atomic bombs. The greatest secrets of all in the cold war were that nuclear winters are a theoretical result of a method of usage that would not be used and that nuclear war is definitely thinkable.
The sad thing is that the propaganda campaign has had such a devastating effect on peaceful usage of nuclear energy. We lag behind other countries in the development of peaceful nuclear usage precisely because we were the center of the propaganda campaign. If not for the cold war, we would not be in the business of mass destruction of our land to gather the coal necessary to produce half of our power. The coal power industry has seen far more deaths than the nuclear power industry and many of those deaths are just as slow and painful if not more so than those that would be expected from nuclear catastrophes.
extremes. And those extremes are (at least in the better sci-fi) usually being used to explore social structures placed under extreme stresses. It is just a nice side effect that these writers exploring the social implications of both technical and non-technical progression have spurred technology itself. Many current day technologies were predicted in sci-fi.
The question of the day should be, if sci-fi hadn't predicted the technologies it has, would they have come into being? My opinion is that they would not have or they would have been delayed. I think that vastly more is possible than what we've imagined. The proof of this is that so many of the things we've imagined have become possible once that imagination spurred thought. Its not that sci-fi writers are good at prediction, its that predicting something that is possible is easy because virtually everything is actually possible.
The hardest thing about raising kids these days is building their attention span. Attention span is something that is trainable, and most technology trains it to be shorter. The attention spans of kids exposed to television and video games at an early age become dependent on the overstimulus that those media provide. They never build the ability to concentrate and pay attention to relatively boring subjects for long periods of time. As little as an hour of television a day before the age of two will cause measurable damage. I believe one of the better studies on the subject was posted here a while back.
The only reason I looked in this discussion was to make sure that someone had made this statement. Now, I'll second it. All college does is to prepare you to learn. In your first few years in the real world, you should prepare yourself to learn several times as fast as you did in college because now you don't have the hindrance of mass education and can learn as an individual.
I've heard it said that we should count someone with a Masters as having a BS+2 years of experience. That would still not place one as a senior. And, frankly, I don't see the 2 years of experience aspect. I think those that got out with the BS and worked for 2 years probably learned the equivalent of at least 4 years at a college pace as long as they truly dove into a development job.
No, I don't. The fact that the shuttle is too expensive is a true and valid reason to criticize, if not eliminate it, though I believe it could be flown at a vastly cheaper level if it was used as an unmanned heavy launch vehicle.
I was simply stating that safety concerns are NOT a valid reason to criticize it.
Space tourism runs into heavy liability concerns no matter what. It is even more vulnerable to bad publicity from crashes than the shuttle once tourists are involved and the protection of being a government agency is absent.
What is needed isn't space tourism, it is private space exploration. When people start building their own space ships with their own money and risk their own lives for profit, then we'll see space exploration take off,,, because then there won't be anyone to sue when it blows up. That's just the facts of life in a world where disclaimers don't hold up in court.
My point is really that it is safe enough. Whether you talk of 98% success or 95% success, its simply good enough. Also, the fact that something else is safer doesn't mean that the shuttle isn't safe enough.
The fact that we've let our idea of what is safe enough change over the centuries is probably the largest factor holding exploration back today. If you took the people of 500 years ago and gave them the technology of today, we would probably have gone to Mars long ago. We may have had 50%+ losses and it might be that nobody has yet made it back, but we would have been there. Its a sad statement of our decline that there hasn't even been talk of the one way option,,, colonization.
Considering that we've only lost about 1 in 50 shuttles, I'd say its an extremely safe machine for what it does. The losses of ships in the early settling of the new world were far greater than 1 in 50. If our ancestors had felt 1 in 50 was too dangerous, the new world would never have been found.
If the shuttle were designed to provide a one way trip to orbit, I'd bet you could find plenty of takers.
Personally, I don't want innovation in the game itself. And I am very happy to see innovation in the technology. Games are heading in exactly the right direction. Towards an ever better representation of reality. The big thing over the next year will be vastly better physics, skin that looks more like skin, cloth that acts like cloth, grass that looks like grass. This trend will keep going in waves, better physics, then better AI, always better graphics, better sound, better this, better that. At the current pace, the full immersion virtually reality games that I really want to see may just arrive in another 30 years or so. To me, there is no more exciting and interesting game design than the one that seeks to come as close to reality as possible, using no plot whatsoever, but instead, simulating a full Earth-sized world where I can go find whatever plot I desire in the relative safety of VR.
This is a tax, plain and simple. I'd give 10 to 1 odds that most of the money will line the pockets of government employees and the hardware will still be shipped to China instead of recycled. Putting more money in the hands of government is never the right solution.
Laws should penalize for crimes, not prevent them. Laws that prevent crimes almost always have undesirable side effects. Given that criteria, neither of these solutions is good. Instead, just make it a crime with a hefty penalty to improperly dispose of the hardware. Then enforce the law. The market can then decide whether consumers or the companies appear to pay.
One more thing... contraty to many of the postings I've read, the consumer doesn't always pay. A company solving a more massive scale problem of disposing large numbers of computers may come up with a more cost effective solution than would be available to individual consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. As a portion of the cost of a launch for a interplanetary mission, that's almost trivial. The overall cost could end up much less if the containment and other technologies don't overly kill the cost.
You're right, its not about the crusades, it started long before that. Even then, the crusades were at least initially only a response to their expansionist invasions which were driven by the written policies of their religion. And the only reason they want you to leave them alone is that it makes their Koran commanded expansionist agenda easier if you don't resist.
You sir, were apparently born blind and deaf in addition to your cowardice. Too bad you'll probably never look back to see if there was a reply to your anonymous attack.
But, it is about religion because religion is the base of his power. Power exists only in the presence of followers. His true motivations are irrelevant because he is irrelevant. If Bin Laden wasn't over that power base someone else would be. This particular power base will always find a leader with some reason, not necessarily genuine, to fight the "infidels". The power base must be changed. One way to do that is to give a political institution, democracy in this case, more power than the religious institution.
Al Qaeda and the many other organizations that are part of the general Muslim extremist organization are not anti-democracy, anti-US, or anti-UK. They are anti infidel. They fight because they believe that it is their god given responsibility to convert or kill all infidels until the world is one uniform Muslim society. Their other excuses are irrelevant because if they didn't have the ones they have, they'd make others. This is what is called an "irreconcilable difference".
As for your side note, the Chinese are infidels too. And they are already being attacked by and fighting these same extremists in their eastern territories. They've been far more ruthless at it than we have and done a far better job covering it up.
These "terrorists" are well supported by a vastly larger system that refuses to police itself. If you kill every single one of them, even with zero injury to others in the system, more will simply rise to replace them. True change cannot occur without change in the system. Since the support system's basis of power is not hatred but a rational(ized) decision that those of us not in the system are infidels and do not have a right to live, that change will be difficult. The supposedly peaceful leadership of the support system must change. That can only occur with a mass rising of the silent majority that have been driven into the system by fear of its leaders. One step in that is to eliminate the worst leaders. Another is to force a political system into being that has the potential of providing protection from the religious system and is not terrorist itself. None of it is easy because the mythology put into place to protect the leadership is extensive and deeply ingrained. And for the same reason, it will be a long battle. Decades at least.
Also, Iraq is just a minor (though certainly related to the development and support of terrorists) piece in the problem. It is a beachhead in a battle that is a part of a vastly larger war that can have no end except the elimination of the philosophy that infidels shouldn't exist or an elimination of the infidels. Since ideas can never be eliminated in a population so large and we are rapidly reaching the technological point where even a single motivated idealist can end us all, as a devoted infidel who dislikes door #2, I sincerely hope the war never ends.
We were hit several times before the twin towers and didn't respond in any credible way. By your logic, the twin towers should have never been hit.
In fact, these aren't bullies. Bullies have no agenda other than too bully. If you are not Muslim, you are an infidel. These so-called terrorists have pledged to either convert or kill you in the name of their God. They have been fighting this war for over a thousand years and aren't going to stop now if we just take it on the chin.
I say "so-called terrorists" because, though their tactics are that of terrorists, that is merely the tactic of the day. There have been many others in the past and will be others in the future.
Taking it in the chin will do and has done no more than cause these guys to take more and more aggressive punches. When you have decided that your enemy does not have a right to live on this planet, you see it as laughingly stupid when they are so arrogant as to ignore you and take it on the chin and you joyfully kill with less concern as to your own safety. After all, your job has become oh so much easier.
Probably not exactly by this mechanism, but undoubtedly, there is a means of passing adjustments to environment on to our children. You don't need "science" to see that physical differentiation amongst peoples, differences that had extremely low occurrences before the differentiation, happens to quickly to be due to Darwinian selection. There has to be either a mechanism by which the parent's physical adjustments to extremes in their environment is being passed on or one by which adjustments that the parent does not have are caused in the children in response to the same extremes. In other words, their is an undiscovered adaptation "kit" that is being employed.
It is also becoming more obvious that there is a lot more "nature" learning going on in the brain than we previously thought. Recent experiments in which mathematical algorithms were used to decode information from more than one individual without change in the algorithms hold great potential for answering the question "when I see blue and you see blue, do we really see the same thing". If relatively high level mental faculties can be passed on, and there is some means by which environmentally induced adaptations can be made to the next generation, it would go a long way to explain things like radical differences in average population IQ (actually, more of a reallocation of mental resources towards the things that we revere as "IQ" today) that have been observed over the last 130 or so years.
An area that I think has the most potential (it fits best with what would solve the problem) and has had little exploration is the possibility of these adjustments occurring in the womb as opposed to at fertilization. Obviously, since only two cells are passed on from the parents, eggs and sperm are created after fertilization. There is thus a time, even in the case of eggs, for adjustments to be made to the genome after fertilization.
Note, that this still fits within the Darwinian concepts with only a minor adjustment. The adjustment is simply to include non-random mutations in the equation. This would in fact speed evolution up and increase its effectiveness.
I'd agree with you that science may be able to provide a physical map of a brain's neural connections, though I think the chances are small. The connections are very small and complex. It may even be that the precise gaps and arrangements of the connections are important.
I disagree that that would be enough to provide a working map. There is a lot more to the function of each neuron than just its physical connections. I believe we'd find it necessary to model each neuron's unique internal physical and chemical structure as well in order to truly duplicate the brain's programming.
Unlikely. First, what they are saying here is that there is no clock. The brain is fundamentally analog in both state and TIME. To "simulate" it using computer algorithms would likely require finely stepped integrators for every connection of every neuron and every chemical pathway. Even the modeling of the blood flow and its nutrients is likely critical to a successful simulation of the thought process in some way. Its not at all like a normal computing problem. Its more like computing physics. We'd need processors like the new PhysX chip though vastly more sophisticated. I'm thinking that a high fidelity of all of the connections of a single neuron in real time would likely take a full chip.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that we'll even be close to understanding how to teach the simulation if we created it. I'd put better odds on the creation of some sensing technology that could fully map the physical connections and the electrochemical state of every neuron and other component involved in thought (does anyone really think we know all of the components?). And I'd still place those odds very low.
And what if we could simulate it... should we? It is likely that we'd create many insane intelligences in the process, either because we didn't duplicate the processes close enough, didn't put in all of the instinct portions of the brain that actually have much more to do with true intelligence than the thinking portions, didn't provide the inputs that they were designed to have, or tried to improve on a analog machine with a complexity level far beyond modern math's ability to balance. And, whether or not its true, many would call them life. Turning them off would likely be considered the same as killing them. The ethical dilemmas that would come about are tremendous.
Well, they used to have extended family. Of course, now that we're so much more civilized, they have television and social security. My how we've improved.
Found the answer (sort of). Check out the FAQs answer to "If a rotor produces less drag the slower it rotates, why don't you just stop the rotor?"
At another point, "lead" was referred to as the metal being utilized, so perhaps they've changed their ways since the older drawing was produced.
Anyone know what the 55lbs of depleted uranium in each blade tip called out on the drawing at http://www.cartercopters.com/first_proto.html is for? I can imagine that they needed the centrifugal force to keep the blades rigid regardless of wind flow over them, but why go all the way to depleted uranium? Seems it would limit the producibility a bit.
It is precisely the misunderstanding that eminent domain is for the public good that is the problem. "good" is an extremely open end term.
Eminent domain is for public use as in public not private use. When the government claims something by eminent domain, it should be for direct usage, not to hand over to a non-public entity. Business usage of land, even for businesses that cater to the general public, is private use. And selling land is not using it.
Wrong. In general the government is only supposed to do this for "public usage". Public usage was supposed to mean direct usage by the government for public purposes, not resale to private individuals or corporations who have the government officials in their pockets.
And for those who can't figure why the liberals on the court went for this one, its because the modern liberal leadership are largely rich elitists who have decided that they know what is best for everybody, should be in charge because it is best for us, and deserve the rewards of royalty. Turning land into strip malls and businesses for their peers gain is one of the larger reward systems they have. In addition, its very socialistic for government to have powers of this nature.
This is just one more step in a slide that was probably irreversible a century ago, but it is sad to see it happen.
Just set aside a state. It would be better than destroying several states with coal mining. The waste problem is not a matter of not having ways to dispose of it. Its a matter of not having the will. And, once again, its a problem that has been heightened by nuclear mythology.
must strike fear. All that we know of the effects of atomic bombs came from our government. Our government has a vested interest in enhancing the fear factor of the atomic bombs. The greatest secrets of all in the cold war were that nuclear winters are a theoretical result of a method of usage that would not be used and that nuclear war is definitely thinkable.
The sad thing is that the propaganda campaign has had such a devastating effect on peaceful usage of nuclear energy. We lag behind other countries in the development of peaceful nuclear usage precisely because we were the center of the propaganda campaign. If not for the cold war, we would not be in the business of mass destruction of our land to gather the coal necessary to produce half of our power. The coal power industry has seen far more deaths than the nuclear power industry and many of those deaths are just as slow and painful if not more so than those that would be expected from nuclear catastrophes.
extremes. And those extremes are (at least in the better sci-fi) usually being used to explore social structures placed under extreme stresses. It is just a nice side effect that these writers exploring the social implications of both technical and non-technical progression have spurred technology itself. Many current day technologies were predicted in sci-fi.
The question of the day should be, if sci-fi hadn't predicted the technologies it has, would they have come into being? My opinion is that they would not have or they would have been delayed. I think that vastly more is possible than what we've imagined. The proof of this is that so many of the things we've imagined have become possible once that imagination spurred thought. Its not that sci-fi writers are good at prediction, its that predicting something that is possible is easy because virtually everything is actually possible.
The hardest thing about raising kids these days is building their attention span. Attention span is something that is trainable, and most technology trains it to be shorter. The attention spans of kids exposed to television and video games at an early age become dependent on the overstimulus that those media provide. They never build the ability to concentrate and pay attention to relatively boring subjects for long periods of time. As little as an hour of television a day before the age of two will cause measurable damage. I believe one of the better studies on the subject was posted here a while back.
The only reason I looked in this discussion was to make sure that someone had made this statement. Now, I'll second it. All college does is to prepare you to learn. In your first few years in the real world, you should prepare yourself to learn several times as fast as you did in college because now you don't have the hindrance of mass education and can learn as an individual.
I've heard it said that we should count someone with a Masters as having a BS+2 years of experience. That would still not place one as a senior. And, frankly, I don't see the 2 years of experience aspect. I think those that got out with the BS and worked for 2 years probably learned the equivalent of at least 4 years at a college pace as long as they truly dove into a development job.
why we don't let (if not encourage) California to just go ahead and secede?
No, I don't. The fact that the shuttle is too expensive is a true and valid reason to criticize, if not eliminate it, though I believe it could be flown at a vastly cheaper level if it was used as an unmanned heavy launch vehicle.
I was simply stating that safety concerns are NOT a valid reason to criticize it.
Space tourism runs into heavy liability concerns no matter what. It is even more vulnerable to bad publicity from crashes than the shuttle once tourists are involved and the protection of being a government agency is absent.
What is needed isn't space tourism, it is private space exploration. When people start building their own space ships with their own money and risk their own lives for profit, then we'll see space exploration take off,,, because then there won't be anyone to sue when it blows up. That's just the facts of life in a world where disclaimers don't hold up in court.
My point is really that it is safe enough. Whether you talk of 98% success or 95% success, its simply good enough. Also, the fact that something else is safer doesn't mean that the shuttle isn't safe enough.
The fact that we've let our idea of what is safe enough change over the centuries is probably the largest factor holding exploration back today. If you took the people of 500 years ago and gave them the technology of today, we would probably have gone to Mars long ago. We may have had 50%+ losses and it might be that nobody has yet made it back, but we would have been there. Its a sad statement of our decline that there hasn't even been talk of the one way option,,, colonization.
"the shuttle is too dangerous to operate"
Considering that we've only lost about 1 in 50 shuttles, I'd say its an extremely safe machine for what it does. The losses of ships in the early settling of the new world were far greater than 1 in 50. If our ancestors had felt 1 in 50 was too dangerous, the new world would never have been found.
If the shuttle were designed to provide a one way trip to orbit, I'd bet you could find plenty of takers.
Personally, I don't want innovation in the game itself. And I am very happy to see innovation in the technology. Games are heading in exactly the right direction. Towards an ever better representation of reality. The big thing over the next year will be vastly better physics, skin that looks more like skin, cloth that acts like cloth, grass that looks like grass. This trend will keep going in waves, better physics, then better AI, always better graphics, better sound, better this, better that. At the current pace, the full immersion virtually reality games that I really want to see may just arrive in another 30 years or so. To me, there is no more exciting and interesting game design than the one that seeks to come as close to reality as possible, using no plot whatsoever, but instead, simulating a full Earth-sized world where I can go find whatever plot I desire in the relative safety of VR.
This is a tax, plain and simple. I'd give 10 to 1 odds that most of the money will line the pockets of government employees and the hardware will still be shipped to China instead of recycled. Putting more money in the hands of government is never the right solution.
Laws should penalize for crimes, not prevent them. Laws that prevent crimes almost always have undesirable side effects. Given that criteria, neither of these solutions is good. Instead, just make it a crime with a hefty penalty to improperly dispose of the hardware. Then enforce the law. The market can then decide whether consumers or the companies appear to pay.
One more thing... contraty to many of the postings I've read, the consumer doesn't always pay. A company solving a more massive scale problem of disposing large numbers of computers may come up with a more cost effective solution than would be available to individual consumers.