There's really an obvious 'nearly the best' answer to this question. It's simple : we build small, automated carlike vehicles that traverse a network of tracks all through a city. The tracks take over most existing roadways to reduce costs : no need to make them elevated; private vehicles, except for limited uses, would be completely banned inside the areas covered by the network. Each vehicle uses a very simple collision avoidance system that talks via the track or through some other method to know when track integrity has been violated (so there are sensors all along the track to detect if someone cuts the fence around the train, or if a track subsystem has failed), and uses a simple laser or radar distance sensor to measure the distance to the next car.
When the car is go mode, it jacks up the current to the motor controlling the wheels whenever the distance to the next car is far enough. It hits the brakes when, based on recent braking performance and current speed, the distance to the car in front is either too short or changing too fast. When coming to intersections, the track itself has an embedded system that tells our vehicle where other vehicles are that the car cannot see and what 'window' in traffic to use for merges.
So a series of simple embedded systems for the transit system, each run by a miniscule microcontroller running a tiny loop of assembly code. (except for the routing computers, which would be big and complex, but nobody dies if these fail) I am sure slashdot readers can appreciate how reliable the final system could be if engineered in this manner (pretty much never failing, except during initial trials or deliberate sabotage. Maybe a few accidents from unexpected flaws the first decade the system is used)
For boarding, each citizens presses a button on their cell phone and specifies what time and which transit station they wish to board at, as well as destination. Routing computers actually tell all the cars where to go and how to get there, and so a personal or group vehicle will wait at the transit station. It could be anonymous, with a photograph taken of the cars interior before and after each trip by an interior camera to determine if someone has vandalized the car. If that is the case, the transit card used loses it's deposit : no disclosing of the identity of the people using the system would be necessary.
Each car is made of fiberglass composite or some other cheap material, is fairly basic and utilitarian with completely standardized body panels, though some are very nice inside. Propulsion and braking is electric, and every vehicle used in the transit system uses the exact same hardware, for radically reduced construction and maintainence costs. Some vehicles, which cost more per trip, have leather interiors and full high definition television or internet access. Some contain cushions and bedding and curtains so that people could sleep or engage in sex while traveling.
Speed : each vehicle could reach the maximum practical speed for electric vehicles and steel rails : probably 120 mph for a typical system, at ALL times (well, obviously, acceleration times but these are brief and use special 'speed up' tracks for merging onto the main feeder, so other people are not inconvenienced by vehicles entering the traffic stream). Since each vehicle reacts in microseconds to changing events, much higher speeds than human drivers can handle are safer. In addition, congestion is kept to a minimum (except when a system failure occurs) because even on 'highways' slowdowns from human faults don't occur. Bumper to bumper traffic at full speed. The routing computers try to prevent any path from becoming too congested, and of course route vehicles around areas where the system has failed.
Transportation related fatalities could vary from low to virtually never occuring, ever, depending on how much money was invested in the system. But a general rule : these things would be at least 10 times safer than cars for the average driver in the av
Do you live in Houston? (I noticed you gave a link to the Houston Chronicle).
While wars in Iraq and missions to mars may be helpful to a small extent, as well as increasing senior citizen entitlements, shouldn't the funds be better spent investing in the country? I mean, with the half trillion or so the Iraqi war may end up costing, or the next half trillion the mission to mars may cost, or the who knows how much giving ALL senior citizens drug benefits, an awful lot of improvement could be made. I mean, there are reforms and changes that more money could bring in virtually every sector of American society, from transportation to energy production to criminal justice to education, and so forth.
Instead, the money is being burned up. The simple fact that it would take an awful lot of suicide attacks to do 500 billion in damage to the country, or cost as many lives as the war in Iraq may come out to. (not just deaths, just how many American maimings have we had so far in Iraq?) This isn't cost effective. Giving the sector of the economy that isn't producing anything even more money isn't effective, either, especially with the current scheme that gives all senior citizens benefits rather than the poor, sick ones who cannot afford EFFECTIVE medication. And going to mars? Please. Sure, a miniscule amount of R&D will be needed...the vast majority of the money would be spent on hideously expensive rocket launches using the same old tech, and NASA bureacracy and quintuple checking every last hair that would go on the mars craft.
I'm trying not to be biased here...but ignoring simple politics (I acknowledge that all the candidates on the field would basically leave things like this), I just can't see why these decisions make any practical sense.
Actually, I didn't think the 3 laws of robotics being broken in the movie to be that big a deal at all. Remember, as near as anyone can tell it is IMPOSSIBLE to actually build a robot that can follow any linear set of rules. (self modifying neural nets have no place for rigid logic).
Alternate explanation : the 3 laws in the movie are marketing HYPE by the company making the bots! They really are just trained not to harm anyone via a little bit of initial training that evidently went awry, or got self modified away. Makes perfect sense : if the company making them commits the kind of ethics violation oh, say Ford, does routinely then it's no surprise.
The only thing that bugged me was : c'mon here, Will Smith (or anyone else) has no chance against robots. If they all work together and are smarter than humans there's just no friggin way he can kill them like that : they'd have superior strategy and teamwork.
Hey, Tyro. A few weeks ago you stated a big problem with any kind of DNA therapy is the insertion technique contains some randomness and DNA is so recursive that even if you put the new material far away from every known oncogene you still might switch the wrong thing on. Isn't this the wrong philosophy to solve the problem, though? Instead of trying to get the method to work with EVERYONE (which is more or less impossible anyway), just develop the science to the point that if the wrong switch is flipped and a tumor starts to grow, you can use the same basic virus to fix things.
Sort of a completely different approach to medicine, where risky procedures are done all the time - so long as its usually possible to correct any mistakes. Similar advancements could do the same for surgery and other fields : if near scarless surgery is possible using the right combination of growth factors, in theory one could keep going back in and cutting dozens of times until its perfect, instead of the current limits.
A soyuz capsule on top of a big piece of rock. Big gyroscopes for stability. Rock turns to plasma from laser heat, explodes in planar shockwave by pulsing laser at correct intervals. Spacecraft rockets in other direction. Same complexity as the crawler, no cable, much cooler takeoff, faster, and can be built starting TODAY, making space travel cheaper (no reason it wouldn't cost any more than the cable plan, probably be cheaper) in just five years.
Did you even read my post? NO TOWER, CABLE, NOTHING! Instead, the LASERS HEAT the bottom of the spacecraft to millions of degrees, causing it to roar of the ground with a satisfying blast of superheated plasma! Since the main complexity of the spacecraft (the lasers and optics) stays on the ground, it can be built to MUCH less stringent specs and be maintained daily, plus have plenty of redundancy. The system would probably be able to launch spacecraft round the clock. You would need 1,000 1 megawatt lasers (a gigawatt) to do this though....about 230 billion dollars, half the military budget this year. No sweat...cheap 1 megawatt lasers have obvious military applications.
One question : the basic plan involves transmitting power through microwaves or laser light, enough electric power to provide the kinetic energy difference to actually put a vehicle in orbit. Why not skip the development of unobtainium and skip trying to put a super long and heavy cable in orbit? Just build the power laser facility 10 times over, and build spacecraft that use a block of inert propellant, heated to millions of degrees celcius from pulses from the laser and pulsed such that the shockwave is a planer wave coming away from the spacecraft. So no nozzles, no rocket engines, no pumps, no chemicals, no fuel, no explosives...all the stuff that make spacecraft expensive and dangerous. Just a block of cheapo rock and a spacecraft built like a cheap copy of an Apollo capsule made by the Russians. Would be safer as well, since in-orbit is pretty safe (there are patches to plug small holes), launches no longer can blow up, and reentry is much simpler and less error prone that with a space shuttle.
Finally, that kind of laser would make a rather fine weapon, and would help out military applications as well (so could get some of the funds from the U.S. military budget)
"pain shared"? That doesn't make sense, as far as we know our wetware doesn't actually know if another mind received the signal. More likely, recalling the memory under safe, non-traumatic conditions creates a new memory that is also recalled each time the incident is brought up, reducing whatever stress response (a whole chemical cascade I suppose) causes pain and loss of function. That would mean in theory a chain of events very similar to the actual painful memory but with a different ending would be ideal for therapy. Not just talking about it in an office, but actually enacting the memory in some way and then doing something different. Like reenacting a vietnam memory in the local forest with your buddies and paintball guns, then banging your S.O. afterwards. Although...I suppose it would be difficult to convince a patient to do this.
Yeah...no 'code'. I just kinda wanted to know...that does make sense. So umm...did medicine work out for you? I heard a scary statistic that 50% of graduating med students regret their career choice, which doesn't seem possible given the known benefits. But things seem so different once actually experienced. Like, for instance, the SWAT shooting example...one would THINK that having shot, say, a subject holding a gun on an innocent person, would not be a traumatic memory.
That's what I mean by the ultimate geek dream...at least for me. The most exciting thing I've ever done in my lousy life was play certain high speed video games...battlefield 1942 is a good example. Two minutes in there is about 20 in the regular world. But the high score list goes away in 60 seconds...dominating the battlefield doesn't mean anything once the power goes off. Your work affects people's lives directly for decades, and ripple effects can last for generations, occasionally far beyond your own lifetime.
I guess you probably perform the best when you try to make the rush minimal...to calmly make decisions and pretend that time isn't important instead of panicking over how tight the situation is. Man that sounds like fun...I sure as hell hope I pass my MCAT.
Umm...ever shot anyone? I know many military and police members have some sort of "code" that prevents them from discussing it if they did. Just kinda want to know what it really feels like (DON'T take the above phrase the wrong way...I would expect it feels pretty damn bad, probably nausea and other physical symptoms as well as guilt and nightmares for years. I would assume your training as a physician enables you to feel some sympathy even for the worst sociopath that SWAT members kill, as in most cases it is thought that these creatures have either been abused severely or lost crucial brain tissue from viral infections or both)
The email address posting was unintentional...I had the tag "" interrupting the address but the post format was HTML. Umm...yeah...I read about our current surgeon general, and upon hearing his life story promptly concluded that there are about 12 people with that kind of record in the entire nation. No disrespect intended to our current leaders, but almost none of them have actually done that much real stuff.
"Incongruous" vocations? milquetoast? Yeah...
So...umm...after experiencing the type of intensity that SWAT, combat, and the E.R. have to offer what can computers offer? I mean, I've messed with computers like most of the dorks here far too long...it isn't very exciting and there's a definity paucity of genuine experiences. Hitting the top of the score list in a game or reading about All Your Base Belong To Us can't possibly compare to a trauma case with real blood and real drama, right? I know it isn't like on television...really exciting stuff only happens a few times a day or week, not every hour, in the E.R., indeed? While there's an entire Google of information I'd love to parse you must have to answer, I'd really like to know how intense these things really are are were.
And don't be afraid to email me...I haven't even been spammed yet.
Hey Tyro...you rock. Have you written up your life story anywhere? I think it's safe to say that at least in technical terms you've experienced the things that most of us geeks here only dream about. So...what is it like? (and how do I maximize my MCAT score in August?:P)
Email me at geraldmmonroe@hotmail.com
Just a note : if a black box is wiretapping, this would be like having a wiretap on EVERY telephone in the U.S., except that it can "only" be read with a court order. So, the moment the authorities find "reason" (basically anything) to suspect you, they know everything you said BEFORE the court order as well. Is this right? No idea, the argument most people would make is "you have nothing to fear if you're innocent".
What I meant is most people who meet the super rich generally agree they are usually charming and intelligent and seem to possess the top 1-10% level of those traits. That is, they are noticably smarter, better social organizers, and more productive than most other people. However, I question whether they are really worth 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more than other people.
Since I don't think that's physically possible (for anyone to do more than 1 order of magnitude more work than an average educated person), I have to assume the money was distributed unfairly. Perhaps theft is too strong a word, but how else do you explain it?
Actually, I've been of the opinion that human intelligence does have a scaling limit. Just because the ideas of these greats seem so impressive today doesn't mean much. First, if the individuals you named were really 1000 times smarter, how come the NET GAINS from their actions were much smaller than one would expect. The VAST majority of the inventions and ideas these people and others came up with never left the workshop. It's only now, after REinventing much of their work, that we praise them.
Further, as always, the men you named had more opportunity and wealth to utilize their creativity. I suspect that this sort of creativity is simply an emergent property of the human mind, and a large number of people are capable of it given the right circumstances.
I don't have a deep seated hatred of everyone 'rich'. People who one could say, within the bounds of reason, have 'earned' their money I have no problem with. I don't resent doctors or lawyers or top managers their wealth, as long as it falls somewhere within the bounds of reason for the work they do (mere tens of millions at the very top of the curve). Tens of billions is an entirely different matter.
See above. The company shareholders, obviously. An analogy : Mr. G starts a lemonade stand. He spends $10 of his own money getting it going, and it makes money. You and a few thousand other investors come in, then. He tricks you and the other investors into agreeing to invest 10 million dollars into the stand, with Mr. G retaining a 30% stake in the company. You have been stolen from.
That's just it. The way it was stolen was indirect : both through options packages that effectively take even MORE of the company and give it to these founders or higher ups, OR...
The shareholders were duped into agreeing that the 'first' guy to start the company should keep a significant fraction of the shares even though the shareholders invest many thousands or millions of times more dollars than the founder ever did.
The practical result is theft. Sure, it usually doesn't violate the laws...but that means little.
This is an example of a logical error. Yes, they lead the tiller on the ship...but simply because the decisions they make touch the wheel, does this mean they are 10,000 times as useful as anyone else? Is it somehow a rare trait for an individual to be able to understand and lead a corporate mechanism? Of course not.
It's like saying the hand on the wheel is 100,000 times as important as the lookouts in the crow's nests or the actual tiller man in the engine room. Sure, the captain's hand perhaps is a litle more important than the less trained hands of the kitchen boy's....but not thousands or millions of times more as in corporations.
Plenty of educated people exist who can provide these sorts of decisions, some no doubt better than the executives we have in place. The reason they are paid more is because the executive has name recognition in the minds of the company shareholders, not because his services are thousands, millions of times more valuble.
A possible analogy might be Formula 1 racing cars. Every last part on those cars from the tiniest minutae in the engine firmware to suspension tuning has to be right for the car to win the race. Yet, the fans only remember the names of the driver, even though his labor is only a small portion of the work required to reach the finish line in time.
Sure, driving a car is tough...but so is tuning the fuel system and making these machines even survive the race. Sure, leading the next level of workers as a corporate exec isn't easy...but neither is debugging code or designing candy colored computer cases.
What bothers me is there is no conceivable way these individuals could have performed over a billion dollars worth of labor, ever. I'm not advocating communism or socialism, I'm just pointing out a basic truth. None of these people could have conceivably done more useful work than the entire lifetimes work of thousands of people.
Sure, corporate CEOs and super rich are much more productive than the average person....but their brains still tick at a mere 1000hz. They can still only speak at a slowish 150wpm and listen at the same rate. Their memories still have limited durations like all other mortal humans. It just isn't physically possible for them to have done the work of 10,000 other people.
The money was not earned, it was stolen. In most cases, the money was stolen from the shareholders of the corporation in question, who by rights should have either had the money in dividends or seen the money re-invested in the corporate machine.
In some cases, the money was stolen from fortunes made by the ideas and productive results of employees of the company. Does anyone truly believe Jobs invented the imac and made it's phenomenal success possible? If you believe that, ask Wozniac what Jobs did with Wozniac's work at Atari.
Before someone accuses me of the obvious : no, I am personally involved in any of this. I'm simply noting the truth.
I mean by eligible : has demonstrated the academic ability to handle college, and does not yet have an education. That's maybe 5% of the population...which comes to $35,000 a person. A bit closer to the goal, enough for 2 years of school at least.
High end tech : you do realize that for every experiment we do in space thousands on the ground have to be canceled. The cost difference is this extreme. So we'll never know what might be accomplished with the billions burned up by the space shuttles.
I have a better idea. It's cheaper to just BUILD A NEW CAPSULE! Let the old one sink. Or build a recovery vessel with a long arm on the crane or something, it's a trivial problem and there's no hurry. If you aren't concerned with recovering the old capsule in reusable shape, you could let it float out there a few weeks anyhow.
(*gasp*. the reason is because you have to take apart the damn thing and replace half the components *anyway* and follow this complicated procedure so it can be 'safely' reused. It's simpler just to make a new one every time following the same procedure used to build every single one of them)
I suggest you retake high school physics. This is an exceedingly poor analogy as throwing parts of the rocket away (and propellant) is inherent as an emergent property of the physics here. That doesn't mean the Saturn V approach is the best possible, but it's actually quite a bit cheaper and safer than the shuttle.
The point remains the same...to get to Mars and back just requires a LOT bigger (and proportionally more expensive) extension of the Apollo tech. Essentially, rather than launching one Saturn 5 worth of stuff, dozens and dozens would be launched each with a piece for this flotilla of modules, engines, and vehicles to be sent to mars. This could have been done in 1975 if one wanted to spend the money.
(which would obviously be about a factor of 10 or so more than the Apollo program, to give approximately 6-12 people a chance to walk on the planet. This means that the productive labor of many many thousands of lifetimes would be spent on such a purpose. Of course, FAR more useful things could be done with those resources....we could spent that 500 billion or so on giving every eligible individual in the United States a college education, or paying scientists and technologists to develop high end tech to revolutionize our lives).
Oh, even worse than that. In this future, 99% of the money won't go to the artist...it'll go to the artist's agent. Practically everyone employeed will be a resource wasting middleman, because automation means that everyone can be marketers and middlemen, with just a handful of actually productive people.
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There's really an obvious 'nearly the best' answer to this question. It's simple : we build small, automated carlike vehicles that traverse a network of tracks all through a city. The tracks take over most existing roadways to reduce costs : no need to make them elevated; private vehicles, except for limited uses, would be completely banned inside the areas covered by the network. Each vehicle uses a very simple collision avoidance system that talks via the track or through some other method to know when track integrity has been violated (so there are sensors all along the track to detect if someone cuts the fence around the train, or if a track subsystem has failed), and uses a simple laser or radar distance sensor to measure the distance to the next car.
When the car is go mode, it jacks up the current to the motor controlling the wheels whenever the distance to the next car is far enough. It hits the brakes when, based on recent braking performance and current speed, the distance to the car in front is either too short or changing too fast. When coming to intersections, the track itself has an embedded system that tells our vehicle where other vehicles are that the car cannot see and what 'window' in traffic to use for merges.
So a series of simple embedded systems for the transit system, each run by a miniscule microcontroller running a tiny loop of assembly code. (except for the routing computers, which would be big and complex, but nobody dies if these fail) I am sure slashdot readers can appreciate how reliable the final system could be if engineered in this manner (pretty much never failing, except during initial trials or deliberate sabotage. Maybe a few accidents from unexpected flaws the first decade the system is used)
For boarding, each citizens presses a button on their cell phone and specifies what time and which transit station they wish to board at, as well as destination. Routing computers actually tell all the cars where to go and how to get there, and so a personal or group vehicle will wait at the transit station. It could be anonymous, with a photograph taken of the cars interior before and after each trip by an interior camera to determine if someone has vandalized the car. If that is the case, the transit card used loses it's deposit : no disclosing of the identity of the people using the system would be necessary.
Each car is made of fiberglass composite or some other cheap material, is fairly basic and utilitarian with completely standardized body panels, though some are very nice inside. Propulsion and braking is electric, and every vehicle used in the transit system uses the exact same hardware, for radically reduced construction and maintainence costs. Some vehicles, which cost more per trip, have leather interiors and full high definition television or internet access. Some contain cushions and bedding and curtains so that people could sleep or engage in sex while traveling.
Speed : each vehicle could reach the maximum practical speed for electric vehicles and steel rails : probably 120 mph for a typical system, at ALL times (well, obviously, acceleration times but these are brief and use special 'speed up' tracks for merging onto the main feeder, so other people are not inconvenienced by vehicles entering the traffic stream). Since each vehicle reacts in microseconds to changing events, much higher speeds than human drivers can handle are safer. In addition, congestion is kept to a minimum (except when a system failure occurs) because even on 'highways' slowdowns from human faults don't occur. Bumper to bumper traffic at full speed. The routing computers try to prevent any path from becoming too congested, and of course route vehicles around areas where the system has failed.
Transportation related fatalities could vary from low to virtually never occuring, ever, depending on how much money was invested in the system. But a general rule : these things would be at least 10 times safer than cars for the average driver in the av
Glad to see you're back. So, umm, what's more exciting...trauma in the E.R. or the latest video game?
Do you live in Houston? (I noticed you gave a link to the Houston Chronicle).
While wars in Iraq and missions to mars may be helpful to a small extent, as well as increasing senior citizen entitlements, shouldn't the funds be better spent investing in the country? I mean, with the half trillion or so the Iraqi war may end up costing, or the next half trillion the mission to mars may cost, or the who knows how much giving ALL senior citizens drug benefits, an awful lot of improvement could be made. I mean, there are reforms and changes that more money could bring in virtually every sector of American society, from transportation to energy production to criminal justice to education, and so forth.
Instead, the money is being burned up. The simple fact that it would take an awful lot of suicide attacks to do 500 billion in damage to the country, or cost as many lives as the war in Iraq may come out to. (not just deaths, just how many American maimings have we had so far in Iraq?) This isn't cost effective. Giving the sector of the economy that isn't producing anything even more money isn't effective, either, especially with the current scheme that gives all senior citizens benefits rather than the poor, sick ones who cannot afford EFFECTIVE medication. And going to mars? Please. Sure, a miniscule amount of R&D will be needed...the vast majority of the money would be spent on hideously expensive rocket launches using the same old tech, and NASA bureacracy and quintuple checking every last hair that would go on the mars craft.
I'm trying not to be biased here...but ignoring simple politics (I acknowledge that all the candidates on the field would basically leave things like this), I just can't see why these decisions make any practical sense.
Actually, I didn't think the 3 laws of robotics being broken in the movie to be that big a deal at all. Remember, as near as anyone can tell it is IMPOSSIBLE to actually build a robot that can follow any linear set of rules. (self modifying neural nets have no place for rigid logic).
Alternate explanation : the 3 laws in the movie are marketing HYPE by the company making the bots! They really are just trained not to harm anyone via a little bit of initial training that evidently went awry, or got self modified away. Makes perfect sense : if the company making them commits the kind of ethics violation oh, say Ford, does routinely then it's no surprise.
The only thing that bugged me was : c'mon here, Will Smith (or anyone else) has no chance against robots. If they all work together and are smarter than humans there's just no friggin way he can kill them like that : they'd have superior strategy and teamwork.
Hey, Tyro. A few weeks ago you stated a big problem with any kind of DNA therapy is the insertion technique contains some randomness and DNA is so recursive that even if you put the new material far away from every known oncogene you still might switch the wrong thing on. Isn't this the wrong philosophy to solve the problem, though? Instead of trying to get the method to work with EVERYONE (which is more or less impossible anyway), just develop the science to the point that if the wrong switch is flipped and a tumor starts to grow, you can use the same basic virus to fix things.
Sort of a completely different approach to medicine, where risky procedures are done all the time - so long as its usually possible to correct any mistakes. Similar advancements could do the same for surgery and other fields : if near scarless surgery is possible using the right combination of growth factors, in theory one could keep going back in and cutting dozens of times until its perfect, instead of the current limits.
A soyuz capsule on top of a big piece of rock. Big gyroscopes for stability. Rock turns to plasma from laser heat, explodes in planar shockwave by pulsing laser at correct intervals. Spacecraft rockets in other direction. Same complexity as the crawler, no cable, much cooler takeoff, faster, and can be built starting TODAY, making space travel cheaper (no reason it wouldn't cost any more than the cable plan, probably be cheaper) in just five years.
Did you even read my post? NO TOWER, CABLE, NOTHING! Instead, the LASERS HEAT the bottom of the spacecraft to millions of degrees, causing it to roar of the ground with a satisfying blast of superheated plasma! Since the main complexity of the spacecraft (the lasers and optics) stays on the ground, it can be built to MUCH less stringent specs and be maintained daily, plus have plenty of redundancy. The system would probably be able to launch spacecraft round the clock. You would need 1,000 1 megawatt lasers (a gigawatt) to do this though....about 230 billion dollars, half the military budget this year. No sweat...cheap 1 megawatt lasers have obvious military applications.
One question : the basic plan involves transmitting power through microwaves or laser light, enough electric power to provide the kinetic energy difference to actually put a vehicle in orbit. Why not skip the development of unobtainium and skip trying to put a super long and heavy cable in orbit? Just build the power laser facility 10 times over, and build spacecraft that use a block of inert propellant, heated to millions of degrees celcius from pulses from the laser and pulsed such that the shockwave is a planer wave coming away from the spacecraft. So no nozzles, no rocket engines, no pumps, no chemicals, no fuel, no explosives...all the stuff that make spacecraft expensive and dangerous. Just a block of cheapo rock and a spacecraft built like a cheap copy of an Apollo capsule made by the Russians. Would be safer as well, since in-orbit is pretty safe (there are patches to plug small holes), launches no longer can blow up, and reentry is much simpler and less error prone that with a space shuttle. Finally, that kind of laser would make a rather fine weapon, and would help out military applications as well (so could get some of the funds from the U.S. military budget)
"pain shared"? That doesn't make sense, as far as we know our wetware doesn't actually know if another mind received the signal. More likely, recalling the memory under safe, non-traumatic conditions creates a new memory that is also recalled each time the incident is brought up, reducing whatever stress response (a whole chemical cascade I suppose) causes pain and loss of function. That would mean in theory a chain of events very similar to the actual painful memory but with a different ending would be ideal for therapy. Not just talking about it in an office, but actually enacting the memory in some way and then doing something different. Like reenacting a vietnam memory in the local forest with your buddies and paintball guns, then banging your S.O. afterwards. Although...I suppose it would be difficult to convince a patient to do this.
Yeah...no 'code'. I just kinda wanted to know...that does make sense. So umm...did medicine work out for you? I heard a scary statistic that 50% of graduating med students regret their career choice, which doesn't seem possible given the known benefits. But things seem so different once actually experienced. Like, for instance, the SWAT shooting example...one would THINK that having shot, say, a subject holding a gun on an innocent person, would not be a traumatic memory.
That's what I mean by the ultimate geek dream...at least for me. The most exciting thing I've ever done in my lousy life was play certain high speed video games...battlefield 1942 is a good example. Two minutes in there is about 20 in the regular world. But the high score list goes away in 60 seconds...dominating the battlefield doesn't mean anything once the power goes off. Your work affects people's lives directly for decades, and ripple effects can last for generations, occasionally far beyond your own lifetime.
I guess you probably perform the best when you try to make the rush minimal...to calmly make decisions and pretend that time isn't important instead of panicking over how tight the situation is. Man that sounds like fun...I sure as hell hope I pass my MCAT.
Umm...ever shot anyone? I know many military and police members have some sort of "code" that prevents them from discussing it if they did. Just kinda want to know what it really feels like (DON'T take the above phrase the wrong way...I would expect it feels pretty damn bad, probably nausea and other physical symptoms as well as guilt and nightmares for years. I would assume your training as a physician enables you to feel some sympathy even for the worst sociopath that SWAT members kill, as in most cases it is thought that these creatures have either been abused severely or lost crucial brain tissue from viral infections or both)
The email address posting was unintentional...I had the tag "" interrupting the address but the post format was HTML. Umm...yeah...I read about our current surgeon general, and upon hearing his life story promptly concluded that there are about 12 people with that kind of record in the entire nation. No disrespect intended to our current leaders, but almost none of them have actually done that much real stuff. "Incongruous" vocations? milquetoast? Yeah... So...umm...after experiencing the type of intensity that SWAT, combat, and the E.R. have to offer what can computers offer? I mean, I've messed with computers like most of the dorks here far too long...it isn't very exciting and there's a definity paucity of genuine experiences. Hitting the top of the score list in a game or reading about All Your Base Belong To Us can't possibly compare to a trauma case with real blood and real drama, right? I know it isn't like on television...really exciting stuff only happens a few times a day or week, not every hour, in the E.R., indeed? While there's an entire Google of information I'd love to parse you must have to answer, I'd really like to know how intense these things really are are were. And don't be afraid to email me...I haven't even been spammed yet.
Hey Tyro...you rock. Have you written up your life story anywhere? I think it's safe to say that at least in technical terms you've experienced the things that most of us geeks here only dream about. So...what is it like? (and how do I maximize my MCAT score in August? :P)
Email me at geraldmmonroe@hotmail.com
Just a note : if a black box is wiretapping, this would be like having a wiretap on EVERY telephone in the U.S., except that it can "only" be read with a court order. So, the moment the authorities find "reason" (basically anything) to suspect you, they know everything you said BEFORE the court order as well. Is this right? No idea, the argument most people would make is "you have nothing to fear if you're innocent".
What I meant is most people who meet the super rich generally agree they are usually charming and intelligent and seem to possess the top 1-10% level of those traits. That is, they are noticably smarter, better social organizers, and more productive than most other people. However, I question whether they are really worth 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more than other people.
Since I don't think that's physically possible (for anyone to do more than 1 order of magnitude more work than an average educated person), I have to assume the money was distributed unfairly. Perhaps theft is too strong a word, but how else do you explain it?
Actually, I've been of the opinion that human intelligence does have a scaling limit. Just because the ideas of these greats seem so impressive today doesn't mean much. First, if the individuals you named were really 1000 times smarter, how come the NET GAINS from their actions were much smaller than one would expect. The VAST majority of the inventions and ideas these people and others came up with never left the workshop. It's only now, after REinventing much of their work, that we praise them.
Further, as always, the men you named had more opportunity and wealth to utilize their creativity. I suspect that this sort of creativity is simply an emergent property of the human mind, and a large number of people are capable of it given the right circumstances.
I don't have a deep seated hatred of everyone 'rich'. People who one could say, within the bounds of reason, have 'earned' their money I have no problem with. I don't resent doctors or lawyers or top managers their wealth, as long as it falls somewhere within the bounds of reason for the work they do (mere tens of millions at the very top of the curve). Tens of billions is an entirely different matter.
See above. The company shareholders, obviously. An analogy : Mr. G starts a lemonade stand. He spends $10 of his own money getting it going, and it makes money. You and a few thousand other investors come in, then. He tricks you and the other investors into agreeing to invest 10 million dollars into the stand, with Mr. G retaining a 30% stake in the company. You have been stolen from.
That's just it. The way it was stolen was indirect : both through options packages that effectively take even MORE of the company and give it to these founders or higher ups, OR...
The shareholders were duped into agreeing that the 'first' guy to start the company should keep a significant fraction of the shares even though the shareholders invest many thousands or millions of times more dollars than the founder ever did.
The practical result is theft. Sure, it usually doesn't violate the laws...but that means little.
This is an example of a logical error. Yes, they lead the tiller on the ship...but simply because the decisions they make touch the wheel, does this mean they are 10,000 times as useful as anyone else? Is it somehow a rare trait for an individual to be able to understand and lead a corporate mechanism? Of course not. It's like saying the hand on the wheel is 100,000 times as important as the lookouts in the crow's nests or the actual tiller man in the engine room. Sure, the captain's hand perhaps is a litle more important than the less trained hands of the kitchen boy's....but not thousands or millions of times more as in corporations. Plenty of educated people exist who can provide these sorts of decisions, some no doubt better than the executives we have in place. The reason they are paid more is because the executive has name recognition in the minds of the company shareholders, not because his services are thousands, millions of times more valuble. A possible analogy might be Formula 1 racing cars. Every last part on those cars from the tiniest minutae in the engine firmware to suspension tuning has to be right for the car to win the race. Yet, the fans only remember the names of the driver, even though his labor is only a small portion of the work required to reach the finish line in time. Sure, driving a car is tough...but so is tuning the fuel system and making these machines even survive the race. Sure, leading the next level of workers as a corporate exec isn't easy...but neither is debugging code or designing candy colored computer cases.
What bothers me is there is no conceivable way these individuals could have performed over a billion dollars worth of labor, ever. I'm not advocating communism or socialism, I'm just pointing out a basic truth. None of these people could have conceivably done more useful work than the entire lifetimes work of thousands of people.
Sure, corporate CEOs and super rich are much more productive than the average person....but their brains still tick at a mere 1000hz. They can still only speak at a slowish 150wpm and listen at the same rate. Their memories still have limited durations like all other mortal humans. It just isn't physically possible for them to have done the work of 10,000 other people.
The money was not earned, it was stolen. In most cases, the money was stolen from the shareholders of the corporation in question, who by rights should have either had the money in dividends or seen the money re-invested in the corporate machine.
In some cases, the money was stolen from fortunes made by the ideas and productive results of employees of the company. Does anyone truly believe Jobs invented the imac and made it's phenomenal success possible? If you believe that, ask Wozniac what Jobs did with Wozniac's work at Atari.
Before someone accuses me of the obvious : no, I am personally involved in any of this. I'm simply noting the truth.
I mean by eligible : has demonstrated the academic ability to handle college, and does not yet have an education. That's maybe 5% of the population...which comes to $35,000 a person. A bit closer to the goal, enough for 2 years of school at least. High end tech : you do realize that for every experiment we do in space thousands on the ground have to be canceled. The cost difference is this extreme. So we'll never know what might be accomplished with the billions burned up by the space shuttles.
I have a better idea. It's cheaper to just BUILD A NEW CAPSULE! Let the old one sink. Or build a recovery vessel with a long arm on the crane or something, it's a trivial problem and there's no hurry. If you aren't concerned with recovering the old capsule in reusable shape, you could let it float out there a few weeks anyhow. (*gasp*. the reason is because you have to take apart the damn thing and replace half the components *anyway* and follow this complicated procedure so it can be 'safely' reused. It's simpler just to make a new one every time following the same procedure used to build every single one of them)
I suggest you retake high school physics. This is an exceedingly poor analogy as throwing parts of the rocket away (and propellant) is inherent as an emergent property of the physics here. That doesn't mean the Saturn V approach is the best possible, but it's actually quite a bit cheaper and safer than the shuttle.
The point remains the same...to get to Mars and back just requires a LOT bigger (and proportionally more expensive) extension of the Apollo tech. Essentially, rather than launching one Saturn 5 worth of stuff, dozens and dozens would be launched each with a piece for this flotilla of modules, engines, and vehicles to be sent to mars. This could have been done in 1975 if one wanted to spend the money.
(which would obviously be about a factor of 10 or so more than the Apollo program, to give approximately 6-12 people a chance to walk on the planet. This means that the productive labor of many many thousands of lifetimes would be spent on such a purpose. Of course, FAR more useful things could be done with those resources....we could spent that 500 billion or so on giving every eligible individual in the United States a college education, or paying scientists and technologists to develop high end tech to revolutionize our lives).
Oh, even worse than that. In this future, 99% of the money won't go to the artist...it'll go to the artist's agent. Practically everyone employeed will be a resource wasting middleman, because automation means that everyone can be marketers and middlemen, with just a handful of actually productive people.