No kidding. We live in a world where any drug with reported effects of Euphoria lists them as a severe negative side effect and it likely to be more tightly controlled.
An implementation could be built that works in a manner similar to Bitcoin but instead of cracking hashes you are performing encryption and doing processing of statistical analysis and cross indexing of data in a completely decentralized manner you could build an anonymous, safe, secure, and global system that potentially could gather statistically significant data on a scale that makes FDA controls and studies look like random speculation.
It could build a biometric fingerprint to assure no duplicate users. It would have a mining component for processing and check-ups but charge for diagnosis, After the diagnosis is complete it produces two printable QR codes one that retrieves the diagnosis and statistical evaluation and another that redeems for the cost of the diagnosis. So the system says you need a script, you go to a doctor, the doctor writes a script or orders the requested test or whatever and you give him the QR code. Otherwise you just credit the QR back to yourself. Doctors can double as exchanges. Implement a feedback mechanism to rate doctors and a fee to be listed as a doctor, the system dynamically adjusts the fee with the assumption that higher fees reduce the number of doctors who do not redeem significant quantities of QR codes. The currency system is essentially backed by Healthcare.
Here in the states any geek could produce a molecule, bundle it with an herb and sell it as a supplement. You are immune from liability as long as you made no claims but if people use your drug and report it to this system it will eventually start recommending it for you for anything it has shown statistically significant effectiveness for. It figures out drug interactions, it continues statistical analysis. Every person ever using it becomes a long term study subject. Since the geek can already do this legally but can't legally demonstrate effectiveness this is all upside.
This has the potential to turn the drug industry on its head. It doesn't prevent governments from regulating medications and treatment options and making sure patients can use government funded treatment options but gives you a way to build the benefits of decentralized facts based self regulating capitalism on top of it.
No worries. This has the potential to reduce the impact of having controlled substances which means it will never happen in a way that doctors need to worry about.
The problem is the most evil of all negative side effects. Euphoria! A computer AI running as a cellphone app wouldn't prescribe things without a cause but it also wouldn't police patients. That would be the excuse at least and never mind that the AI as a gateway to scripts guarantees screening for drug interactions and informed choices thus eliminating any excuses that could trump their right to make their own choice about what to put in their body.
Most likely the software prescribing anything will be seen as self-prescription because people are in denial about just being an AI themselves. So AI scripts probably won't be allowed in the first place. They will require you to take the recommendation to a doctor. So the general practitioner will continue to fill the same primary capacity, he will be a drug dispenser and liability holder. They will probably FDA regulate the software itself saying it is a physicians diagnostic tool and require a certified hardware platform for it. It will be expensive as hell but doctors will love it because the FDA certification will make them proof against lawsuits as long as they use it.
The Pharma industry also likely knows no algorithm given a free choice would end up prescribing their latest molecular tweaks. Statistically the generic older drug will work comparably and it mathematically doesn't make sense to prescribe something with less tracked history unless it has shown significant benefits over the old drug with the expired patent. If you let the AI analyze and discover treatments instead plugging in controlled FDA studies as statistical data instead of locking it to FDA recommendations it could analyze the health information of everyone who reports using any substance with the ability to get the result of controls through cross indexing data from routine checkups and sheer stupidly massive sample size. In most cases it would have as much or more data on unregulated herbal remedies/supplements, vitamin supplements, over the counter medications, diets, etc and would be able to find if and where they are effective and what their interactions are without any need to care about isolated molecules. If a chem geek isolated a molecule from a traditional herbal remedy and sold it as a supplement and it turned out to be more effective than the top cholesterol medication it could well end up being recommended nationwide without any FDA red tape and because the software and not the seller is advocating the effectiveness the seller would enjoy the same sort of immunity to liability a drug company enjoys. If he changed manufacturing in a way that reduced effectiveness that would automatically show up in the stats. And it would be global data not merely US data. Yeah big Pharma would never allow any of this to happen and neither would the FDA.
It's a nice dream. Maybe someone will build a network version that is open source and completely decentralized and can't be regulated after being kick started. It wouldn't be able to prescribe but nothing would stop it from collecting data about scripts and comparing it to reported data. If it grew large enough and it's effectiveness well known the result could be mostly the same. Then doctors could prescribe off label using the data and could point to the known reliability of the system to mitigate reliability.
"Congratulations! By the way, I have over thirty years experience doing hardware design and assembly programming."
I'd demand a refund. You also keep talking about hardware but we are talking about software.
"First, to your addressing question. I don't know if you are talking about segment-register type addressing, or bank-select type addressing, but in either case you are completely wrong... if you can address 4G then you have 32 addressing lines"
I wasn't asking a question. It doesn't matter what the underlying mechanism is or the count of address lines. A segment is an offset so yes a 16bit address with a 16bit offset is actually a 32bit address.
"I already said it does not matter what the unit is being selected (bit, byte, word, line, whatever). The addressing does not change based on the size of the data, on the number of data lines changes."
The addressing doesn't change based on the size of the data. The addressing changes based on the size of the storage. It is more efficient for a filesystem to abstract a disk into an address space that fits completely into one CPU register even at the expense of that address DIRECTLY pointing to every location on the disk. Address lines and physical implementation of the disk have nothing to do with it.
"WTF does something being measured in bits-per-second have to do with powers of two?"
The fact that the data, PROGRAM and USER DATA, is generated in powers of two and the network exists for the single purpose of transferring it? You don't label the device with a metric that most closely matches it's implementation or method of function, you label with the metric that most directly relates to utility. A user isn't transferring 5mbit to their other PC. They are transferring 5MB. Rating the network in anything but powers of two bytes means they'll have to perform a conversion before they can find out how long that will take.
"Likewise, the size of a harddisk is dependant only on the bit density of the medium. A disk can be manufactured in absolutely any size at all, there is NO 'natural' power of two boundary to disk sizes."
The physical mechanisms of the disk are completely irrelevant. A disk is a storage device. It's purpose is to store a users data. It's capacity rating does not exist to be an exact representation of the number of bits physically contained within but to let a user know how much file content can be stored on it. The rating isn't for use by an engineer it is for use by a buyer.
User data is generated in units that are power of two sized because memory is power of two sized and user data is generated in memory and stored to disk, usually in pieces that are the same size as the logical container of memory that contained the value being stored not the minimum number of bits that could potentially contain that specific piece of data.
"There is no reason that the 'word size' of a machine has to be a power of two."
No but there is plenty of properties innate to binary and implementations in binary that dictate it SHOULD be. I can flash back to the old days of making individual bits meaningful to squeeze the maximum potential out of a single byte and use XOR with masks to flip bits but there is plenty of reason I shouldn't that anywhere in a word processor implementation.
For starters if you have a logic implementation that works for one bit you can copy and paste the identical logic and it will now work for 2 bits. Copy and paste that and it now works for 4 bits, etc. Or in other places you are adding a bit to the logic, logically doubling the implementation in powers of 2. Binary logic can be made to magically grow in power of two increments and every power of 2 is evenly divisible by every power of 2 preceding it and a multiple of every value preceding it.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to use none power of 2 groupings or even come up with a scheme that is efficient. It's just a lot more effort for absolutely no gain. There is as much benefit to thinking of all binary compatible units IN binary as there to thinking of all decimal compatible units in decimal. If it weren't useful to keep all values in the same base there would be no SI.
You know a 5 dollar bill is 5 base 10 units not 1 base 5 unit right? A single base 5 unit would be worth $1 not 5 and multiplying it by 5 would not be 25.
A quantity of decimal units grouped together are still decimal units.
"You have posted more stupidly incorrect information in this forum than I have ever seen before."
You are getting fairly hostile for someone who is making stuff up as they go.
"Going back to async days, a 'packet' consisted of 1, 1.5, or two start bits, 5-8 data bits, 0 or 1 parity bit, and 1 or two stop bits."
1.5 start bits? That's amazing!
I've built binary systems using cmos chips loaded with gates. I've written ASM for various microprocessors depending on what I was playing with at the time. I wrote a toy minimal OS for x86 at one point. Hell I've even done some tcp/ip over nerf arrow to instruct students. But I've have never yet seen a half bit! Most likely because there are only two values a bit can have, 0 and 1.
"Oh, you didn't mean async, you meant something more modern, like Ethernet, right? OK, so what is the most common ethernet packet size? 1500 bytes."
Ethernet doesn't have packets. It splits them up. It is also hardly new. But if you look at the overhead for Ethernet you will see that all the values are divisible by 16bits (2bytes). That includes the default max 1500 bytes and minimum 46 bytes. They aren't powers of two but they are, deliberately, all even numbers of bytes. The reason for those choices are that devices that speak Ethernet are digital and at the time would be expected to have 8 or 16 bit registers. But the overall size of 1500 wasn't selected to be efficient at processing and has nothing to do with the size of data packets your computer generates it was chosen because it would tie up a 14.4k modem for 1 sec. When you are designing something to completely saturate a network for a full second you aren't trying to get it evenly into the fewest number of frames possible, you are trying to avoid retransmits and the cost of retransmits.
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/overhead
Now that networks are faster and more reliable we are seeing Ethernet revamped with jumbo frames. Let's take a look.
""Jumbo frames" extends ethernet to 9000 bytes. Why 9000? First because ethernet uses a 32 bit CRC that loses its effectiveness above about 12000 bytes. And secondly, 9000 was large enough to carry an 8 KB application datagram (e.g. NFS) plus packet header overhead. Is 9000 bytes enough? It's a lot better than 1500, but for pure performance reasons there is little reason to stop there. At 64 KB we reach the limit of an IPv4 datagram, while IPv6 allows for packets up to 4 GB in size. For ethernet however, the 32 bit CRC limit is hard to change, so don't expect to see ethernet frame sizes above 9000 bytes anytime soon. "
Look at that. When we aren't intentionally designing around a bigger problem like super slow and unreliable links we do suddenly come back to neat fitting power of 2 units after all. hmm... IPv4 limit is 64KB IPv6 allows 4GB in size. Ethernet uses a 32bit CRC. Odd how these are all power of two units.
"If every industry defined its own set of units you'd end up with a mess."
That's just it, these aren't industry defined units. These are physics defined units. They are physically incompatible with a decimal unit and therefore with the SI model.
And this isn't just any industry. We could drop SI before dropping computing.
Instead of 12 do base 3. Everything works better in base 3. Except conversion to 10 base numbers. Stop thinking in binary logic today and start looking at life in shades of grey! Things come in 3's not 2's, everybody knows that! Need to divide up 100 bucks three ways? 01021.1! Okay, now you do PI...
This actually makes more sense as long as they keep it to whole units of 1024 bytes and never divide capacity smaller than that. You don't generate data in 2^x values you actually generate it in y^x values where y is the size of an int on your system/8. 1024 bytes would cover us up to 4096 bit CPU's without having to worry about it about the value not being evenly divisible. Given that we've gone from 8 bits to 64 bits in like 20years or so it seems like a pretty good buffer for the foreseeable future.
Then it's just a matter of displaying in those units for filesize in the operating system.
Actually I wish they would create a new SI unit of data that is 1024 bytes and call it the "data" or something so it doesn't clash with bytes. They can decimal it up all day long as long as they make sure to truncate to a whole value when rating the capacity and there would be no harm done.
"This can be done in your head if you use base-10 units"
It can be done in your head using compatible binary units as well as long as you stay within a given unit be it KB, MB, GB etc you can shift decimal places all day long. And if you are HD manufacturer that amounts to converting those figures a new unit amounts to multiplying by 1024 every 5-10 years. Or they can simply store these values in bytes or some lowest common denominator and keep a list of constants for conversion factors to KB/MB/GB/etc. Of course they should always make drives that are of whole unit capacity or at least that are rated in the number of whole units without decimals so if you have a 3.2TB drive you rate that as 3TB or 3TB 204MB.
However data is generated in even power of 2 bounds that correspond to the size of CPU registers and memory units. Those units are always going to be some power of 2^8+. CPU registers have gone from 8 to 64bit in the past 20 years so it isn't growing fast but isn't going to be a decimal notation anytime in the next ever.
No I hate the change, I hate the new prefixes. But now that those prefixes exist they should be using base 2 aligned byte values with the new prefixes. Nobody should have ever used based 10 prefixes to refer to a count of base 2 units. It's stupid.
The correct thing for a digital device to do when measuring base 2 capacity is to use orders of base 2 magnitude because data is generated in base orders of magnitude and filesystems have to divide the space up into base 2 aligned units or else become fragmented to shite.
The correct thing for them to do now would be to list capacity with the base aligned equivalents from SI.
"Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?"
The si units exist for easy conversion, they are base 10 units.
Bits by definition are not base 10 units. You convert them in base 2 not base 10. 2^8 is a byte (because 8bit cpu's were once all the rage). 2^10 bits is a kilobyte, 2^20 bits is a megabyte, 2^30 bits is a gigabyte, etc. It is a way to express an order of magnitude more capacity. 1000000 bits does not actually represent an order of magnitude capacity increase relative to 1000 bits. An order of magnitude worth of bits expressed as a decimal count would be 1024 not 1000. That difference adds up to quite a bit as the numbers scale.
Sorry, but Microsoft was right. DATA is created in powers of 2 units because memory is manipulated in powers of 2. It isn't arbitrary that packet sizes are even powers of 2 or that filesystem chunks are power of 2 units.
It is ridiculous for something that handles binary data not to be in power of two units that divide evenly into CPU register friendly increments. None of that means it makes sense to hijack metric units but disks and network devices should be measured that way.
His point was that bits and bytes base 2 units not base 10 units. Therefore it is illogical to count them in base 10. It doesn't make much sense to refer to the number of digits of one base in a completely different base.
"None of what you are talking about has anything to do with what I said. I am talking about the measurement of things, not the things themselves."
Everything I am saying has to do with what you said. Specifically as to why you are wrong that Storage and Network should be rated in something other than power of 2 units. I can only assume you've never worked with assembly/machine code especially for smaller chips.
"With binary sizes however, all you need to do is use the address lines to directly access the correct location in the correct chip."
Not true. Directly addressing individual bits requires a huge address space. You only get 2^a where a is address bits locations. That's why we don't directly address individual bits. With a 16bit address you can directly address 65536 storage locations so if you work at the byte level you can directly address 64KB but you wouldn't because that isn't enough. You would directly address 65536 locations and then use a second 16 bit address as an offset to individual 64KB locations for a total of 4GB (that's real GB). Why 16bit vs 12bit or 15bit? Because that is the size of a register on your CPU and you don't want to have to double the number of instructions needed for each data access. With a true 32bit CPU you could directly address 4GB (power of 2 bytes). That's the other reason we don't directly address individual bits. It would be silly to address individual bits when the CPU loads and saves data in 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, or even 64bit chunks.
"Network speeds are not dependant in the slightest on a power-of-two, regardless of the data being transported."
1024bps, 1000bps, and 1100bps are all bits per second. In other words they all based on power-of-two. Nothing used in any digital system isn't bound by powers of two because they are all talking binary.
"Hard disk sizes are like network speeds: there is no inherent power-of-two to their size. There is no reason why a disk could not be made to hold exactly 1000000 bytes"
Again, a byte is a power of 2 unit. A bit is a power of two unit.
But that is all beside the point. Networks are for transferring data. Hard drives are for storing data. And data is generated by software running on computers working that work with data in chunks dictated by the size of an integer on their system. That size is going to be a power of two unit divisible by a byte. Network links are for transferring DATA. And hard drives are for storing DATA. Data is generated in power of two byte chunks by CPU's acting on memory and tracking memory in power of two units. It doesn't matter if my data is the number 1 and requires only 1 bit. I have to store it in an integer unit of ram. When I write it out I'm writing integer bits not the minimum number of bits needed for my data. That is why my files are sized in MB where that is 2^20 bits. As a consumer I expect to be able to store 1024 1MB data files on a 1GB drive but what I really get is 953 and that isn't counting filesystem overhead. By the time I format that drive it will have a capacity that is 10% less than advertised. How about a 1TB drive how many GB of data is that? 931GB of data files on that drive.
A 64KB packet of data is 524288 bits. Why am I using that odd size? Because it is the number of bytes I can address with a 16 bit integer. It might seem odd to you and I but it is a nice even increment for a computer. So now I need to know how many of those my 1mbit network link can handle at once. First I have to convert to bits so 524288 then divide it up... only 1.907! If I had 8 such links I could transfer 8 at a time. A byte is 8 bits so a 1MByte link should be about the same right? Let's see a 1MB link is 1024KByte which is 16 simultaneous packets! Odd how it works out evenly!
"Disks, network speeds, etc have no such 'binary' component. There is absolutely no reason that those things should be counted in binary."
How on earth would they not have a binary component? Network speeds are shown in bits (a binary unit) for the same reason memory is shown in bytes. The amount of individual meaningful units of information that can be stored in a binary value is 2^x where x is bits. But bits still don't make sense. The reason they don't make sense is that we represent binary in hexadecimal. You can represent 2 values with a bit. But you need two to represent the result of operations performed with them. 2*2 is 4. That is the minimum amount of storage you need to represent the results. We don't generally think in binary directly anymore. We think in hex. Well the same thing is true of hex that is true of binary. If you want to think in single hex digits you need two to store the largest result. A single hex digit is 4 bits so to store two we need 8. This is why the first computers to gain popular use had 8 bit registers in the CPU. Everything digital is working in binary, and it is still viewed as hex. That isn't going to change, even with quantum computing. Logical operations to handle more than 1 byte of data are just repetition and combinations of those that do the 8 bit operations. Logical operations up to 8 bits are easily tested by truth tables and systematically reduced to the mathematically guaranteed most efficient implementation with a given set of logic gates without the need for a computer.
So even though the size of the CPU register grows, it grows in units of 4^x bits which if you've followed along is automatically accomplished by growing by 2^x from 8 and since 8 is really 2^4 you could also look at that as 2^x. 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. We put significance on 2^10 (KB), 2^20 (MB), 2^30 (GB) because they correspond to orders of magnitude that seem meaningful to humans.
But network link speeds don't exist to be meaningful numbers to human, memory doesn't exist to be a meaningful number to humans, and neither does disk space. These exist to transfer computationally meaningful payloads and to store computationally meaningful data. This data is processed by and output by a Computers processor and that processor can only work with chunks of data that are size of its registers and those registers are going to be some multiple of 8 in size. Your physical storage medium or your physical network link implementation might allow for a few odd bits at the end but you are never going to be able to use them. Your filesystem is going to work with units of bytes or larger and your packets are going to be composed of bytes or larger.
"I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity."
I said nothing of the sort. I clearly said of a next Einstein, "Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed."
I.E. Advanced Physics and mathematics skills among other prerequisites and the ability to see simplicity in complexity.
You just got hung up on my implication that someone who gained an understanding of physics from informal learning rather than university study could potentially have value and yet would have no opportunity to express their insight under the current peer review system. It got your back up and you read the rest of what I said as what you expected to hear. Namely an assertion of that oft repeated and poorly informed opinion that a great leap or out-of-the-box idea would come from someone without knowledge of the subject because they are an outsider. I did not claim that and I do not claim that.
I will say, there is nothing about theoretical (as opposed to applied) physics that you can learn at a university that you can't learn from an armchair at home. Note, I didn't just assert that armchair physicists are equally educated to university trained. I said the POTENTIAL for an armchair physicist to attain that level is there. Such an individual would have expended as least as much effort as one university trained and would be barred from even reaching peer review in the traditional journals. Surely you can admit that isn't a good thing? Such individuals attempting to get published should be viewed on the merits of what they are trying to publish rather than personal credentials. Perhaps tossing such submissions in an online archive where those with better and more established reputation can choose to voluntarily review a few here and there where individuals with more formal credentials and with a positive history get fast tracked for peer review. Additionally those with a poor historical record (regardless of credentials) could be tossed into yet a third pile where especially open minded or bored individuals could review them.
You said previously that anyone can see simplicity in complexity but that is not true. Learning the complexity comes at the expense of seeing the simplicity for most. Once you understand all those intricacies and details it becomes difficult to impossible to look at the forest without seeing all those trees. In that regard, an individual with less thorough understanding might actually have an easier time intuitively understanding higher level aspects of a model than someone mired in the details. That person would be wrong the vast majority of the time but such a person positing ideas in intelligent conversation with someone who did understand the details could potentially yield fruit that neither alone would have arrived at.
"you need to understand the math, you need a deep understanding of it" "I'd say all three would be great for understanding math/physics"
I don't think we are really disagreeing here. I think we are splitting hairs that come into play when mathematics reaches the level of physics. Technically, the models themselves are math and certainly physics as well. Having an intuitive understanding of the model, an ability to see "imagery of movement" and "visuospatial cognition" could well be called a deep understanding of the math and physics involved. I separate that from skill at working problems as equations on a board. A great many can work very advanced problems on a board and never have that ability to intuitively and intimately understand the models behind them. There are quite a few equations to describe aspects of a grouping of gears
You realize everything you just said was anticipated and answered within text from my post you quoted right?
"Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk."
There were dozens of people as skilled as Einstein when it came to math and equally knowledgeable about physics. There are thousands of them today. Einstein had a portion of the brain known to be related to visuospatial cognition that was 15% larger than normal. That particular area of the brain activates when unusual creative thinking is occurring. That is what set him apart.
The idea of an engine was a revolutionary breakthrough. Steam and internal combustion are just progressive steps. Whatever new breakthroughs do come down the line, those who come after them will see them as simple and low hanging fruit.
That is what they thought before Einstein and at pretty much all points in history. The fact that you can list those things makes those things all progressive steps in technology. If you can name it, then it isn't a revolutionary breakthrough but rather just a milestone we haven't hit yet.
The breakthroughs of the past weren't low hanging fruit. Like all great breakthroughs they just seem like low hanging fruit to the people who come after.
There are a million and one off the shelf solutions that will detect movement, etc and trigger recording based on it and likely something came with the cameras. I don't know of any that both record 24/7 AND highlight events. It might be possible to duplicate the video stream through two solutions or have overlapping coverage cameras with some streams set to record 24/7 and some that trigger on movement.
Slashdot Mirror
For a win you'd need to slap the bill on the low life that DID rat on his brother.
No kidding. We live in a world where any drug with reported effects of Euphoria lists them as a severe negative side effect and it likely to be more tightly controlled.
I can't see this obsoleting doctors.
An implementation could be built that works in a manner similar to Bitcoin but instead of cracking hashes you are performing encryption and doing processing of statistical analysis and cross indexing of data in a completely decentralized manner you could build an anonymous, safe, secure, and global system that potentially could gather statistically significant data on a scale that makes FDA controls and studies look like random speculation.
It could build a biometric fingerprint to assure no duplicate users. It would have a mining component for processing and check-ups but charge for diagnosis, After the diagnosis is complete it produces two printable QR codes one that retrieves the diagnosis and statistical evaluation and another that redeems for the cost of the diagnosis. So the system says you need a script, you go to a doctor, the doctor writes a script or orders the requested test or whatever and you give him the QR code. Otherwise you just credit the QR back to yourself. Doctors can double as exchanges. Implement a feedback mechanism to rate doctors and a fee to be listed as a doctor, the system dynamically adjusts the fee with the assumption that higher fees reduce the number of doctors who do not redeem significant quantities of QR codes. The currency system is essentially backed by Healthcare.
Here in the states any geek could produce a molecule, bundle it with an herb and sell it as a supplement. You are immune from liability as long as you made no claims but if people use your drug and report it to this system it will eventually start recommending it for you for anything it has shown statistically significant effectiveness for. It figures out drug interactions, it continues statistical analysis. Every person ever using it becomes a long term study subject. Since the geek can already do this legally but can't legally demonstrate effectiveness this is all upside.
This has the potential to turn the drug industry on its head. It doesn't prevent governments from regulating medications and treatment options and making sure patients can use government funded treatment options but gives you a way to build the benefits of decentralized facts based self regulating capitalism on top of it.
Sorry, s/reliability/liability/ at the end there. Probably lots of other typos in that rant too.
No worries. This has the potential to reduce the impact of having controlled substances which means it will never happen in a way that doctors need to worry about.
The problem is the most evil of all negative side effects. Euphoria! A computer AI running as a cellphone app wouldn't prescribe things without a cause but it also wouldn't police patients. That would be the excuse at least and never mind that the AI as a gateway to scripts guarantees screening for drug interactions and informed choices thus eliminating any excuses that could trump their right to make their own choice about what to put in their body.
Most likely the software prescribing anything will be seen as self-prescription because people are in denial about just being an AI themselves. So AI scripts probably won't be allowed in the first place. They will require you to take the recommendation to a doctor. So the general practitioner will continue to fill the same primary capacity, he will be a drug dispenser and liability holder. They will probably FDA regulate the software itself saying it is a physicians diagnostic tool and require a certified hardware platform for it. It will be expensive as hell but doctors will love it because the FDA certification will make them proof against lawsuits as long as they use it.
The Pharma industry also likely knows no algorithm given a free choice would end up prescribing their latest molecular tweaks. Statistically the generic older drug will work comparably and it mathematically doesn't make sense to prescribe something with less tracked history unless it has shown significant benefits over the old drug with the expired patent. If you let the AI analyze and discover treatments instead plugging in controlled FDA studies as statistical data instead of locking it to FDA recommendations it could analyze the health information of everyone who reports using any substance with the ability to get the result of controls through cross indexing data from routine checkups and sheer stupidly massive sample size. In most cases it would have as much or more data on unregulated herbal remedies/supplements, vitamin supplements, over the counter medications, diets, etc and would be able to find if and where they are effective and what their interactions are without any need to care about isolated molecules. If a chem geek isolated a molecule from a traditional herbal remedy and sold it as a supplement and it turned out to be more effective than the top cholesterol medication it could well end up being recommended nationwide without any FDA red tape and because the software and not the seller is advocating the effectiveness the seller would enjoy the same sort of immunity to liability a drug company enjoys. If he changed manufacturing in a way that reduced effectiveness that would automatically show up in the stats. And it would be global data not merely US data. Yeah big Pharma would never allow any of this to happen and neither would the FDA.
It's a nice dream. Maybe someone will build a network version that is open source and completely decentralized and can't be regulated after being kick started. It wouldn't be able to prescribe but nothing would stop it from collecting data about scripts and comparing it to reported data. If it grew large enough and it's effectiveness well known the result could be mostly the same. Then doctors could prescribe off label using the data and could point to the known reliability of the system to mitigate reliability.
I'd be more excited if they could dead cells into live ones.
"Congratulations! By the way, I have over thirty years experience doing hardware design and assembly programming."
I'd demand a refund. You also keep talking about hardware but we are talking about software.
"First, to your addressing question. I don't know if you are talking about segment-register type addressing, or bank-select type addressing, but in either case you are completely wrong... if you can address 4G then you have 32 addressing lines"
I wasn't asking a question. It doesn't matter what the underlying mechanism is or the count of address lines. A segment is an offset so yes a 16bit address with a 16bit offset is actually a 32bit address.
"I already said it does not matter what the unit is being selected (bit, byte, word, line, whatever). The addressing does not change based on the size of the data, on the number of data lines changes."
The addressing doesn't change based on the size of the data. The addressing changes based on the size of the storage. It is more efficient for a filesystem to abstract a disk into an address space that fits completely into one CPU register even at the expense of that address DIRECTLY pointing to every location on the disk. Address lines and physical implementation of the disk have nothing to do with it.
"WTF does something being measured in bits-per-second have to do with powers of two?"
The fact that the data, PROGRAM and USER DATA, is generated in powers of two and the network exists for the single purpose of transferring it? You don't label the device with a metric that most closely matches it's implementation or method of function, you label with the metric that most directly relates to utility. A user isn't transferring 5mbit to their other PC. They are transferring 5MB. Rating the network in anything but powers of two bytes means they'll have to perform a conversion before they can find out how long that will take.
"Likewise, the size of a harddisk is dependant only on the bit density of the medium. A disk can be manufactured in absolutely any size at all, there is NO 'natural' power of two boundary to disk sizes."
The physical mechanisms of the disk are completely irrelevant. A disk is a storage device. It's purpose is to store a users data. It's capacity rating does not exist to be an exact representation of the number of bits physically contained within but to let a user know how much file content can be stored on it. The rating isn't for use by an engineer it is for use by a buyer.
User data is generated in units that are power of two sized because memory is power of two sized and user data is generated in memory and stored to disk, usually in pieces that are the same size as the logical container of memory that contained the value being stored not the minimum number of bits that could potentially contain that specific piece of data.
"There is no reason that the 'word size' of a machine has to be a power of two."
No but there is plenty of properties innate to binary and implementations in binary that dictate it SHOULD be. I can flash back to the old days of making individual bits meaningful to squeeze the maximum potential out of a single byte and use XOR with masks to flip bits but there is plenty of reason I shouldn't that anywhere in a word processor implementation.
For starters if you have a logic implementation that works for one bit you can copy and paste the identical logic and it will now work for 2 bits. Copy and paste that and it now works for 4 bits, etc. Or in other places you are adding a bit to the logic, logically doubling the implementation in powers of 2. Binary logic can be made to magically grow in power of two increments and every power of 2 is evenly divisible by every power of 2 preceding it and a multiple of every value preceding it.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to use none power of 2 groupings or even come up with a scheme that is efficient. It's just a lot more effort for absolutely no gain. There is as much benefit to thinking of all binary compatible units IN binary as there to thinking of all decimal compatible units in decimal. If it weren't useful to keep all values in the same base there would be no SI.
You know a 5 dollar bill is 5 base 10 units not 1 base 5 unit right? A single base 5 unit would be worth $1 not 5 and multiplying it by 5 would not be 25.
A quantity of decimal units grouped together are still decimal units.
"You have posted more stupidly incorrect information in this forum than I have ever seen before."
You are getting fairly hostile for someone who is making stuff up as they go.
"Going back to async days, a 'packet' consisted of 1, 1.5, or two start bits, 5-8 data bits, 0 or 1 parity bit, and 1 or two stop bits."
1.5 start bits? That's amazing!
I've built binary systems using cmos chips loaded with gates. I've written ASM for various microprocessors depending on what I was playing with at the time. I wrote a toy minimal OS for x86 at one point. Hell I've even done some tcp/ip over nerf arrow to instruct students. But I've have never yet seen a half bit! Most likely because there are only two values a bit can have, 0 and 1.
"Oh, you didn't mean async, you meant something more modern, like Ethernet, right? OK, so what is the most common ethernet packet size? 1500 bytes."
Ethernet doesn't have packets. It splits them up. It is also hardly new. But if you look at the overhead for Ethernet you will see that all the values are divisible by 16bits (2bytes). That includes the default max 1500 bytes and minimum 46 bytes. They aren't powers of two but they are, deliberately, all even numbers of bytes. The reason for those choices are that devices that speak Ethernet are digital and at the time would be expected to have 8 or 16 bit registers. But the overall size of 1500 wasn't selected to be efficient at processing and has nothing to do with the size of data packets your computer generates it was chosen because it would tie up a 14.4k modem for 1 sec. When you are designing something to completely saturate a network for a full second you aren't trying to get it evenly into the fewest number of frames possible, you are trying to avoid retransmits and the cost of retransmits.
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/overhead
Now that networks are faster and more reliable we are seeing Ethernet revamped with jumbo frames. Let's take a look.
""Jumbo frames" extends ethernet to 9000 bytes. Why 9000? First because ethernet uses a 32 bit CRC that loses its effectiveness above about 12000 bytes. And secondly, 9000 was large enough to carry an 8 KB application datagram (e.g. NFS) plus packet header overhead. Is 9000 bytes enough? It's a lot better than 1500, but for pure performance reasons there is little reason to stop there. At 64 KB we reach the limit of an IPv4 datagram, while IPv6 allows for packets up to 4 GB in size. For ethernet however, the 32 bit CRC limit is hard to change, so don't expect to see ethernet frame sizes above 9000 bytes anytime soon. "
Look at that. When we aren't intentionally designing around a bigger problem like super slow and unreliable links we do suddenly come back to neat fitting power of 2 units after all. hmm... IPv4 limit is 64KB IPv6 allows 4GB in size. Ethernet uses a 32bit CRC. Odd how these are all power of two units.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn
G.hn specifies data frames of 2^14.
"If every industry defined its own set of units you'd end up with a mess."
That's just it, these aren't industry defined units. These are physics defined units. They are physically incompatible with a decimal unit and therefore with the SI model.
And this isn't just any industry. We could drop SI before dropping computing.
Instead of 12 do base 3. Everything works better in base 3. Except conversion to 10 base numbers. Stop thinking in binary logic today and start looking at life in shades of grey! Things come in 3's not 2's, everybody knows that! Need to divide up 100 bucks three ways? 01021.1! Okay, now you do PI...
This actually makes more sense as long as they keep it to whole units of 1024 bytes and never divide capacity smaller than that. You don't generate data in 2^x values you actually generate it in y^x values where y is the size of an int on your system/8. 1024 bytes would cover us up to 4096 bit CPU's without having to worry about it about the value not being evenly divisible. Given that we've gone from 8 bits to 64 bits in like 20years or so it seems like a pretty good buffer for the foreseeable future.
Then it's just a matter of displaying in those units for filesize in the operating system.
Actually I wish they would create a new SI unit of data that is 1024 bytes and call it the "data" or something so it doesn't clash with bytes. They can decimal it up all day long as long as they make sure to truncate to a whole value when rating the capacity and there would be no harm done.
"This can be done in your head if you use base-10 units"
It can be done in your head using compatible binary units as well as long as you stay within a given unit be it KB, MB, GB etc you can shift decimal places all day long. And if you are HD manufacturer that amounts to converting those figures a new unit amounts to multiplying by 1024 every 5-10 years. Or they can simply store these values in bytes or some lowest common denominator and keep a list of constants for conversion factors to KB/MB/GB/etc. Of course they should always make drives that are of whole unit capacity or at least that are rated in the number of whole units without decimals so if you have a 3.2TB drive you rate that as 3TB or 3TB 204MB.
However data is generated in even power of 2 bounds that correspond to the size of CPU registers and memory units. Those units are always going to be some power of 2^8+. CPU registers have gone from 8 to 64bit in the past 20 years so it isn't growing fast but isn't going to be a decimal notation anytime in the next ever.
No I hate the change, I hate the new prefixes. But now that those prefixes exist they should be using base 2 aligned byte values with the new prefixes. Nobody should have ever used based 10 prefixes to refer to a count of base 2 units. It's stupid.
The correct thing for a digital device to do when measuring base 2 capacity is to use orders of base 2 magnitude because data is generated in base orders of magnitude and filesystems have to divide the space up into base 2 aligned units or else become fragmented to shite.
The correct thing for them to do now would be to list capacity with the base aligned equivalents from SI.
"Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?"
The si units exist for easy conversion, they are base 10 units.
Bits by definition are not base 10 units. You convert them in base 2 not base 10. 2^8 is a byte (because 8bit cpu's were once all the rage). 2^10 bits is a kilobyte, 2^20 bits is a megabyte, 2^30 bits is a gigabyte, etc. It is a way to express an order of magnitude more capacity. 1000000 bits does not actually represent an order of magnitude capacity increase relative to 1000 bits. An order of magnitude worth of bits expressed as a decimal count would be 1024 not 1000. That difference adds up to quite a bit as the numbers scale.
Sorry, but Microsoft was right. DATA is created in powers of 2 units because memory is manipulated in powers of 2. It isn't arbitrary that packet sizes are even powers of 2 or that filesystem chunks are power of 2 units.
It is ridiculous for something that handles binary data not to be in power of two units that divide evenly into CPU register friendly increments. None of that means it makes sense to hijack metric units but disks and network devices should be measured that way.
His point was that bits and bytes base 2 units not base 10 units. Therefore it is illogical to count them in base 10. It doesn't make much sense to refer to the number of digits of one base in a completely different base.
"None of what you are talking about has anything to do with what I said. I am talking about the measurement of things, not the things themselves."
Everything I am saying has to do with what you said. Specifically as to why you are wrong that Storage and Network should be rated in something other than power of 2 units. I can only assume you've never worked with assembly/machine code especially for smaller chips.
"With binary sizes however, all you need to do is use the address lines to directly access the correct location in the correct chip."
Not true. Directly addressing individual bits requires a huge address space. You only get 2^a where a is address bits locations. That's why we don't directly address individual bits. With a 16bit address you can directly address 65536 storage locations so if you work at the byte level you can directly address 64KB but you wouldn't because that isn't enough. You would directly address 65536 locations and then use a second 16 bit address as an offset to individual 64KB locations for a total of 4GB (that's real GB). Why 16bit vs 12bit or 15bit? Because that is the size of a register on your CPU and you don't want to have to double the number of instructions needed for each data access. With a true 32bit CPU you could directly address 4GB (power of 2 bytes). That's the other reason we don't directly address individual bits. It would be silly to address individual bits when the CPU loads and saves data in 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, or even 64bit chunks.
"Network speeds are not dependant in the slightest on a power-of-two, regardless of the data being transported."
1024bps, 1000bps, and 1100bps are all bits per second. In other words they all based on power-of-two. Nothing used in any digital system isn't bound by powers of two because they are all talking binary.
"Hard disk sizes are like network speeds: there is no inherent power-of-two to their size. There is no reason why a disk could not be made to hold exactly 1000000 bytes"
Again, a byte is a power of 2 unit. A bit is a power of two unit.
But that is all beside the point. Networks are for transferring data. Hard drives are for storing data. And data is generated by software running on computers working that work with data in chunks dictated by the size of an integer on their system. That size is going to be a power of two unit divisible by a byte.
Network links are for transferring DATA. And hard drives are for storing DATA. Data is generated in power of two byte chunks by CPU's acting on memory and tracking memory in power of two units. It doesn't matter if my data is the number 1 and requires only 1 bit. I have to store it in an integer unit of ram. When I write it out I'm writing integer bits not the minimum number of bits needed for my data. That is why my files are sized in MB where that is 2^20 bits. As a consumer I expect to be able to store 1024 1MB data files on a 1GB drive but what I really get is 953 and that isn't counting filesystem overhead. By the time I format that drive it will have a capacity that is 10% less than advertised. How about a 1TB drive how many GB of data is that? 931GB of data files on that drive.
A 64KB packet of data is 524288 bits. Why am I using that odd size? Because it is the number of bytes I can address with a 16 bit integer. It might seem odd to you and I but it is a nice even increment for a computer. So now I need to know how many of those my 1mbit network link can handle at once. First I have to convert to bits so 524288 then divide it up... only 1.907! If I had 8 such links I could transfer 8 at a time. A byte is 8 bits so a 1MByte link should be about the same right? Let's see a 1MB link is 1024KByte which is 16 simultaneous packets! Odd how it works out evenly!
"Disks, network speeds, etc have no such 'binary' component. There is absolutely no reason that those things should be counted in binary."
How on earth would they not have a binary component? Network speeds are shown in bits (a binary unit) for the same reason memory is shown in bytes. The amount of individual meaningful units of information that can be stored in a binary value is 2^x where x is bits. But bits still don't make sense. The reason they don't make sense is that we represent binary in hexadecimal. You can represent 2 values with a bit. But you need two to represent the result of operations performed with them. 2*2 is 4. That is the minimum amount of storage you need to represent the results. We don't generally think in binary directly anymore. We think in hex. Well the same thing is true of hex that is true of binary. If you want to think in single hex digits you need two to store the largest result. A single hex digit is 4 bits so to store two we need 8. This is why the first computers to gain popular use had 8 bit registers in the CPU. Everything digital is working in binary, and it is still viewed as hex. That isn't going to change, even with quantum computing. Logical operations to handle more than 1 byte of data are just repetition and combinations of those that do the 8 bit operations. Logical operations up to 8 bits are easily tested by truth tables and systematically reduced to the mathematically guaranteed most efficient implementation with a given set of logic gates without the need for a computer.
So even though the size of the CPU register grows, it grows in units of 4^x bits which if you've followed along is automatically accomplished by growing by 2^x from 8 and since 8 is really 2^4 you could also look at that as 2^x. 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. We put significance on 2^10 (KB), 2^20 (MB), 2^30 (GB) because they correspond to orders of magnitude that seem meaningful to humans.
But network link speeds don't exist to be meaningful numbers to human, memory doesn't exist to be a meaningful number to humans, and neither does disk space. These exist to transfer computationally meaningful payloads and to store computationally meaningful data. This data is processed by and output by a Computers processor and that processor can only work with chunks of data that are size of its registers and those registers are going to be some multiple of 8 in size. Your physical storage medium or your physical network link implementation might allow for a few odd bits at the end but you are never going to be able to use them. Your filesystem is going to work with units of bytes or larger and your packets are going to be composed of bytes or larger.
"I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity."
I said nothing of the sort. I clearly said of a next Einstein, "Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed."
I.E. Advanced Physics and mathematics skills among other prerequisites and the ability to see simplicity in complexity.
You just got hung up on my implication that someone who gained an understanding of physics from informal learning rather than university study could potentially have value and yet would have no opportunity to express their insight under the current peer review system. It got your back up and you read the rest of what I said as what you expected to hear. Namely an assertion of that oft repeated and poorly informed opinion that a great leap or out-of-the-box idea would come from someone without knowledge of the subject because they are an outsider. I did not claim that and I do not claim that.
I will say, there is nothing about theoretical (as opposed to applied) physics that you can learn at a university that you can't learn from an armchair at home. Note, I didn't just assert that armchair physicists are equally educated to university trained. I said the POTENTIAL for an armchair physicist to attain that level is there. Such an individual would have expended as least as much effort as one university trained and would be barred from even reaching peer review in the traditional journals. Surely you can admit that isn't a good thing? Such individuals attempting to get published should be viewed on the merits of what they are trying to publish rather than personal credentials. Perhaps tossing such submissions in an online archive where those with better and more established reputation can choose to voluntarily review a few here and there where individuals with more formal credentials and with a positive history get fast tracked for peer review. Additionally those with a poor historical record (regardless of credentials) could be tossed into yet a third pile where especially open minded or bored individuals could review them.
You said previously that anyone can see simplicity in complexity but that is not true. Learning the complexity comes at the expense of seeing the simplicity for most. Once you understand all those intricacies and details it becomes difficult to impossible to look at the forest without seeing all those trees. In that regard, an individual with less thorough understanding might actually have an easier time intuitively understanding higher level aspects of a model than someone mired in the details. That person would be wrong the vast majority of the time but such a person positing ideas in intelligent conversation with someone who did understand the details could potentially yield fruit that neither alone would have arrived at.
"you need to understand the math, you need a deep understanding of it" "I'd say all three would be great for understanding math/physics"
I don't think we are really disagreeing here. I think we are splitting hairs that come into play when mathematics reaches the level of physics. Technically, the models themselves are math and certainly physics as well. Having an intuitive understanding of the model, an ability to see "imagery of movement" and "visuospatial cognition" could well be called a deep understanding of the math and physics involved. I separate that from skill at working problems as equations on a board. A great many can work very advanced problems on a board and never have that ability to intuitively and intimately understand the models behind them. There are quite a few equations to describe aspects of a grouping of gears
You realize everything you just said was anticipated and answered within text from my post you quoted right?
"Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk."
There were dozens of people as skilled as Einstein when it came to math and equally knowledgeable about physics. There are thousands of them today. Einstein had a portion of the brain known to be related to visuospatial cognition that was 15% larger than normal. That particular area of the brain activates when unusual creative thinking is occurring. That is what set him apart.
The idea of an engine was a revolutionary breakthrough. Steam and internal combustion are just progressive steps. Whatever new breakthroughs do come down the line, those who come after them will see them as simple and low hanging fruit.
That is what they thought before Einstein and at pretty much all points in history. The fact that you can list those things makes those things all progressive steps in technology. If you can name it, then it isn't a revolutionary breakthrough but rather just a milestone we haven't hit yet.
The breakthroughs of the past weren't low hanging fruit. Like all great breakthroughs they just seem like low hanging fruit to the people who come after.
There are a million and one off the shelf solutions that will detect movement, etc and trigger recording based on it and likely something came with the cameras. I don't know of any that both record 24/7 AND highlight events. It might be possible to duplicate the video stream through two solutions or have overlapping coverage cameras with some streams set to record 24/7 and some that trigger on movement.