No offense, but wouldn't research money be better spent on diseases that we have very little control over contracting? For example, I smoke, and if I get lung cancer, I have no one to blame but myself. Assuming someone out there is researching a cure for lung cancer, I would still be all for diverting that money into a disease that is largely incidental or hereditary, such as diabetes. As the old adage goes: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
First of all, if the road markers can snap a photo of my license plate, how is the info retrieved? Since they're solar-powered, I would assume that there are no plans to dig up the highways and run wire for power/communication, and I don't see how a small solar cell is going to provide enough power to light a few LED's *and* transmit several sufficiently-detailed photos via any wireless means. However, assuming I'm incorrect in that assumption, what's to stop each and every one of these from taking my picture? Even using OCR to quickly check my plates against a database of previously offending plates is only going to be useful *after* the picture has been taken. It just seems unlikely that there is any way to keep every single one of those markers from photographing the license plates of every car on the road. Any way you slice it, that sort of system would have to be horribly inefficient.
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That $565 Billion is so Bush can buy enough Duplo blocks to personally put a man on Mars....
...take the unused bandwidth and divert it toward broadcasting shows that havn't been dumbed-down for the masses?
No offense, but wouldn't research money be better spent on diseases that we have very little control over contracting? For example, I smoke, and if I get lung cancer, I have no one to blame but myself. Assuming someone out there is researching a cure for lung cancer, I would still be all for diverting that money into a disease that is largely incidental or hereditary, such as diabetes. As the old adage goes: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
First of all, if the road markers can snap a photo of my license plate, how is the info retrieved? Since they're solar-powered, I would assume that there are no plans to dig up the highways and run wire for power/communication, and I don't see how a small solar cell is going to provide enough power to light a few LED's *and* transmit several sufficiently-detailed photos via any wireless means. However, assuming I'm incorrect in that assumption, what's to stop each and every one of these from taking my picture? Even using OCR to quickly check my plates against a database of previously offending plates is only going to be useful *after* the picture has been taken. It just seems unlikely that there is any way to keep every single one of those markers from photographing the license plates of every car on the road. Any way you slice it, that sort of system would have to be horribly inefficient.