It is a matter of opportunity. It takes resources to steal and utilize nuclear material. If it is all over the place, it is easier. We should be removing it from the economic system, not proliferating it.
A clever thought, but it would not solve the problem. In fact, it would make it worse. A breeder reactor fuel cycle would require used fuel rods to be transported to reprocessing plants. That means: lots of trucks on the road carrying the most dangerous substance known to man....
What if we didn't have nuclear power? We would be just fine.
Claims that we have to use it because other forms of renewable energy are not ready, are mistaken.
As Churchill said, 'Americans can be counted on to do the right thing only after all other options have been exhausted.'
And indeed, the US will not develop alternatives to oil and nuclear unless we have no choice about it. But if those options were removed, we would find alternatives. It would be costly for awhile, but eventually costs would go down and new industries will have been born.
The fact is, as a former nuclear engineer, I can say with some intimate knowledge that nuclear energy is extremely dangerous from a proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism. Nuclear reactors produce plutonium in their fuel rods, and plutonium is one of the most hazardous materials on Earth; and it is possible to purify plutonium sufficiently to make a dirty bomb powerful enough to take out a city, using table-top chemical processes. One does not need enrichment centrifuges the way that one does for uranium.
If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power.
I think that the wave function does not collapse because the observation becomes part of the wave function. Thus, there still must be an "Observer". Otherwise, the observer is merely theoretical. The "Observer" makes it real.
The fact that it is not real until there is an "Observer" is what provides the suspicious link between QM and consciousness.
I have often wondered if we have it all backwards: maybe consciousness _is_ the universe in some way. Maybe the "physical world" is nothing but observations that must all correlate and be consistent because the universe's transactional wave function requires them to be in order to satisfy endpoint conditions. Maybe the state space of the universe is somehow a consciousness system. Maybe the only observations that must correlate are the ones that have Observers. I know this is conjecture without theory, but isn't it possible? Who are we to discard such an idea, when we clearly don't really know what consciousness is?
Consider this: one can never, ever prove that the world exists apart from one's consciousness. That fact alone should make us take pause.
I am not saying it is this way: I am merely wondering. Something seems to be going on that is not as we think. To solve the problem of consciousness we must have an open mind.
Good points, but not sure that eliminating causation solves the problem of the role of consciousness in the Copenhagen interpretation.
There still must be an observer. In the transactional view, the observer is a receiver, and emits waves just as the event being observed does. However, one cannot remove the observer and have a complete transaction. There is no transaction until an observer is introduced. If the observer is a device and not a consciousness, then one can apply the "Wigner's friend" and extend the system that is being observed to encompass the device, so that the transaction is the end to end phenomenon of the original event terminating with the conscious observation.
I have a Roku and an Apple TV. I will not be surprised if these things become a commodity at some point; but we are not there yet by any means. These boxes have quite different portfolios of available content, and very different styles of operation. I like them both. I like having both. I find them far superior to the on-demand services offered by my cable provider (Comcast). I never, ever watch broadcast cable anymore: I obtain all of my content via these external boxes, and always commercial free.
"The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
Heaven help us. Then literally nothing will work anymore. I shudder every time I use a "smart" appliance. To me, a "smart" appliance - one with an embedded computer - is something that needs occasional reboots, contains concurrency bugs and therefore gets into undefined states ("frozen"), second guess incorrectly about what I want it to do, needs to be recharged and have its batteries replaced, is vulnerable to hacking, needs continual updates, needs to be "managed" in various ways, and is generally not reliable enough to trust. Smart appliances make life miserable. Unless we can radically change the way that we program these things, to alleviate these ills, a world in which everything is a "smart" appliance is a frustrating world in which nothing works anymore.
"Chromebooks are a new model that doesn't put the burden of managing the computer on yourself."
Really?
What about thin clients?
And before that, what about X terminals?
There is nothing new here. It is still a good idea to some extent: for applications that can always be connected when they need to be. But there is no new concept here. The only things that are new are that (1) the client has become immeasurably more complex and heavyweight (a browser versus a terminal), with very little additional value over what X terminals offered; and (2) there is now an Internet in place so that connecting to the server is easier when it is beyond the local LAN.
My essential point is that if a drug company is in the business of cancer research, their managers have a portfolio of R&D proposals. These managers are going to choose the ones that have the highest ROI and lowest risk, given limited R&D funds. And the ones that have the highest ROI and lowest risk are usually the ones involving long-term treatment - not cures.
I concede that a drug company might produce a cure (what "cure" means is not the point). However, the current economic motivators do not favor it.
No. Health is not viewed in these terms. If a cure cost $10 to produce, and a company tried to charge $30,000 for that cure, there would immediately be Congressional hearings about it. It is widely viewed as immoral to profit excessively from providing a cure. Look at the case of the drug Makena. Before it was approved it cost $15 a shot, but after approval the company increased the cost to $1500 a shot, and there is a huge outcry now.
People would not stand for a company charging $30,000 for a cure if the true cost of that cure was substantially less. It would be considered to be immoral: holding a cure from all except those who can afford to pay the huge price, and a death sentence for everyone else, while company shareholders made huge profits. People would not stand for it, and it would bring huge scrutiny over the company.
You don't deserve a response. I pity anyone who lives with you or has to discuss anything with you. I will never reply to any post of yours again, Russotto.
PS - I never got less than 720 on any standardized test, and often scored in the 99th percentile, so I know that I am not an "idiot". And by the way, I have written four books and built a successful company with 183 people. What have you done?
Yes, I suspect you are right. But the equipment I have tried include the latest models of Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys (Cisco) wireless routers, all 802.11n capable. And everyone in my household has a Mac, and the other wireless devices are an Apple TV and a Roku. The Roku seems to be the least problematic, although it also loses its connection frequently - just not as frequently. (This never happens while one is streaming, however: only when a stream is done.) And interestingly, all devices show a strong wifi signal strength.
I am mystified and at a loss to explain what is wrong.
I agree with the sentiments here that wireless is not appropriate for a large portion of traffic. Especially as we move to all kinds of media traveling over our IP networks, do we really want all of that to be steamed over wireless when it does not need to be?
I consume all of my media at home over IP, and because of my house's design and the location of my wireless router, it is very difficult to run a wire to where our big screen is, so I use wifi. When it works it is fine, but I have to reset the connection every time I finish watching anything. There is something wrong with the protocols. And I have very new equipment. And I have tried several brands of router, and the problem manifests with both my AppleTV and Roku - and with our laptops (Macs) as well.
I find that wifi is not reliable enough to rely on. It is great when it works, but it is very flaky. If we want to deploy it for everything then we need to make it work first.
People do not fundamentally change. I was a scientist at one time. Scientists by and large are not motivated by money. As long as they can pay their bills, their primary concern is intellectual stimulation, discovery, and recognition.
Perhaps you are referring to the grant process. Yes, that process has problems. The greatest problem with the current process is the role of private interests in funding. Nowadays it is hard to trust research papers because private interests publish the papers that support their position and don't publish the ones that don't. And scientists who receive private funding are inherently biased. The role of private money in research corrupts the entire process. Even universities are now pursuing patents, as a result of the Bayh–Dole Act. That act should be repealed. Pure research should not be corrupted by financial motivations.
My essential point is that if we want to find cures for diseases, then we need research institutions that are motivated by their discoveries and not by private interests that want to sell us more and more drugs forever.
That is not how it works. There are approximately 3 million new cancer cases per year in the US. In order to get $100B/year, the industry would have to charge $30,000 per cancer vaccine dose (assuming that one dose cures the disease). There is no way that people (or the government) would tolerate that type of fee to save people's lives. It would be a form of extortion.
Penicillin is not a permanent cure. One has to take it again with every new infection.
Drug companies do develop vaccines: it is not so black and white. They do some good things. But remember that the treatment of cancer is nearly a $100B/year industry. The industry is not going to undermine this business by finding a cure.
With regard to your comment, "If you want people to work at making you better, you'll need to make it in their interest. Say, by paying them money." - you are right, but money is not the only motivator. In fact, for scientists, it is a very poor motivator. Scientists tend to be motivated by everything but money.
Non-profits are not motivated by money: they have other missions. Alexander Fleming was not motivated by money when he discovered penicillin while working in a hospital (not a drug company). Jonas Salk also was not working for a drug company when he discovered the polio vaccine: he was working at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, under a grant provided by a non-profit.
Money is not the best way to motivate research to make people well. It is, however, the best way to motivate large companies to find ways to make the public dependent on them.
"There are lots of cures for cancer, most of them made by drug companies."
I wish that my friend who just died from cancer two weeks ago knew this. Or both of my parents. Or Seve Ballesteros, the legendary five-time major winning golfer, who died today from cancer at age 54.
The fact is, the drug companies have developed expensive medicines that must be taken for a long time. They have little incentive to develop a cancer vaccine: there would be very, very low return on investment compared to investments in other drugs that must be take for a long time. If you are a middle manager in a drug company, and your year-end performance (and consequent bonus) is measured based on the financial performance of your business area, you are going to balance your R&D investment portfolio based on what will yield the highest overall return for your business unit. Cures have very low return because you only take them once, and so drug company managers are simply not interested in cures.
If the drug companies were to do their job the way that we (the public) want them to, they (the drug companies) would put themselves out of business, by curing every disease. But they will never do that. They want all of us to become junkies, each of us taking many expensive medicines every day for the rest of our lives.
"nuggz" made a good point that today we can detect many diseases before someone has symptoms. Should we return to 19th century medicine, with a friendly country doctor listening to one's heartbeat, breathing, and a knock on one's knees?
The problem is not too many tests! I personally want to have every test that is available to detect things like cancer and heart disease before they manifest!!
The reason that medical costs have risen faster than inflation is not because of too much testing. Rather it is because: (1) payment should be based on the patient's health - not on procedures performed - and, (2) the incentives for the organizations that invest cures and treatments is mis-aligned with our health.
The root problem - and this has been completely omitted from the health care debate - is that drug companies make their R&D decisions based on expected ROI, and cures have a very low ROI, whereas expensive long-term treatments have a very high ROI. Thus, the drug companies will never be the ones to discover a cure for cancer or heart disease: rather, they will discover long term expensive treatments.
Health should not be about profit. It should be about health. It is a non-monetary value. That is why we should eliminate the patenting of drugs, and shift fundamental research for cures to non-profit entities.
And profit-making caregivers should not be paid based on services rendered: they should be paid based on one's long-term health. In that regime, they will want to give tests, and they will invest in the equipment needed.
We live in Reston VA, and I have asked Comcast to discontinue our cable service, which is their most basic level, and only retain the Internet service. They told me that if they did this, they would charge me _more_ than if I keep the cable service. They claim that they have no way to centrally disconnect the Internet service: yet they have the ability to centrally turn on and off all other kinds of channels, so I don't think I believe them. I think they just don't want me to disconnect the cable service, so they have engineered it this way.
Therefore, for me, it makes no economic sense to not have cable. However, as it turns out, we don't watch _anything_ on cable. We have both a Roku (with Netflix subscription) and an Apple TV (with an iTunes account), and we stream all content. As a result, we never watch a single advertisement. It is wonderful.
Yes, indeed. But that is because the CISC chips contains a grab-bag of instructions, many of which were not needed. What is needed is the right set of instructions, not a minimal set.
An overlooked aspect of this point is that languages are poorly matched to what programmers need to do. My favorite example is linked lists. Linked lists are so widespread and yet they are not built into languages. That means that hardware cannot provide built-in support for something that is widely used.
Before asking the question, "what is the minimum instruction set needed to support common languages?" we should also ask ourselves "what would the optimum language be?"
Yes, your points are true. I didn't really explain myself well.
I understand that a goal of RISC was to reduce execution time: the path through the PLA. And I had forgot about equalizing instruction times. Thanks for reminding me of that: it has been a couple of decades....;-)
What I am really saying is that there was - and still is - a disconnect between hardware design and software design. Yes, hardware was ill-matched to languages, but the reverse was (and is) true as well: lots of things that programmers want to do are not directly supported by languages and compilers. If they were, then the hardware could be better suited to actual applications.
But RISC was wrong. RISC resulted from a study of what instruction were actually used by typical applications that were compiled with standard compilers. This is like studying what railroad tracks are used and concluding that rail travel would be optimum if certain tracks were eliminated and others improved. This conclusion is wrong, because it assumes that existing rails include all optimal paths. In actuality, there might be paths that do not currently have rails.
Thus, the conclusion that a CPU should have fewer instructions is specious. A more accurate conclusion would have been that a CPU should have an optimum set of instructions for its intended task.
For example, consider the fact that linked lists are heavily used by most C programs. Yet, the C language does not have a linked list primitive: one has to use a library. Therefore, if a CPU had linked list operations built in (as the VAX did), a C compiler could not even use those operations because the language does not support it. Instead of concluding that the CPU's instruction should be fewer, one might conclude that the CPU should have linked list operations built in, and that linked list operations should be added to C. The result might be much faster programs.
My point is that RISC exposed the issue of the matching of CPU instruction to software, but the conclusion that CPUs should be simpler was wrong. The right conclusion would have been that CPUs should have optimal instructions, which might mean removing some and adding others - not merely removing some.
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It is a matter of opportunity. It takes resources to steal and utilize nuclear material. If it is all over the place, it is easier. We should be removing it from the economic system, not proliferating it.
A clever thought, but it would not solve the problem. In fact, it would make it worse. A breeder reactor fuel cycle would require used fuel rods to be transported to reprocessing plants. That means: lots of trucks on the road carrying the most dangerous substance known to man....
What if we didn't have nuclear power? We would be just fine.
Claims that we have to use it because other forms of renewable energy are not ready, are mistaken.
As Churchill said, 'Americans can be counted on to do the right thing only after all other options have been exhausted.'
And indeed, the US will not develop alternatives to oil and nuclear unless we have no choice about it. But if those options were removed, we would find alternatives. It would be costly for awhile, but eventually costs would go down and new industries will have been born.
The fact is, as a former nuclear engineer, I can say with some intimate knowledge that nuclear energy is extremely dangerous from a proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism. Nuclear reactors produce plutonium in their fuel rods, and plutonium is one of the most hazardous materials on Earth; and it is possible to purify plutonium sufficiently to make a dirty bomb powerful enough to take out a city, using table-top chemical processes. One does not need enrichment centrifuges the way that one does for uranium.
If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power.
It has been awhile for me too ;-).
I think that the wave function does not collapse because the observation becomes part of the wave function. Thus, there still must be an "Observer". Otherwise, the observer is merely theoretical. The "Observer" makes it real.
The fact that it is not real until there is an "Observer" is what provides the suspicious link between QM and consciousness.
I have often wondered if we have it all backwards: maybe consciousness _is_ the universe in some way. Maybe the "physical world" is nothing but observations that must all correlate and be consistent because the universe's transactional wave function requires them to be in order to satisfy endpoint conditions. Maybe the state space of the universe is somehow a consciousness system. Maybe the only observations that must correlate are the ones that have Observers. I know this is conjecture without theory, but isn't it possible? Who are we to discard such an idea, when we clearly don't really know what consciousness is?
Consider this: one can never, ever prove that the world exists apart from one's consciousness. That fact alone should make us take pause.
I am not saying it is this way: I am merely wondering. Something seems to be going on that is not as we think. To solve the problem of consciousness we must have an open mind.
Good points, but not sure that eliminating causation solves the problem of the role of consciousness in the Copenhagen interpretation.
There still must be an observer. In the transactional view, the observer is a receiver, and emits waves just as the event being observed does. However, one cannot remove the observer and have a complete transaction. There is no transaction until an observer is introduced. If the observer is a device and not a consciousness, then one can apply the "Wigner's friend" and extend the system that is being observed to encompass the device, so that the transaction is the end to end phenomenon of the original event terminating with the conscious observation.
Do you agree?
I have a Roku and an Apple TV. I will not be surprised if these things become a commodity at some point; but we are not there yet by any means. These boxes have quite different portfolios of available content, and very different styles of operation. I like them both. I like having both. I find them far superior to the on-demand services offered by my cable provider (Comcast). I never, ever watch broadcast cable anymore: I obtain all of my content via these external boxes, and always commercial free.
"The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
Heaven help us. Then literally nothing will work anymore. I shudder every time I use a "smart" appliance. To me, a "smart" appliance - one with an embedded computer - is something that needs occasional reboots, contains concurrency bugs and therefore gets into undefined states ("frozen"), second guess incorrectly about what I want it to do, needs to be recharged and have its batteries replaced, is vulnerable to hacking, needs continual updates, needs to be "managed" in various ways, and is generally not reliable enough to trust. Smart appliances make life miserable. Unless we can radically change the way that we program these things, to alleviate these ills, a world in which everything is a "smart" appliance is a frustrating world in which nothing works anymore.
"Chromebooks are a new model that doesn't put the burden of managing the computer on yourself."
Really?
What about thin clients?
And before that, what about X terminals?
There is nothing new here. It is still a good idea to some extent: for applications that can always be connected when they need to be. But there is no new concept here. The only things that are new are that (1) the client has become immeasurably more complex and heavyweight (a browser versus a terminal), with very little additional value over what X terminals offered; and (2) there is now an Internet in place so that connecting to the server is easier when it is beyond the local LAN.
My essential point is that if a drug company is in the business of cancer research, their managers have a portfolio of R&D proposals. These managers are going to choose the ones that have the highest ROI and lowest risk, given limited R&D funds. And the ones that have the highest ROI and lowest risk are usually the ones involving long-term treatment - not cures.
I concede that a drug company might produce a cure (what "cure" means is not the point). However, the current economic motivators do not favor it.
I don't reply to rude people.
No. Health is not viewed in these terms. If a cure cost $10 to produce, and a company tried to charge $30,000 for that cure, there would immediately be Congressional hearings about it. It is widely viewed as immoral to profit excessively from providing a cure. Look at the case of the drug Makena. Before it was approved it cost $15 a shot, but after approval the company increased the cost to $1500 a shot, and there is a huge outcry now.
People would not stand for a company charging $30,000 for a cure if the true cost of that cure was substantially less. It would be considered to be immoral: holding a cure from all except those who can afford to pay the huge price, and a death sentence for everyone else, while company shareholders made huge profits. People would not stand for it, and it would bring huge scrutiny over the company.
I am an idiot?
You don't deserve a response. I pity anyone who lives with you or has to discuss anything with you. I will never reply to any post of yours again, Russotto.
PS - I never got less than 720 on any standardized test, and often scored in the 99th percentile, so I know that I am not an "idiot". And by the way, I have written four books and built a successful company with 183 people. What have you done?
Yes, I suspect you are right. But the equipment I have tried include the latest models of Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys (Cisco) wireless routers, all 802.11n capable. And everyone in my household has a Mac, and the other wireless devices are an Apple TV and a Roku. The Roku seems to be the least problematic, although it also loses its connection frequently - just not as frequently. (This never happens while one is streaming, however: only when a stream is done.) And interestingly, all devices show a strong wifi signal strength.
I am mystified and at a loss to explain what is wrong.
I agree with the sentiments here that wireless is not appropriate for a large portion of traffic. Especially as we move to all kinds of media traveling over our IP networks, do we really want all of that to be steamed over wireless when it does not need to be?
I consume all of my media at home over IP, and because of my house's design and the location of my wireless router, it is very difficult to run a wire to where our big screen is, so I use wifi. When it works it is fine, but I have to reset the connection every time I finish watching anything. There is something wrong with the protocols. And I have very new equipment. And I have tried several brands of router, and the problem manifests with both my AppleTV and Roku - and with our laptops (Macs) as well.
I find that wifi is not reliable enough to rely on. It is great when it works, but it is very flaky. If we want to deploy it for everything then we need to make it work first.
People do not fundamentally change. I was a scientist at one time. Scientists by and large are not motivated by money. As long as they can pay their bills, their primary concern is intellectual stimulation, discovery, and recognition.
Perhaps you are referring to the grant process. Yes, that process has problems. The greatest problem with the current process is the role of private interests in funding. Nowadays it is hard to trust research papers because private interests publish the papers that support their position and don't publish the ones that don't. And scientists who receive private funding are inherently biased. The role of private money in research corrupts the entire process. Even universities are now pursuing patents, as a result of the Bayh–Dole Act. That act should be repealed. Pure research should not be corrupted by financial motivations.
My essential point is that if we want to find cures for diseases, then we need research institutions that are motivated by their discoveries and not by private interests that want to sell us more and more drugs forever.
That is not how it works. There are approximately 3 million new cancer cases per year in the US. In order to get $100B/year, the industry would have to charge $30,000 per cancer vaccine dose (assuming that one dose cures the disease). There is no way that people (or the government) would tolerate that type of fee to save people's lives. It would be a form of extortion.
Then how come the major cures of the 20th century had nothing to do with money?
I am not so pessimistic. Some animals - and possibly some humans - are immune to cancer. See this news report: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/aug/areyouimmune
Penicillin is not a permanent cure. One has to take it again with every new infection.
Drug companies do develop vaccines: it is not so black and white. They do some good things. But remember that the treatment of cancer is nearly a $100B/year industry. The industry is not going to undermine this business by finding a cure.
With regard to your comment, "If you want people to work at making you better, you'll need to make it in their interest. Say, by paying them money." - you are right, but money is not the only motivator. In fact, for scientists, it is a very poor motivator. Scientists tend to be motivated by everything but money.
Non-profits are not motivated by money: they have other missions. Alexander Fleming was not motivated by money when he discovered penicillin while working in a hospital (not a drug company). Jonas Salk also was not working for a drug company when he discovered the polio vaccine: he was working at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, under a grant provided by a non-profit.
Money is not the best way to motivate research to make people well. It is, however, the best way to motivate large companies to find ways to make the public dependent on them.
"There are lots of cures for cancer, most of them made by drug companies."
I wish that my friend who just died from cancer two weeks ago knew this. Or both of my parents. Or Seve Ballesteros, the legendary five-time major winning golfer, who died today from cancer at age 54.
The fact is, the drug companies have developed expensive medicines that must be taken for a long time. They have little incentive to develop a cancer vaccine: there would be very, very low return on investment compared to investments in other drugs that must be take for a long time. If you are a middle manager in a drug company, and your year-end performance (and consequent bonus) is measured based on the financial performance of your business area, you are going to balance your R&D investment portfolio based on what will yield the highest overall return for your business unit. Cures have very low return because you only take them once, and so drug company managers are simply not interested in cures.
If the drug companies were to do their job the way that we (the public) want them to, they (the drug companies) would put themselves out of business, by curing every disease. But they will never do that. They want all of us to become junkies, each of us taking many expensive medicines every day for the rest of our lives.
"nuggz" made a good point that today we can detect many diseases before someone has symptoms. Should we return to 19th century medicine, with a friendly country doctor listening to one's heartbeat, breathing, and a knock on one's knees?
The problem is not too many tests! I personally want to have every test that is available to detect things like cancer and heart disease before they manifest!!
The reason that medical costs have risen faster than inflation is not because of too much testing. Rather it is because: (1) payment should be based on the patient's health - not on procedures performed - and, (2) the incentives for the organizations that invest cures and treatments is mis-aligned with our health.
The root problem - and this has been completely omitted from the health care debate - is that drug companies make their R&D decisions based on expected ROI, and cures have a very low ROI, whereas expensive long-term treatments have a very high ROI. Thus, the drug companies will never be the ones to discover a cure for cancer or heart disease: rather, they will discover long term expensive treatments.
Health should not be about profit. It should be about health. It is a non-monetary value. That is why we should eliminate the patenting of drugs, and shift fundamental research for cures to non-profit entities.
And profit-making caregivers should not be paid based on services rendered: they should be paid based on one's long-term health. In that regime, they will want to give tests, and they will invest in the equipment needed.
We live in Reston VA, and I have asked Comcast to discontinue our cable service, which is their most basic level, and only retain the Internet service. They told me that if they did this, they would charge me _more_ than if I keep the cable service. They claim that they have no way to centrally disconnect the Internet service: yet they have the ability to centrally turn on and off all other kinds of channels, so I don't think I believe them. I think they just don't want me to disconnect the cable service, so they have engineered it this way.
Therefore, for me, it makes no economic sense to not have cable. However, as it turns out, we don't watch _anything_ on cable. We have both a Roku (with Netflix subscription) and an Apple TV (with an iTunes account), and we stream all content. As a result, we never watch a single advertisement. It is wonderful.
Yes, indeed. But that is because the CISC chips contains a grab-bag of instructions, many of which were not needed. What is needed is the right set of instructions, not a minimal set.
An overlooked aspect of this point is that languages are poorly matched to what programmers need to do. My favorite example is linked lists. Linked lists are so widespread and yet they are not built into languages. That means that hardware cannot provide built-in support for something that is widely used.
Before asking the question, "what is the minimum instruction set needed to support common languages?" we should also ask ourselves "what would the optimum language be?"
Yes, your points are true. I didn't really explain myself well.
I understand that a goal of RISC was to reduce execution time: the path through the PLA. And I had forgot about equalizing instruction times. Thanks for reminding me of that: it has been a couple of decades.... ;-)
What I am really saying is that there was - and still is - a disconnect between hardware design and software design. Yes, hardware was ill-matched to languages, but the reverse was (and is) true as well: lots of things that programmers want to do are not directly supported by languages and compilers. If they were, then the hardware could be better suited to actual applications.
Yes, you are right. This is the spirit of RISC.
But RISC was wrong. RISC resulted from a study of what instruction were actually used by typical applications that were compiled with standard compilers. This is like studying what railroad tracks are used and concluding that rail travel would be optimum if certain tracks were eliminated and others improved. This conclusion is wrong, because it assumes that existing rails include all optimal paths. In actuality, there might be paths that do not currently have rails.
Thus, the conclusion that a CPU should have fewer instructions is specious. A more accurate conclusion would have been that a CPU should have an optimum set of instructions for its intended task.
For example, consider the fact that linked lists are heavily used by most C programs. Yet, the C language does not have a linked list primitive: one has to use a library. Therefore, if a CPU had linked list operations built in (as the VAX did), a C compiler could not even use those operations because the language does not support it. Instead of concluding that the CPU's instruction should be fewer, one might conclude that the CPU should have linked list operations built in, and that linked list operations should be added to C. The result might be much faster programs.
My point is that RISC exposed the issue of the matching of CPU instruction to software, but the conclusion that CPUs should be simpler was wrong. The right conclusion would have been that CPUs should have optimal instructions, which might mean removing some and adding others - not merely removing some.