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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (486228)	6/7/2009 10:12:45 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572107

"The same holds with missions for surface" This isn't true. If you've followed the autonomous robot vehicle challenge (funded by the Pentagon), the vehicles have been a regular clown circus of failure. I think it's just in the last year that vehicles have even completed the easy (for a human ) course. Land navigation has a thicket of problems air and sea robots don't face. darpa.mil

To: i-node who wrote (486228)	6/7/2009 10:48:02 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572107

"The same holds with missions for surface and submarine sea vehicles on recon missions." Air and sea, sure. Those are relatively simple environments. Surface? Not any time soon. Unless you are talking about something like the Sahara desert, you have to deal with a cluttered environment. And conventional robotic techniques break down pretty quickly. Mapping a path is a non-trivial task. And a general solution, one that can be used in urban, forested, tundra etc. environments is not even on the radar yet. As I have mentioned, even navigating a room is exceptionally tricky, and no one is firing a RPG at them. So a human is going to be needed for many functions. Patrolling a controlled perimeter, probably not. For anything more challenging? You betcha. "Expert systems are getting better and military research is a big part of it. " There are severe restrictions on what can be done with expert systems. It is inherent in them, no way around it. They are good for certain restricted tasks where the set of all possibilities can be evaluated and rules are written. Using fuzzy logic can help in some gray areas. But that just isn't good enough for something that is capable of exercising deadly force. Which is not to say we won't field such weapons, the history of those sort of mistakes is pretty clear. The lab isn't a battlefield.

To: i-node who wrote (486228)	6/8/2009 11:54:49 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572107

THE BEST SYSTEM SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.... There's a script Republicans lawmakers are supposed to stick to on health care. They're encouraged to engage in anti-government demagoguery, but they're also not supposed to defend the status quo. After all, if there's one thing most Americans agree on in this debate, it's that the current system is a mess. It's why I found Sen. Richard Shelby's (R-Ala.) remarks on Fox News yesterday pretty interesting. "One, we don't know how much [a reform package is] going to cost and who's going to pay for it," he said. <b."Secondly, it will be the first steps in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known." Really? The current U.S. health care system is the best, not only in the world, but in the history of the world? I haven't seen this quote generate much in the way of attention, but Shelby's remarks yesterday strike me as a possible opportunity for Democrats. Here we have a prominent Republican senator defending the status quo as the best system "the world has ever known." Do the tens of millions of Americans with no coverage agree with that? How about the Americans who've had to declare bankruptcy because they couldn't afford their health care bills? Or the workers who've seen their premiums quadruple? Or the families who wait in long lines for care? Or the businesses who struggle to compete because of health care costs? It seems like a fairly difficult position to defend -- Republicans think the dysfunctional status quo, which costs too much and covers too few, is "the best care system the world has ever known." Seems like a loser for the GOP, should Dems try to capitalize on this one.