I realize this forum is for technological entrepreneurial pursuits but are you kidding me?
A single MRI costs ~2 million used (Angel Investors are always the hard ones to grab). GE Medical Holding invests more then 1 billion dollars a year in R&D with almost 18 billion a year in revenue. This is like reading up on a Intel Processors and wondering if their is a way for you to personally refine and profit from refining the technology.
While I agree about your main point, your costs are a bit out of date. Most brand-new MRI machines cost between $1-3 million with an additional $300-500,000 for the room and ancillary equipment.
But you wouldn't have to use a MRI. In fact a MRI is not practical at all because the patient needs to be inside it to communicate. Much better would be an implantable electrode array. I'm sure they're much cheaper than a MRI too.
I have been trying for years. I fail at everything. The thing is this, just knowing how to program and do DOM manipulation isn't good enough. You need to have a stack/framework or 5 that you know like clockwork and as intuitively as a language. I thought by now I would know enough but its really going to be another year of learning node/express/mongoose/mongo/jade/programming patterns/web apis/authentication and god knows what else before the 'big' $20hr checks come rolling in. Seriously , if you don't have enough 'intuitive' understanding of a stack coming into it then you're dead before you've entered the door. Learning a stack is like learning a new language. I have written in PHP but trying to learn CakePHP or any of the other PHP frameworks is a large time investment. I tried Rails and plopped. I've now finally settled on node with express but learning mongoose, ajax w/mongoose and jade in conjunction with api's and storing dom id's and whatever else takes time as building muscle memory is the only route to employment. When I was younger I use to play with drum machines and electronic music equipment a lot and knew certain pieces of it like the back of my hand. The only way I see myself making any real money is to learn a stack literally as well as I knew that music equipment when I was a kid. That means striving to know every granular piece of it....and that takes time.
You don't. You need to set reasonable expectations and approach a coding job as a "new" task instead of one you perceive you've failed at - you probably know more than many intermediate developers but it sounds like your ability to ship code is the biggest problem. Being a programmer doesn't mean knowing the entire stack and each and every piece of it, its about being able to pick out whats important to the task at hand.
I've run into a frequent roadblock in that I always want to know all the elements of what I'm getting into. I'm finding that in MOST cases its not important at all, until you're architecting a new system. Leave that to senior level folks for now, just find a place you can fix or work on UI elements or clear bugs - theres no need to be so stressed about a programming job, just reach for a branch that you can grasp firmly.
Something that would be cool: implementing X-Windows in JS, using HTML for rendering. So you could run your desktop applications remotely in the browser.
You'd have to tunnel the X protocol somehow to Ajax or Websockets, of course, but that should be quite easy.
Robust classification of EEG data from humans in real time in controlled environments (no motion, perfect contact quality, on subjects you can communicate with, etc) is difficult enough. It's part of the R&D that I do now. But on pets? How do you keep them still enough and the sensors seated and wet? Is the classification purely based on unsupervised learning? How the heck does one gather meaningful training data?
My skepto-meter is really pinging on this one. Especially with the flex-funding model.
Studio Total (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Total) who are involved with the product are known to do crazy stuff to get PR, like the 'teddybear airdrop' over Minsk. Some things they make buzz about does not exist yet :)
