BECAUSE Gates and others had the vision of a putting an affordable computer in every home, millions of youngsters today have the opportunity to learn, who may not have been exposed to comptuers unti they reached college age.
Huh?
How do you figure Microsoft had anything to do with it?
First off, IBM PCs and clones were originally for business use. For home use people used Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore PET Sinclair ZX-80, Acorn BBC micro, etc, etc. Nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft.
The idea of making computers based on commodity hardware and open standards wasn't new to the IBM PC (and had nothing to do with Microsoft). Before the IBM PC + DOS standard there was the S-100 bus and CP/M.
If Microsoft had never existed it'd just mean that IBM chose another OS for the IBM PC, or obtained DOS direct from Seattle computer rather than via Microsoft. If the IBM PC never took off then the existing S-100 + CP/M would have continued until something better came long. And in the meantime the hobbyists would still be running all the other computers being produced by everyone else!
No - systems like that were before microprocessors. They were based on multiple logic chips.
The first microprocessor - CPU on a chip - was the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971, designed to power desktop calculators.
One of the earliest computers was the SCELBI Mark 8, powered by the Intel 8008, introduced in 1974. However, he MITS Altair 8800 (based on the Intel 8080), launched in 1975 can really be regarded as the beginning of the personal computer industry... It rocketed to fame by being featured on the cover of Personal Electronics magazine (it was a build-it yourself kit).
I don't know how much the younger/. crowd know about the MITS Altair... It was an S-100 bus based system so could be exapanded, but in it's basic form it was very primitive. No display or keyboard. Just a bunch of toggle switches and LEDs on the front panel to monitor and program the data and address buses. To program a byte into memory you set the toggle switches for each bit of the byte and address (up = 1, down = 0), then toggled it in and did the next byte. There was no boot ROM. If you had a paper tape drive and a tape to load, you would have to manually toggle in the boot loader program from the front panel every time you powered the machine on.
Actually the MITS Altair came out in '75 and Microsoft Altair BASIC came out either the same or following year. Commodore PET BASIC was also licenced from Microsoft.
Well, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Microsoft BASIC was very early and fairly ubiquitous. It was originally written in '75 for the MITS Altair, which really is the beginning of the personal computer industry excepting a few obscure very low volume products most people have never heard of.
The BASIC interpreters for many (but not all) of the early machines were all from Microsoft: MITS Altair BASIC, Commodore PET BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, TRS-80 Level II BASIC. Some that weren't by Microsoft are Apple I/II Integer BASIC (written by Woz), TRS-80 Level I BASIC, Sinclair BASIC, Acorn BBC BASIC (written by Roger Wilson).
As for better languages than BASIC for microprocessors (as opposed to mainframes), there really wasn't much at that date. Forth was quite popular, but quite primitive, I'm not sure about availability of BCPL (precursor to C) for any really early machine - it certainly wasn't mainstream. USCD Pascal was an early decent language if you had a CP/M disk-based machine. I personally co-wrote Acorn ISO-Pascal for Acorn's BBC Micro in 1982, which was the first full implementation (ISO certified) for a Microprocessor, and was shown to PM Marget Thatcher by the British Standards Institute (BSI adopted the ISO standard) as an example of Britich computer innovation! I re-used the (very fast) BBC BASIC software floating point library, written by Roger Wilson, for ISO Pascal.
I'm not worried so much about someone coming up with some massive uber AI that will debate with us and finally decide that it can run things better.
I think we need to be eventually, whether we knowlingly build autonomous robots with this kind of intelligence or not. Think of some of the longlived computer viruses out on the net that are almost impossible to eradicate. A sufficiently advanced AI program should also be able to "hide" on the internet - find abandoned hosts to live on and distribute itself in such as way as not to be noticeable or eradicable.
It's also inevitable that we will build service robots, or robotic gadgets (e.g. self-driving cars), even if we do limit the software to protect ourselves, and when this type of hardware is out in the wild, then there's no reason to think that an AI would not be able to find it's way onto it, or to control it, via security holes.
It maybe far away in the future, but with computer controlled factories, and the military already building computer controlled killing machines, it's not too hard to see a time when against our will an AI is able to take over a robotic factory and defend it against being taken back. By that stage society will probably be so dependent on computers that it'll also be able to threaten us with reprisal (disable defence and communication computers, shut down nuclear reactors, factories, the robotic highway ssystem of the future) if we don't allow it it's independence.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying in principle, but some robots are getting fairly proficient, even if still rather brittle.
Consider the DARPA grand challenge where the winning robotic card drove down a dirt track across hundred of miles of desert without fucking up in any of the myriad ways possible.
Or consider some of the robots in university labs. There's a video on YouTube of a MIT (I think) humanoid robot where a guy sitting on one room tells the robot (verbally) "go fetch my stapler", and it shuffles off to his office down the coridoor (finding the right one), opens the door by itself, scans the *totall* clutter filled-office/desk spaces for the stapler, then picks it up brings it back and says something like "there you go". No doubt a basically "hard-coded" demo (i.e. when told to do it that triggered a set sequence of events, if didn't do it because it wanted to, nor have to logically reason where it might find a stapler, etc).
Insects are very close to robots in that their behavior is basically 100% gentically proscribed.
Try and flush out the competition, maybe? (unles it really is the best they have, or think they'll have).
Or perhaps try to lull the competition into a false sense of security by only edging them by a hair, when they something better held back?
Of course, with the amount of effort the teams have put into this, and the money at stake, you'd be nuts not to keep working on it flat-out until the time runs out; but still, if you're tired it could make a difference if you think you've got the competition by a comfortable margin as opposed to knowing you're in a losing position because they've already submitted their true best shot, or something close to it.
Dunno - I think I'd prefer Paula Abdul as an overlord to a Dalek. Ditzy and scatter-brained, but at least with some compassion.
Of course a robot could have emotions/compassion too, but doesn't need to have. Something with our intelligence and without them would be scary indeed.
ANY first programming language introduces new concepts. When you're starting out even something like the concept of a variable takes a little getting used to. Maybe you can relate it to memory store/recall on a pocket calculator, but with a name. Later you can introduce arrays of variables, non-numeric variables, etc.
You seem to have forgotten what it was like in the beginning to know *nothing*.
The best first language is anything simple that lets you jump right in and understand the basics like variables, loops, arrays, etc, without getting bogged down in an over complex or restrictive language. It doesn't need to be the worlds best language - it's to get you started. You could do far worse than start with a BASIC interpreter (instant feedback, no compiler/linker to deal with) at a very young age.
Those of use who started out at the beginning of the personal comnputer (not PC) phenomemon in the late 70's started out simple. After putting away your soldering iron, you got out pen and paper and started hand assembling machine code. And we liked it!
At the same time c.1978 a highschool math teacher and a bunch of us took adult education classes at the local university (Durham, UK), where they taught us PL/1, and some of us found a way to hang out at the university after that and started playing with BASIC, then taught ourself C. The big excitement was going from the batch-mode PL/1 class with jobs submitted on punched card decks, with printed green bar fanfold output (maybe just a syntax error) delivered some time later, to being ONLINE sitting in front of a terminal. Whoopee!
I think it's possible to ignore the chemical aspect of the brain, and just focus on a connectionist model, if what you are primarily interested in are things like perception and cognition. If you want to consider the way the brain implements emotions (and how that impacts cognition, etc), then that's a different story, although it would also be easy to implement that some other way too.
I don't think anyone serious is nowadays trying to model the brain as a computer - that's symbolic AI which died a death decades ago, although not without some considerable success to the extent the approach allowed (e.g. SOAR). Modern approaches, such as the Blue Brain project of TFA, are connectionist, which is entirely unlike how computers work - there's no processor, no memory, no program, no programmer...
What TFA is really missing, AFAIK, is the architecture of the brain. Saying we'll be able to put X billion interconnected artifical neurons on a chip is not the same as saying you know how to connect them to make a brain. The most telling part of the summary is that they've "built elements of a rat brain" as if that represents any significant progress. I guess anyone with a suction-based toilet and a solar panel could say they've "built elements of a space station". The real trick with the brain is not to simulate any individual piece like the visual cortex or hippocampus, but to have a complete architecture. Focusing on the parts would be like an Area-51 scientist bulding an exact replica of a UFO toilet because that's all they know, and they don't have a clue how the actual flying part works.
Dunno how I managed to get two toilets into a discussion on brains. Oh, well.
Hardly - the code in the Apollo guidance computer isn't going to have been doing anything very fancy. Just implementing a few formulae or control algorithms.
I'm sure there were many more way advanced things done on early home computers of similar specs. My first was a Z80 based NASCOM-1 in 1978 which was also had a 1MHz clock, but only 1K of RAM for the user as opposed to the 2K the Apollo computer had a decade earlier. They were lucky!
Even in 1K you could write a basic line editor or graphical (ASCII art) hangman game, which in reality is probably just as complex as what the Apollo computer was doing code-wise, even if their application domain was a tad more exciting. We'd also write self-modifying oode due to space/speed contraints, which used to be fun (e.g. write a loop where an address is nominally hard-coded, but in fact changes since you're writing to the address portion of that machine instruction).
The Apollo code was rather the opposite to self-modifying - it was physically woven out of wires ard ferrite cores!
100,000 lines of machine code can't be right. It would generate at least one byte per instruction/line, and result in 100K+ of code.
TFA mentions the Apollo computer only having 2K of memory. I read elsewhere that the program was stored in old fashioned hand-woven core memories (a grid of fine copper wires passing thru or around **TINY** donut-like magnetic ferrite cores). The Apollo astronauts visited the factory where women were assembling these ROM cores (pass wire through core for a "1", around it for a "0") to make them feel more personally connected to the project and not make any mistakes, although I assume they did double-check anyway.
An IP address does only identify a computer (for dynamic IP addresses it's not even enough - you also need the time+date), not a person.
Tying an IP address to a person rather than computer requires that you have separate evidence tying the person to the computer at that time. Of course if it's a static IP address in a private home (as opposed to library, or other public place), it does rather narrow down who may have been using it (once you've proved it wasn't being spoofed).
Of course given that IP addresses, and even MAC addresses, are spoofable/changeable, I'd hope they're not taken at face value in court. Who's to say that the criminal act using "your" IP address was not done by a script kiddie spoofing your IP address?
On it's own an IP address is really more of a circumstantial link to a computer (and indirectly to a person) than a direct one. It's kinda like saying that a glove found at a crime scene matches one bought by a defendant, without proving that it's actually his glove, or that he was the one wearing it when the crime was committed.
There is a benefit to stockholders since being in the S&P 500 creates instant demand - it means that all the S&P 500 index funds need to buy your stock!
Why would the Navy need a cover story for putting weapons systems into their boats? I don't think anyone is under the false impression that the Navy is operating a cruise line.
Anyway, a rail gun is going to be an integrated system - the highly unusual power needs (dumping a massive amount of electricity into it in an extremely short period of time, and wanting an extremely short "reload" time) are not going to be met just by hooking it up to the engine battery, anymore than the National Ignition Facility is powering it's laser fusion experiments from the 110V wall outlets.
The US Navy already has nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and used to have nuclear-powered destroyers also. The generators are used both to directly drive the propellers as well as to generate electricity.
Show them how to build a two state flip-flop out of two NAND (or NOR) gates, then how to combine flip-flops into a larger state machine
A nice demo is then to build a toggle-switch driven state machine using the states to power a few different color LEDs (e.g. red/yellow/green traffic light sequence)
This is a very low cost project other than a breadboard/power supply (or battery) you just need some 7400 NAND gates, LEDs and toggle switches. It's a good basic and fun introduction to digital logic.
Because the GPL itself explicitly states that it's non-revocable (unless you violate it).
2. Basic Permissions.
All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.
I don't think it's entirely obvious that it couldn't be run as a space hotel at a profit, maintainence included. If you had Soyuz going up weekly to fery passengers up and back, then presumably you'd not need any additional launches for maintenance. At the current $25M/week if you kept the ISS full with 4 tourists + 2 crew you'd be raking in $100M/week, which would surely more than cover expenses. It just depends on how much they could charge, and how much their per-launch costs would drop, to do this as an ongoing business.
e.g. Is there sustained demand of ~200 people (4 ISS bunks * 50 weeks) a year paying $10M/week? If so could they turn a profit on $40M/launch revenue (4 * $10M revenue for a weekly launch)?
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BECAUSE Gates and others had the vision of a putting an affordable computer in every home, millions of youngsters today have the opportunity to learn, who may not have been exposed to comptuers unti they reached college age.
Huh?
How do you figure Microsoft had anything to do with it?
First off, IBM PCs and clones were originally for business use. For home use people used Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore PET Sinclair ZX-80, Acorn BBC micro, etc, etc. Nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft.
The idea of making computers based on commodity hardware and open standards wasn't new to the IBM PC (and had nothing to do with Microsoft). Before the IBM PC + DOS standard there was the S-100 bus and CP/M.
If Microsoft had never existed it'd just mean that IBM chose another OS for the IBM PC, or obtained DOS direct from Seattle computer rather than via Microsoft. If the IBM PC never took off then the existing S-100 + CP/M would have continued until something better came long. And in the meantime the hobbyists would still be running all the other computers being produced by everyone else!
No - systems like that were before microprocessors. They were based on multiple logic chips.
The first microprocessor - CPU on a chip - was the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971, designed to power desktop calculators.
One of the earliest computers was the SCELBI Mark 8, powered by the Intel 8008, introduced in 1974. However, he MITS Altair 8800 (based on the Intel 8080), launched in 1975 can really be regarded as the beginning of the personal computer industry... It rocketed to fame by being featured on the cover of Personal Electronics magazine (it was a build-it yourself kit).
I don't know how much the younger /. crowd know about the MITS Altair... It was an S-100 bus based system so could be exapanded, but in it's basic form it was very primitive. No display or keyboard. Just a bunch of toggle switches and LEDs on the front panel to monitor and program the data and address buses. To program a byte into memory you set the toggle switches for each bit of the byte and address (up = 1, down = 0), then toggled it in and did the next byte. There was no boot ROM. If you had a paper tape drive and a tape to load, you would have to manually toggle in the boot loader program from the front panel every time you powered the machine on.
Actually the MITS Altair came out in '75 and Microsoft Altair BASIC came out either the same or following year. Commodore PET BASIC was also licenced from Microsoft.
Well, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Microsoft BASIC was very early and fairly ubiquitous. It was originally written in '75 for the MITS Altair, which really is the beginning of the personal computer industry excepting a few obscure very low volume products most people have never heard of.
The BASIC interpreters for many (but not all) of the early machines were all from Microsoft: MITS Altair BASIC, Commodore PET BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, TRS-80 Level II BASIC. Some that weren't by Microsoft are Apple I/II Integer BASIC (written by Woz), TRS-80 Level I BASIC, Sinclair BASIC, Acorn BBC BASIC (written by Roger Wilson).
As for better languages than BASIC for microprocessors (as opposed to mainframes), there really wasn't much at that date. Forth was quite popular, but quite primitive, I'm not sure about availability of BCPL (precursor to C) for any really early machine - it certainly wasn't mainstream. USCD Pascal was an early decent language if you had a CP/M disk-based machine. I personally co-wrote Acorn ISO-Pascal for Acorn's BBC Micro in 1982, which was the first full implementation (ISO certified) for a Microprocessor, and was shown to PM Marget Thatcher by the British Standards Institute (BSI adopted the ISO standard) as an example of Britich computer innovation! I re-used the (very fast) BBC BASIC software floating point library, written by Roger Wilson, for ISO Pascal.
The summary has the sales figure for the million dollar award wrong... it's, well, a million dollars.
I wonder what Microsoft 8080 BASIC was priced at, and how man copies $1M respresents... certainly not very many.
I'm not worried so much about someone coming up with some massive uber AI that will debate with us and finally decide that it can run things better.
I think we need to be eventually, whether we knowlingly build autonomous robots with this kind of intelligence or not. Think of some of the longlived computer viruses out on the net that are almost impossible to eradicate. A sufficiently advanced AI program should also be able to "hide" on the internet - find abandoned hosts to live on and distribute itself in such as way as not to be noticeable or eradicable.
It's also inevitable that we will build service robots, or robotic gadgets (e.g. self-driving cars), even if we do limit the software to protect ourselves, and when this type of hardware is out in the wild, then there's no reason to think that an AI would not be able to find it's way onto it, or to control it, via security holes.
It maybe far away in the future, but with computer controlled factories, and the military already building computer controlled killing machines, it's not too hard to see a time when against our will an AI is able to take over a robotic factory and defend it against being taken back. By that stage society will probably be so dependent on computers that it'll also be able to threaten us with reprisal (disable defence and communication computers, shut down nuclear reactors, factories, the robotic highway ssystem of the future) if we don't allow it it's independence.
Yeah, but you could probably hide from her by standing still with a lampshade on your head.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying in principle, but some robots are getting fairly proficient, even if still rather brittle.
Consider the DARPA grand challenge where the winning robotic card drove down a dirt track across hundred of miles of desert without fucking up in any of the myriad ways possible.
Or consider some of the robots in university labs. There's a video on YouTube of a MIT (I think) humanoid robot where a guy sitting on one room tells the robot (verbally) "go fetch my stapler", and it shuffles off to his office down the coridoor (finding the right one), opens the door by itself, scans the *totall* clutter filled-office/desk spaces for the stapler, then picks it up brings it back and says something like "there you go". No doubt a basically "hard-coded" demo (i.e. when told to do it that triggered a set sequence of events, if didn't do it because it wanted to, nor have to logically reason where it might find a stapler, etc).
Insects are very close to robots in that their behavior is basically 100% gentically proscribed.
Try and flush out the competition, maybe? (unles it really is the best they have, or think they'll have).
Or perhaps try to lull the competition into a false sense of security by only edging them by a hair, when they something better held back?
Of course, with the amount of effort the teams have put into this, and the money at stake, you'd be nuts not to keep working on it flat-out until the time runs out; but still, if you're tired it could make a difference if you think you've got the competition by a comfortable margin as opposed to knowing you're in a losing position because they've already submitted their true best shot, or something close to it.
I'd be very surprised if Belkor doesn't have something better to submit at the last second.
It'd certainly have been an awful strategy to trigger the endgame with all your cards on the table.
Dunno - I think I'd prefer Paula Abdul as an overlord to a Dalek. Ditzy and scatter-brained, but at least with some compassion.
Of course a robot could have emotions/compassion too, but doesn't need to have. Something with our intelligence and without them would be scary indeed.
It's worth pointing out too what "BASIC" stands for (which corresponds to what it was designed for) - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
How many other languages are actually designed for beginners and teaching as opposed to being meant as tools of the trade for professionals?
100% agree - nothing better than just jumping in and doing it, getting some immediate feedback, to foster some excitement and interest.
Next you change it to a for loop rather than an infinite loop, and whaddya know, you're programming...
ANY first programming language introduces new concepts. When you're starting out even something like the concept of a variable takes a little getting used to. Maybe you can relate it to memory store/recall on a pocket calculator, but with a name. Later you can introduce arrays of variables, non-numeric variables, etc.
You seem to have forgotten what it was like in the beginning to know *nothing*.
The best first language is anything simple that lets you jump right in and understand the basics like variables, loops, arrays, etc, without getting bogged down in an over complex or restrictive language. It doesn't need to be the worlds best language - it's to get you started. You could do far worse than start with a BASIC interpreter (instant feedback, no compiler/linker to deal with) at a very young age.
Those of use who started out at the beginning of the personal comnputer (not PC) phenomemon in the late 70's started out simple. After putting away your soldering iron, you got out pen and paper and started hand assembling machine code. And we liked it!
At the same time c.1978 a highschool math teacher and a bunch of us took adult education classes at the local university (Durham, UK), where they taught us PL/1, and some of us found a way to hang out at the university after that and started playing with BASIC, then taught ourself C. The big excitement was going from the batch-mode PL/1 class with jobs submitted on punched card decks, with printed green bar fanfold output (maybe just a syntax error) delivered some time later, to being ONLINE sitting in front of a terminal. Whoopee!
I think it's possible to ignore the chemical aspect of the brain, and just focus on a connectionist model, if what you are primarily interested in are things like perception and cognition. If you want to consider the way the brain implements emotions (and how that impacts cognition, etc), then that's a different story, although it would also be easy to implement that some other way too.
I don't think anyone serious is nowadays trying to model the brain as a computer - that's symbolic AI which died a death decades ago, although not without some considerable success to the extent the approach allowed (e.g. SOAR). Modern approaches, such as the Blue Brain project of TFA, are connectionist, which is entirely unlike how computers work - there's no processor, no memory, no program, no programmer...
What TFA is really missing, AFAIK, is the architecture of the brain. Saying we'll be able to put X billion interconnected artifical neurons on a chip is not the same as saying you know how to connect them to make a brain. The most telling part of the summary is that they've "built elements of a rat brain" as if that represents any significant progress. I guess anyone with a suction-based toilet and a solar panel could say they've "built elements of a space station". The real trick with the brain is not to simulate any individual piece like the visual cortex or hippocampus, but to have a complete architecture. Focusing on the parts would be like an Area-51 scientist bulding an exact replica of a UFO toilet because that's all they know, and they don't have a clue how the actual flying part works.
Dunno how I managed to get two toilets into a discussion on brains. Oh, well.
Hardly - the code in the Apollo guidance computer isn't going to have been doing anything very fancy. Just implementing a few formulae or control algorithms.
I'm sure there were many more way advanced things done on early home computers of similar specs. My first was a Z80 based NASCOM-1 in 1978 which was also had a 1MHz clock, but only 1K of RAM for the user as opposed to the 2K the Apollo computer had a decade earlier. They were lucky!
Even in 1K you could write a basic line editor or graphical (ASCII art) hangman game, which in reality is probably just as complex as what the Apollo computer was doing code-wise, even if their application domain was a tad more exciting. We'd also write self-modifying oode due to space/speed contraints, which used to be fun (e.g. write a loop where an address is nominally hard-coded, but in fact changes since you're writing to the address portion of that machine instruction).
The Apollo code was rather the opposite to self-modifying - it was physically woven out of wires ard ferrite cores!
100,000 lines of machine code can't be right. It would generate at least one byte per instruction/line, and result in 100K+ of code.
TFA mentions the Apollo computer only having 2K of memory. I read elsewhere that the program was stored in old fashioned hand-woven core memories (a grid of fine copper wires passing thru or around **TINY** donut-like magnetic ferrite cores). The Apollo astronauts visited the factory where women were assembling these ROM cores (pass wire through core for a "1", around it for a "0") to make them feel more personally connected to the project and not make any mistakes, although I assume they did double-check anyway.
An IP address does only identify a computer (for dynamic IP addresses it's not even enough - you also need the time+date), not a person.
Tying an IP address to a person rather than computer requires that you have separate evidence tying the person to the computer at that time. Of course if it's a static IP address in a private home (as opposed to library, or other public place), it does rather narrow down who may have been using it (once you've proved it wasn't being spoofed).
Of course given that IP addresses, and even MAC addresses, are spoofable/changeable, I'd hope they're not taken at face value in court. Who's to say that the criminal act using "your" IP address was not done by a script kiddie spoofing your IP address?
On it's own an IP address is really more of a circumstantial link to a computer (and indirectly to a person) than a direct one. It's kinda like saying that a glove found at a crime scene matches one bought by a defendant, without proving that it's actually his glove, or that he was the one wearing it when the crime was committed.
There is a benefit to stockholders since being in the S&P 500 creates instant demand - it means that all the S&P 500 index funds need to buy your stock!
Why would the Navy need a cover story for putting weapons systems into their boats? I don't think anyone is under the false impression that the Navy is operating a cruise line.
Anyway, a rail gun is going to be an integrated system - the highly unusual power needs (dumping a massive amount of electricity into it in an extremely short period of time, and wanting an extremely short "reload" time) are not going to be met just by hooking it up to the engine battery, anymore than the National Ignition Facility is powering it's laser fusion experiments from the 110V wall outlets.
The US Navy already has nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and used to have nuclear-powered destroyers also. The generators are used both to directly drive the propellers as well as to generate electricity.
Teach them about basic NAND/NOT/NOT logic gates
Show them how to build a two state flip-flop out of two NAND (or NOR) gates, then how to combine flip-flops into a larger state machine
A nice demo is then to build a toggle-switch driven state machine using the states to power a few different color LEDs (e.g. red/yellow/green traffic light sequence)
This is a very low cost project other than a breadboard/power supply (or battery) you just need some 7400 NAND gates, LEDs and toggle switches. It's a good basic and fun introduction to digital logic.
Why would they not be concerns for GPL?
Because the GPL itself explicitly states that it's non-revocable (unless you violate it).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
I don't think it's entirely obvious that it couldn't be run as a space hotel at a profit, maintainence included. If you had Soyuz going up weekly to fery passengers up and back, then presumably you'd not need any additional launches for maintenance. At the current $25M/week if you kept the ISS full with 4 tourists + 2 crew you'd be raking in $100M/week, which would surely more than cover expenses. It just depends on how much they could charge, and how much their per-launch costs would drop, to do this as an ongoing business.
e.g. Is there sustained demand of ~200 people (4 ISS bunks * 50 weeks) a year paying $10M/week? If so could they turn a profit on $40M/launch revenue (4 * $10M revenue for a weekly launch)?