Here is a serious response - being able to simulate a complicated system is not the end of the process, it is the beginning. We have been simulating galactic dynamics for roughly 50 years, and weather for 80, and we don't really understand either. Heck, we've been simulating the solar system for centuries, and we don't really understand that either. We understand bits and pieces of all of these systems, in some cases spectacularly well, but anyone who would say that after decades of simulations all problems have been solved is just whacked. (Don't forget that simulations are not the only way to study things, and that in each of these cases, serious advances are still being made by other means.)
So, if you say, "in the next few decades we will simulate some parts of brain function and learn stuff that will compliment other means of study," sure, I could buy that. That is very, very far from saying that in the same time frame we will be able to construct superintelligences to run on silicon.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says.Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
Dude, the equations of quantum mechanics can be written on one page. General Relativity can be written on a second page. What more do you need ? Clearly, a few hundred lines of code (and a few do loops) should be enough to simulate the entire universe, brains and all.
Glad we cleared that up. All you physicists and astronomers can go home now and work on your resumes.
This sort of thing would only pass if it could be done under the radar, so the fact that the CEA is fulminating against it means that its prospects are dim, and deservedly so.
The Constitutional "lever" for the FCC has always been the perceived scarcity of the airwaves, necessitating spectrum control and licensing and thus a certain power over broadcasts over transmitters licensed under that authority.
Where is the Constitutional "lever" here, given the First Amendment ? In the case of Cable TV (from the FCC Cable TV Fact sheet web site) this authority was extended :
The Supreme Court affirmed the Commission's jurisdiction over cable in United States v. Southwestern Cable Co., 392 U.S. 157 (1968). The Court ruled that "the Commission has reasonably concluded that regulatory authority over CATV is imperative if it is to perform with appropriate effectiveness certain of its responsibilities." The Court found the Commission needed authority over cable systems to assure the preservation of local broadcast service and to effect an equitable distribution of broadcast services among the various regions of the country.
This case in 1968 deals with the transmission of regulated broadcasts over cable, which is not applicable to Internet only broadcasts. (The 1968 Supreme Court ruling is available here.)
I see a big Constitutional fight coming up here at some point, maybe over this bill, maybe not, but at some point. Under what basis does the US Government FCC have power to regulate speech on the Internet ? Anyone can put up a broadcast on the Internet; regulation of those broadcasts is thus a regulation of free speech, and thus a violation of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law") ? Regulation has a tendency to start with sensible things, and wind up with stupidity like the Janet Jackson "breast malfunction" mess. (Do you want your web site or video posting to be done under such rules ?)
The Internet has been the most positive development in the cause of Freedom since the fall of the Berlin Wall. To put it simply, it has given the people a voice that they previously lacked. I hope that we don't screw it up in this country by giving it over to FCC regulations, no matter how sensible they seem on the surface. Applying FCC regulation to the Internet will almost inevitably lead to a situation where only major corporations have the ability (in fact if not in law) to broadcast on the Internet. (If you doubt me, try reading the FCC regs sometime.) The major corporations that own most on-air broadcasting in this country fear the Internet and would love to have it delivered into their hands; any bill that threatens to give them that power should be resisted.
The problem remains with Progress or Jules Verne that you would then need somewhere to put your rubbish and something to shoot it with to make it burn up in the upper atmosphere.
Why ? Material is brought at great expense to Earth orbit, why not keep it there for potential future re-use ?
The ATV is a 20 ton spacecraft, with steering & fully man-rated. ISS Node-3 is 19 tons. Why not save up 3 or 4 years of (once per year) ATV supply vehicles, and make the asteroid mission out of those ? That would be 60 or 80 tons of living space, which I suspect the astronauts would appreciate.
Because there was not an immediate need for them, and (to be blunt) because in many ways "the system" is set up to spend money building things, not to save money reusing things. Look at the Jules Verne - a man-rated cargo carrier (i.e., an actual pressurized spacecraft) that was used once, filled up with garbage, and disposed of via re-entry.
There were many plans in the early days of the space shuttle to take the Space Shuttle External Tank (which certainly could be used in orbit - it actually is brought to orbit, and then energy is expended to make sure it re-enters immediately) and make them into space stations in the Skylab fashion. (Skylab was the 3rd stage of a Saturn V outfitted as a space station - this was originally intended to be launched "wet" in a 1973 Venus Flyby Mission. Nixon killed this mission and all plans and infrastructure for manned deep space flight and we are still trying to get them back.)
The Space Shuttle External Tank space station could have been done, there was even a start-up I had a remote involvement with trying to make one into a space hotel, but such ideas got no support and no funding and all died on the vine.
There are a number of Near Earth Asteroids that are dynamically easy to reach (i.e., with very low delta-V's). The "Plymouth Rock" presentation to the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) last year lists 12 that could be reached with Orion. These are being found fairly rapidly, so there is no shortage of targets.
(Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
No, I don't think so, at least as long as your threat model is "most votes on items are unbiased, but some small number are attacked." Suppose pictures (to stay with the OP's model) are being voted on, with most pictures getting a small positive response (say, a typical picture gets a 1% positive score), and a few getting as much as 99% positive votes, with each picture getting, say, a few thousands of responses. In theory, in this situation, you know the "likeability" of any given picture to a few %. Suppose you want to test the high ranking ones for attempts to game the system. To do that you might get as few as 10 votes from people you select at random. Now, 10 votes would not be nearly enough to distinguish between (say) "50% like" and "90% like," but it would be enough to distinguish between "99% like" and "1%" like or, for that matter, "50% like" and "1 % like."
So, if you think of the overall votes as providing you with statistics, and the much smaller number of 'random' votes as providing a go/no go confidence indicator to detect gaming of the system, both are useful, and neither can replace the other. (You can use the tools of operational research to tell you, for a given confidence level, just how many random votes you need to detect gaming for any given situation.)
Yes. Water irradiates fairly nicely. In the solar system, this "radiation" is actually high energy protons and electron, with a little Helium (AKA Alpha particles) and a smidgen of other stuff. Generally, you would worry about fission byproducts under such radiation. However, you can't fission Hydrogen at all, and you're not likely to encounter energies required to fission Oxygen either, or to make Neon from Oxygen by the Alpha process. You might make a little Tritium, but Tritium decays rapidly.
It's the heavy elements (roughly, Iron and above) that tend to have lots of nasty fission byproducts, caused by a proton hitting and breaking apart the nucleus. A steel container for your water, now that would be an issue, but I don't think that the water itself is likely to be dangerous.
The cost of Deep Space missions is so great you could make everything out of solid gold and it really wouldn't matter, as long as it saved a little weight. My guess is, using Ti instead of Pb saved a little weight, so they went with it.
You are correct that there are no significant tidal forces in a 10 meter spacecraft, but there are certainly solar tides on the Earth - they are about 1/2 the amplitude of the Lunar tides, and the interaction between the two gives rise to the Spring and Neap tides.
Metric first, and imperial units as backup. Very nice.
What I like is that the author didn't say
The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (440.92 pounds).
The key to running "dual stack" on metric / English units is to realize that most of the time you do not have to be too precise in the conversion, as most of the time the original is not very precise either.
There has to be shielding, but not every part of the spacecraft has to be shielded. BTW, NASA does monitor radiation exposure to its astronauts, and you can't do a long duration mission to the ISS once you reach your lifetime limit.
While the depth of the atmosphere also helps in shielding, 14 pounds per square inch (or, ten metric tons per square meter), is not a bad first guess for adequate shielding for most of deep space, although it would not nearly be adequate for Jupiter. (Not every part of the spacecraft would require this, but a shielded "safe room" for solar flares would be a very good idea.) Note that the Jovian / Solar Flare radiation is all charged particles (no X or gamma rays), so it might also be possible to do magnetic shielding.
This radiation will make it hard to ever do direct human exploration of the Jovian moons. The radiation peaks strongly in the equatorial regions, and all 4 Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) have equatorial orbits. An unprotected human on the surface of Europa would be killed by the radiation within minutes (not quite as fast as from the vacuum of space, but still very fast), and so people on Europa would be restricted to moving around in something like tanks, for survival. Clearly, unmanned spacecraft (or at best tele-presence robots operated from a few million km away) are going to be the means of exploration there for a long time to come.
Bingo. Remember, the old Bell system philosophy was that the phone company controlled all traffic on their networks, and charged everyone for everything that passed their network, under the protection of a government monopoly. They have been trying to recreate this for over two decades now, and preventing that is what the net neutrality fight is really about.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a serious response - being able to simulate a complicated system is not the end of the process, it is the beginning. We have been simulating galactic dynamics for roughly 50 years, and weather for 80, and we don't really understand either. Heck, we've been simulating the solar system for centuries, and we don't really understand that either. We understand bits and pieces of all of these systems, in some cases spectacularly well, but anyone who would say that after decades of simulations all problems have been solved is just whacked. (Don't forget that simulations are not the only way to study things, and that in each of these cases, serious advances are still being made by other means.)
So, if you say, "in the next few decades we will simulate some parts of brain function and learn stuff that will compliment other means of study," sure, I could buy that. That is very, very far from saying that in the same time frame we will be able to construct superintelligences to run on silicon.
If you did it in APL, you could do it in one line of code. Of course, who still has an APL keyboard ?
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says.Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
Dude, the equations of quantum mechanics can be written on one page. General Relativity can be written on a second page. What more do you need ? Clearly, a few hundred lines of code (and a few do loops) should be enough to simulate the entire universe, brains and all.
Glad we cleared that up. All you physicists and astronomers can go home now and work on your resumes.
Myself, I think that both the singularity and the rapture have already happened. You didn't translate to the other realm. Get over it.
This sort of thing would only pass if it could be done under the radar, so the fact that the CEA is fulminating against it means that its prospects are dim, and deservedly so.
The Constitutional "lever" for the FCC has always been the perceived scarcity of the airwaves, necessitating spectrum control and licensing and thus a certain power over broadcasts over transmitters licensed under that authority.
Where is the Constitutional "lever" here, given the First Amendment ? In the case of Cable TV (from the FCC Cable TV Fact sheet web site) this authority was extended :
The Supreme Court affirmed the Commission's jurisdiction over cable in United States v. Southwestern Cable Co., 392 U.S. 157 (1968). The Court ruled that "the Commission has reasonably concluded that regulatory authority over CATV is imperative if it is to perform with appropriate effectiveness certain of its responsibilities." The Court found the Commission needed authority over cable systems to assure the preservation of local broadcast service and to effect an equitable distribution of broadcast services among the various regions of the country.
This case in 1968 deals with the transmission of regulated broadcasts over cable, which is not applicable to Internet only broadcasts. (The 1968 Supreme Court ruling is available here.)
I see a big Constitutional fight coming up here at some point, maybe over this bill, maybe not, but at some point. Under what basis does the US Government FCC have power to regulate speech on the Internet ? Anyone can put up a broadcast on the Internet; regulation of those broadcasts is thus a regulation of free speech, and thus a violation of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law") ? Regulation has a tendency to start with sensible things, and wind up with stupidity like the Janet Jackson "breast malfunction" mess. (Do you want your web site or video posting to be done under such rules ?)
The Internet has been the most positive development in the cause of Freedom since the fall of the Berlin Wall. To put it simply, it has given the people a voice that they previously lacked. I hope that we don't screw it up in this country by giving it over to FCC regulations, no matter how sensible they seem on the surface. Applying FCC regulation to the Internet will almost inevitably lead to a situation where only major corporations have the ability (in fact if not in law) to broadcast on the Internet. (If you doubt me, try reading the FCC regs sometime.) The major corporations that own most on-air broadcasting in this country fear the Internet and would love to have it delivered into their hands; any bill that threatens to give them that power should be resisted.
The problem remains with Progress or Jules Verne that you would then need somewhere to put your rubbish and something to shoot it with to make it burn up in the upper atmosphere.
Why ? Material is brought at great expense to Earth orbit, why not keep it there for potential future re-use ?
The ATV is a 20 ton spacecraft, with steering & fully man-rated. ISS Node-3 is 19 tons. Why not save up 3 or 4 years of (once per year) ATV supply vehicles, and make the asteroid mission out of those ? That would be 60 or 80 tons of living space, which I suspect the astronauts would appreciate.
From the Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions (xPRM) briefing :
Per NASA Johnson Space Center analysis: 44-known NEOs are reachable humans assuming notional Ares V-class launch vehicle performance;
Here is the actual presentation, from the agenda (which has all of the presentations).
Perusal of that shows that gravity was to be obtained by a rotating tether, not within a module.
Because there was not an immediate need for them, and (to be blunt) because in many ways "the system" is set up to spend money building things, not to save money reusing things. Look at the Jules Verne - a man-rated cargo carrier (i.e., an actual pressurized spacecraft) that was used once, filled up with garbage, and disposed of via re-entry.
There were many plans in the early days of the space shuttle to take the Space Shuttle External Tank (which certainly could be used in orbit - it actually is brought to orbit, and then energy is expended to make sure it re-enters immediately) and make them into space stations in the Skylab fashion. (Skylab was the 3rd stage of a Saturn V outfitted as a space station - this was originally intended to be launched "wet" in a 1973 Venus Flyby Mission. Nixon killed this mission and all plans and infrastructure for manned deep space flight and we are still trying to get them back.)
The Space Shuttle External Tank space station could have been done, there was even a start-up I had a remote involvement with trying to make one into a space hotel, but such ideas got no support and no funding and all died on the vine.
There are a number of Near Earth Asteroids that are dynamically easy to reach (i.e., with very low delta-V's). The "Plymouth Rock" presentation to the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) last year lists 12 that could be reached with Orion. These are being found fairly rapidly, so there is no shortage of targets.
(Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
No, I don't think so, at least as long as your threat model is "most votes on items are unbiased, but some small number are attacked." Suppose pictures (to stay with the OP's model) are being voted on, with most pictures getting a small positive response (say, a typical picture gets a 1% positive score), and a few getting as much as 99% positive votes, with each picture getting, say, a few thousands of responses. In theory, in this situation, you know the "likeability" of any given picture to a few %. Suppose you want to test the high ranking ones for attempts to game the system. To do that you might get as few as 10 votes from people you select at random. Now, 10 votes would not be nearly enough to distinguish between (say) "50% like" and "90% like," but it would be enough to distinguish between "99% like" and "1%" like or, for that matter, "50% like" and "1 % like."
So, if you think of the overall votes as providing you with statistics, and the much smaller number of 'random' votes as providing a go/no go confidence indicator to detect gaming of the system, both are useful, and neither can replace the other. (You can use the tools of operational research to tell you, for a given confidence level, just how many random votes you need to detect gaming for any given situation.)
Yes. Water irradiates fairly nicely. In the solar system, this "radiation" is actually high energy protons and electron, with a little Helium (AKA Alpha particles) and a smidgen of other stuff. Generally, you would worry about fission byproducts under such radiation. However, you can't fission Hydrogen at all, and you're not likely to encounter energies required to fission Oxygen either, or to make Neon from Oxygen by the Alpha process. You might make a little Tritium, but Tritium decays rapidly.
It's the heavy elements (roughly, Iron and above) that tend to have lots of nasty fission byproducts, caused by a proton hitting and breaking apart the nucleus. A steel container for your water, now that would be an issue, but I don't think that the water itself is likely to be dangerous.
I guess given the cost of Titanium/processing...
The cost of Deep Space missions is so great you could make everything out of solid gold and it really wouldn't matter, as long as it saved a little weight. My guess is, using Ti instead of Pb saved a little weight, so they went with it.
Anyone know how long it will take the probe to get there?
Current plans are for a 5 year cruise phase with one Earth fly-by. This might change, especially if the mission has to slip for some reason.
None of this would surprise me. Akamai has been placing gear in ISP's premises (for free!) for over a decade now.
Here is a 2.4 Mbyte pdf on Google's approach to data centers, and a video tour.
You are correct that there are no significant tidal forces in a 10 meter spacecraft, but there are certainly solar tides on the Earth - they are about 1/2 the amplitude of the Lunar tides, and the interaction between the two gives rise to the Spring and Neap tides.
Metric first, and imperial units as backup. Very nice.
What I like is that the author didn't say
The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (440.92 pounds).
The key to running "dual stack" on metric / English units is to realize that most of the time you do not have to be too precise in the conversion, as most of the time the original is not very precise either.
There has to be shielding, but not every part of the spacecraft has to be shielded. BTW, NASA does monitor radiation exposure to its astronauts, and you can't do a long duration mission to the ISS once you reach your lifetime limit.
While the depth of the atmosphere also helps in shielding, 14 pounds per square inch (or, ten metric tons per square meter), is not a bad first guess for adequate shielding for most of deep space, although it would not nearly be adequate for Jupiter. (Not every part of the spacecraft would require this, but a shielded "safe room" for solar flares would be a very good idea.) Note that the Jovian / Solar Flare radiation is all charged particles (no X or gamma rays), so it might also be possible to do magnetic shielding.
This radiation will make it hard to ever do direct human exploration of the Jovian moons. The radiation peaks strongly in the equatorial regions, and all 4 Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) have equatorial orbits. An unprotected human on the surface of Europa would be killed by the radiation within minutes (not quite as fast as from the vacuum of space, but still very fast), and so people on Europa would be restricted to moving around in something like tanks, for survival. Clearly, unmanned spacecraft (or at best tele-presence robots operated from a few million km away) are going to be the means of exploration there for a long time to come.
We are already paying twice
Bingo. Remember, the old Bell system philosophy was that the phone company controlled all traffic on their networks, and charged everyone for everything that passed their network, under the protection of a government monopoly. They have been trying to recreate this for over two decades now, and preventing that is what the net neutrality fight is really about.
If you have a 768 Kbps connection, no amount of traffic engineering will allow you to receive a 3 Mbps stream.
No surprise, really, but a shame.
... and so can you !
(Stephen Colbert's next book ?)