So nothing you brought up really excludes the possibility of using the GPL for missile control software.
Reflecting on this more, I think you're right. Realistically, I don't think the actual GPL does anything for you that you couldn't get with a well written contract, and it introduces the scare factor into the acquisition community ("what! we can't have everyone looking at the software!"... same mistake I made). But in any case, I think we're all in violent agreement about the need for the gov't customer to be able to look at the source code.
Sorry, I thought you were advocating all-out community development of military software... my apologies. I agree that not being able to see the source code at all is a serious issue. Luckily, it's not one that we face all that often.
For every example of software failures discussed above, you can come up with a fine example of a government system that worked great. I'm not going to spend a lot of time digging up examples, but here's one: the Navy's Aegis Combat System. Aegis is just Skynet's littler (and nicer) brother - it's vastly complex, and under certain circumstances is capable of conducting difficult anti-air battles more-or-less autonomously. It detects, tracks, and engages subsurface, surface, air, and ballistic missile threats. And yes, this was a program run by the government.
As the parent points out, the common thread in massive software implementation failures isn't that the customers were government agencies - it's that they didn't have their requirements nailed down before they started shoveling money at their problems. There's plenty of that going on in the private sector as well.
Sure, there are plenty of situations in which OTS software will get the job done just fine. But in the defense market... suffice it to say that you can't buy My Missile Launch Program for Windows 7... and you wouldn't want to. Prefab software is great if there's a package made for what you need to have done... but there's a whole world of software requirements out there that don't correspond to anything you can go out and buy.
Big commercial contractors are favored because they are the ones most capable of jumping through the flaming hurdles that the feds put up to keep up the appearance of saving tax money. The solution is simple: change the damn laws and regulations so that they can be easily hired and fired, and any 1099 can big on a small project without being an expert in government processes.
IAADC (I am a defense contractor). Actually, there are plenty of gov't contracts that are small business set-asides, which include any number of one man shops. And all the contracting shops include small-business liaison types whose job it is to make any flaming hurdles go away for small businesses. And even full & open competitions (those that are open to large businesses as well as small) frequently have small business participation goals, so the large business prime would have to go recruit some small business and give them some of the work
I really don't understand why you'd want to make it easier to hire and fire gov't employees. The gov't side is where you need more continuity. The reason you have contractors is because 1) they're frequently cheaper, and 2) they are, in fact, easier to hire & fire. The reason you need gov't employees is that contractors don't necessarily have the taxpayers best interests at heart. Not that they're lying scumbags (usually), but the incentives are different.
... but it's certainly possible to go too far in the other direction too, particularly with off-the-shelf software. The DOD recently bought a system from a defense contractor in a friendly foreign country (keeping the details vague here on purpose) that included a bunch of software controls. Our outfit was tasked with doing a safety analysis of the system. So we contact company X, asking for, among other things, a code listing. They flat out refused. "Well, you've analyzed it, right?"... "Oh, of course". "So can we see the analysis?" Nope. Not very smart on the part of company X, as it's hurting their chances of getting more business in the future, but in the meantime... we've bought this damn thing and we're having to treat the control system as a black box for the purposes of safety analysis. So it's not like this issue doesn't exist... it's a real problem. I'm not sure open source is really the answer, though.
I work as a defense contractor, and most of the stuff we work on these days has a software component (whether commercial off-the-shelf, commercial/custom, or gov't developed). I'm pretty sure I don't want my missiles being launched by gnuFireControl or KLauncher. For one thing, there aren't all that many people with expertise in military software development outside of the existing M-I complex. And yes, military software is considerably different from other business software - for one thing, there are very complex safety requirements that have to be met, and if you don't know what they are, you won't be able to do it. More importantly, a lot of the military software in use today is classified - if you could look at the source, you'd get a lot of information about our own forces' capabilities and limitations, plus you'd be able to infer intel data on what we know about adversary systems. Not the kind of thing I want available to Boris and Natasha (or whoever our favorite bad guys are this week).
So you'd have to establish at least some exceptions to the all open-source rule. And once you start allowing exceptions, it can be hard to know where to stop.
If this takes off, and we actually do manage to contain the global warming problem, then no doubt we'll continue merrily burning fossil fuels... and gradually lowering the pH of the ocean. We know this will be fairly devastating to any creatures with carbonate shells, but we don't know what other bad effects will result.
Radical changes to ocean ecology: totally bad idea, folks. Not only do we get a significant amount of food out of the ocean, it produces a fair amount of the freakin' oxygen we breathe everyday. There's really no choice but to stop burning so damn much fossil fuel.
... if 1) we didn't massively subsidize the use of fossil fuels, and 2) the price of various forms of environmental devastation wasn't treated as an externality. Consider that the continental shelf is the property of the US government, and we have been and continue to lease the mineral rights to BP, et al, for way below market rates. And that we provide massive security services to various oil companies in the form of huge military commitments in the Middle East. And we provide an enormous interstate highway system, the cost of which is only partly offset by user fees such as tolls and gas taxes.
Also, consider that fossil fuel extractors and consumers are essentially paying nothing for the privilege of dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere, even though everyone is paying the cost in the form of climate disturbances, poor air quality, etc. And that when these major spills happen, the companies involved generally get off without paying significant damages (note that after years of litigation, Exxon ended up paying a tiny fraction of the total estimated damages from the Exxon Valdez spill - local fishing and tourism industries were left holding the bag).
Greener alternatives such as wind and solar could compete, if the true costs of fossil fuels were paid at the pump. But they're not.
Clathrates require enormous pressures and very cold temperatures to remain stable. Warm them up to room temperature... and let's just say your gas tank won't be remaining whole very long.
Control your tailings output, and use solar collectors to fuse it into aggregate masses you can use for mass shielding.
Oh, sure, that'd be cost effective. Because providing enough solar collection capability to do that - in the freaking asteroid belt - would be practically free. Snort, indeed.
Or, you ship up the mining/refining equipment, and the machining shops to build the rest. We build these things on earth in automated factories, no reason why we can't adapt our techniques to do so in space. Difficult, massive investment, yes. Half baked fantasy, no.
I guarantee you that we do not have the technology to even "ship up" automated mines (have you noticed that low-tech coal mining is still managing to kill fair numbers of humans these days? Seems like that would be prime ground for automation... but we can't even manage it on earth) - much less automating the process of building a freaking factory that, in turn, automatically builds all the stuff I talked about in the OP. Sorry, but that is, in fact, total fantasy land.
*snort* Where do you get "chaotic" from? Even NEA's that pass close enough to earth to have their orbits changed frequently are still trackable, and the changes in their orbits predictable enough to put any number of spacecraft within a few m/s delta V range of them. We are in the process - underfunded, but still doing it - of trying to improve our tracking of NEAs anyway.
Have you kept count of how many probes have been lost trying to land on Mars? And it's approximately spherical, has an extremely predictable orbit and rotation, and is not significantly influenced by nearby bodies. Asteroids have none of that going for them. They're moving in a cloud of similarly sized and relatively close objects, are tumbling about all 3 axes, etc. Landing on them is most certainly going to be challenging.
You need to stop substituting wishful thinking for critical thought here.
Come on, dude. Water, as pointed out in my post, is OXIDIZED hydrogen and oxygen. To turn it back into rocket fuel requires the aforementioned enormous expenditure of energy. Which would be prohibitively expensive to do in space.
The main problem isn't whether you could get the technology to work (although it would be very, very difficult). The main problem is that you couldn't do it at a price anyone would be willing to pay. Doing all the stuff called out in my post would be absolutely insanely expensive.
There's a much cheaper solution to the problem you mention: it's called birth control. And we're already doing it - global populations are on track to plateau in the fairly near future. And there's no reason why we can't move to totally renewable energy, and completely recycle minerals on earth. The technology for that is actually a lot cheaper and more developed than finding, mining, processing, refining, and returning minerals from the asteroid belt.
I know that current models show that the brief moments after the BB (relatively speaking), that they had the universe expanding at FTL speeds. But I never understood how on the one hand, Physicists says that nothing can go FTL, and then say the first bit of time after the BB, things were going FTL.
Actually, physicists are not saying that "things" were going faster than light. They're saying that space itself was expanding faster than than light. Which is not the same thing at all.
Also: the article at the link you provide shoots down the idea that the speed of light changes with time, in rather strong terms. I'm not an expert in the field of cosmology, but I don't believe anyone takes seriously the idea of a varying speed of light. You might want to read over your own link.
It has also regularly required extensive maintenance, on top of which it's essentially a rowboat compared the supertanker an industrial scale extraction process will require.
This is the thing that always trips up the/. crowd. Making a few wisps of O2 and H2 via electrolysis in space is one thing. Making volumes of liquid O2 and H2 sufficient to actually power rockets that go somewhere is an entirely different story. It's going to require a simply enormous amount of infrastructure, all of which would have to be shipped from earth, and it would have to be completely automated. I doubt we have the technology to do this at all, and certainly not at a price anyone would be willing to pay.
So, now all we have to do is build an incredibly large and thick pyrex sphere. Millions of miles from earth. And let it hang around in the asteroid belt (which, needless to say, is full of flying rocks) without breaking. Yeah, that'll happen.
Even if there was any possibility of that working... now you have a sphere full of white hot oxygen and hydrogen. How, pray tell, do you get them out without them oxidizing again? How do you pressurize/liquefy them?
Ok, so I build the giant mylar bag mirror, and focus a bunch of sunlight onto the surface of the asteroid. What do I have now? Hot rocks with the water ice vaporized out of them and escaping into space. Even if you could somehow focus enough solar energy onto the surface to actually electrolyze water (without actually vaporizing the rock substrate), you've not even postulated a way to collect the product.
If you were planning to do something different with your reflected sunlight, it wasn't obvious from your post.
Whether or not landing on asteroids is easy (I have my doubts - their motion is likely to be at least somewhat chaotic), there's a more important problem. We're talking about water here, which doesn't, you know, make a very good rocket fuel. Being as how it's already oxidized and everything. TFA indicates that for this to work, you'd first have to grind up some substantial amount of ice-containing rock, microwave it for a while, separate and purify the water... and then you get to electrolyze it. In other words, you need to dump an enormous amount of energy into it. So to do this, you'd have to ship a really large amount of equipment to said asteroid - solar collectors, electricity distribution and storage systems, rock-digging/grinding equipment, microwave machines, electrolysis equipment, hydrogen/oxygen distribution and storage systems, etc, etc. And presumably this all has to be automated, so you need to include computer equipment and then figure out how to actually do automation of a process this complicated.
You'd also need to figure out how to dispose of your rock tailings in such a way that they don't produce a giant abrasive cloud around the asteroid you want to work on, which would almost certainly screw up both incoming vehicles and your solar collectors and other equipment.
I highly, highly doubt you'd be able to make enough trips back and forth to this asteroid for such a system to pay off (all this is going to be extraordinarily expensive to build) before it broke down.
Bottom line: this idea hasn't even gotten to the half-baked stage yet. I wouldn't be bidding up the price of asteroid real estate at this point.
... daisy-chaining. One of the supposed advantages to both FireWire and USB was that you could daisy-chain devices. But in practice, how many devices ever actually contained an upstream port so you could use this feature? I have a FW external hard drive that had an additional port, and I can and do use that as a link in a daisy chain. But no other device I own, either USB or FireWire, supports this. You have to plug them straight into the computer or get a hub. Since my main machine is a laptop and has exactly 2 USB ports, it's sometimes an issue.
I hope Light Peak devices do a better job at this. Lack of device support for daisy-chaining isn't a huge deal, but it's at least somewhat of a pain in the ass.
I thought that your particular species of troll (you know, the ones who just make ludicrous crap up and then get modded up for it) had gone extinct! Way to go, trolls!
Not particularly an iPad fan here, but still... every technology product has this issue. I think most people understand the tradeoff between having something now and having something slightly more whiz-bang later.
Dude, you need to read up on physics. This is not a technological issue - it's not just that we need to smash stuff together harder. The Standard model predicts that quarks are it... they are true elementary particles. I'm not sure where you're getting this "turtles all the way down" thing.
Pulling out small amounts of wind energy may be harmless; pulling out gigawatts will affect the environment. Why would anybody think that it would have no impact?
Geez, every time we start talking about wind energy in this place, someone trots this one out. I'm not going to go to the trouble of looking up the reference again, but suffice it to say that we could extract wind energy sufficient to meet the entire world's supply of electricity, and still not be using more than a tiny fraction of all the wind energy in the atmosphere. It's nowhere near enough to affect anything. This argument is just plain dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
... it was about detecting sarcasm and irony. Might want to check that one out.
Hmm.
Reflecting on this more, I think you're right. Realistically, I don't think the actual GPL does anything for you that you couldn't get with a well written contract, and it introduces the scare factor into the acquisition community ("what! we can't have everyone looking at the software!"... same mistake I made). But in any case, I think we're all in violent agreement about the need for the gov't customer to be able to look at the source code.
Sorry, I thought you were advocating all-out community development of military software... my apologies. I agree that not being able to see the source code at all is a serious issue. Luckily, it's not one that we face all that often.
For every example of software failures discussed above, you can come up with a fine example of a government system that worked great. I'm not going to spend a lot of time digging up examples, but here's one: the Navy's Aegis Combat System. Aegis is just Skynet's littler (and nicer) brother - it's vastly complex, and under certain circumstances is capable of conducting difficult anti-air battles more-or-less autonomously. It detects, tracks, and engages subsurface, surface, air, and ballistic missile threats. And yes, this was a program run by the government.
As the parent points out, the common thread in massive software implementation failures isn't that the customers were government agencies - it's that they didn't have their requirements nailed down before they started shoveling money at their problems. There's plenty of that going on in the private sector as well.
Sure, there are plenty of situations in which OTS software will get the job done just fine. But in the defense market... suffice it to say that you can't buy My Missile Launch Program for Windows 7... and you wouldn't want to. Prefab software is great if there's a package made for what you need to have done... but there's a whole world of software requirements out there that don't correspond to anything you can go out and buy.
IAADC (I am a defense contractor). Actually, there are plenty of gov't contracts that are small business set-asides, which include any number of one man shops. And all the contracting shops include small-business liaison types whose job it is to make any flaming hurdles go away for small businesses. And even full & open competitions (those that are open to large businesses as well as small) frequently have small business participation goals, so the large business prime would have to go recruit some small business and give them some of the work
I really don't understand why you'd want to make it easier to hire and fire gov't employees. The gov't side is where you need more continuity. The reason you have contractors is because 1) they're frequently cheaper, and 2) they are, in fact, easier to hire & fire. The reason you need gov't employees is that contractors don't necessarily have the taxpayers best interests at heart. Not that they're lying scumbags (usually), but the incentives are different.
... but it's certainly possible to go too far in the other direction too, particularly with off-the-shelf software. The DOD recently bought a system from a defense contractor in a friendly foreign country (keeping the details vague here on purpose) that included a bunch of software controls. Our outfit was tasked with doing a safety analysis of the system. So we contact company X, asking for, among other things, a code listing. They flat out refused. "Well, you've analyzed it, right?"... "Oh, of course". "So can we see the analysis?" Nope. Not very smart on the part of company X, as it's hurting their chances of getting more business in the future, but in the meantime... we've bought this damn thing and we're having to treat the control system as a black box for the purposes of safety analysis. So it's not like this issue doesn't exist... it's a real problem. I'm not sure open source is really the answer, though.
I work as a defense contractor, and most of the stuff we work on these days has a software component (whether commercial off-the-shelf, commercial/custom, or gov't developed). I'm pretty sure I don't want my missiles being launched by gnuFireControl or KLauncher. For one thing, there aren't all that many people with expertise in military software development outside of the existing M-I complex. And yes, military software is considerably different from other business software - for one thing, there are very complex safety requirements that have to be met, and if you don't know what they are, you won't be able to do it. More importantly, a lot of the military software in use today is classified - if you could look at the source, you'd get a lot of information about our own forces' capabilities and limitations, plus you'd be able to infer intel data on what we know about adversary systems. Not the kind of thing I want available to Boris and Natasha (or whoever our favorite bad guys are this week).
So you'd have to establish at least some exceptions to the all open-source rule. And once you start allowing exceptions, it can be hard to know where to stop.
If this takes off, and we actually do manage to contain the global warming problem, then no doubt we'll continue merrily burning fossil fuels... and gradually lowering the pH of the ocean. We know this will be fairly devastating to any creatures with carbonate shells, but we don't know what other bad effects will result.
Radical changes to ocean ecology: totally bad idea, folks. Not only do we get a significant amount of food out of the ocean, it produces a fair amount of the freakin' oxygen we breathe everyday. There's really no choice but to stop burning so damn much fossil fuel.
... if 1) we didn't massively subsidize the use of fossil fuels, and 2) the price of various forms of environmental devastation wasn't treated as an externality. Consider that the continental shelf is the property of the US government, and we have been and continue to lease the mineral rights to BP, et al, for way below market rates. And that we provide massive security services to various oil companies in the form of huge military commitments in the Middle East. And we provide an enormous interstate highway system, the cost of which is only partly offset by user fees such as tolls and gas taxes.
Also, consider that fossil fuel extractors and consumers are essentially paying nothing for the privilege of dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere, even though everyone is paying the cost in the form of climate disturbances, poor air quality, etc. And that when these major spills happen, the companies involved generally get off without paying significant damages (note that after years of litigation, Exxon ended up paying a tiny fraction of the total estimated damages from the Exxon Valdez spill - local fishing and tourism industries were left holding the bag).
Greener alternatives such as wind and solar could compete, if the true costs of fossil fuels were paid at the pump. But they're not.
Clathrates require enormous pressures and very cold temperatures to remain stable. Warm them up to room temperature... and let's just say your gas tank won't be remaining whole very long.
Oh, sure, that'd be cost effective. Because providing enough solar collection capability to do that - in the freaking asteroid belt - would be practically free. Snort, indeed.
I guarantee you that we do not have the technology to even "ship up" automated mines (have you noticed that low-tech coal mining is still managing to kill fair numbers of humans these days? Seems like that would be prime ground for automation... but we can't even manage it on earth) - much less automating the process of building a freaking factory that, in turn, automatically builds all the stuff I talked about in the OP. Sorry, but that is, in fact, total fantasy land.
Have you kept count of how many probes have been lost trying to land on Mars? And it's approximately spherical, has an extremely predictable orbit and rotation, and is not significantly influenced by nearby bodies. Asteroids have none of that going for them. They're moving in a cloud of similarly sized and relatively close objects, are tumbling about all 3 axes, etc. Landing on them is most certainly going to be challenging.
You need to stop substituting wishful thinking for critical thought here.
Come on, dude. Water, as pointed out in my post, is OXIDIZED hydrogen and oxygen. To turn it back into rocket fuel requires the aforementioned enormous expenditure of energy. Which would be prohibitively expensive to do in space.
The main problem isn't whether you could get the technology to work (although it would be very, very difficult). The main problem is that you couldn't do it at a price anyone would be willing to pay. Doing all the stuff called out in my post would be absolutely insanely expensive.
There's a much cheaper solution to the problem you mention: it's called birth control. And we're already doing it - global populations are on track to plateau in the fairly near future. And there's no reason why we can't move to totally renewable energy, and completely recycle minerals on earth. The technology for that is actually a lot cheaper and more developed than finding, mining, processing, refining, and returning minerals from the asteroid belt.
Actually, physicists are not saying that "things" were going faster than light. They're saying that space itself was expanding faster than than light. Which is not the same thing at all.
Also: the article at the link you provide shoots down the idea that the speed of light changes with time, in rather strong terms. I'm not an expert in the field of cosmology, but I don't believe anyone takes seriously the idea of a varying speed of light. You might want to read over your own link.
This is the thing that always trips up the /. crowd. Making a few wisps of O2 and H2 via electrolysis in space is one thing. Making volumes of liquid O2 and H2 sufficient to actually power rockets that go somewhere is an entirely different story. It's going to require a simply enormous amount of infrastructure, all of which would have to be shipped from earth, and it would have to be completely automated. I doubt we have the technology to do this at all, and certainly not at a price anyone would be willing to pay.
So, now all we have to do is build an incredibly large and thick pyrex sphere. Millions of miles from earth. And let it hang around in the asteroid belt (which, needless to say, is full of flying rocks) without breaking. Yeah, that'll happen.
Even if there was any possibility of that working... now you have a sphere full of white hot oxygen and hydrogen. How, pray tell, do you get them out without them oxidizing again? How do you pressurize/liquefy them?
Ok, so I build the giant mylar bag mirror, and focus a bunch of sunlight onto the surface of the asteroid. What do I have now? Hot rocks with the water ice vaporized out of them and escaping into space. Even if you could somehow focus enough solar energy onto the surface to actually electrolyze water (without actually vaporizing the rock substrate), you've not even postulated a way to collect the product.
If you were planning to do something different with your reflected sunlight, it wasn't obvious from your post.
Whether or not landing on asteroids is easy (I have my doubts - their motion is likely to be at least somewhat chaotic), there's a more important problem. We're talking about water here, which doesn't, you know, make a very good rocket fuel. Being as how it's already oxidized and everything. TFA indicates that for this to work, you'd first have to grind up some substantial amount of ice-containing rock, microwave it for a while, separate and purify the water... and then you get to electrolyze it. In other words, you need to dump an enormous amount of energy into it. So to do this, you'd have to ship a really large amount of equipment to said asteroid - solar collectors, electricity distribution and storage systems, rock-digging/grinding equipment, microwave machines, electrolysis equipment, hydrogen/oxygen distribution and storage systems, etc, etc. And presumably this all has to be automated, so you need to include computer equipment and then figure out how to actually do automation of a process this complicated.
You'd also need to figure out how to dispose of your rock tailings in such a way that they don't produce a giant abrasive cloud around the asteroid you want to work on, which would almost certainly screw up both incoming vehicles and your solar collectors and other equipment.
I highly, highly doubt you'd be able to make enough trips back and forth to this asteroid for such a system to pay off (all this is going to be extraordinarily expensive to build) before it broke down.
Bottom line: this idea hasn't even gotten to the half-baked stage yet. I wouldn't be bidding up the price of asteroid real estate at this point.
... daisy-chaining. One of the supposed advantages to both FireWire and USB was that you could daisy-chain devices. But in practice, how many devices ever actually contained an upstream port so you could use this feature? I have a FW external hard drive that had an additional port, and I can and do use that as a link in a daisy chain. But no other device I own, either USB or FireWire, supports this. You have to plug them straight into the computer or get a hub. Since my main machine is a laptop and has exactly 2 USB ports, it's sometimes an issue.
I hope Light Peak devices do a better job at this. Lack of device support for daisy-chaining isn't a huge deal, but it's at least somewhat of a pain in the ass.
I thought that your particular species of troll (you know, the ones who just make ludicrous crap up and then get modded up for it) had gone extinct! Way to go, trolls!
Not particularly an iPad fan here, but still... every technology product has this issue. I think most people understand the tradeoff between having something now and having something slightly more whiz-bang later.
Yes, I understand that and was going with the flow regarding the metaphor. I think we're all in violent agreement here.
Dude, you need to read up on physics. This is not a technological issue - it's not just that we need to smash stuff together harder. The Standard model predicts that quarks are it... they are true elementary particles. I'm not sure where you're getting this "turtles all the way down" thing.
Geez, every time we start talking about wind energy in this place, someone trots this one out. I'm not going to go to the trouble of looking up the reference again, but suffice it to say that we could extract wind energy sufficient to meet the entire world's supply of electricity, and still not be using more than a tiny fraction of all the wind energy in the atmosphere. It's nowhere near enough to affect anything. This argument is just plain dumb.