It depends on what you want to do. If you want to communicate with other people nearby in the city, then peer-to-peer networking is the way to do it. Set up mobile hotspots with open access. With VoIP you can even use your mobile handsets. Vulnerable to jamming, snooping and RDF.
If you want to reconnect with the global network, then a satellite link is one way, or packet data over ham freq, maybe bounced off the ionosphere.
There are upward of 70 microprocessors, 20 million lines of code (if you include multimedia tech) and hundreds of I/O ports in a typical upscale modern car. Manufacturers are moving towards in-car wireless networking to replace the enormous amount of cabling that current exists. Researchers have already demonstrated to seize control of the engine and brakes by hacking a couple of 2009 model year cars.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18901-modern-cars-vulnerable-to-malicious-hacks.html
Considering that they won't let me use my ipod on an aircraft during takeoff and landing because IT MIGHT CRASH (tell me about it), yeah, count me worried about automobiles and other transportation as well.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the brain using induced currents has been around for quite a while. Google it. TMS of certain regions of the brain can induce spiritual feelings (in the religious sense). That said, TMS is a procedure for studying the brain, and uses sophisticated and precisely calibrated equipment you are unlikely to find in a haunted house!
Right. The lead time is quite long on some parts. Contracts with suppliers have expired and manufacturing lines shut down. I doubt that another Shuttle flight is actually possible.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but automatic classification of galaxies from sky survey data using machine learning techniques was accomplished in the early '90s by the SKICAT system developed at JPL and Caltech. http://adsabs.harvard.edu//abs/1995PASP..107.1243W is a good overview of the system and its accomplishments as of 1995.
The instrumentation is clearly not sensitive enough to detect residual neural activity. Patients in emergency situations are on EEGs, which are far less sensitive than fMRI or other non-invasive methods of monitoring brain activity.,
The "Vision for Space Exploration" of George W. Bush was a politically motivated move to show he was "visionary" at a time in the election cycle when he really needed it. Recall that his father, George H.W. Bush also had his version of this, the "Human Exploration Initiative" at roughly the same time in his presidential career. In both cases, they failed to support the program either with political leadership or sufficient budget requests. These programs were completely insincere and many of us who worked on them for all the right reasons never quite could accept the evanescent political nature of the programs because we were (and are) true believers in the spirit of exploration.
Is Obama's vision for NASA any different? Time will tell. Unlike either of the Bush presidents, Obama has proposed increased budgets for NASA. That seems sincere to me. Will he back it up with political leadership as well? I don't know. This guy has a lot to think about right now with two wars and an economy on the brink and the health care system falling apart. NASA really shouldn't even be on his radar come to think of it.
I disagree that Constellation is too big to shut down. Nixon shut down Apollo and it was (in comparative $ and labor) a much larger and SUCCESSFUL program at the time. Constellation has nothing to show right now. It will go down fast, like the Titanic.
I used to work for NASA. You are totally wrong about the need for "gee whiz flashy programs". NASA lives or dies by its ability to deliver jobs and contract $ to states and Congressional districts. Furthermore, NASA and the space industry (the big guys like LockMar etc.) are joined at the hip. I remember procurement-sensitive meetings at NASA where NASA managers with lots of responsibility would say, "can I bring so-and-so (their pet contractor) to the meeting?" The reason is that the contractors, at least in the human exploration side of NASA, do most of the hard technical work. They will close out these contractors and it will also be the end of career for many NASA people who don't have the right stuff for whatever comes next. These changes in NASA are really at heart a local jobs issue. Regarding "placate various legislators": no, you are definitely not paranoid! Look where the NASA Centers are located. They were deliberately place in southern states during Apollo to woo those states to the Democrat side. It didn't work all that well. But now you have these government centers in places where they provide a disproportionate amount of state revenue and jobs for the region. OF COURSE THIS IS POLITICAL. Any change to the work that NASA does, and which NASA Center gets the work, directly affects the fortunes of one state versus another, which affects the direction of NASA as a whole. Expect to see a lot of high and mighty words from Senators and Representatives about what is right for NASA, but what they are really talking about is jobs and total contract $ for their political domain. That's all it is. That is their motivation. Its plain as daylight. Nobody is Congress plans for the long term of NASA unless it is spelled out in terms for jobs and $.
I doubt this will come as a shock to most/. readers, but having your fingerprints taken is quite common in the workplace. Many employers will require this as part of a background check. If you work for a company with significant US federal contracts, you should expect it. When you enter and leave certain countries, fingerprints are required (e.g., Japan). Actually I am more comfortable with being identified by my fingerprints or retina than by my name or address or whatever other text data is found in all those zillions of databases that know about me. Identity theft is so common but as far as I know it hasn't quite caught up to biometrics yet. Seriously, this is no big deal because you can't really use fingerprint data to tell anything else about you. Now if they want a mouth swap or hair samples then I would object!
I beg to differ. I was an inside observer of Exploration and the Constellation program from the beginning and later a technical manager participant (I am no longer with NASA). It was obvious from the very beginning that the Constellation program would NOT fit within the NASA multi-year budget. The program was sold on "best case" rosy predictions and a bet that more money would be coming down the line between FY09 and FY11. A "bathtub" was forecast and it worried every manager for years. Still, the attitude at NASA's manned spaceflight centers was "if you need more FTEs [full time equivalents, i.e., people], they bring them right out." A true quote I wrote down at the time. The debate among senior management was whether the shortfall would be a $3 billion or $6 billion or $9 billion shortfall (over several years). The cost growth and schedule delays were foreseen but could not be acknowledged or the program would have become politically unacceptable. The plans were broken from the beginning and believe me it was very frustrating to be part of it. The Augustine commission just said what everybody knew but no NASA-insider could say without losing their job: "The emperor has no clothes".
Lord Apathy, you are right about the political nature of the budgeting process. I used to work for NASA and once (years ago) I was told privately by a very senior NASA person at HQ that "the purpose of NASA is to distribute money to congressional districts". That might be a bit more cynical than is deserved, but it is surely a truth about how major programs come into being and get assigned to the various NASA field centers. There is no question that a lot more politics is still to come. It isn't going to be about the "fate of NASA", its going to be about the "fate of federal dollars going to states and congressional districts".
I understand you don't care anymore, but I'll ask you anyway to please keep your racist attitudes private so we can have a civil discussion here.
An overview "Fact Sheet" on the proposed FY2011 budget for NASA has been published by the OMB at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/ The Constellation program is cancelled, and this could mean thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and Texas at the major human space flight centers. The savings from the cuts will be reinvested in new R&D for future exploration.
... and prions (infectious agents composed primarily of protein; responsible for a number of diseases in animals), what are also distributed laterally.
...and parasites. Plant parasitism is a medium for horizontal gene transfer between different species Genes can be transmitted in both directions in this case.
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1716.html
While electromagnetic implants will certainly appear first (they are already used for deep-brain stimulation to staunch epileptic attacks), I believe it will be the non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that really will come into widespread use. One step on the way there is a new technique called "Optogenetics" http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/. Another is "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation which has already been used to both induce and suppress brain states. There are a variety of other techniques being investigated, e.g., near-infrared for monitoring oxygen uptake which also promise good resolution imaging of brain structure and activity. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMFRI) is the key tool being used now to map cerebral structure and function. The Koreans have had a 10-year initiative going in reverse-engineering the brain that is now showing very significant progress to the extent that universities such as Seoul National University, Hanyang, and KAIST have actually created multidisciplinary "Brain Engineering" departments. Last week I drove a toy slot car on a track with an external brain sensor... you'll be able to buy it at Toys R US for Christmas this year. Believe it.
Chips, devices, components, subassemblies and so forth can all be compromised at any time in the manufacturing life cycle. It doesn't really matter whether some portion of the manufacturing is done domestically or elsewhere. The risk is mostly about people and access to data and the manufacturing process, and people are clearly vulnerable. Furthermore, each stage of the manufacturing process has enough engineering to worry about without having to verify and validate all the previous steps. Sure, major portions of the manufacture of critical military systems is done under heavy security, but not all of it! I submit that although having a completely trusted system is a worthwhile goal, there is a rapidly diminishing return on investment in trying to achieve it. You just won't get 100% trust without some real breakthroughs in how systems are currently built. Therefore you will have vulnerable if not already-compromised systems. I think the important practical question is how to continue to operate effectively without trusted systems, when you know there is a risk your systems will not work, work incorrectly or even work against you. When it starts to do so. That's the challenge.
Other than stone tablets, one proven very long term data storage medium is interstellar space. For example, the data reaching us from distant stars and galaxies may be millions or billions of years old and yet it is preserved in pristine condition. One suggestion is to encode your work in a suitable format along with decoding instructions and then radiate the data into space using high power antenna's such as JPL's Deep Space Network. Your work is now effectively immortal. Reading the data "later" will require some finesse, as you must travel FTL to intercept the transmission. Alternatively, you can position reflectors on the Moon and Phobos (orbiting Mars), for example (you might choose other Solar bodies for engineering reasons) and bounce the signal perpetually between the two. With no atmospheric interference the signal would not be expected to degrade for quite some time depending on energy, wavelength and reflective material you use. Just a thought. You said price was not an issue.
The so-called tests will find exactly what they are designed to find, and that is a reason to exclude undesirables by broad category. The categories are all ready figured out (skin color, etc.). "Science" provides the rational cover for what would otherwise be overt racism. I say, call it like it is: bigotry.
News of hacked public websites of powerful public agencies is titillating but technically insignificant. These sites are usually maintained by the lowest bidder on the cheapest servers with the most scant security. And they generally have no useful information. Boring!
On the other hand, cyber warfare is constant and both government and industry networks with valuable information assets are under constant attack. I know this first hand from having had oversight of network security in a major scientific lab several years ago. Little or nothing is reported either in the way of successful penetrations and damage or attacks thwarted. That is the frontier people, where there is not only action with major consequences but hard computer and network science happening every day.
There are other pathways into the visual cortex than the retina and optic nerve. These may be especially useful for augmented reality and vision prosthetics. For example, the tongue is highly enervated and by-passes the optic nerve. A company called Wicab, Inc manufactures a product called the "BrainPort" Vision Device http://vision.wicab.com/technology/. The resolution is not great, but the race is on and thus far the most promising methods for manufacture of high-density transducer / electrode arrays have not been employed. With prospective military and medical applications "in sight" (pun intended), there is high competition internationally in the development of tongue display technology.
I personally know of one such project being conducted by Dr. Anil Raj at IHMC http://www.ihmc.us/ to replace night vision goggles with tongue displays. The main research thrust in Dr. Raj's lab is sensory augmentation see http://ihmc.us:16080/community/ILOVEScience/Activities/TestingReactionTime/IHMCReactionTime.pdf for more information. Experiments have shown that "data" from slaved cameras can be "overlaid" on normal retinal vision, although there are still some registration (match up) challenges.
Launch vehicle: The Minotaur V (not yet in production as far as I know), essentially refurbished and upgraded ICBM, should be able to deliver a 100kg or so payload into lunar orbit. DoD has thousands of Minotaurs that are scheduled for retirement. It is possible for a government agency (don't know about private enterprise) to request repurpose of one of these Minotaurs. Cost? One off - maybe $20M each. Buy in bulk - I've heard $7M each. This is not including launch services which also run into multiple $M.
Probably the most economical way for a competitor to get to the moon will be to go as a secondary payload with another mission - sharing the same launcher. In most cases, this would be to Earth orbit (low) and a translunar injection stage will be needed to get to lunar orbit insertion (LOI). Still going to cost multiple $M.
Better yet --- catch a ride with somebody else who is going to the moon. Who? China, India, Europe -- all have announced lunar orbiting missions to be launched in the next several years. It is too late to team up with India on their first mission. China maybe? NASA is deciding whether to send a science mission to lunar orbit (two are already in the works for launch in Oct 2008: LRO http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/ and LCROSS http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/ ). LCROSS is a secondary payload for LRO and has a budget of under $100M. It won't exactly land... let's call it a "sporty" landing.
The next NASA mission could use a Delta IV; if so, there will be plenty of room within the fairing on the next mission for a secondary payload (if the mission is approved). That could be a "free" delivery to lunar orbit.
Putting a spacecraft on the surface with not less than 5kg useful payload is possible, but a rover (especially one with the capabilities required by the prize) will likely be quite a bit heavier, and more costly.
I know of one team that thinks they can do such a mission - including the launcher - for under $100M. Maybe $75M on a good day. Most in NASA would say $120M would be cutting it very tight... need more like $175M.
Where will the money come from? How about sponsorship from a few companies who would like to be associated with a lunar mission? Pick any 10 at $10M each and you are on your way.
Really. Its time to put this medieval theocratic crime organization behind us. The Pope is the big boss. Recognize the Church for what it is. Can't bring it down anytime soon, so just move on.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to communicate with other people nearby in the city, then peer-to-peer networking is the way to do it. Set up mobile hotspots with open access. With VoIP you can even use your mobile handsets. Vulnerable to jamming, snooping and RDF. If you want to reconnect with the global network, then a satellite link is one way, or packet data over ham freq, maybe bounced off the ionosphere.
There are upward of 70 microprocessors, 20 million lines of code (if you include multimedia tech) and hundreds of I/O ports in a typical upscale modern car. Manufacturers are moving towards in-car wireless networking to replace the enormous amount of cabling that current exists. Researchers have already demonstrated to seize control of the engine and brakes by hacking a couple of 2009 model year cars. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18901-modern-cars-vulnerable-to-malicious-hacks.html Considering that they won't let me use my ipod on an aircraft during takeoff and landing because IT MIGHT CRASH (tell me about it), yeah, count me worried about automobiles and other transportation as well.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the brain using induced currents has been around for quite a while. Google it. TMS of certain regions of the brain can induce spiritual feelings (in the religious sense). That said, TMS is a procedure for studying the brain, and uses sophisticated and precisely calibrated equipment you are unlikely to find in a haunted house!
Right. The lead time is quite long on some parts. Contracts with suppliers have expired and manufacturing lines shut down. I doubt that another Shuttle flight is actually possible.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but automatic classification of galaxies from sky survey data using machine learning techniques was accomplished in the early '90s by the SKICAT system developed at JPL and Caltech. http://adsabs.harvard.edu//abs/1995PASP..107.1243W is a good overview of the system and its accomplishments as of 1995.
The instrumentation is clearly not sensitive enough to detect residual neural activity. Patients in emergency situations are on EEGs, which are far less sensitive than fMRI or other non-invasive methods of monitoring brain activity.,
This "loophole" in the law augers an era where gangs of clones can commit crimes with impunity. You heard it here first.
Hah! I doesn't know about me, and I've hardly been quiet on the Net. So maybe there is still hope for "relative" obscurity.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rumsey%20Maps%201/133/247/56/?title=David%20Rumsey%20Maps&msg=David%20Rumsey%20map%20collection
See also http://www.davidrumsey.com/
The "Vision for Space Exploration" of George W. Bush was a politically motivated move to show he was "visionary" at a time in the election cycle when he really needed it. Recall that his father, George H.W. Bush also had his version of this, the "Human Exploration Initiative" at roughly the same time in his presidential career. In both cases, they failed to support the program either with political leadership or sufficient budget requests. These programs were completely insincere and many of us who worked on them for all the right reasons never quite could accept the evanescent political nature of the programs because we were (and are) true believers in the spirit of exploration. Is Obama's vision for NASA any different? Time will tell. Unlike either of the Bush presidents, Obama has proposed increased budgets for NASA. That seems sincere to me. Will he back it up with political leadership as well? I don't know. This guy has a lot to think about right now with two wars and an economy on the brink and the health care system falling apart. NASA really shouldn't even be on his radar come to think of it. I disagree that Constellation is too big to shut down. Nixon shut down Apollo and it was (in comparative $ and labor) a much larger and SUCCESSFUL program at the time. Constellation has nothing to show right now. It will go down fast, like the Titanic.
I used to work for NASA. You are totally wrong about the need for "gee whiz flashy programs". NASA lives or dies by its ability to deliver jobs and contract $ to states and Congressional districts. Furthermore, NASA and the space industry (the big guys like LockMar etc.) are joined at the hip. I remember procurement-sensitive meetings at NASA where NASA managers with lots of responsibility would say, "can I bring so-and-so (their pet contractor) to the meeting?" The reason is that the contractors, at least in the human exploration side of NASA, do most of the hard technical work. They will close out these contractors and it will also be the end of career for many NASA people who don't have the right stuff for whatever comes next. These changes in NASA are really at heart a local jobs issue. Regarding "placate various legislators": no, you are definitely not paranoid! Look where the NASA Centers are located. They were deliberately place in southern states during Apollo to woo those states to the Democrat side. It didn't work all that well. But now you have these government centers in places where they provide a disproportionate amount of state revenue and jobs for the region. OF COURSE THIS IS POLITICAL. Any change to the work that NASA does, and which NASA Center gets the work, directly affects the fortunes of one state versus another, which affects the direction of NASA as a whole. Expect to see a lot of high and mighty words from Senators and Representatives about what is right for NASA, but what they are really talking about is jobs and total contract $ for their political domain. That's all it is. That is their motivation. Its plain as daylight. Nobody is Congress plans for the long term of NASA unless it is spelled out in terms for jobs and $.
I doubt this will come as a shock to most /. readers, but having your fingerprints taken is quite common in the workplace. Many employers will require this as part of a background check. If you work for a company with significant US federal contracts, you should expect it. When you enter and leave certain countries, fingerprints are required (e.g., Japan). Actually I am more comfortable with being identified by my fingerprints or retina than by my name or address or whatever other text data is found in all those zillions of databases that know about me. Identity theft is so common but as far as I know it hasn't quite caught up to biometrics yet. Seriously, this is no big deal because you can't really use fingerprint data to tell anything else about you. Now if they want a mouth swap or hair samples then I would object!
I beg to differ. I was an inside observer of Exploration and the Constellation program from the beginning and later a technical manager participant (I am no longer with NASA). It was obvious from the very beginning that the Constellation program would NOT fit within the NASA multi-year budget. The program was sold on "best case" rosy predictions and a bet that more money would be coming down the line between FY09 and FY11. A "bathtub" was forecast and it worried every manager for years. Still, the attitude at NASA's manned spaceflight centers was "if you need more FTEs [full time equivalents, i.e., people], they bring them right out." A true quote I wrote down at the time. The debate among senior management was whether the shortfall would be a $3 billion or $6 billion or $9 billion shortfall (over several years). The cost growth and schedule delays were foreseen but could not be acknowledged or the program would have become politically unacceptable. The plans were broken from the beginning and believe me it was very frustrating to be part of it. The Augustine commission just said what everybody knew but no NASA-insider could say without losing their job: "The emperor has no clothes".
I understand you don't care anymore, but I'll ask you anyway to please keep your racist attitudes private so we can have a civil discussion here.
An overview "Fact Sheet" on the proposed FY2011 budget for NASA has been published by the OMB at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/ The Constellation program is cancelled, and this could mean thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and Texas at the major human space flight centers. The savings from the cuts will be reinvested in new R&D for future exploration.
Prions can confer evolutionary advantages through protein-based inheritance. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11260797
and are themselves subject to mutation and natural selection. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20044542
While electromagnetic implants will certainly appear first (they are already used for deep-brain stimulation to staunch epileptic attacks), I believe it will be the non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that really will come into widespread use. One step on the way there is a new technique called "Optogenetics" http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/. Another is "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation which has already been used to both induce and suppress brain states. There are a variety of other techniques being investigated, e.g., near-infrared for monitoring oxygen uptake which also promise good resolution imaging of brain structure and activity. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMFRI) is the key tool being used now to map cerebral structure and function. The Koreans have had a 10-year initiative going in reverse-engineering the brain that is now showing very significant progress to the extent that universities such as Seoul National University, Hanyang, and KAIST have actually created multidisciplinary "Brain Engineering" departments. Last week I drove a toy slot car on a track with an external brain sensor ... you'll be able to buy it at Toys R US for Christmas this year. Believe it.
Chips, devices, components, subassemblies and so forth can all be compromised at any time in the manufacturing life cycle. It doesn't really matter whether some portion of the manufacturing is done domestically or elsewhere. The risk is mostly about people and access to data and the manufacturing process, and people are clearly vulnerable. Furthermore, each stage of the manufacturing process has enough engineering to worry about without having to verify and validate all the previous steps. Sure, major portions of the manufacture of critical military systems is done under heavy security, but not all of it! I submit that although having a completely trusted system is a worthwhile goal, there is a rapidly diminishing return on investment in trying to achieve it. You just won't get 100% trust without some real breakthroughs in how systems are currently built. Therefore you will have vulnerable if not already-compromised systems. I think the important practical question is how to continue to operate effectively without trusted systems, when you know there is a risk your systems will not work, work incorrectly or even work against you. When it starts to do so. That's the challenge.
Other than stone tablets, one proven very long term data storage medium is interstellar space. For example, the data reaching us from distant stars and galaxies may be millions or billions of years old and yet it is preserved in pristine condition. One suggestion is to encode your work in a suitable format along with decoding instructions and then radiate the data into space using high power antenna's such as JPL's Deep Space Network. Your work is now effectively immortal. Reading the data "later" will require some finesse, as you must travel FTL to intercept the transmission. Alternatively, you can position reflectors on the Moon and Phobos (orbiting Mars), for example (you might choose other Solar bodies for engineering reasons) and bounce the signal perpetually between the two. With no atmospheric interference the signal would not be expected to degrade for quite some time depending on energy, wavelength and reflective material you use. Just a thought. You said price was not an issue.
The so-called tests will find exactly what they are designed to find, and that is a reason to exclude undesirables by broad category. The categories are all ready figured out (skin color, etc.). "Science" provides the rational cover for what would otherwise be overt racism. I say, call it like it is: bigotry.
News of hacked public websites of powerful public agencies is titillating but technically insignificant. These sites are usually maintained by the lowest bidder on the cheapest servers with the most scant security. And they generally have no useful information. Boring! On the other hand, cyber warfare is constant and both government and industry networks with valuable information assets are under constant attack. I know this first hand from having had oversight of network security in a major scientific lab several years ago. Little or nothing is reported either in the way of successful penetrations and damage or attacks thwarted. That is the frontier people, where there is not only action with major consequences but hard computer and network science happening every day.
There are other pathways into the visual cortex than the retina and optic nerve. These may be especially useful for augmented reality and vision prosthetics. For example, the tongue is highly enervated and by-passes the optic nerve. A company called Wicab, Inc manufactures a product called the "BrainPort" Vision Device http://vision.wicab.com/technology/. The resolution is not great, but the race is on and thus far the most promising methods for manufacture of high-density transducer / electrode arrays have not been employed. With prospective military and medical applications "in sight" (pun intended), there is high competition internationally in the development of tongue display technology. I personally know of one such project being conducted by Dr. Anil Raj at IHMC http://www.ihmc.us/ to replace night vision goggles with tongue displays. The main research thrust in Dr. Raj's lab is sensory augmentation see http://ihmc.us:16080/community/ILOVEScience/Activities/TestingReactionTime/IHMCReactionTime.pdf for more information. Experiments have shown that "data" from slaved cameras can be "overlaid" on normal retinal vision, although there are still some registration (match up) challenges.
Probably the most economical way for a competitor to get to the moon will be to go as a secondary payload with another mission - sharing the same launcher. In most cases, this would be to Earth orbit (low) and a translunar injection stage will be needed to get to lunar orbit insertion (LOI). Still going to cost multiple $M.
Better yet --- catch a ride with somebody else who is going to the moon. Who? China, India, Europe -- all have announced lunar orbiting missions to be launched in the next several years. It is too late to team up with India on their first mission. China maybe? NASA is deciding whether to send a science mission to lunar orbit (two are already in the works for launch in Oct 2008: LRO http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/ and LCROSS http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/ ). LCROSS is a secondary payload for LRO and has a budget of under $100M. It won't exactly land... let's call it a "sporty" landing.
The next NASA mission could use a Delta IV; if so, there will be plenty of room within the fairing on the next mission for a secondary payload (if the mission is approved). That could be a "free" delivery to lunar orbit.
Putting a spacecraft on the surface with not less than 5kg useful payload is possible, but a rover (especially one with the capabilities required by the prize) will likely be quite a bit heavier, and more costly.
I know of one team that thinks they can do such a mission - including the launcher - for under $100M. Maybe $75M on a good day. Most in NASA would say $120M would be cutting it very tight ... need more like $175M.
Where will the money come from? How about sponsorship from a few companies who would like to be associated with a lunar mission? Pick any 10 at $10M each and you are on your way.
Really. Its time to put this medieval theocratic crime organization behind us. The Pope is the big boss. Recognize the Church for what it is. Can't bring it down anytime soon, so just move on.
Using a different technology (no direct chip-neural interface), a monkey controlled a robotic arm over the Internet about seven years ago. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/monkeys-1206.ht ml
The technology for direct neural interfaces is developing very rapidly.
Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interf ace