No. It's pure naivete to think that Tesla will somehow continue in this business as a car manufacturer. They don't even manufacture the body of the car they sell. They are an IP company through and through. Their only hope is to have a good patent chest and find licensees.
Daimler seems to be interested, and I'm sure they aren't the only ones who want to build an electric vehicle.
Anyone who thinks Tesla will be around as a car manufacturer 3 years from now ought to buy stock in Moller today.
BTW, in regards to using Lotus for the assembly and manufacturing of the Roadster, that was a business decision which was made at the early stages of developing the car in hopes to bring the vehicle to market sooner. For all of the changes that they have had to make in order to accommodate the electric motor and fit more with an American automotive market, they might as well have simply built the manufacturing plant in the USA.
As it is now, all Lotus does is put the vehicles together with only about 10% of the vehicle parts coming from the Lotus supply chain.
If you read Elon Musk's blog entry about this and other early manufacturing decisions, this was a decision if done again would have happened quite differently. The next vehicle, the "Model S", is going to have the manufacturing plant in California, of all places. Nearly all of the parts except for a few more or less standard parts like brake pads are going to be manufactured directly by Tesla.
To go trolling like this and claiming that Tesla is only an IP company has completely missed what they have accomplished or what their plans and investments in real estate are planning on doing. It certainly doesn't sound like a pure IP company to me.
Sad to say, some people just don't understand the concepts of economics. Of course, most of the U.S. Congress doesn't understand the basic principles of economics either.
BTW, well said. Shy of Tesla starting out with Bill Gates dumping a couple billion dollars into their company, it would have been impossible for a new start-up company to create a highway speed electric vehicles at an "affordable price". Certainly the poster you were responding to has not a clue for how much money it takes Ford or GM to bring a new vehicle line to market.
Chrysler is so cash poor that I don't think they could bring a new line of consumer cars to market without huge government intervention.
Tesla developed the Roadster completely on their own funds.... without government assistance of any kind. The money from the technology development fund is a low-interest loan (not a grant... it has to be paid back) that is being used to help build the actual manufacturing plant for the production of their next vehicle... called the "Model S", which is a 4-door sedan being targeted more toward middle management business executives and small business entrepreneurs... priced at about $50,000 USD with similar driving distances, but the acceleration performance targeted more toward what is typical for sedans and not sports cars.
At least get the facts straight if you are going to criticize the company and don't go muddling the issues together.
There is an eventual goal for a 3rd vehicle that is supposed to be in the $25,000 range that is intended to be competitive with typical economy-model vehicles, but in order to make a profit off of that vehicle they will have to develop a production line capable of producing tens or even hundreds of thousands of vehicles per month and have a sales & service infrastructure capable of dealing with all of those vehicles and customers. All of that takes a huge amount of money and time to develop, which is precisely why they have decided to aim for the top tier of the automotive market to start out with.
From what I've seen of Tesla, they are doing this on what for the automotive industry would have to say is a shoestring budget. It is a miracle that they have even been able to get this far this quickly, from having precisely zero cars in production two years ago. They still have only two service centers (San Francisco and Los Angeles) and are trying to gear up to become a major automobile brand in America.
As for markable products, they also have their electric motors themselves (a variable speed and voltage alternating current electric motor), and the Lithium ion battery packs that have passed U.S. Department of Transportation regulations for use in automobiles. Both are huge accomplishments in their own right and something that has been of interest to other automotive manufacturers.
If you have the idea for an all-electric yacht... go ahead and try to get government-backed loans. You might be surprised and find a few out there, including some small-business loans, but you had better have the proven experience behind them and have some "skin in the game" before you would have such loans sent your way. Seriously, the money is out there if you really want to get some idea off the ground, and don't go crying that Tesla is doing what nearly every single business listed in the major American stock exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.) has also done at some point or another, as well as a huge number of smaller businesses. Perhaps not this specific fund, but you can find examples of government financing of private businesses going back to the Abraham Lincoln administration (the trans-continental railroad) and even earlier.
Yes, I'll admit that there most of education is mostly regurgitation... or frankly even more important a bunch of diploma mills that go through the motions of delivering information (not the same thing as teaching) and hoping that some of it sticks when they graduate. Or even worse, it is a windowing process that gives a variation of trade guild journeyman status upon its graduates, but deliberately tries to cull out as much cruft as they can to maintain higher wages for the respective professions that earn these credentials.
None of this is actually related to learning... as that isn't the point of the educational process. Indeed a great portion of the educational process is actually dedicated to deliberately occupying a significant part of the labor force (children and young adults) so that they won't be competing for wages against older adults. Other objectives for the educational process also include teaching conformity, social behaviors like not starting a revolution (even if teaching about previous revolutions), and all kinds of social conditioning.
If you happen to learn something along the way, you have actually accomplished something above and beyond what the overall objective of the educational process was really about.
Getting back to the journeyman status in various trade guilds... and keeping in mind that the ranks and titles are not the same for every profession.... it is generally assumed that a "journeyman" or somebody newly initiated into a profession ought to have at least a basic knowledge of that profession. It would look bad to the profession if somebody with the proper credentials can't really do what they claim to be able to do... so there are some information presentation standards that some of the brighter students do pick up.
All this said, in the USA with its overlapping levels of jurisdiction (federal, state, county, municipality, and even neighborhood levels of government sometimes... and other governing bodies that cross various jurisdictional boundaries) there is room for an instructor who actually teaches. As an ordinary teacher, one of the real pleasures that you get out of the process of instruction is to be able to see a student who "gets it" that didn't understand a concept before. Typical school district tenure policies... while they do protect the incompetent and politically motivated... also protect those who genuinely have a love of learning and want to inspire the next generation of students.
In this I'd have to agree that most of what happens is to pound in information in a rather robotic fashion, but there are scattered around to have enough of these would-be real instructors who actually help students to learn that it allows the system to actually work. These instructors (they can be grade school teachers or university professors... found at all levels and kinds of educational institutions) usually just quietly do their job and get things done, and it is because of the humble and quiet nature of what they do that they are able to stay beneath the radar of those who would drive out this sort of creativity.
So what is a "soul" anyway? Do animals have souls? What about plants or bacteria? When does a soul "enter" a person - if it's at conception, what about identical twins?
The issue of the soul of a twin is trying to bait the question and moot to this issue. As for the soul of non-human living things, that is something which has been endlessly debated in theological circles nearly ad nauseum and doesn't really fit with a debate on slashdot as well.
I would point out that most pet owners who have a slight religious bent would argue forcefully that their pets certainly have a soul with which if there is an afterlife they would want to enjoy the company of that creature in that afterlife in some way.
As for the soul of plants, bacteria, or even virii... that is something that is outside the scope of what I was trying to talk about. I was referring to an aspect of how a mind or brain works. Could a plant have an analog (but much slower moving and reacting) to how a brain in most multi-cellular animals work? Now that is an interesting thought by itself, and something perhaps even worthy of biological research in and of itself.
For it to be objective, the first thing we need is a definition of "soul" (that isn't a meaningless circular definition such as "the thing which causes intelligence").
The physical description of an atom was for millenia something that was seriously lacking, yet when physical objects that resembled the ancient ideas were discovered, the ancient terminology was applied to those objects. I am suggesting something similar to a soul could apply here.
I'd argue that a soul is that aspect of intelligence that transcends the physical and imparts a consciousness onto the brain. Axiomatically, consciousness is being self-aware and sentient, and is the leap beyond what is currently done with artificial intelligence. A dog is certainly aware of himself (even if chasing his own tail), so I don't ascribe this to be strictly a human trait either. Even so, until now there has been absolutely no valid artificial intelligence research which has even postulated that they have created such a consciousness that somehow created independent ideas, thoughts, or actions on its own.
Define consciousness in such a way that isn't a "meaningless circular definition", and you might have something resembling a definition of a soul as a corollary to that definition. The original article that started this whole discussion asserts that by creating a complex enough neural network that such a consciousness might arise from self-emergent behavior due to the complexity alone. An interesting idea, but I believe such an approach is missing something, and that could very well be the "soul".
Yet the entirety of human scientific experience shows no such interaction between any "magical force" and the physical world.
On this one, you have got to be kidding. We deal with all kinds of "magical forces", ranging from magnetic and sub-atomic that are manipulated on a regular basis.
No, I'm not talking some kind of "magic" here, but rather something that is physical and tangible... otherwise it isn't worth talking about. If you really think you happen to have such a good bead on the universe that you happen to understand everything in the physical realm and can define all interactions of matter with 100% certainty (at least up to Heisenberg uncertainty levels... and then know the exact probabilities involved in all dimensions)... good for you. You also have earned the next Nobel Prize in Physics... and have caused the committee in Sweden to disband as well while you are at it.
It is you that has suggested I'm postulated a magical force, and what I'm trying to suggest is that when the full model of what a mind/brain actually does when all is said and done that something that resembles a "soul" will also end up being discovered as well. No, I don't buy that the "software" is this soul either, but at least that is something in the right direction.
Terminology and exact details may vary, but there is something to the more traditional concept of a soul as postulated by those with a more religious attitude here. What I see is somebody so fixated with trying to prove all with religious beliefs are ignorant nut cases not worthy of even being listened to that you ignore that some ancient concepts and memes might actually have some scientific validity in describing physical phenomena.
It is the description I'm talking about, as it may apply to describing the fine details of how a brain works.
I dare anybody to show an independent private "inventor" who creates something and makes money by selling the idea to some mega-corporation for royalties. It doesn't happen.
Huh? This happens all the time. Its a well-known business model. An entrepeneur comes up with a new idea, if its patentable typically patents it, develops the business, and then sells it to a larger company for big bucks. While IP isn't the only thing being bought in these cases, its typically a non-trivial portion of it.
This doesn't happen nearly as often as your teachers in school would have you think it occurs, such as when Thomas Edison is being discussed. Typically, a major company will not only be disinterested in outside ideas, but there are legal reasons to actually run with fear that some idiot with a supposedly good idea will come up to some random manufacturing company (or anybody else that runs a business) and then sue you for some other new product that you come up with independently.
Seriously, if you want to invent things, get your academic credentials (degrees, honors, etc.) to a point that one of these companies will hire you as an engineer or scientific researcher. But the independent tinkerer who is self-made isn't going to be in any position to offer ideas to an established business.
Most of the "business" involved with patenting is really just one giant legalized scam where well meaning folks who do have some good ideas but don't know where to turn to get them implemented discover a patent lawyer who empties out their bank accounts and is constantly begging for more money. For a private individual, the process of going through the meat grinder of filing for a patent is a painful regime that is most usually not recommended.... if only due to cost alone.
The only legitimate application of patents is in a defensive manner, where you are trying to stop the individuals I mentioned above from suing you into oblivion... by demonstrating that you already patented the idea previously or at least something similar. Larger companies often will "cross-license" patents... in an attempt to drive out any new competition from entering the market. In other words, if you are a part of the club with a portfolio of patents, you can do business, but God help you if you don't have a patent portfolio to join the club.
Frankly, the baby in this case is already dead, rotting, and flesh dangling off the bones. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater may not be a bad thing to do in this case, and well deserved. Patent laws really don't do any good for private citizens, and are barely tolerable for even larger corporations... usually for things that would normally merit anti-trust litigation and often do anyway.
The novel Gateway written by Frederick Pohl has an interesting plot device where humans encounter an alien race... or at least the machines of that race and have humans trying to figure out how the things work. One of the interesting artifacts that they discover is what were called "prayer fans" that turned out to be nothing more than an alien version of thumb drives... but it took getting a live "Heechee" to explain what they were before the contents were figured out.
It would be interesting to see what people would think about a thumb drive or a room full of CD's and DVD's if for some reason human civilization collapsed (aka a massive nuclear war or something along that line) and thousands of years from now a researcher comes across some of this computer technology and tries to figure it out. With our understanding of computer technology, figuring out the patterns is easy to grasp, but where do you start if you have no baseline reference to compare to?
That is essentially what is happening with studies of the brain, where we are taking something that has taken literally billions of years to evolve and to reverse-engineer the thing in some way to try and duplicate with the eye to perhaps even "improve" upon the model that we have.
The role of a soul in the development of A.I. is certainly an interesting question... as it supposes that there is something more to intelligence than simply the assembly of raw pieces and parts that make up the hardware.
As a matter of faith, I would believe that there is something more to how my children behave, as well as my interactions with my pets. Certainly there seems to be a fine point that you can define something as "alive" and when it is "dead". Restoring something from a dead state to alive is usually difficult and often a leap of faith in itself, even though that is something which is the subject of legitimate scientific inquiry (medicine of all fields and types), and there is even a legal pronouncement of when a person is no longer considered "alive".
With this life, is there something more that can also be described as a critical ingredient for intelligence? Presuming that there is a soul (yeah, a huge leap of logic here, but bear with me) the presumption here is that somehow this "soul" is interacting with the physical and tangible world. Something that can be quantified and measured at least in some degree. What that "soul" may do is certainly something that is arguably abstract and currently is mainly a bunch of guess work, but so is so much of the field of artificial intelligence as well right now.
Atomic theory as postulated by the ancient Greek philosophers got the memes of ideas of how matter was put together with basic building blocks and then assembled into the great complexity that we see in the universe today. They got the simple outline idea correct, but missed by a long shot the idea that we have over a hundred elements instead of the four that were originally postulated. That water and air (both originally considered elements) were in fact mixtures of elements proved even more interesting.
I advance that in the process of really finding out how the mind works and what can create a genuine intelligence, that some basic building block will be discovered that will ultimately be called a "soul" at least in terms of what makes the thing work. When we finally figure this out, the ancient philosophers (including Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, and the others mentioned in the New Testament and elsewhere) may end up being proven correct in principle but off as to the fine detailed points. Certainly I wouldn't consider the New Testament to be a scientific roadmap when it wasn't written to be one. Still, the idea that there could be something that would be labeled a soul in a clinical sense when organizing and creating artificially intelligent machines is something that may have some value for objective discussions.
Considering that we can't identify what other species of animals may have sentience, I would think it is all that much harder to identify when a computer might have that ability. Some species are dolphins, other primates, and my favorite: Amazonian parrots.... but even things like California Sea Otters display some remarkable intelligence and even the ability to manufacture tools (they make a chisel to pry open clams and oysters). Describing intelligence that doesn't use anthroprogenic terms in its description seems to be a rather difficult challenge.
Sentient computers have always presumed behavior on the part of the human brain that has proven to be woefully inadequate. Certain aspects of what people think might be signs of intelligence, such as rapidly multiplying hundred digit numbers together, have been automated and made routine now.... but that isn't really genuine intelligence.
While I like the field of Artificial Intelligence and the quest for intelligence, far too much of the field is full of games and tricks that mimic some aspects of intelligence (like expert programs and machine translation) but still continue to miss the mark if you are targeting genuine intelligence.
This "brain on a chip" might be able to join in with the games that have been played so far, and perhaps some new insights into human intelligence could be gained. There might even be some very interesting applications that can come from such a device that would prove useful even or make some awesome toys for kids eventually (getting back to my games and tricks). Even so, the field of A.I. has been so fraught with dead ends and wasted resources striving for the ultimate goal that it seems almost futile to try. We are still decades away from human-like intelligence.... something that A.I. researchers 40 years ago would have thought was a done deal by now given the computational resources that we have available at the present time.
I do wonder where the "Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things would do" comments are. The point is that even a cluster of these chips wouldn't have enhanced intelligence over what it does by itself either.
BTW, I do think the quest itself perhaps is the worthy endeavor. But neither this new device nor anything else that will be invented in the near future is something to brag about... as we really are still trying to figure out how the dang thing works in the first place.
I'm still convinced that this can be accelerated by a more intelligent government involvement. NASA unfortunately has a long track record of screwing this up. (They've done other things well.)
It is surprising how much is being funded toward orbital flight. Richard Branson at the last Oshkosh air show hinted that he and Burt Rutan are currently in discussions about an orbital vehicle. SpaceX clearly has an operational orbital vehicle (in the Falcon 1) and is doing research to move to the Falcon 9 with the Dragon vehicle. All the NASA funding has done is to give a guaranteed customer and help speed up the process, as the Falcon 9 was announced and engineering was started well before the COTS contracts. There are other companies going for LEO, but admittedly the sub-orbital flights are where most of the money is at for now for things that are new in space.
Some of the really remarkable genuine progress is with more innovative fuel sources like has happened with the Lunar Landing Challenge... particularly the work in Hydrogen Peroxide and Peroxide/Kerosene motors. It is unfortunate that ATF regulations since 9/11 have put a real tight collar on potential research in this area of non-cryogenic rocket fuels.
As for more intelligent government involvement, it is too bad that NASA hasn't expanded the role of the Centennial Prizes... or for that matter had Congress appropriate any more money into the Centennial Prize fund. For the most recent fiscal year, Congress appropriated absolutely nothing for any new prizes (but they did keep existing prizes in tact). Newt Gingrich... right before he was ousted from his speakership.... had written legislation and was going through the process to put the bill on the floor to have a prize worth $10 billion to land somebody on the Moon in a sort of beefed up X-Prize. Considering that the Orion/Ares program is going to cost on the order of $100 billion before all is said and done to do the same thing, it seems now like a bargain if that had been done back in the 1990's. If I recall correctly, there were even consolation prizes for second and third place.... just to make sure that competitors for a private spaceflight mission to the Moon would try to continue their efforts even if somebody beat them out.
NASA also needs to return to the hard-core R&D that it does best. NASA research into innovative propulsion systems like nuclear rocketry, ion engines, and plasma rockets like the VASMIR are things that legitimately could use even existing government bureaucracies that exist within NASA. These sort of hard core basic principle research is the sort of thing that a government research grant is useful for. Building yet another launch system like the Ares isn't something that builds on the strengths of NASA and is IMHO something legitimate to rip NASA apart on... particularly when they are cutting basic research programs to support the development budget for a launcher that is at best a mediocre and pork-barrel laden project.
Regular readers of my comments will know that I'm highly critical of NASA. However, it's important for enthusiastic supporters of space exploration to understand that private industry, left to its own devices, is not likely (is, in fact, extremely unlikely) to fund the R&D required to build the next generation of space transportation system. Getting to LEO is a big, big project. Much bigger than the trans-continental railways. Private corporations do not have the vision required for long term investment on this scale. They have quarterly numbers to meet, impatient and risk averse investors and managers.
I can give plenty of counter examples, including nearly all of the "new space" companies who are spending altogether nearly a billion dollars in original R&D this past year. Indeed nearly all that private industry is doing right now in commercial spaceflight is R&D.
Yes, getting to LEO was a big project equivalent to the trans-continental railroad... when it was done for the first time. But now that we know that orbital environment and what it takes to get there, it is more like building the other trans-continental railroads like the Southern Pacific and the Northern routes.... both that were paid completely with private funds (although some public lands were given to the railroad companies in exchange for building those routes).
Frankly, from what I've seen, it is easier and cheaper to build a company who designs and launches rockets capable of low-earth orbit vehicles than it is to create an automobile company that has to meet safety, and environmental standards if you were to start from scratch today.
I don't want to list the companies because any list would be incomplete, but there are now more than a couple dozen companies who are building launchers... including a couple that already have put things into orbit. SpaceX and Orbital Science have both put paid commercial payloads into orbit.... not something insignificant, and both companies built these rockets with largely private funds.
I don't buy this argument at all, and there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary that private individuals will spend their own money for rocket research. We don't need the government to screw up the picture any more than it has, and certainly what is needed instead is to get the government bureaucrats and lawyers who want to over-regulate this industry out of the way so even more private R&D can happen.
The short answer is that building a spacecraft to orbit and come back is 100% equivalent to building an ICBM. How many average joes in the US do you think would be willing to sell that information to anyone who asks? I know it's not ideal, but I really would prefer if countries like North Korea and Iran don't have that kind of technology.
I'd give it at best 80% or less. ICBMs have a very different flight profile than an orbital vehicle, and certainly a different overall design goal in terms of how you want to use the vehicles as well.
Consider, an ICBM's goal is to deliver a nuclear warhead (a rather sturdy little package on the whole with almost no appendages and relatively simple functionality... it just has to go BOOM eventually) to a specific geographical location as fast as it can. The acceleration forces on an ICBM can go as high as 30x normal gravity here on the Earth (aka 30 g's) and can put up with other forces that would destroy most typical spaceflight hardware... and particularly human passengers. The Apollo spacecraft that went to the Moon would pull a maximum of about 9 g's in the early stages of flight, and on average about 6 g's. The Space Shuttle has a maximum of about 4 g's for both passengers and cargo.
And all this is just forces going up... not really taking into account the issues of orbital insertion and smoothing out the orbit to something useful.... or making a maneuver heading to geo-synchronous orbit.
As for re-entry... most ICBM warheads use Uranium as the heat shield. It makes a nice protective heavy metal that is going to melt anyway once it blows up, and it helps to reduce payload mass on top of that as the metal can be used as a part of the bomb itself. Again, this is a completely different design regime compared to trying to make a "soft" landing where you actually want to recover the contents of the vehicle (not even a design consideration for an ICBM)... much less trying to recover human passengers/crew members.
So the point here is that while there are some similarities and certainly some knowledge that can be utilized by both ICBM builders and by spacecraft launchers, it really is two different areas of expertise and there are design compromises that impact each type of vehicle.
Even the launching aspects of both kinds of vehicles have a different profile. An ICBM has to be ready to launch for years... even decades at a time. A spacecraft launcher, on the other hand, is designed to be launched as soon as it is ready. This will have a significant impact on the choice of equipment chosen for each type of vehicle.
Of course, who knows... North Korea and Iran may want to launch their ICBMs as soon as they are developed and ready to use, but I digress that that point.
Far too many of both the American and Russian space vehicle launches came from a background of being converted ICBMs... which is one of the reasons why spaceflight continues to be expensive even today. They were built to be deployed rapidly and to hit a target with precision, it is an afterthought that they might be used in space. The booster engines have to be "de-tuned" to throttle back for the safety of the cargo, and components fail because they aren't really intended for spaceflight. If the USA launches 100 ICBMs and only 80 actually reach their targets.... that is considered a military success. If you are in a spacecraft that will blow up or be destroyed 20% of the time.... that would normally be considered a disaster.
Also, nearly all information (including blueprints, engineering notes, and more) of how NASA builts its rockets are in the public domain and accessible either through its various websites, contacting NASA curators directly, or by visiting the National Archives in Washington D.C. This isn't "Top Secret" information, and a well trained aerospace engineer can read enough information to make corrections to their designs by reading this public information.
The point is, building ICBMs and spacecraft launchers is not identical and in many ways spacecraft launchers could be built in a way that would prevent their use for ICBMs.
This was originally going to be $300 million (according to the original "Recovery Act" appropriation), but Senator Shelby (R-Alabama) decided to move the funds to the Ares I/V development. What happened here is that Shelby finally "compromised" and admitted that it wasn't intended strictly for the Constellation program.
BTW, Elon Musk and SpaceX were planning on doing this development anyway... with or without NASA funds. What even this little bit does is to help encourage the development of the launch escape system (and the manned version of the Dragon Capsule) slightly ahead of when SpaceX would have built it on their own. In addition, this will allow an alternative to using the Soyuz spacecraft for travel to and from the ISS once the Space Shuttle retires.
Keep in mind that SpaceX wants to sell spaceflight services to private companies (like Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures) and to other interested private individuals... as well as to some countries like Dubai who are trying to get into space. Until now, there was no American company willing to sell you a "seat" into orbital flight at any price... and even the Russians have shut down their commercial manned spaceflight slots. As to how many flights SpaceX will make once all this get built... I couldn't guess. I would imagine, however, that NASA would not have even half of the flights that might fly.
The first flight of the Falcon 9 is due to go up in a couple of months... as the hardware is already built and all that is happening now is the final tests to determine flight worthiness. Once that is proven... the Dragon capsule will be fairly straight forward as one more iteration on the development cycle on what will be hopefully a proven launch vehicle. The first unmanned flights of the Dragon capsule might happen as soon as next year... and may be flying before the shuttle is even officially retired. They are that close to being ready.
As far as NASA spending more on the art work for the Constellation/Ares rocket system than this... you may be correct. What is amazing is how much has happened in spite of this kind of paltry effort to support commercial spaceflight.
The concept of patents for the designs of mechanical engineers seems to have at least the fundamentals of a good idea. It takes quite a bit of effort to get some mechanical device created, a process developed to make the thing, distributed to various retail outlets (or to potential customers for devices intended more for businesses than ordinary consumers), and the cash flow coming back to the group that made the thing in the first place.
Keep in mind that the constitutional provision asserts that purpose of both patents and copyright is to "promote the useful arts and science".
Where the problem has come in not only this case but a great many others is the expansion of the role of a patent to cover things like business methods, genetic sequences, computer software (originally unpatentable), and other more nebulous ideas and theoretical constructs that have nothing to do with an actual tangible item. None of these should have patent protection, and IMHO it is an abuse of constitutional authority to even grant these kind of patents.
Furthermore, I would have to agree that patents in and of themselves, even in regards to mechanical patents, are a waste of government bureaucrats and courts. They don't do what they claim (protecting the independent entrepreneur/inventor), nor to they really provide any benefit for society as a whole, nor even promote scientific endeavors. I dare anybody to show an independent private "inventor" who creates something and makes money by selling the idea to some mega-corporation for royalties. It doesn't happen.
What happened with the solar panels is not so much the jamming (which did happen, and a repair fixed that particular problem) but that when the panels were repositioned due to adding modules, a small section of one of the panels tore apart and created a minor mess. This was a slight degradation of the solar panels and their overall efficiency, not a dramatic drop in their overall power ability.
What caused the jamming was that one of the bearings in the positioning mechanism for the solar arrays literally welded itself onto the motor and caused the array to grind to a halt. This is BTW one of the nasty engineering issues in space, where pieces of metal like to come together and stick to each other when in a vacuum. The efficiency did drop for a time because the solar arrays simply weren't pointed at the Sun (on one set of the arrays).
As for batteries only lasting 10 years or so... that is actually amazingly good for most batteries that are high energy density cells. Some lead-acid batteries have longer lifetimes (not much longer), but those are not only dangerous from the Sulfuric Acid in them but also not really efficient in terms of energy storage to weight ratios that are all too critical for space systems. Again, that is a part of the design.
For me, it simply seems to be a total waste of time, money, and resources to deorbit so quickly something like the ISS. If it is going to be up there, it should also be used, which implies sending folks up to it to not only maintain the place but make it something useful. Due to the modular design of the place, additional modules could in theory be sent up even if they are not necessarily going up on a shuttle. Yes, that would take some extra work and design, but it can be something worth doing.
As good as this FAQ is, that isn't something explicitly mentioned in the GPL itself. This is more of a casual annotation of the GPL and suggesting that it is the position of the Free Software Foundation that they won't assert any such copyright on software tools owned by the FSF like GCC and related compilers.
Some companies like MySQL AB have asserted claims on the GPL that are in their interpretation much more broadly asserted copyright than the FSF typically asserts (in the case of MySQL, that any software linking to the MySQL libraries must be GPL'd software, or you must buy a commercial license from MySQL). I'm just saying that somebody could be a jerk and try to assert GPL'd copyright over software produced by a GPL'd compiler.
When I was first getting into copyright law and trying to find out if I wanted to get into the publishing business (a couple of decades ago), I grabbed a couple of law books and read up on how broad copyright has been interpreted. The legal precedence regarding compiler output was already well established, and several cases were cited... I just can't remember the specific cases at the moment (my bad, but then again I'm not trying to win a court case here).
Essentially, this is something that dates back to the 1960's and 1970's, and is something so old that trying to search for the content on the internet via Google search will come up empty. More to the point, since it was already established legal precedence, there are no recent cases that have tried to challenge the concept on a significant basis.
The rational used in the legal opinions was along the lines that the order of the software instructions in a compiler (optimization of code and other similar kinds of constructs) is something that does take artistic merit and is a unique expression that can be different between one compiler to another. Certainly you can demonstrate that the same source code that is passed through multiple compilers will result in substantially different binary files that are produced from the compilation tools.
Ditto for word processors, at least so far as the markup tags and how the content is presented, formatted, and displayed when printed.
This is a sort of shared copyright, as the compiler and word processor developers can assert copyright only on those unique parts that are not common to other similar products, nor is the copyright being asserted on the "source code", for which the original "author" can claim sole copyright authority.
All I'm suggesting is that such precedence does exist, and that a good attorney ought to be able to dig it up. Give me some time in a good law library (I'm kind of far from one at the moment) and I could dig up the specific cases.
The requalification requirement is something that is a purely political process and something that is mostly made up out of whole cloth to rationalize the shutting down of the shuttle program. That some sort of requalification process ought to happen if the shuttle is to continue to fly for the next decade or more is true, and certainly the need for a replacement of the Shuttle ought to happen in one way or another, but this isn't like the shuttles will fall apart on a given date because of planned obsolescence.
Adding a couple more flights without a full requalification is not going to be that big of a deal, and yes it would be safe to do so... at least as safe as any shuttle flight has been in the past.
I also say we should strap some remote-controlled ion thrusters to the ISS and push it over to the moon where it can orbit indefinitely. That would be so cool.
Actually, I've heard that lunar orbits aren't known for being stable. So that might actually be a lot trickier than keeping it in Earth orbit.
That is why suggestions of putting it at one of the Lagrangian points around the Moon is a much stronger suggestion... where the orbit is stable on the order of decades to centuries even without station keeping equipment. Still, the trick is to find the energy to get the ISS to that position rather than keeping it in low-earth orbit.
The "Chinese national" that was caught sending classified materials to the Chinese government was actually a naturalized U.S. citizen, and had passed a security clearance review to even get access to that material. In a society like the USA that allows people from all countries to become citizens that enjoy the full rights of anybody else as if they were even native-born citizens, super-patriots like this will bound to show up from time to time that seem to show some loyalty to their original homeland. Even native-born Americans have been compromised in the past, so no, I don't think this shows stupidity of the USA in general, but rather the stupidity of individual citizens who are shooting themselves in the foot.
As to the technical abilities of the Chinese.... I have my doubts. They are struggling with basic space faring capabilities like performing EVAs and doing an in-space vehicle rendezvous that the USA mastered in the 1960's. What capabilities are necessary for performing these tasks and for going into deeper space have been a matter of public record in the USA... in other words it hasn't even been classified. I don't know how much easier it could be for somebody from China to simply go into the National Archives or even simply download the necessary documents from the official NASA website if you want the technical specifications. You certainly don't need a classified clearance at Sandia Labs to get information about the U.S. space program.
Yes, ion engines might be possible, but the question then becomes keeping those maintained, and that is expensive. Nothing in space holds up for extreme amounts of time, and whats the point of keeping an orbital junk pile?
As to the longevity of the components of the ISS.... yeah, that is something which could be debated. There will be a point in time that general maintenance of the ISS will get to the point that it will be considered a pile of junk and not worth the effort to salvage any of the compoents, but that is something which will happen decades from now... certainly well past 2016. There are things you can also do with a huge mass of materials like are found with the ISS and reprocess that stuff now that the effort to get it out of the Earth's atmosphere has happened which would have value all to itself, but I digress.
In terms of the ion engines themselves, the maintenance costs involved aren't nearly what you think they are. Of the various ion engines that have already been deployed into space and are currently operating (like the Dawn spacecraft) they are designed to operate for decades without having human assistance in terms of repairs or even refueling. All it really needs is a supply of electricity... of which the ISS has in ample quantities.
For something that has cost taxpayers on the order of $200 billion to put up into space in the first place, spending a couple more billion to keep the thing from deorbiting would certainly be worth the effort to design, build, and send up into space. Ion engines, while there is certainly ongoing research to try and get them to be improved, have become a proven technology and something which has actual flight experience. To dismiss this as some speculative future technology is to deny the production equipment that has already been produced.
If installing an ion engine on the ISS could eliminate even one shuttle resupply flight, that by itself might be more than enough in terms of costs to justify the added expense of developing an ion engine that would work with the ISS as well. Once installed, the ion engine could work for a decade or longer without having to be refueled.
BTW, the Progress vehicles, which they can and do provide propellant and thrust for station keeping on the ISS, is not sufficient to maintain the altitude that the ISS operates at. I suppose that a dedicated Progress mission that is nothing but fuel could do the job, but that is also quite expensive and could be potentially catestrophic. It was a Progress resupply flight on the MIR where the docking procedure missed a step and the vehicle crashed into the station... causing considerable damage. Eliminating even a couple resupply flights to avoid damaging the ISS might also provide justification and rationale for adding something like an ion engine as well.
As for why the ISS isn't providing scientific research on the scale that would be considered useful, that is as much a political issue as it is a technical issue: NASA canceled modules like the Trans-Hab module that would have provided the logistical and life support equipment necessary for housing researchers in sufficient quantities to make the ISS work. The ISS was designed for a minimal crew of at least a couple of full-time astronauts to perform maintenance, and was originally supposed to have at least three to four full-time researchers (or the equivalent) operating the research equipment. The space to house those astronauts simply never got put up, nor have the vehicles to support larger crews on the ISS such as the Crew Return Vehicle that would have supported emergency evacuation of the ISS ever been built.
That is the real problem with the ISS: Enough has been built that it seems like a waste to get rid of the thing, but not enough parts have been built to make the thing genuinely useful.
We are talking about different kinds of friction here. Yes, there is atmospheric drag on the ISS caused by occasional air molecules bumping into the ISS and slowing the whole station down, which is a form of friction. But that isn't the same thing as trying to overcome the binding friction of something that is sitting on the ground... even if that something is on wheels covered in grease and that binding friction is minimized to as little as can be done given the weight of whatever you are trying to move.
Any little bit of acceleration would help, and one of the things that the ISS has is a whole lot of energy being produced in its solar cell array. There is about 50-100 kilowatts (solar array modules have been added since this article) of power available for running experiments and performing tasks above and beyond maintaining life support and other critical station functions like radio communications and other mechanical systems critical to station operations. If that raw electrical energy is even temporarily redirected into an ion trust engine, that would certainly give you more than enough thrust to boost the ISS to whatever altitude is really necessary.... and the "propellant" in ion engines is comparatively cheap to send up if the engine needs to be resupplied.
The issue isn't even proving if ion engines work, as there are ample examples of even current spacecraft doing the job. The only issue really is if you can scale up such an engine and be able to attach it to the ISS in such a way that the cost of doing such an operation is worth the effort. Considering the expense to send up propellant to the ISS in the form of more conventional rockets, it would seem as though such a design would have real value for ISS station keeping.
The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Honest question: How many times has that down-mass capability actually been used? I don't know of any time the "bring broken ISS equipment back to the ground" scenario you describe ever occurred, although I might just be unaware.
Actually, it has been used on several occasions. Explicitly for the ISS, there have been the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules designed by the Italian government and flown on the Space Shuttle named for Italian scientists (and for NASA the Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles) Leonardo, Raffaello, and Donatello. These were modules that were docked to the ISS, and on occasion have been swapped out and had the modules brought back to the Earth in the shuttle.... essentially using the Space Shuttle as a trash hauler. Yes, there have been some scientific research products that have been brought back to the Earth in these modules, and broken down research racks and other items that have value in and of themselves for research purposes, but a great deal of what was stuffed in these modules for shipment back to the ground included things like old clothing, used food trays, paperwork for projects that have been completed (like checklists and installation manuals), and packaging materials for all of the equipment that has been installed.
In addition to these modules that have been returned to the Earth on several occasions, there have been several satellites which have been captured and stowed into the shuttle cargo bay as well... including one satellite where NASA got a check from Lloyds of London for ship salvage when the satellite was repaired and sent back up into space on a later mission and redeployed.
Another research experiment using the down-mass haulage capability was a research project that tested how various metals and materials functioned in a Low-Earth Orbit environment for an extended period of time (it was in space for about 10 years) which was put into space by one shuttle mission and it was retrieved a decade later by a subsequent mission. Simply put, this was one research project that simply could not have been done at all without the down-mass capability of the shuttle.
All this said, and in spite of having the Shuttle being used for this unique capability that no other spacecraft possesses, it is not used nearly as often as it could be nor is the loss of this capability mentioned in design analysis of proposed vehicles in the future. Only the Shuttle can take large and bulky items as large as a semi-truck trailer (aka as big as the Hubble Telescope) and bring those items safely back to the ground without those items requiring a re-entry system of their own. I'll admit that the Buran spacecraft also had this capability, but that vehicle never really made it into space either.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's pure naivete to think that Tesla will somehow continue in this business as a car manufacturer. They don't even manufacture the body of the car they sell. They are an IP company through and through. Their only hope is to have a good patent chest and find licensees.
Daimler seems to be interested, and I'm sure they aren't the only ones who want to build an electric vehicle.
Anyone who thinks Tesla will be around as a car manufacturer 3 years from now ought to buy stock in Moller today.
BTW, in regards to using Lotus for the assembly and manufacturing of the Roadster, that was a business decision which was made at the early stages of developing the car in hopes to bring the vehicle to market sooner. For all of the changes that they have had to make in order to accommodate the electric motor and fit more with an American automotive market, they might as well have simply built the manufacturing plant in the USA.
As it is now, all Lotus does is put the vehicles together with only about 10% of the vehicle parts coming from the Lotus supply chain.
If you read Elon Musk's blog entry about this and other early manufacturing decisions, this was a decision if done again would have happened quite differently. The next vehicle, the "Model S", is going to have the manufacturing plant in California, of all places. Nearly all of the parts except for a few more or less standard parts like brake pads are going to be manufactured directly by Tesla.
To go trolling like this and claiming that Tesla is only an IP company has completely missed what they have accomplished or what their plans and investments in real estate are planning on doing. It certainly doesn't sound like a pure IP company to me.
Sad to say, some people just don't understand the concepts of economics. Of course, most of the U.S. Congress doesn't understand the basic principles of economics either.
BTW, well said. Shy of Tesla starting out with Bill Gates dumping a couple billion dollars into their company, it would have been impossible for a new start-up company to create a highway speed electric vehicles at an "affordable price". Certainly the poster you were responding to has not a clue for how much money it takes Ford or GM to bring a new vehicle line to market.
Chrysler is so cash poor that I don't think they could bring a new line of consumer cars to market without huge government intervention.
Tesla developed the Roadster completely on their own funds.... without government assistance of any kind. The money from the technology development fund is a low-interest loan (not a grant... it has to be paid back) that is being used to help build the actual manufacturing plant for the production of their next vehicle... called the "Model S", which is a 4-door sedan being targeted more toward middle management business executives and small business entrepreneurs... priced at about $50,000 USD with similar driving distances, but the acceleration performance targeted more toward what is typical for sedans and not sports cars.
At least get the facts straight if you are going to criticize the company and don't go muddling the issues together.
There is an eventual goal for a 3rd vehicle that is supposed to be in the $25,000 range that is intended to be competitive with typical economy-model vehicles, but in order to make a profit off of that vehicle they will have to develop a production line capable of producing tens or even hundreds of thousands of vehicles per month and have a sales & service infrastructure capable of dealing with all of those vehicles and customers. All of that takes a huge amount of money and time to develop, which is precisely why they have decided to aim for the top tier of the automotive market to start out with.
From what I've seen of Tesla, they are doing this on what for the automotive industry would have to say is a shoestring budget. It is a miracle that they have even been able to get this far this quickly, from having precisely zero cars in production two years ago. They still have only two service centers (San Francisco and Los Angeles) and are trying to gear up to become a major automobile brand in America.
As for markable products, they also have their electric motors themselves (a variable speed and voltage alternating current electric motor), and the Lithium ion battery packs that have passed U.S. Department of Transportation regulations for use in automobiles. Both are huge accomplishments in their own right and something that has been of interest to other automotive manufacturers.
If you have the idea for an all-electric yacht... go ahead and try to get government-backed loans. You might be surprised and find a few out there, including some small-business loans, but you had better have the proven experience behind them and have some "skin in the game" before you would have such loans sent your way. Seriously, the money is out there if you really want to get some idea off the ground, and don't go crying that Tesla is doing what nearly every single business listed in the major American stock exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.) has also done at some point or another, as well as a huge number of smaller businesses. Perhaps not this specific fund, but you can find examples of government financing of private businesses going back to the Abraham Lincoln administration (the trans-continental railroad) and even earlier.
Yes, I'll admit that there most of education is mostly regurgitation... or frankly even more important a bunch of diploma mills that go through the motions of delivering information (not the same thing as teaching) and hoping that some of it sticks when they graduate. Or even worse, it is a windowing process that gives a variation of trade guild journeyman status upon its graduates, but deliberately tries to cull out as much cruft as they can to maintain higher wages for the respective professions that earn these credentials.
None of this is actually related to learning... as that isn't the point of the educational process. Indeed a great portion of the educational process is actually dedicated to deliberately occupying a significant part of the labor force (children and young adults) so that they won't be competing for wages against older adults. Other objectives for the educational process also include teaching conformity, social behaviors like not starting a revolution (even if teaching about previous revolutions), and all kinds of social conditioning.
If you happen to learn something along the way, you have actually accomplished something above and beyond what the overall objective of the educational process was really about.
Getting back to the journeyman status in various trade guilds... and keeping in mind that the ranks and titles are not the same for every profession.... it is generally assumed that a "journeyman" or somebody newly initiated into a profession ought to have at least a basic knowledge of that profession. It would look bad to the profession if somebody with the proper credentials can't really do what they claim to be able to do... so there are some information presentation standards that some of the brighter students do pick up.
All this said, in the USA with its overlapping levels of jurisdiction (federal, state, county, municipality, and even neighborhood levels of government sometimes... and other governing bodies that cross various jurisdictional boundaries) there is room for an instructor who actually teaches. As an ordinary teacher, one of the real pleasures that you get out of the process of instruction is to be able to see a student who "gets it" that didn't understand a concept before. Typical school district tenure policies... while they do protect the incompetent and politically motivated... also protect those who genuinely have a love of learning and want to inspire the next generation of students.
In this I'd have to agree that most of what happens is to pound in information in a rather robotic fashion, but there are scattered around to have enough of these would-be real instructors who actually help students to learn that it allows the system to actually work. These instructors (they can be grade school teachers or university professors... found at all levels and kinds of educational institutions) usually just quietly do their job and get things done, and it is because of the humble and quiet nature of what they do that they are able to stay beneath the radar of those who would drive out this sort of creativity.
So what is a "soul" anyway? Do animals have souls? What about plants or bacteria? When does a soul "enter" a person - if it's at conception, what about identical twins?
The issue of the soul of a twin is trying to bait the question and moot to this issue. As for the soul of non-human living things, that is something which has been endlessly debated in theological circles nearly ad nauseum and doesn't really fit with a debate on slashdot as well.
I would point out that most pet owners who have a slight religious bent would argue forcefully that their pets certainly have a soul with which if there is an afterlife they would want to enjoy the company of that creature in that afterlife in some way.
As for the soul of plants, bacteria, or even virii... that is something that is outside the scope of what I was trying to talk about. I was referring to an aspect of how a mind or brain works. Could a plant have an analog (but much slower moving and reacting) to how a brain in most multi-cellular animals work? Now that is an interesting thought by itself, and something perhaps even worthy of biological research in and of itself.
For it to be objective, the first thing we need is a definition of "soul" (that isn't a meaningless circular definition such as "the thing which causes intelligence").
The physical description of an atom was for millenia something that was seriously lacking, yet when physical objects that resembled the ancient ideas were discovered, the ancient terminology was applied to those objects. I am suggesting something similar to a soul could apply here.
I'd argue that a soul is that aspect of intelligence that transcends the physical and imparts a consciousness onto the brain. Axiomatically, consciousness is being self-aware and sentient, and is the leap beyond what is currently done with artificial intelligence. A dog is certainly aware of himself (even if chasing his own tail), so I don't ascribe this to be strictly a human trait either. Even so, until now there has been absolutely no valid artificial intelligence research which has even postulated that they have created such a consciousness that somehow created independent ideas, thoughts, or actions on its own.
Define consciousness in such a way that isn't a "meaningless circular definition", and you might have something resembling a definition of a soul as a corollary to that definition. The original article that started this whole discussion asserts that by creating a complex enough neural network that such a consciousness might arise from self-emergent behavior due to the complexity alone. An interesting idea, but I believe such an approach is missing something, and that could very well be the "soul".
Yet the entirety of human scientific experience shows no such interaction between any "magical force" and the physical world.
On this one, you have got to be kidding. We deal with all kinds of "magical forces", ranging from magnetic and sub-atomic that are manipulated on a regular basis.
No, I'm not talking some kind of "magic" here, but rather something that is physical and tangible... otherwise it isn't worth talking about. If you really think you happen to have such a good bead on the universe that you happen to understand everything in the physical realm and can define all interactions of matter with 100% certainty (at least up to Heisenberg uncertainty levels... and then know the exact probabilities involved in all dimensions)... good for you. You also have earned the next Nobel Prize in Physics... and have caused the committee in Sweden to disband as well while you are at it.
It is you that has suggested I'm postulated a magical force, and what I'm trying to suggest is that when the full model of what a mind/brain actually does when all is said and done that something that resembles a "soul" will also end up being discovered as well. No, I don't buy that the "software" is this soul either, but at least that is something in the right direction.
Terminology and exact details may vary, but there is something to the more traditional concept of a soul as postulated by those with a more religious attitude here. What I see is somebody so fixated with trying to prove all with religious beliefs are ignorant nut cases not worthy of even being listened to that you ignore that some ancient concepts and memes might actually have some scientific validity in describing physical phenomena.
It is the description I'm talking about, as it may apply to describing the fine details of how a brain works.
I dare anybody to show an independent private "inventor" who creates something and makes money by selling the idea to some mega-corporation for royalties. It doesn't happen.
Huh? This happens all the time. Its a well-known business model. An entrepeneur comes up with a new idea, if its patentable typically patents it, develops the business, and then sells it to a larger company for big bucks. While IP isn't the only thing being bought in these cases, its typically a non-trivial portion of it.
This doesn't happen nearly as often as your teachers in school would have you think it occurs, such as when Thomas Edison is being discussed. Typically, a major company will not only be disinterested in outside ideas, but there are legal reasons to actually run with fear that some idiot with a supposedly good idea will come up to some random manufacturing company (or anybody else that runs a business) and then sue you for some other new product that you come up with independently.
Seriously, if you want to invent things, get your academic credentials (degrees, honors, etc.) to a point that one of these companies will hire you as an engineer or scientific researcher. But the independent tinkerer who is self-made isn't going to be in any position to offer ideas to an established business.
Most of the "business" involved with patenting is really just one giant legalized scam where well meaning folks who do have some good ideas but don't know where to turn to get them implemented discover a patent lawyer who empties out their bank accounts and is constantly begging for more money. For a private individual, the process of going through the meat grinder of filing for a patent is a painful regime that is most usually not recommended.... if only due to cost alone.
The only legitimate application of patents is in a defensive manner, where you are trying to stop the individuals I mentioned above from suing you into oblivion... by demonstrating that you already patented the idea previously or at least something similar. Larger companies often will "cross-license" patents... in an attempt to drive out any new competition from entering the market. In other words, if you are a part of the club with a portfolio of patents, you can do business, but God help you if you don't have a patent portfolio to join the club.
Frankly, the baby in this case is already dead, rotting, and flesh dangling off the bones. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater may not be a bad thing to do in this case, and well deserved. Patent laws really don't do any good for private citizens, and are barely tolerable for even larger corporations... usually for things that would normally merit anti-trust litigation and often do anyway.
The novel Gateway written by Frederick Pohl has an interesting plot device where humans encounter an alien race... or at least the machines of that race and have humans trying to figure out how the things work. One of the interesting artifacts that they discover is what were called "prayer fans" that turned out to be nothing more than an alien version of thumb drives... but it took getting a live "Heechee" to explain what they were before the contents were figured out.
It would be interesting to see what people would think about a thumb drive or a room full of CD's and DVD's if for some reason human civilization collapsed (aka a massive nuclear war or something along that line) and thousands of years from now a researcher comes across some of this computer technology and tries to figure it out. With our understanding of computer technology, figuring out the patterns is easy to grasp, but where do you start if you have no baseline reference to compare to?
That is essentially what is happening with studies of the brain, where we are taking something that has taken literally billions of years to evolve and to reverse-engineer the thing in some way to try and duplicate with the eye to perhaps even "improve" upon the model that we have.
The role of a soul in the development of A.I. is certainly an interesting question... as it supposes that there is something more to intelligence than simply the assembly of raw pieces and parts that make up the hardware.
As a matter of faith, I would believe that there is something more to how my children behave, as well as my interactions with my pets. Certainly there seems to be a fine point that you can define something as "alive" and when it is "dead". Restoring something from a dead state to alive is usually difficult and often a leap of faith in itself, even though that is something which is the subject of legitimate scientific inquiry (medicine of all fields and types), and there is even a legal pronouncement of when a person is no longer considered "alive".
With this life, is there something more that can also be described as a critical ingredient for intelligence? Presuming that there is a soul (yeah, a huge leap of logic here, but bear with me) the presumption here is that somehow this "soul" is interacting with the physical and tangible world. Something that can be quantified and measured at least in some degree. What that "soul" may do is certainly something that is arguably abstract and currently is mainly a bunch of guess work, but so is so much of the field of artificial intelligence as well right now.
Atomic theory as postulated by the ancient Greek philosophers got the memes of ideas of how matter was put together with basic building blocks and then assembled into the great complexity that we see in the universe today. They got the simple outline idea correct, but missed by a long shot the idea that we have over a hundred elements instead of the four that were originally postulated. That water and air (both originally considered elements) were in fact mixtures of elements proved even more interesting.
I advance that in the process of really finding out how the mind works and what can create a genuine intelligence, that some basic building block will be discovered that will ultimately be called a "soul" at least in terms of what makes the thing work. When we finally figure this out, the ancient philosophers (including Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, and the others mentioned in the New Testament and elsewhere) may end up being proven correct in principle but off as to the fine detailed points. Certainly I wouldn't consider the New Testament to be a scientific roadmap when it wasn't written to be one. Still, the idea that there could be something that would be labeled a soul in a clinical sense when organizing and creating artificially intelligent machines is something that may have some value for objective discussions.
Considering that we can't identify what other species of animals may have sentience, I would think it is all that much harder to identify when a computer might have that ability. Some species are dolphins, other primates, and my favorite: Amazonian parrots.... but even things like California Sea Otters display some remarkable intelligence and even the ability to manufacture tools (they make a chisel to pry open clams and oysters). Describing intelligence that doesn't use anthroprogenic terms in its description seems to be a rather difficult challenge.
Sentient computers have always presumed behavior on the part of the human brain that has proven to be woefully inadequate. Certain aspects of what people think might be signs of intelligence, such as rapidly multiplying hundred digit numbers together, have been automated and made routine now.... but that isn't really genuine intelligence.
While I like the field of Artificial Intelligence and the quest for intelligence, far too much of the field is full of games and tricks that mimic some aspects of intelligence (like expert programs and machine translation) but still continue to miss the mark if you are targeting genuine intelligence.
This "brain on a chip" might be able to join in with the games that have been played so far, and perhaps some new insights into human intelligence could be gained. There might even be some very interesting applications that can come from such a device that would prove useful even or make some awesome toys for kids eventually (getting back to my games and tricks). Even so, the field of A.I. has been so fraught with dead ends and wasted resources striving for the ultimate goal that it seems almost futile to try. We are still decades away from human-like intelligence.... something that A.I. researchers 40 years ago would have thought was a done deal by now given the computational resources that we have available at the present time.
I do wonder where the "Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things would do" comments are. The point is that even a cluster of these chips wouldn't have enhanced intelligence over what it does by itself either.
BTW, I do think the quest itself perhaps is the worthy endeavor. But neither this new device nor anything else that will be invented in the near future is something to brag about... as we really are still trying to figure out how the dang thing works in the first place.
I'm still convinced that this can be accelerated by a more intelligent government involvement. NASA unfortunately has a long track record of screwing this up. (They've done other things well.)
It is surprising how much is being funded toward orbital flight. Richard Branson at the last Oshkosh air show hinted that he and Burt Rutan are currently in discussions about an orbital vehicle. SpaceX clearly has an operational orbital vehicle (in the Falcon 1) and is doing research to move to the Falcon 9 with the Dragon vehicle. All the NASA funding has done is to give a guaranteed customer and help speed up the process, as the Falcon 9 was announced and engineering was started well before the COTS contracts. There are other companies going for LEO, but admittedly the sub-orbital flights are where most of the money is at for now for things that are new in space.
Some of the really remarkable genuine progress is with more innovative fuel sources like has happened with the Lunar Landing Challenge... particularly the work in Hydrogen Peroxide and Peroxide/Kerosene motors. It is unfortunate that ATF regulations since 9/11 have put a real tight collar on potential research in this area of non-cryogenic rocket fuels.
As for more intelligent government involvement, it is too bad that NASA hasn't expanded the role of the Centennial Prizes... or for that matter had Congress appropriate any more money into the Centennial Prize fund. For the most recent fiscal year, Congress appropriated absolutely nothing for any new prizes (but they did keep existing prizes in tact). Newt Gingrich... right before he was ousted from his speakership.... had written legislation and was going through the process to put the bill on the floor to have a prize worth $10 billion to land somebody on the Moon in a sort of beefed up X-Prize. Considering that the Orion/Ares program is going to cost on the order of $100 billion before all is said and done to do the same thing, it seems now like a bargain if that had been done back in the 1990's. If I recall correctly, there were even consolation prizes for second and third place.... just to make sure that competitors for a private spaceflight mission to the Moon would try to continue their efforts even if somebody beat them out.
NASA also needs to return to the hard-core R&D that it does best. NASA research into innovative propulsion systems like nuclear rocketry, ion engines, and plasma rockets like the VASMIR are things that legitimately could use even existing government bureaucracies that exist within NASA. These sort of hard core basic principle research is the sort of thing that a government research grant is useful for. Building yet another launch system like the Ares isn't something that builds on the strengths of NASA and is IMHO something legitimate to rip NASA apart on... particularly when they are cutting basic research programs to support the development budget for a launcher that is at best a mediocre and pork-barrel laden project.
Regular readers of my comments will know that I'm highly critical of NASA. However, it's important for enthusiastic supporters of space exploration to understand that private industry, left to its own devices, is not likely (is, in fact, extremely unlikely) to fund the R&D required to build the next generation of space transportation system. Getting to LEO is a big, big project. Much bigger than the trans-continental railways. Private corporations do not have the vision required for long term investment on this scale. They have quarterly numbers to meet, impatient and risk averse investors and managers.
I can give plenty of counter examples, including nearly all of the "new space" companies who are spending altogether nearly a billion dollars in original R&D this past year. Indeed nearly all that private industry is doing right now in commercial spaceflight is R&D.
Yes, getting to LEO was a big project equivalent to the trans-continental railroad... when it was done for the first time. But now that we know that orbital environment and what it takes to get there, it is more like building the other trans-continental railroads like the Southern Pacific and the Northern routes.... both that were paid completely with private funds (although some public lands were given to the railroad companies in exchange for building those routes).
Frankly, from what I've seen, it is easier and cheaper to build a company who designs and launches rockets capable of low-earth orbit vehicles than it is to create an automobile company that has to meet safety, and environmental standards if you were to start from scratch today.
I don't want to list the companies because any list would be incomplete, but there are now more than a couple dozen companies who are building launchers... including a couple that already have put things into orbit. SpaceX and Orbital Science have both put paid commercial payloads into orbit.... not something insignificant, and both companies built these rockets with largely private funds.
I don't buy this argument at all, and there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary that private individuals will spend their own money for rocket research. We don't need the government to screw up the picture any more than it has, and certainly what is needed instead is to get the government bureaucrats and lawyers who want to over-regulate this industry out of the way so even more private R&D can happen.
The short answer is that building a spacecraft to orbit and come back is 100% equivalent to building an ICBM. How many average joes in the US do you think would be willing to sell that information to anyone who asks? I know it's not ideal, but I really would prefer if countries like North Korea and Iran don't have that kind of technology.
I'd give it at best 80% or less. ICBMs have a very different flight profile than an orbital vehicle, and certainly a different overall design goal in terms of how you want to use the vehicles as well.
Consider, an ICBM's goal is to deliver a nuclear warhead (a rather sturdy little package on the whole with almost no appendages and relatively simple functionality... it just has to go BOOM eventually) to a specific geographical location as fast as it can. The acceleration forces on an ICBM can go as high as 30x normal gravity here on the Earth (aka 30 g's) and can put up with other forces that would destroy most typical spaceflight hardware... and particularly human passengers. The Apollo spacecraft that went to the Moon would pull a maximum of about 9 g's in the early stages of flight, and on average about 6 g's. The Space Shuttle has a maximum of about 4 g's for both passengers and cargo.
And all this is just forces going up... not really taking into account the issues of orbital insertion and smoothing out the orbit to something useful.... or making a maneuver heading to geo-synchronous orbit.
As for re-entry... most ICBM warheads use Uranium as the heat shield. It makes a nice protective heavy metal that is going to melt anyway once it blows up, and it helps to reduce payload mass on top of that as the metal can be used as a part of the bomb itself. Again, this is a completely different design regime compared to trying to make a "soft" landing where you actually want to recover the contents of the vehicle (not even a design consideration for an ICBM)... much less trying to recover human passengers/crew members.
So the point here is that while there are some similarities and certainly some knowledge that can be utilized by both ICBM builders and by spacecraft launchers, it really is two different areas of expertise and there are design compromises that impact each type of vehicle.
Even the launching aspects of both kinds of vehicles have a different profile. An ICBM has to be ready to launch for years... even decades at a time. A spacecraft launcher, on the other hand, is designed to be launched as soon as it is ready. This will have a significant impact on the choice of equipment chosen for each type of vehicle.
Of course, who knows... North Korea and Iran may want to launch their ICBMs as soon as they are developed and ready to use, but I digress that that point.
Far too many of both the American and Russian space vehicle launches came from a background of being converted ICBMs... which is one of the reasons why spaceflight continues to be expensive even today. They were built to be deployed rapidly and to hit a target with precision, it is an afterthought that they might be used in space. The booster engines have to be "de-tuned" to throttle back for the safety of the cargo, and components fail because they aren't really intended for spaceflight. If the USA launches 100 ICBMs and only 80 actually reach their targets.... that is considered a military success. If you are in a spacecraft that will blow up or be destroyed 20% of the time.... that would normally be considered a disaster.
Also, nearly all information (including blueprints, engineering notes, and more) of how NASA builts its rockets are in the public domain and accessible either through its various websites, contacting NASA curators directly, or by visiting the National Archives in Washington D.C. This isn't "Top Secret" information, and a well trained aerospace engineer can read enough information to make corrections to their designs by reading this public information.
The point is, building ICBMs and spacecraft launchers is not identical and in many ways spacecraft launchers could be built in a way that would prevent their use for ICBMs.
This was originally going to be $300 million (according to the original "Recovery Act" appropriation), but Senator Shelby (R-Alabama) decided to move the funds to the Ares I/V development. What happened here is that Shelby finally "compromised" and admitted that it wasn't intended strictly for the Constellation program.
BTW, Elon Musk and SpaceX were planning on doing this development anyway... with or without NASA funds. What even this little bit does is to help encourage the development of the launch escape system (and the manned version of the Dragon Capsule) slightly ahead of when SpaceX would have built it on their own. In addition, this will allow an alternative to using the Soyuz spacecraft for travel to and from the ISS once the Space Shuttle retires.
Keep in mind that SpaceX wants to sell spaceflight services to private companies (like Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures) and to other interested private individuals... as well as to some countries like Dubai who are trying to get into space. Until now, there was no American company willing to sell you a "seat" into orbital flight at any price... and even the Russians have shut down their commercial manned spaceflight slots. As to how many flights SpaceX will make once all this get built... I couldn't guess. I would imagine, however, that NASA would not have even half of the flights that might fly.
The first flight of the Falcon 9 is due to go up in a couple of months... as the hardware is already built and all that is happening now is the final tests to determine flight worthiness. Once that is proven... the Dragon capsule will be fairly straight forward as one more iteration on the development cycle on what will be hopefully a proven launch vehicle. The first unmanned flights of the Dragon capsule might happen as soon as next year... and may be flying before the shuttle is even officially retired. They are that close to being ready.
As far as NASA spending more on the art work for the Constellation/Ares rocket system than this... you may be correct. What is amazing is how much has happened in spite of this kind of paltry effort to support commercial spaceflight.
The concept of patents for the designs of mechanical engineers seems to have at least the fundamentals of a good idea. It takes quite a bit of effort to get some mechanical device created, a process developed to make the thing, distributed to various retail outlets (or to potential customers for devices intended more for businesses than ordinary consumers), and the cash flow coming back to the group that made the thing in the first place.
Keep in mind that the constitutional provision asserts that purpose of both patents and copyright is to "promote the useful arts and science".
Where the problem has come in not only this case but a great many others is the expansion of the role of a patent to cover things like business methods, genetic sequences, computer software (originally unpatentable), and other more nebulous ideas and theoretical constructs that have nothing to do with an actual tangible item. None of these should have patent protection, and IMHO it is an abuse of constitutional authority to even grant these kind of patents.
Furthermore, I would have to agree that patents in and of themselves, even in regards to mechanical patents, are a waste of government bureaucrats and courts. They don't do what they claim (protecting the independent entrepreneur/inventor), nor to they really provide any benefit for society as a whole, nor even promote scientific endeavors. I dare anybody to show an independent private "inventor" who creates something and makes money by selling the idea to some mega-corporation for royalties. It doesn't happen.
What happened with the solar panels is not so much the jamming (which did happen, and a repair fixed that particular problem) but that when the panels were repositioned due to adding modules, a small section of one of the panels tore apart and created a minor mess. This was a slight degradation of the solar panels and their overall efficiency, not a dramatic drop in their overall power ability.
What caused the jamming was that one of the bearings in the positioning mechanism for the solar arrays literally welded itself onto the motor and caused the array to grind to a halt. This is BTW one of the nasty engineering issues in space, where pieces of metal like to come together and stick to each other when in a vacuum. The efficiency did drop for a time because the solar arrays simply weren't pointed at the Sun (on one set of the arrays).
As for batteries only lasting 10 years or so... that is actually amazingly good for most batteries that are high energy density cells. Some lead-acid batteries have longer lifetimes (not much longer), but those are not only dangerous from the Sulfuric Acid in them but also not really efficient in terms of energy storage to weight ratios that are all too critical for space systems. Again, that is a part of the design.
For me, it simply seems to be a total waste of time, money, and resources to deorbit so quickly something like the ISS. If it is going to be up there, it should also be used, which implies sending folks up to it to not only maintain the place but make it something useful. Due to the modular design of the place, additional modules could in theory be sent up even if they are not necessarily going up on a shuttle. Yes, that would take some extra work and design, but it can be something worth doing.
As good as this FAQ is, that isn't something explicitly mentioned in the GPL itself. This is more of a casual annotation of the GPL and suggesting that it is the position of the Free Software Foundation that they won't assert any such copyright on software tools owned by the FSF like GCC and related compilers.
Some companies like MySQL AB have asserted claims on the GPL that are in their interpretation much more broadly asserted copyright than the FSF typically asserts (in the case of MySQL, that any software linking to the MySQL libraries must be GPL'd software, or you must buy a commercial license from MySQL). I'm just saying that somebody could be a jerk and try to assert GPL'd copyright over software produced by a GPL'd compiler.
When I was first getting into copyright law and trying to find out if I wanted to get into the publishing business (a couple of decades ago), I grabbed a couple of law books and read up on how broad copyright has been interpreted. The legal precedence regarding compiler output was already well established, and several cases were cited... I just can't remember the specific cases at the moment (my bad, but then again I'm not trying to win a court case here).
Essentially, this is something that dates back to the 1960's and 1970's, and is something so old that trying to search for the content on the internet via Google search will come up empty. More to the point, since it was already established legal precedence, there are no recent cases that have tried to challenge the concept on a significant basis.
The rational used in the legal opinions was along the lines that the order of the software instructions in a compiler (optimization of code and other similar kinds of constructs) is something that does take artistic merit and is a unique expression that can be different between one compiler to another. Certainly you can demonstrate that the same source code that is passed through multiple compilers will result in substantially different binary files that are produced from the compilation tools.
Ditto for word processors, at least so far as the markup tags and how the content is presented, formatted, and displayed when printed.
This is a sort of shared copyright, as the compiler and word processor developers can assert copyright only on those unique parts that are not common to other similar products, nor is the copyright being asserted on the "source code", for which the original "author" can claim sole copyright authority.
All I'm suggesting is that such precedence does exist, and that a good attorney ought to be able to dig it up. Give me some time in a good law library (I'm kind of far from one at the moment) and I could dig up the specific cases.
The requalification requirement is something that is a purely political process and something that is mostly made up out of whole cloth to rationalize the shutting down of the shuttle program. That some sort of requalification process ought to happen if the shuttle is to continue to fly for the next decade or more is true, and certainly the need for a replacement of the Shuttle ought to happen in one way or another, but this isn't like the shuttles will fall apart on a given date because of planned obsolescence.
Adding a couple more flights without a full requalification is not going to be that big of a deal, and yes it would be safe to do so... at least as safe as any shuttle flight has been in the past.
I also say we should strap some remote-controlled ion thrusters to the ISS and push it over to the moon where it can orbit indefinitely. That would be so cool.
Actually, I've heard that lunar orbits aren't known for being stable. So that might actually be a lot trickier than keeping it in Earth orbit.
That is why suggestions of putting it at one of the Lagrangian points around the Moon is a much stronger suggestion... where the orbit is stable on the order of decades to centuries even without station keeping equipment. Still, the trick is to find the energy to get the ISS to that position rather than keeping it in low-earth orbit.
The "Chinese national" that was caught sending classified materials to the Chinese government was actually a naturalized U.S. citizen, and had passed a security clearance review to even get access to that material. In a society like the USA that allows people from all countries to become citizens that enjoy the full rights of anybody else as if they were even native-born citizens, super-patriots like this will bound to show up from time to time that seem to show some loyalty to their original homeland. Even native-born Americans have been compromised in the past, so no, I don't think this shows stupidity of the USA in general, but rather the stupidity of individual citizens who are shooting themselves in the foot.
As to the technical abilities of the Chinese.... I have my doubts. They are struggling with basic space faring capabilities like performing EVAs and doing an in-space vehicle rendezvous that the USA mastered in the 1960's. What capabilities are necessary for performing these tasks and for going into deeper space have been a matter of public record in the USA... in other words it hasn't even been classified. I don't know how much easier it could be for somebody from China to simply go into the National Archives or even simply download the necessary documents from the official NASA website if you want the technical specifications. You certainly don't need a classified clearance at Sandia Labs to get information about the U.S. space program.
Yes, ion engines might be possible, but the question then becomes keeping those maintained, and that is expensive. Nothing in space holds up for extreme amounts of time, and whats the point of keeping an orbital junk pile?
As to the longevity of the components of the ISS.... yeah, that is something which could be debated. There will be a point in time that general maintenance of the ISS will get to the point that it will be considered a pile of junk and not worth the effort to salvage any of the compoents, but that is something which will happen decades from now... certainly well past 2016. There are things you can also do with a huge mass of materials like are found with the ISS and reprocess that stuff now that the effort to get it out of the Earth's atmosphere has happened which would have value all to itself, but I digress.
In terms of the ion engines themselves, the maintenance costs involved aren't nearly what you think they are. Of the various ion engines that have already been deployed into space and are currently operating (like the Dawn spacecraft) they are designed to operate for decades without having human assistance in terms of repairs or even refueling. All it really needs is a supply of electricity... of which the ISS has in ample quantities.
For something that has cost taxpayers on the order of $200 billion to put up into space in the first place, spending a couple more billion to keep the thing from deorbiting would certainly be worth the effort to design, build, and send up into space. Ion engines, while there is certainly ongoing research to try and get them to be improved, have become a proven technology and something which has actual flight experience. To dismiss this as some speculative future technology is to deny the production equipment that has already been produced.
If installing an ion engine on the ISS could eliminate even one shuttle resupply flight, that by itself might be more than enough in terms of costs to justify the added expense of developing an ion engine that would work with the ISS as well. Once installed, the ion engine could work for a decade or longer without having to be refueled.
BTW, the Progress vehicles, which they can and do provide propellant and thrust for station keeping on the ISS, is not sufficient to maintain the altitude that the ISS operates at. I suppose that a dedicated Progress mission that is nothing but fuel could do the job, but that is also quite expensive and could be potentially catestrophic. It was a Progress resupply flight on the MIR where the docking procedure missed a step and the vehicle crashed into the station... causing considerable damage. Eliminating even a couple resupply flights to avoid damaging the ISS might also provide justification and rationale for adding something like an ion engine as well.
As for why the ISS isn't providing scientific research on the scale that would be considered useful, that is as much a political issue as it is a technical issue: NASA canceled modules like the Trans-Hab module that would have provided the logistical and life support equipment necessary for housing researchers in sufficient quantities to make the ISS work. The ISS was designed for a minimal crew of at least a couple of full-time astronauts to perform maintenance, and was originally supposed to have at least three to four full-time researchers (or the equivalent) operating the research equipment. The space to house those astronauts simply never got put up, nor have the vehicles to support larger crews on the ISS such as the Crew Return Vehicle that would have supported emergency evacuation of the ISS ever been built.
That is the real problem with the ISS: Enough has been built that it seems like a waste to get rid of the thing, but not enough parts have been built to make the thing genuinely useful.
We are talking about different kinds of friction here. Yes, there is atmospheric drag on the ISS caused by occasional air molecules bumping into the ISS and slowing the whole station down, which is a form of friction. But that isn't the same thing as trying to overcome the binding friction of something that is sitting on the ground... even if that something is on wheels covered in grease and that binding friction is minimized to as little as can be done given the weight of whatever you are trying to move.
Any little bit of acceleration would help, and one of the things that the ISS has is a whole lot of energy being produced in its solar cell array. There is about 50-100 kilowatts (solar array modules have been added since this article) of power available for running experiments and performing tasks above and beyond maintaining life support and other critical station functions like radio communications and other mechanical systems critical to station operations. If that raw electrical energy is even temporarily redirected into an ion trust engine, that would certainly give you more than enough thrust to boost the ISS to whatever altitude is really necessary.... and the "propellant" in ion engines is comparatively cheap to send up if the engine needs to be resupplied.
The issue isn't even proving if ion engines work, as there are ample examples of even current spacecraft doing the job. The only issue really is if you can scale up such an engine and be able to attach it to the ISS in such a way that the cost of doing such an operation is worth the effort. Considering the expense to send up propellant to the ISS in the form of more conventional rockets, it would seem as though such a design would have real value for ISS station keeping.
The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Honest question: How many times has that down-mass capability actually been used? I don't know of any time the "bring broken ISS equipment back to the ground" scenario you describe ever occurred, although I might just be unaware.
Actually, it has been used on several occasions. Explicitly for the ISS, there have been the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules designed by the Italian government and flown on the Space Shuttle named for Italian scientists (and for NASA the Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles) Leonardo, Raffaello, and Donatello. These were modules that were docked to the ISS, and on occasion have been swapped out and had the modules brought back to the Earth in the shuttle.... essentially using the Space Shuttle as a trash hauler. Yes, there have been some scientific research products that have been brought back to the Earth in these modules, and broken down research racks and other items that have value in and of themselves for research purposes, but a great deal of what was stuffed in these modules for shipment back to the ground included things like old clothing, used food trays, paperwork for projects that have been completed (like checklists and installation manuals), and packaging materials for all of the equipment that has been installed.
In addition to these modules that have been returned to the Earth on several occasions, there have been several satellites which have been captured and stowed into the shuttle cargo bay as well... including one satellite where NASA got a check from Lloyds of London for ship salvage when the satellite was repaired and sent back up into space on a later mission and redeployed.
Another research experiment using the down-mass haulage capability was a research project that tested how various metals and materials functioned in a Low-Earth Orbit environment for an extended period of time (it was in space for about 10 years) which was put into space by one shuttle mission and it was retrieved a decade later by a subsequent mission. Simply put, this was one research project that simply could not have been done at all without the down-mass capability of the shuttle.
All this said, and in spite of having the Shuttle being used for this unique capability that no other spacecraft possesses, it is not used nearly as often as it could be nor is the loss of this capability mentioned in design analysis of proposed vehicles in the future. Only the Shuttle can take large and bulky items as large as a semi-truck trailer (aka as big as the Hubble Telescope) and bring those items safely back to the ground without those items requiring a re-entry system of their own. I'll admit that the Buran spacecraft also had this capability, but that vehicle never really made it into space either.
How many permanent American non-native towns were there in 1492?
L'Anse aux Meadows?
This was established by the Vikings, coming from Scandinavia by way of Greenland and Iceland.
Still, this is the exception that proves the rule you are trying to imply here.