Cell phone do not interfere with airplane equipment. Totally different frequency bands. Cell phones are used on planes (surreptitiously) every day. Occasionally and angry stewardess, but no other ill effects.
Cell phones are not allowed on planes at the behest of the FCC, because the cell systems we use today were never designed for hand off calls over vast regions at the speed of a plane, and a phone at cruise altitude could light up a thousand towers. This prohibition was always an FCC issue, and never much of a concern for the FAA.
WIFI would be just as likely to interfere as would cellular radio. Yet wifi on the planes is already available on many flights. With wifi, you can do voip. Almost every Android phone has Voip (internet calling) built in.
As of this time, none of the airlines allowing WIFI let you use any Voice app. They claim bandwidth issues. However voice does not take as much bandwidth as most people think.
I suspect there is still some security concerns with allowing voice communications that are the real hold up here, I doubt there are any real technological issues in providing the bandwidth. On the other hand they do allow text chat apps, as well as email.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
Exactly.
Further, lava tubes, oddly enough, are lined with lava. Not that informative.
A German designed drill is scheduled for the next lander in 2016 and drill 16 feet into the surface. Nothing you can put in a cave will be able come close to that, and at best it might be able to drill a few inches into solid lava.
The Brits used full flash hoods for turret crews in World War 2, but these excluded the face. The modern British navy have anti-flash gear that covers much more of the face when in actual combat such as in the Falklands. These are made of Nomex today.
In those days, the US Navy was never much of a believer in anti flash clothing as the Royal Navy; though for a long time it did use anti flash cream for covering the face. Now I believe anti-flash hoods and sleeves are used in combat situations.
The US issued Anti Flash cream as early as 1943, to both navy and Marine corp, which was essentially titanium dioxide - same as is used for sun protection today.
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
I find it ironic that you can propose this is a good idea if used for Universal Access, and then in the same post, inform us that some rural areas don't have internet access.
Wait, What? We've had Universal Service for decades in the telephone industry, and now you inform us that rural areas don't even have dial-up internet access?
And air pressure storage is notoriously inefficient. How does it compare to fuel cells though?
And how can it be non-polluting when some external compressor is required to compress all this air? It seems that India is having troubles keeping the electricity flowing these days, so how do they propose to power the compressor plants?
Is this another exercise in externalizing any environmental impact, and then pronouncing your product "Green" with great fanfare?
Its a lot like electric cars in general, powered by something, just not something we sell. The pollution will be 3 states away. You don't need to worry about it.
There is no way to compress air in the quantity needed other than by using fissile and fossil fuels or wind and solar. But we don't have enough of those to handle our houses and our factories as it is, especially in India.
But ALL of the employees given big budgets to do this type of thing are significantly more magical than your average self appointed expert posting on slashdot under the name of Tastecicles.
Commodity mobile phones aren't safe for flight science systems, end of story, because they're a: not hardened, b: not real time, c: not reliable and d: vulnerable to script kiddy software hacks.
Really? If all your assertions are true, then explain why is it that this program is being done at NASA’s Ames Research Center where they employ real world class ROCKET SCIENTISTS, rather than kids who play them on slashdot?
Script kiddies in space? Really? You are going with that? Not reliable? Did you even read TFA? Its a coffee cup sized payload, in low earth orbit, expected to re-enter in less than a year. How reliable does it have to be? Real Time? Seriously? Its monitoring a sensor package, and radioing it back to earth. It has no thrusters to control. Just how much real time is needed? Hardended? In low earth orbit (WAY lower than the ISS) protected by the Van Allen belts. Costing maybe a thousand dollars to construct. Who cares if it takes a direct hit? They are cheap enough to send up two dozen on a single sounding rocket.
At least READ TFA before pontificating on things you obviously know nothing about.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things,...In the same vein, is there an advantage to using an Android environment(whose virtues lie primarily in UI and 3rd party applications) rather than a standard embedded linux or other OS?
Android IS Linux. Its just that it has already been trimmed down to the bones and runs on very powerful, but low energy consuming hardware. So it saves them the need of making a linux version to do the same thing.
As for your other points, it seems from TFA that they will not actually be using the phones as we know them, but rather stripped down models sans screen, case, battery, etc. Probably wrapped in something to compensate for lack of radiation hardened componentry. But then again, the types of short duration, low orbit, small payload missions they are planning this for can probably risk the radiation for the duration.
In the case of our intrepid Nexus phones, the issue is being tactfully ignored. As these are test missions, NASA isn’t concerned about the long-term viability of these craft, and only expects them to last a few weeks or months. Due to their low orbits and lack of thrusters to increase their altitude during the mission, the Nexus-powered satellites will be falling back down to Earth within a year anyway. Even if they were built to better withstand the extremes of space, they would still just burn up in the atmosphere before too long.
I doubt they launch these things singly, they probably piggyback on other launches, but being the size of a coffee cup, they might be able to use cheap sounding rockets. There are a number of different models of these relatively cheap rockets that can launch low earth orbit small payloads.
What you would have here is the legal bequeathment of an asset, which then turns out to not have the cash equivalent value it would otherwise have because the company refuses to allow the recipient to take it up and use it. That's called an encumberment. At that point, people will be contacting the IRS to show that they recieved an encumbered asset that is not worth taxing, and the IRS will be (probably), giving them that point. Then the IRS will be explaining to Congress that they had X loss of potential tax revenues because of that encumberment attached to all such property. Then the US will realize it can collect all those taxes if the encumberment is removed or they can spend money to deal with litigation and to try to educate all those tax lawyers not to let people put that asset in their wills in the first place. The decision becomes butt heads with a bunch of state attorney generals and local lawyers to help a company make something non-taxable post facto, or tell the company their terms are invalid, and incidentally end up getting some tax revenue out of the decision. So, either the fed gets a court decision, or Congress passes a new law, or the IRS makes a very bad decision and thousands of people wealthy enough to pay estate taxes start adding that to their reasons for tax revolt, and a whole bunch of state v. fed lawsuits get launched anyways.
Wait, weren't you the one explaining how they ran out of ways to politely call bullshit?
Re-read your juvenile diatribe and see which one of us is slinging bullshit. There's no point in telling us you are not a lawyer in your sig, since its pretty evident you are still working on your GED.
Seeing as how in-game assets can be worth real world money, they should be bequeathable.
But I wonder... None of this stuff existed when you were a kid, and the stuff that did exist then is old hat, unused, and obsolete now, and other than the occasional pinball table collector pretty much no one cares. So don't expect any lasting value of any of these in-game assets. Infact, when your kid is 24, I doubt even YOU will place any value on these things. Raising a child and putting them thru college has a way of changing one's perspective on the relative worth of things.
Second, on the matter of transferability, are you sure it is even allowed by the terms of service? Some of these gaming sites might preclude that (don't know personally), and if prohibited when you were alive and signed up, that prohibition doesn't go away just because you died.
A train passenger seat, what's that? And I doubt the GPS can tell if I'm on the car's driver's seat or passenger's seat.
If I have to explain what a train passenger seat is, then its no wonder you blankly stare out the window between typing characters.;-)
The GPS simply tells the software you are in motion, not which side of the car you are on. The typing style and cadence, combined with being in motion indicates driver seat for most. For you it might not work until after you collect your thoughts to the point where you can complete a word before becoming distracted.
Put another way how many cherished commercial books and albums have you personally inherited? Maybe it's a bad question since people who have, will be more likely to answer. But for me the answer is 0. I can't even get my dad to take an interest in getting his old slides scanned so we can see our childhood photos.
I inherited not more than 5 books from my parents. They were big time library patrons, without enough money after putting 5 kids thru college, to amass their own collection. Turns out a couple of these books have collector value, being first editions which were handed down to my parents from my grand parents. (early Audubon stuff). So, no, most of us don't have huge libraries of stuff handed down.
But that is water under the bridge at this point, and the discussion is about what we can hand down today. I've got an entire wall covered by bookshelves that someone will pick over when I shuffle off. I've got at least as many digital books that they may look at when they find my several nook e-readers laying around.
Hard to say if they might want any of that, but it should be my decision to give, and their decision to receive.
Now as to those slides, its your job to scan them. He has his memories. He probably never needs to even look at the slides. You've probably got the skills to scan them, sift them, and save them. He probably doesn't want to waste his remaining hours moving images from one media to another when he knows you will inherit the entire collection anyway.
Simple: digital content should convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. Why should, e.g., books written on vellum have different rights than those written on paper?
Next problem,
I simply take the ownership rights of the books I buy. (And, yes, I do buy them, because authors have to eat too).
There are methods of DRM removal that can be used on your dbooks, and ebook library managers (such as Calibre) that you can use to manage your collection on your local hard drive, and back up to CD-Rom. Combine these two tool sets and you have the ownership you want.
Similarly, for music, every digital music locker I am aware of allows download to your hard drive. Any drm protection on those files can also be stripped.
I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.
Since it combines GPS motion detection, you would have to be reading that interesting book on the train/bus/car passenger seat.
But even then, you don't read a little, text a few characters, read a little more, then type a couple characters. You stop reading, text the message, then pick up the book again. They measure for erratic intervals between keystrokes while in motion.
I suspect there would be a lot of false positives for people texting while walking unless they restricted it to speeds above 3mph.
So basically they are taking it upon themselves to ban you from texting in a public transport, or as a passenger. Many rides are bumpy enough and anyone carrying on a conversation might seem distracted enough for the app to trigger..
Fishing the phone out, opening the texting screen and starting to text is probably the most dangerous time, whereas entering characters slowly while attempting to watch the road is probably not quite so dangerous (although still dangerous enough since you pretty much can't text on a touch screen one handed).
I suspect that the design here is to make it futile to try to text, thereby extinguishing the urge to do so.
I also wonder what some of the predictive keyboards such as Swiftkey that can predict not just words after a couple characters have been typed, but entire words that typically occur together. Such keyboards deliver entire words in bursts to the text message, followed by a couple characters followed by more entire words (selected from the suggestions). That has to mess up the cadence.
The article says the error rate would be combined with GPS. Only erratic typing while driving or while riding public transit would result in a block.
Or erratic typing while on a car's passenger seat, Anyway, preventing erratic typing while on public transport seems like a rather large problem to me.
When reading the linked article, (I know, this is slashdot), they seem to suggest that the typing patterns and cadences are unique to driving:
After evaluating the sensitivity of the keystroke entropy indicator against the number of keystrokes recorded, the researchers found they could accurately and relatively quickly identify when a test subject had been both texting and operating the simulator. They found normal texting took on more rhythmic patterns.
I suspect that even on the bus sitting next to some random dodgy character you would type in a more normal cadence, even allowing for a bumpy ride. You could probably type a whole sentence in your normal text-speak without more than one or two breaks in rhythm as opposed to pauses mid-word.
So it might well be able to distinguish bus and passenger seat users from drivers.
I could see that a passenger engaged in watching the scenery might actually text as distractedly as a driver, but they have a choice of texting or watching, and could modify their texting style to "git er done" in one go, which is an option the driver doesn't rationally have. (To the degree that rationality enters the discussion).
The Curiosity rover is proof your theory is wrong.
There aren't likely to be any significant emergencies on the surface of mars. But the likely ones have all been planned for. It can choose its own path, and navigate to a destination without direct human control. It knows how to avoid steep slopes, bolder fields, and other obstacles.
And have you not noticed that Google has self driving cars running around the south west?
Sending probes to far planets isn't an all-in-one undertaking. You send orbiters to photograph. You send landers to measure environmental. Then you plan for any dangers you discover, and send a rover that can avoid them, circumvent them, and which was designed for the environment.
Lose a couple vehicles along the way? So what? Failure teaches you a lot.
Communication delays are far from the largest obstacle. You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
More to the point is that people aren't as willing to take 5 year voyages that are likely to be one way. Any place Beagle could land other than the antarctic was as likely to be habitable, with eventual visitors. Not so while heading to Alpha Centauri. Even a one way trip to Mars is an unreasonable undertaking (although not without many who claim they are willing to do so).
We need vastly bigger ships and better engines, large enough to produce enough of its own food for 20 or 30 years. We need a way to fund this adventure, which will not likely come from a divided world, or a world where religious nut jobs consider such adventures as "showing up God".
So technological breakthrough is the best bet, and nobody is currently dogging that bird. It will probably happen by accidental discovery.
Not convincing to me. The guy is full of waffle words, and backtracking, and third hand info. He never had hands on with any of these samples"
The laboratory, I've checked with the people who did the analysis, and I very carefully went through it with them. They're absolutely 100% sure that these results are valid
yet the very samples he is talking about showed inconsistent results, not only between A and B samples but within the same (A) sample.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't call another plane, and they can shut them off on approach and take off.
They don't allow any streaming video either.
Cell phone do not interfere with airplane equipment. Totally different frequency bands. Cell phones are used on planes (surreptitiously) every day. Occasionally and angry stewardess, but no other ill effects.
Cell phones are not allowed on planes at the behest of the FCC, because the cell systems we use today were never designed for hand off calls over vast regions at the speed of a plane, and a phone at cruise altitude could light up a thousand towers. This prohibition was always an FCC issue, and never much of a concern for the FAA.
WIFI would be just as likely to interfere as would cellular radio.
Yet wifi on the planes is already available on many flights.
With wifi, you can do voip. Almost every Android phone has Voip (internet calling) built in.
As of this time, none of the airlines allowing WIFI let you use any Voice app. They claim bandwidth issues.
However voice does not take as much bandwidth as most people think.
I suspect there is still some security concerns with allowing voice communications that are the real hold up here, I doubt there are any real technological issues in providing the bandwidth. On the other hand they do allow text chat apps, as well as email.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
Exactly.
Further, lava tubes, oddly enough, are lined with lava.
Not that informative.
A German designed drill is scheduled for the next lander in 2016 and drill 16 feet into the surface.
Nothing you can put in a cave will be able come close to that, and at best it might be able to drill a few inches into solid lava.
The Brits used full flash hoods for turret crews in World War 2, but these excluded the face. The modern British navy have anti-flash gear that covers much more of the face when in actual combat such as in the Falklands. These are made of Nomex today.
In those days, the US Navy was never much of a believer in anti flash clothing as the Royal Navy; though for a long time it did use anti flash cream for covering the face. Now I believe anti-flash hoods and sleeves are used in combat situations.
The US issued Anti Flash cream as early as 1943, to both navy and Marine corp, which was essentially titanium dioxide - same as is used for sun protection today.
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
I find it ironic that you can propose this is a good idea if used for Universal Access, and then in the same post, inform us that some rural areas don't have internet access.
Wait, What? We've had Universal Service for decades in the telephone industry, and now you inform us that rural areas don't even have dial-up internet access?
And air pressure storage is notoriously inefficient. How does it compare to fuel cells though?
And how can it be non-polluting when some external compressor is required to compress all this air?
It seems that India is having troubles keeping the electricity flowing these days, so how do they propose to power the compressor plants?
Is this another exercise in externalizing any environmental impact, and then pronouncing your product "Green" with great fanfare?
Its a lot like electric cars in general, powered by something, just not something we sell. The pollution will be 3 states away. You don't need to worry about it.
There is no way to compress air in the quantity needed other than by using fissile and fossil fuels or wind and solar.
But we don't have enough of those to handle our houses and our factories as it is, especially in India.
Any thing to save the world from drunk texting would be a god send.
But ALL of the employees given big budgets to do this type of thing are significantly more magical than your average self appointed expert posting on slashdot under the name of Tastecicles.
Commodity mobile phones aren't safe for flight science systems, end of story, because they're a: not hardened, b: not real time, c: not reliable and d: vulnerable to script kiddy software hacks.
Really?
If all your assertions are true, then explain why is it that this program is being done at NASA’s Ames Research Center where they employ real world class ROCKET SCIENTISTS, rather than kids who play them on slashdot?
Script kiddies in space? Really? You are going with that?
Not reliable? Did you even read TFA? Its a coffee cup sized payload, in low earth orbit, expected to re-enter in less than a year. How reliable does it have to be?
Real Time? Seriously? Its monitoring a sensor package, and radioing it back to earth. It has no thrusters to control. Just how much real time is needed?
Hardended? In low earth orbit (WAY lower than the ISS) protected by the Van Allen belts. Costing maybe a thousand dollars to construct. Who cares if it takes a direct hit? They are cheap enough to send up two dozen on a single sounding rocket.
At least READ TFA before pontificating on things you obviously know nothing about.
TFA goes a long way toward answering your concerns.
They don't care. These are coffee cup sized, low cost, low orbit, short duration missions that will re-enter and burn up within a year.
They don't care about radiation damage risk, they are well below the radiation belts where the biggest risk is.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things, ...In the same vein, is there an advantage to using an Android environment(whose virtues lie primarily in UI and 3rd party applications) rather than a standard embedded linux or other OS?
Android IS Linux. Its just that it has already been trimmed down to the bones and runs on very powerful, but low energy consuming hardware. So it saves them the need of making a linux version to do the same thing.
As for your other points, it seems from TFA that they will not actually be using the phones as we know them, but rather stripped down models sans screen, case, battery, etc. Probably wrapped in something to compensate for lack of radiation hardened componentry. But then again, the types of short duration, low orbit, small payload missions they are planning this for can probably risk the radiation for the duration.
In the case of our intrepid Nexus phones, the issue is being tactfully ignored. As these are test missions, NASA isn’t concerned about the long-term viability of these craft, and only expects them to last a few weeks or months. Due to their low orbits and lack of thrusters to increase their altitude during the mission, the Nexus-powered satellites will be falling back down to Earth within a year anyway. Even if they were built to better withstand the extremes of space, they would still just burn up in the atmosphere before too long.
I doubt they launch these things singly, they probably piggyback on other launches, but being the size of a coffee cup, they might be able to use cheap sounding rockets. There are a number of different models of these relatively cheap rockets that can launch low earth orbit small payloads.
What you would have here is the legal bequeathment of an asset, which then turns out to not have the cash equivalent value it would otherwise have because the company refuses to allow the recipient to take it up and use it. That's called an encumberment. At that point, people will be contacting the IRS to show that they recieved an encumbered asset that is not worth taxing, and the IRS will be (probably), giving them that point. Then the IRS will be explaining to Congress that they had X loss of potential tax revenues because of that encumberment attached to all such property. Then the US will realize it can collect all those taxes if the encumberment is removed or they can spend money to deal with litigation and to try to educate all those tax lawyers not to let people put that asset in their wills in the first place. The decision becomes butt heads with a bunch of state attorney generals and local lawyers to help a company make something non-taxable post facto, or tell the company their terms are invalid, and incidentally end up getting some tax revenue out of the decision. So, either the fed gets a court decision, or Congress passes a new law, or the IRS makes a very bad decision and thousands of people wealthy enough to pay estate taxes start adding that to their reasons for tax revolt, and a whole bunch of state v. fed lawsuits get launched anyways.
Wait, weren't you the one explaining how they ran out of ways to politely call bullshit?
Re-read your juvenile diatribe and see which one of us is slinging bullshit.
There's no point in telling us you are not a lawyer in your sig, since its pretty evident you are still working on your GED.
Seeing as how in-game assets can be worth real world money, they should be bequeathable.
But I wonder...
None of this stuff existed when you were a kid, and the stuff that did exist then is old hat, unused, and obsolete now, and other than the occasional pinball table collector pretty much no one cares. So don't expect any lasting value of any of these in-game assets. Infact, when your kid is 24, I doubt even YOU will place any value on these things. Raising a child and putting them thru college has a way of changing one's perspective on the relative worth of things.
Second, on the matter of transferability, are you sure it is even allowed by the terms of service? Some of these gaming sites might preclude that (don't know personally), and if prohibited when you were alive and signed up, that prohibition doesn't go away just because you died.
A train passenger seat, what's that? And I doubt the GPS can tell if I'm on the car's driver's seat or passenger's seat.
If I have to explain what a train passenger seat is, then its no wonder you blankly stare out the window between typing characters. ;-)
The GPS simply tells the software you are in motion, not which side of the car you are on. The typing style and cadence, combined with being in motion indicates driver seat for most. For you it might not work until after you collect your thoughts to the point where you can complete a word before becoming distracted.
Put another way how many cherished commercial books and albums have you personally inherited? Maybe it's a bad question since people who have, will be more likely to answer. But for me the answer is 0. I can't even get my dad to take an interest in getting his old slides scanned so we can see our childhood photos.
I inherited not more than 5 books from my parents. They were big time library patrons, without enough money after putting 5 kids thru college, to amass their own collection. Turns out a couple of these books have collector value, being first editions which were handed down to my parents from my grand parents. (early Audubon stuff). So, no, most of us don't have huge libraries of stuff handed down.
But that is water under the bridge at this point, and the discussion is about what we can hand down today. I've got an entire wall covered by bookshelves that someone will pick over when I shuffle off. I've got at least as many digital books that they may look at when they find my several nook e-readers laying around.
Hard to say if they might want any of that, but it should be my decision to give, and their decision to receive.
Now as to those slides, its your job to scan them.
He has his memories. He probably never needs to even look at the slides.
You've probably got the skills to scan them, sift them, and save them. He probably doesn't want to waste his remaining hours
moving images from one media to another when he knows you will inherit the entire collection anyway.
So what's the solution?
Simple: digital content should convey the same ownership rights as print books and CDs. Why should, e.g., books written on vellum have different rights than those written on paper?
Next problem,
I simply take the ownership rights of the books I buy. (And, yes, I do buy them, because authors have to eat too).
There are methods of DRM removal that can be used on your dbooks, and ebook library managers (such as Calibre) that you can use to manage your collection on your local hard drive, and back up to CD-Rom. Combine these two tool sets and you have the ownership you want.
Similarly, for music, every digital music locker I am aware of allows download to your hard drive. Any drm protection on those files can also be stripped.
I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.
Since it combines GPS motion detection, you would have to be reading that interesting book on the train/bus/car passenger seat.
But even then, you don't read a little, text a few characters, read a little more, then type a couple characters. You stop reading, text the message, then pick up the book again. They measure for erratic intervals between keystrokes while in motion.
I suspect there would be a lot of false positives for people texting while walking unless they restricted it to speeds above 3mph.
So basically they are taking it upon themselves to ban you from texting in a public transport, or as a passenger. Many rides are bumpy enough and anyone carrying on a conversation might seem distracted enough for the app to trigger. .
The linked article suggests otherwise.
They can distinguish between texting by the driver and texting by a passenger based on the cadence of typing.
Realize of course this was in a simulator. They plan to put it on a closed course with actual cars for further testing.
Good point.
Fishing the phone out, opening the texting screen and starting to text is probably the most dangerous time, whereas entering characters slowly while attempting to watch the road is probably not quite so dangerous (although still dangerous enough since you pretty much can't text on a touch screen one handed).
I suspect that the design here is to make it futile to try to text, thereby extinguishing the urge to do so.
I also wonder what some of the predictive keyboards such as Swiftkey that can predict not just words after a couple characters have been typed, but entire words that typically occur together. Such keyboards deliver entire words in bursts to the text message, followed by a couple characters followed by more entire words (selected from the suggestions). That has to mess up the cadence.
The article says the error rate would be combined with GPS. Only erratic typing while driving or while riding public transit would result in a block.
Or erratic typing while on a car's passenger seat, Anyway, preventing erratic typing while on public transport seems like a rather large problem to me.
When reading the linked article, (I know, this is slashdot), they seem to suggest that the typing patterns and cadences are unique to driving:
After evaluating the sensitivity of the keystroke entropy indicator against the number of keystrokes recorded, the researchers found they could accurately and relatively quickly identify when a test subject had been both texting and operating the simulator. They found normal texting took on more rhythmic patterns.
I suspect that even on the bus sitting next to some random dodgy character you would type in a more normal cadence, even allowing for a bumpy ride. You could probably type a whole sentence in your normal text-speak without more than one or two breaks in rhythm as opposed to pauses mid-word.
So it might well be able to distinguish bus and passenger seat users from drivers.
I could see that a passenger engaged in watching the scenery might actually text as distractedly as a driver, but they have a choice of texting or watching, and could modify their texting style to "git er done" in one go, which is an option the driver doesn't rationally have. (To the degree that rationality enters the discussion).
Guys, lets see if you can upload your mind across the basement to your own computer before you postulate uploading it to a space probe, mKay?
The Curiosity rover is proof your theory is wrong.
There aren't likely to be any significant emergencies on the surface of mars. But the likely ones have all been planned for. It can choose its own path, and navigate to a destination without direct human control. It knows how to avoid steep slopes, bolder fields, and other obstacles.
And have you not noticed that Google has self driving cars running around the south west?
Sending probes to far planets isn't an all-in-one undertaking. You send orbiters to photograph. You send landers to measure environmental. Then you plan for any dangers you discover, and send a rover that can avoid them, circumvent them, and which was designed for the environment.
Lose a couple vehicles along the way? So what? Failure teaches you a lot.
Communication delays are far from the largest obstacle. You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
More to the point is that people aren't as willing to take 5 year voyages that are likely to be one way. Any place Beagle could land other than the antarctic was as likely to be habitable, with eventual visitors. Not so while heading to Alpha Centauri. Even a one way trip to Mars is an unreasonable undertaking (although not without many who claim they are willing to do so).
We need vastly bigger ships and better engines, large enough to produce enough of its own food for 20 or 30 years. We need a way to fund this adventure, which will not likely come from a divided world, or a world where religious nut jobs consider such adventures as "showing up God".
So technological breakthrough is the best bet, and nobody is currently dogging that bird. It will probably happen by accidental discovery.
This page is very informative and, if it is to be believed, implies that there was some scientific basis for calling him out as a cheat
http://nyvelocity.com/content/interviews/2009/michael-ashenden
Not convincing to me.
The guy is full of waffle words, and backtracking, and third hand info.
He never had hands on with any of these samples"
The laboratory, I've checked with the people who did the analysis, and I very carefully went through it with them. They're absolutely 100% sure that these results are valid
yet the very samples he is talking about showed inconsistent results, not only between A and B samples but within the same (A) sample.