What I am waiting to see is Virgin to decide to talk to Bigelow.
A lot of people were hoping that yesterday's announcement would have been a deal between Virgin/Scaled and XCOR. Scaled has fantastic airframe experience but minimal rocket engine experience, and it would've been ideal for XCOR (which has minimal airframe experience but great reusable rocket engine experience) to partner with them. This would've been particularly ideal in light of Scaled's recent problems with hybrid rocket engines. Oh well...
For anyone interested in more than the press release, here's a link to their paper, "A 3MPixel Multi-Aperture Image Sensor with 0.7m Pixels in 0.11m CMOS."
Sorry, but ex post facto only applies when criminalizing a previously legal activity, not the other way around. Otherwise it would also be unconstitutional to do things like grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
Is there any actual disadvantage to making use of the arm on the space station? I suspect that it isn't too much harder to do it without the arm, but it should make the safety approval process much easier/cheaper.
For those of you unfamiliar with Brin's notion of the "Transparent Society," the first chapter of his book is available for free online, and there's of course the Wikipedia page.
Personally, I think Bruce Schneier is sort of missing the point; if anything he seems to be advocating the same sort of system as Brin. Brin's general thesis is that with ever-increasing technological capabilities, with cameras becoming ever-smaller and cheaper and networks increasingly ubiquitous, this loss of privacy is sadly inevitable. Given the choice of surveillance being solely the domain of government, or the domain of both the people and the government, the latter is preferable, and also has some interesting side-benefits. Balancing power between people and the government is one of the major benefits.
Since it looks like SEGA's on board for iPhone development (and is already porting Super Monkey Ball), I wonder if there's any chance of getting Typing of the Dead for the iPhone. That would be insanely cool.
This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.
Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.
At first sight, this pair of municipalities look pretty much alike. Both contain dazzling technological marvels, especially in the realm of electronic media. Both suffer familiar urban quandaries of frustration and decay. If some progress is being made at solving human problems, it is happening gradually. Perhaps some kids seem better educated. The air may be marginally cleaner. People still worry about over-population, the environment, and the next international crisis.
None of these features are of interest to us right now, for we have noticed something about both of these 21st century cities that is radically different. A trait that marks them distinct from any metropolis of the late nineteen-nineties.
Street crime has nearly vanished from both towns. But that is only a symptom, a result.
The real change peers down from every lamp post, every roof-top and street sign.
Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.
Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?...
Last year's *total* NASA budget was $16.8B. The cost of the Apollo program, adjusted for 2006 dollars, was about $135B ($25B 1969 USD).
Hm... so the Apollo program went from 1961 to 1975, 14 years total. $135B/14 = $9.6 billion/year, which seems to be substantially less than NASA is getting now. Am I missing something in my calculations?
An interesting quote from his most recent post:
We cut into the trash yard behind the mosque so no one would see us coming. Rusted cars were piled up against the wall behind the mosque and repair shops. This, supposedly, is where the Iraqi man found the IED, but it seemed an unlikely place for it. Most IEDs are mortar rounds, artillery shells, or anti-tank mines deployed alongside or underneath roads.
"Don't get any closer," Corporal Waddle said. "We need to stay out of the blast radius in case it blows."
One Marine, whose name I didn't catch, accompanied the Iraqi man to the location of the explosive. "It's an 82mm mortar round," he said when he returned. "It's not an IED. Most likely a round that didn't go off when it was fired."
Every time I thought something vaguely exciting might happen, it didn't happen. There is no war in Western Iraq any more. This is a mop-up.
It's a little confusing because they aren't often. Referred to by their full name, but SpaceX is just the abbreviated name for "Space Exploration Technologies," the company mentioned in the summary. They were awarded a NASA COTS contract a couple years ago, and have been steadily meeting NASA's milestones. Their competitor, Rocketplane-Kistler, didn't do such a great job meeting the milestones, which is why those funds were switches to Orbital.
I assume you're joking, but just in case anyone else doesn't know, the contracting approach NASA is using with the COTS cargo/crew delivery program is actually rather less vulnerable to corruption/politicking than the usual cost-plus contracts (see ATK and the Ares launcher)
The point isn't to demonstrate some sort of fancy cutting-edge World of Tomorrow technology. Rather, the point is to make access to space more affordable. Right now exorbitant launch costs are the largest barrier to most in-space activities, and a big part of why many of the space-related predictions of the past never came to fruition. Personally I think the COTS approach is one of the best ideas NASA has ever had -- I only which they had done this decades ago.
Keep in mind that this is not about winning the millions. It is about winning the prestige.
Sure, but it seems that there's almost as much prestige (especially to potential customers) in being the launcher of for the winning team, without the risk of accidentally picking the wrong horse. Also, I'm not sure how much SpaceX's expertise actually gets them with regards to the lander/rover...
But in this case, I think that musk will team up just to try and make a serviceable flight stack to the moon.
That's possible, although it seems more likely to me that they'd just team up with whoever the winner is after the fact. Of course, if it looks like there probably won't be a winner -period- unless SpaceX throws their financial weight in, then I could see them participating more directly.
Oh sure, I'm just addressing the question of whether or not the launch price itself would necessarily set a competitor's cost above the prize amount. I don't have the expertise to say whether or not a hypothetical 213kg is at all a realistic mass limit for a lander/rover. I did a little googling, and found that the Mars Pathfinder had a 264 kg lander and a 10.5 kg rover. To my naive mind it makes the limit seem at least quasi-realistic, although of course the Pathfinder had the benefit of the Martian atmosphere to use for braking.
Hummmm. Everybody swore that America's space prize was un-winnable. And yet, I think that Musk will win it, with the remote possibility that several others could still do it.
I'm sure Musk's Dragon has the technical capability to win the prize, but I think they might not qualify due to the government funding SpaceX has received from NASA COTS. Of course, regardless of the prize, I'm sure Musk is eying Bigelow's private space stations as a large potential market for his spacecraft.
My prediction: Musk wins the American space prize, followed by Lunar X prize
I don't think Musk is planning on competing in the Lunar X Prize directly, however SpaceX has stated that they'll essentially offer a 10% launch price reduction to competitors. $30 million seems a little small for Musk to care about in and of itself, and it would make more business sense to establish itself as a launch service provider to whatever teams want to compete, rather than choose a particular team to favor.
Where's John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace? I would think that these guys would jump at a chance like this since they could use some promotion after what happened last year.
Personally, I think it'd be quite interesting to see them partner up with someone else, focusing on the lander while somebody else constructs the rover. From their FAQ:
We've discussed it and have considered approaches for it, but we have no firm plans at this time. We have a lot of other things to think about at the moment, and getting to the moon is further down that list.
For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.
Some folks have been speculating that it might be possible to use a $6 million SpaceX Falcon 1 to get 213kg of mass to the moon. Of course, you still have to worry about landing that mass and the rover itself, which may or may not be feasible. Another possibility is a $11 million Russian Dnepr rocket.
Actually, I read a study a while back (several years ago) that showed talking to a non-present individual to be far more distracting than talking to someone who was physically there.
Leo GugertyCorresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, a, Mick Rakauskasb and Johnell Brooksa a Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA b HumanFIRST Program, University of Minnesota, USA Received 23 July 2003; Revised 1 December 2003; accepted 11 December 2003. Available online 24 April 2004.
Abstract
This study focused on how teams allocated attention between a driving-related spatial task and a verbal task, and how different kinds of verbal interactions affected performance of the driving-related task. In Experiment 1, 29 two-person teams performed an interactive verbal task while one team member also performed a simulated driving task. Of the team members performing only the verbal task, half could see their partner's spatial situation, as a car passenger can (in-person condition), and half were remotely located, similar to someone speaking to a driver using a cell-phone. Teams interacted verbally at an overall slower rate during remote than in-person interactions, suggesting that remote verbal interactions are more difficult than in-person interactions. Verbal interactions degraded situation awareness for driving-related information while performing the spatial task; and this degradation was not greater during remote than in-person interactions. Experiment 2 used a faster-paced verbal task and found greater degradation of situation awareness due to the verbal task. These findings are potentially relevant to the issue of how passenger and cell-phone conversations affect driving performance.
To be fair, I think an extensive detailed database system would be invaluable to crime fighting officials.
Actually, after some quick googling, it turns out that similar methods are already used somewhat extensively and successfully in domestic crime fighting:
If anything, this seems like a way to computationally extract and quantify such "common sense" assumptions, and perhaps even see if old "common sense" ideas are actually not supported by the data (as happens rather often). As an added bonus, new "common sense" tactics might emerge.
Of course, there's also a chance that their work will end up not being useful. That's why it's called research.
Either they've found some hidden predictor of attacks, or maybe someone needs a course in basic Ramsey theory [wikipedia.org], which deals with conditions under which order (patterns) must occur even in random noise.
Sure, that's why you have test sets to determine if the models the system learns from the data are useful or not. I think it's safe to assume that the scientists working on this are familiar with the basics of learning theory and modeling.
Or more precisely, predict the mostly-unpredictable. Just about any activity involving humans, even if it seems utterly random at first glance, will have underlying patterns which emerge once one analyzes the data.
> I would certainly hope that every worker in our national space and military industries would have to undergo background checks and periodic lie detector tests, just like they use in the CIA.
As I mentioned in another comment, Chung had Secret-level security clearance, which (if I understand correctly) requires precisely the sort of background checks you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am waiting to see is Virgin to decide to talk to Bigelow.
A lot of people were hoping that yesterday's announcement would have been a deal between Virgin/Scaled and XCOR. Scaled has fantastic airframe experience but minimal rocket engine experience, and it would've been ideal for XCOR (which has minimal airframe experience but great reusable rocket engine experience) to partner with them. This would've been particularly ideal in light of Scaled's recent problems with hybrid rocket engines. Oh well...
For anyone interested in more than the press release, here's a link to their paper, "A 3MPixel Multi-Aperture Image Sensor with 0.7m Pixels in 0.11m CMOS."
Sorry, but ex post facto only applies when criminalizing a previously legal activity, not the other way around. Otherwise it would also be unconstitutional to do things like grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
Is there any actual disadvantage to making use of the arm on the space station? I suspect that it isn't too much harder to do it without the arm, but it should make the safety approval process much easier/cheaper.
For those of you unfamiliar with Brin's notion of the "Transparent Society," the first chapter of his book is available for free online, and there's of course the Wikipedia page.
Personally, I think Bruce Schneier is sort of missing the point; if anything he seems to be advocating the same sort of system as Brin. Brin's general thesis is that with ever-increasing technological capabilities, with cameras becoming ever-smaller and cheaper and networks increasingly ubiquitous, this loss of privacy is sadly inevitable. Given the choice of surveillance being solely the domain of government, or the domain of both the people and the government, the latter is preferable, and also has some interesting side-benefits. Balancing power between people and the government is one of the major benefits.
Since it looks like SEGA's on board for iPhone development (and is already porting Super Monkey Ball), I wonder if there's any chance of getting Typing of the Dead for the iPhone. That would be insanely cool.
Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin, Ph.D.
This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.
Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.
At first sight, this pair of municipalities look pretty much alike. Both contain dazzling technological marvels, especially in the realm of electronic media. Both suffer familiar urban quandaries of frustration and decay. If some progress is being made at solving human problems, it is happening gradually. Perhaps some kids seem better educated. The air may be marginally cleaner. People still worry about over-population, the environment, and the next international crisis.
None of these features are of interest to us right now, for we have noticed something about both of these 21st century cities that is radically different. A trait that marks them distinct from any metropolis of the late nineteen-nineties.
Street crime has nearly vanished from both towns. But that is only a symptom, a result.
The real change peers down from every lamp post, every roof-top and street sign.
Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.
Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?
Last year's *total* NASA budget was $16.8B. The cost of the Apollo program, adjusted for 2006 dollars, was about $135B ($25B 1969 USD).
Hm... so the Apollo program went from 1961 to 1975, 14 years total. $135B/14 = $9.6 billion/year, which seems to be substantially less than NASA is getting now. Am I missing something in my calculations?
http://www.michaeltotten.com/
An interesting quote from his most recent post: We cut into the trash yard behind the mosque so no one would see us coming. Rusted cars were piled up against the wall behind the mosque and repair shops. This, supposedly, is where the Iraqi man found the IED, but it seemed an unlikely place for it. Most IEDs are mortar rounds, artillery shells, or anti-tank mines deployed alongside or underneath roads.
"Don't get any closer," Corporal Waddle said. "We need to stay out of the blast radius in case it blows."
One Marine, whose name I didn't catch, accompanied the Iraqi man to the location of the explosive. "It's an 82mm mortar round," he said when he returned. "It's not an IED. Most likely a round that didn't go off when it was fired."
Every time I thought something vaguely exciting might happen, it didn't happen. There is no war in Western Iraq any more. This is a mop-up.
It's a little confusing because they aren't often. Referred to by their full name, but SpaceX is just the abbreviated name for "Space Exploration Technologies," the company mentioned in the summary. They were awarded a NASA COTS contract a couple years ago, and have been steadily meeting NASA's milestones. Their competitor, Rocketplane-Kistler, didn't do such a great job meeting the milestones, which is why those funds were switches to Orbital.
I assume you're joking, but just in case anyone else doesn't know, the contracting approach NASA is using with the COTS cargo/crew delivery program is actually rather less vulnerable to corruption/politicking than the usual cost-plus contracts (see ATK and the Ares launcher)
The point isn't to demonstrate some sort of fancy cutting-edge World of Tomorrow technology. Rather, the point is to make access to space more affordable. Right now exorbitant launch costs are the largest barrier to most in-space activities, and a big part of why many of the space-related predictions of the past never came to fruition. Personally I think the COTS approach is one of the best ideas NASA has ever had -- I only which they had done this decades ago.
Keep in mind that this is not about winning the millions. It is about winning the prestige.
Sure, but it seems that there's almost as much prestige (especially to potential customers) in being the launcher of for the winning team, without the risk of accidentally picking the wrong horse. Also, I'm not sure how much SpaceX's expertise actually gets them with regards to the lander/rover...
But in this case, I think that musk will team up just to try and make a serviceable flight stack to the moon.
That's possible, although it seems more likely to me that they'd just team up with whoever the winner is after the fact. Of course, if it looks like there probably won't be a winner -period- unless SpaceX throws their financial weight in, then I could see them participating more directly.
Oh sure, I'm just addressing the question of whether or not the launch price itself would necessarily set a competitor's cost above the prize amount. I don't have the expertise to say whether or not a hypothetical 213kg is at all a realistic mass limit for a lander/rover. I did a little googling, and found that the Mars Pathfinder had a 264 kg lander and a 10.5 kg rover. To my naive mind it makes the limit seem at least quasi-realistic, although of course the Pathfinder had the benefit of the Martian atmosphere to use for braking.
Hummmm. Everybody swore that America's space prize was un-winnable. And yet, I think that Musk will win it, with the remote possibility that several others could still do it.
I'm sure Musk's Dragon has the technical capability to win the prize, but I think they might not qualify due to the government funding SpaceX has received from NASA COTS. Of course, regardless of the prize, I'm sure Musk is eying Bigelow's private space stations as a large potential market for his spacecraft.
My prediction: Musk wins the American space prize, followed by Lunar X prize
I don't think Musk is planning on competing in the Lunar X Prize directly, however SpaceX has stated that they'll essentially offer a 10% launch price reduction to competitors. $30 million seems a little small for Musk to care about in and of itself, and it would make more business sense to establish itself as a launch service provider to whatever teams want to compete, rather than choose a particular team to favor.
Personally, I think it'd be quite interesting to see them partner up with someone else, focusing on the lander while somebody else constructs the rover. From their FAQ:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/FAQ#lunarXPrize Do you plan to compete in the recently-announced Google Lunar X Prize?
We've discussed it and have considered approaches for it, but we have no firm plans at this time. We have a lot of other things to think about at the moment, and getting to the moon is further down that list.
For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.
Some folks have been speculating that it might be possible to use a $6 million SpaceX Falcon 1 to get 213kg of mass to the moon. Of course, you still have to worry about landing that mass and the rover itself, which may or may not be feasible. Another possibility is a $11 million Russian Dnepr rocket.
Is this the study you're thinking of? Effects of remote and in-person verbal interactions on verbalization rates and attention to dynamic spatial scenes
Leo GugertyCorresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, a, Mick Rakauskasb and Johnell Brooksa
a Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
b HumanFIRST Program, University of Minnesota, USA
Received 23 July 2003; Revised 1 December 2003; accepted 11 December 2003. Available online 24 April 2004.
Abstract
This study focused on how teams allocated attention between a driving-related spatial task and a verbal task, and how different kinds of verbal interactions affected performance of the driving-related task. In Experiment 1, 29 two-person teams performed an interactive verbal task while one team member also performed a simulated driving task. Of the team members performing only the verbal task, half could see their partner's spatial situation, as a car passenger can (in-person condition), and half were remotely located, similar to someone speaking to a driver using a cell-phone. Teams interacted verbally at an overall slower rate during remote than in-person interactions, suggesting that remote verbal interactions are more difficult than in-person interactions. Verbal interactions degraded situation awareness for driving-related information while performing the spatial task; and this degradation was not greater during remote than in-person interactions. Experiment 2 used a faster-paced verbal task and found greater degradation of situation awareness due to the verbal task. These findings are potentially relevant to the issue of how passenger and cell-phone conversations affect driving performance.
To be fair, I think an extensive detailed database system would be invaluable to crime fighting officials.
Actually, after some quick googling, it turns out that similar methods are already used somewhat extensively and successfully in domestic crime fighting:
http://www.google.com/search?q=crime+mapping
I guess this is basically just a way to see if similar methods would also be useful in warfare. There are worse ways to spend $100K.
Yeah but a 6th month study done in Alabama ain't going to give you anything more than a good soldier is going to be able to tell you
That remains to be seen. Are you suggesting that analyzing attack data is a bad idea?
If anything, this seems like a way to computationally extract and quantify such "common sense" assumptions, and perhaps even see if old "common sense" ideas are actually not supported by the data (as happens rather often). As an added bonus, new "common sense" tactics might emerge.
Of course, there's also a chance that their work will end up not being useful. That's why it's called research.
Either they've found some hidden predictor of attacks, or maybe someone needs a course in basic Ramsey theory [wikipedia.org], which deals with conditions under which order (patterns) must occur even in random noise.
Sure, that's why you have test sets to determine if the models the system learns from the data are useful or not. I think it's safe to assume that the scientists working on this are familiar with the basics of learning theory and modeling.
So predict the unpredictable?
Or more precisely, predict the mostly-unpredictable. Just about any activity involving humans, even if it seems utterly random at first glance, will have underlying patterns which emerge once one analyzes the data.
> Are the designs to the Space Shuttle even worth stealing? It's thus far proven to be an expensive and unreliable launch platform.
It seems from the article that the espionage started in the early 80s. Back then the technology was probably somewhat more worth stealing.
> I would certainly hope that every worker in our national space and military industries would have to undergo background checks and periodic lie detector tests, just like they use in the CIA.
As I mentioned in another comment, Chung had Secret-level security clearance, which (if I understand correctly) requires precisely the sort of background checks you describe.