NASA's other option lies in the private sector; but thus far, the progress from that quarter does not look sufficient to meet the 2011 deadline.
Although it says this in the summary, the linked article doesn't seem to actually have anything to support this claim. In fact, it's looking like according to their current schedule the private SpaceX Dragon crew/cargo capsule will be flying demonstration flights 2008-2010. With an additional purchase commitment from NASA, they could probably finish and be able to transport cargo and crew to the ISS even sooner.
I have no problem with private enterprise, I have a problem when people start insisting that private enterprise is the only way to get things done, and that governments can't possibly do anything right or well.
I never played pen-and-paper MechWarrior (just BattleTech), so I'm curious: What other classes/roles were there besides mech pilot, and say, aerospace pilot or some-such? Assuming there were roles for things like engineers and such, what did the players do when a battle was on-going?
What is it that DIRECT does differently from NASA's current plans that results in it being so much faster/better? Are there any particular reasons for why NASA isn't pursuing this?
Nice straw men, but could you elaborate on what they have to do with the current issue? Should NASA just let the gap remain as-is and not invest a relatively-small amount to investigate the solutions offered by private companies?
I concur that Grim Fandango is a great soundtrack. It's kind of funny... I never played the game, or even saw it being played. However, after I heard some tracks on Gaming FM a few years ago, I bought the soundtrack and enjoyed it immensely.
I think that's "Subterranean," which I also like quite a bit. I'm not sure if the CD is still available (maybe eBay?), but both those tracks were on a "Tommy Tallarico Games Greatest Hits Vol. 2" CD I bought several years ago:
If we can push out a space delivery system that is "good enough" in such a short time, why bother with Orion?
How else do you propose keeping the jobs of the several thousand shuttle program employees in key congressional districts? It may not be the most cost-effective (or effective period) way to do things, but it's political reality.
But there are no satellites that create the precise kind of data that Landsat needs.
In this case though, NASA has a fairly specific need: transport crew and cargo up to low earth orbit, and bring crew back down safely. Unlike what seems to have happened with Landsat, there are a number of commercial companies who are pursuing this same need.
In case you haven't seen it already, the other day boingboing had a link to a Pleo torture video. It's actually somewhat disturbing, as the little robot dinosaur seems to make whimpering noises if you dangle it by its tail, and choking noises if you grab its neck. I found this quote from boingboing quite interesting:
So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.
My wife didn't want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is "bad for your psyche," and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too. I concur with one of the comments on dVice, that I'm rather in disbelief that the guys who made the video work for the SciFi channel, and yet passed up on an opportunity while choking the Pleo to say, "If this is a consular ship, then where is the ambassador?"
It's kind of funny, but when I was kid for quite a while I would -only- listen to video game music, and had sort of a disdain for "normal" music. I guess that changed sometime in middle school, and I like all sorts of music now, but I still have a fondness for VG music. Here's a few more of my personal favorites, not listed in the article:
* "Radio" from Command and Conquer: Red Alert * menu song from Forsaken (it's track 6 or 7 on the game CD... not sure if it has an actual title but the band that performed it is "The Swarm") * "Tangerine" from Earthworm Jim 2 (soundtrack by Tommy Tallarico) * the intro song from Earthworm Jim 2... I don't think I've ever seen it on a CD, but it's probably the first "a cappella" song I ever saw in a video game, even though it was just samples on a SNES/Genesis * most of Mechwarrior II * most of Katamari Damacy * "Beyond the Bounds" from Zone of the Enders: Second Runner * the operatic tracks from Heroes of Might & Magic II * most of the Interstate '76 soundtrack * one of the songs from Dr. Mario ("fever"?). * "Skyward Fire" and "Save Me" from Unreal Tournament
Also, for those of you who haven't seen it already, OverClocked Remix has plenty of great freely-downloadable remixes of video game songs:
That video will probably be one of the first exhibits in the Case for the Robot Uprising.
Another exhibit would probably have to be this Pleo torture video. It's actually pretty disturbing, as the little robot dinosaur seems to make whimpering noises if you dangle it by its tail, and choking noises if you grab its neck.
1. Detainee admitted being a member of the Taliban. A supervisor of Taliban Civilian Intelligence recruited the detainee into the Taliban.
2. Detainee served as the driver for a Taliban Intelligence Service member and performed clerical work for the Intelligence Service in Kabul, AF, from 1999 or 2000 until his capture by U.S. forces in December of 2001. The detainee was required to carry a pistol in this job.
3. Detainee was captured with a senior Taliban intelligence member, Abdul Haq Wasiq, by U.S. forces on 9 December of 2001. The detainee was in possession of 7.62MM [sic] rounds when captured.
4. During confinement the detainee has made death threates to guards.
b. Connections / Associations
1. For years the detainee worked for the Taliban in the Operations Department of the Ministry of Intelligence in Kabul. The detainee supervised several associates.
2. The detainee and his 13-14 associated were members of a quasi-police organization affiliated with Taliban Internal Affairs. The detainee and others in the unit were armed.
3. The detainee's sister is married to a Taliban Intelligence Officer.
4. The Taliban Chief of Intelligence led a group of 600 to 700 armed Taliban fighters in an Afghan province.
5. The detainee couriered a letter between the Taliban Chief of Intelligence and a Taliban military commander.
6. The Taliban military commander is associated with Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin (HIG). The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Terrorist Organization Reference Guide, states that HIG has long established ties with Usama Bin Laden [sic] and has staged attacks in attempts to force United States troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
c. Intent
After the fall of Kabul the detainee and his associated fled the city in a pick-up truck armed with two RPG-7's [sic], twenty AK-47's [sic] and two PK machine guns.
I don't think this was mentioned on slashdot, but since this is quasi-related I thought I'd mention that a couple weeks ago Freakonomics also had a Q&A with Jonathan Coulton, a really awesome (IMHO) singer-songwriter who releases many of his songs under a Creative Commons license and whose music often has a rather geeky tilt. He also got quite a bit of attention recently for writing the song "Still Alive" which plays at the end of Portal. Here's a few neat quotes from the interview:
Q: Do you think having music available for free will make releasing some of it on a traditional album more difficult? Also, why aren't more of your songs available on Yahoo Music Engine or iTunes?
A: It's always hard to figure out the actual numbers on this, but I definitely get the feeling that having a more open attitude with MP3s has contributed to my ability to actually make a living. More and more, people don't like to buy things that they haven't heard first, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. This is why they have listening stations in record stores (er, I mean, when they used to have record stores). And because I depend so heavily on word of mouth marketing, it's extremely important that it's as easy as possible to hear my stuff. Again, it comes down to the extremely low cost that comes with digital content -- it's okay if only a small percentage of listeners buy, as long as the number of listeners is very high. That can only happen if you let people listen....
Q: When you wrote "Still Alive" for Portal did you have any idea how well the synergy would be with the game? I don't think that there has every been ending credits in any media that has matched the love that people have for the end of Portal. Have you been asked to work on any other video game music since the release of Portal?
A: One of the reasons I agreed to do it was that I understood the character so well -- it was one of those things where I looked at what they had created and it made absolute sense to me. We didn't know all the details of how we were going to finish the game, but I really could sort of feel how it was supposed to end up. Of course I'm thrilled with the reception, and it's been much larger and more positive than I could have imagined. There's nothing else in the works at the moment, but I'm definitely open to doing more things like that if it's the right project....
Q: When will Valve release a video game that is also a full musical comedy?
A: Yes please. That would be a great deal of fun to do, whether or not it was any fun to play. I'll put you in touch with Gabe and you can insist that he make it happen.
Is there really much Slashdot/Facebook overlap? Everyone I know on this forum just hosts their own personal site(s). Facebook seems like more of a newbie technology than would normally be attractive to the average Slashdotter: kind of one step up from "what's your favorite desktop background image?"
I've got a 4-digit slashdot ID (whatever that counts for) and I use Facebook intensively, primarily to keep in touch with my friends from high school, college, and grad school.
The vast majority of my techie friends from my undergrad CS program at Carnegie Mellon use Facebook, and the majority of my friends in PhD programs at Caltech also use Facebook. It'd be rather a stretch to consider either of those demographics newbie-heavy.
The NYT's John Tierney had a pretty interesting post about this a few weeks ago, which included the following comment from Taube:
In the context of what you're discussing, I would say that the purpose of this "unending exchange of critical judgment" is to stop cascades before they can gain momentum or gather enough believers that they reach a kind of critical mass and erroneous beliefs become self-perpetuating, as I believe has happened, of course, in obesity, nutrition and chronic disease research. The other problem with public health-related research is that the beliefs not only infect entire fields of science, but they spread beyond the science to the public, the politicians, etc., and so the number of those individuals invested in the erroneous belief grows exponentially and it becomes almost impossible to eradicate it or correct it.
If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences -- high energy physics being the one I know best -- then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened. The researchers would have been be so scared of screwing up that cascades would never have been allowed to start (string theory, perhaps, being the exception to the rule).
You can think of this kind of brutal response to bad science as an immune system that serves to protect reliable knowledge from infection by the infinite number of bogus but compelling ideas that are out there. The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack.
Those are interesting figures, but I'd argue that the important figure (besides the straight-out money amounts) isn't NASA/defense spending as a portion of the federal budget, but rather how they compare as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product). For FY 2006, the federal budget was 18.4% of total GDP, meaning that NASA was 0.107% of GDP and defense spending was 3.86% of GDP. Despite this, NASA still spends more on spaceflight and space science than the rest of the world combined.
That said, even though NASA could probably use more funding, misallocation of resources is still a huge problem. I agree heartily with this recent comment by Clark Lindsay over at RLV News:
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=4926
Keith Cowing responds to Mike Griffin's claim that he did not cause the VSE budget problems: Mike Griffin on VSE Woes: "I did not put us into this position" - NASA Watch - Nov.15.07
You most certainly did get the agency into the predicament that it is in today. Instead of going off and reinventing the wheel (Ares 1) you could have bought EELVs off the shelf from a ULA catalog and focused only on CEV development. You forced a rigid and recycled architecture upon the agency - one that requires large monolithic launchers - when in fact you could have come up with one that used existing launchers or straightforward derivations thereof.
I can certainly support that scolding. I think Ares 1 is a disaster and Ares V is a bad dream. However, rather than NASA choosing an EELV outright, I would have preferred a Super-COTS competition in 2006 that went something like the following: * A budget of two or three billion dollars for Phase 1 * As with COTS, the systems proposed should be capable of supplying a minimum amount cargo to the ISS per year but be upgradable to crew operations no later than 2011. * The ULA firms would be invited to enter their proposals along with the entrepreneurial rocket firms * Four commercial launcher proposals would be selected for Phase 1 * The entrants would decide for themselves whether a capsule or lifting body or whatever is the most cost effective system for cargo/crew delivery. * Assuming at least two firms successfully fulfilled Phase 1, the two with the lowest cost/kg to the ISS would each be guaranteed half of all NASA launches to LEO in, say, the period 2010-2015. * NASA would focus on lunar exploration systems that would work within the capabilities of the COTS transports. (This would no doubt involve a more modular approach than is currently envisioned.)
Too late now, of course, to run such a COTS competition. It's possible, though, that Lockheed-Martin has used the current studies with Bigelow and SpaceDev to prepare a proposal for NASA launch services just in case the next administration cancels Ares 1. On the other hand, if the Falcon 9 initial flights go well, there will be no need for such alternatives.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
My heart goes out to your wife and what happened to her, but I don't think this is the case with the patient from the experiment. He already is able to answer yes/no questions via eye movements, and I'd be very surprised if they haven't already asked him about his consent to remain on life support.
The ultimate goal of this project is to restore speech communication to a patient, Erik, who suffered a brain stem stroke as a result of an auto accident, and is currently locked-in. He has minimal control of eye movements, and can answer yes/no questions by moving his eyes up or down. Approximately 3 years ago, two neurotrophic electrodes were implanted 6 mm deep in a region of the cortex controlling speech posterior to Broca's area. In these experiments, Erik attempted to produce a series of phonemes. We used the recorded data to discriminate the intended phonemes.
While this is indeed promising, and I hope that this 'unlocks' this poor fellow, this 'unlocking' has not happened yet.
It's a little unclear from the BBC article, but going from their research posters, they have in fact tested the translation already, using a data set compiled from neural recordings made while having the subject try to produce different phoneme sounds. However, this analysis was done "offline," not in real-time. I think what they're referring to doing in the "next few weeks" is getting the analysis working in real-time, so the guy could actually use it to communicate.
For those curious, this speech prosthesis research was presented in a number of posters at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference a couple weeks ago. Their six SfN posters can be found on their website here, covering topics like the circuitry they developed, Bayesian signal analysis, and so forth:
Slashdot Mirror
NASA's other option lies in the private sector; but thus far, the progress from that quarter does not look sufficient to meet the 2011 deadline.
Although it says this in the summary, the linked article doesn't seem to actually have anything to support this claim. In fact, it's looking like according to their current schedule the private SpaceX Dragon crew/cargo capsule will be flying demonstration flights 2008-2010. With an additional purchase commitment from NASA, they could probably finish and be able to transport cargo and crew to the ISS even sooner.
http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php
I have no problem with private enterprise, I have a problem when people start insisting that private enterprise is the only way to get things done, and that governments can't possibly do anything right or well.
Where in the original article was that suggested?
I never played pen-and-paper MechWarrior (just BattleTech), so I'm curious: What other classes/roles were there besides mech pilot, and say, aerospace pilot or some-such? Assuming there were roles for things like engineers and such, what did the players do when a battle was on-going?
What is it that DIRECT does differently from NASA's current plans that results in it being so much faster/better? Are there any particular reasons for why NASA isn't pursuing this?
Nice straw men, but could you elaborate on what they have to do with the current issue? Should NASA just let the gap remain as-is and not invest a relatively-small amount to investigate the solutions offered by private companies?
I concur that Grim Fandango is a great soundtrack. It's kind of funny... I never played the game, or even saw it being played. However, after I heard some tracks on Gaming FM a few years ago, I bought the soundtrack and enjoyed it immensely.
I never played it, but it's on my to-buy list!
I think that's "Subterranean," which I also like quite a bit. I'm not sure if the CD is still available (maybe eBay?), but both those tracks were on a "Tommy Tallarico Games Greatest Hits Vol. 2" CD I bought several years ago:
http://www.altpop.com/stc/reviews/ttggh2.htm
If we can push out a space delivery system that is "good enough" in such a short time, why bother with Orion?
How else do you propose keeping the jobs of the several thousand shuttle program employees in key congressional districts? It may not be the most cost-effective (or effective period) way to do things, but it's political reality.
But there are no satellites that create the precise kind of data that Landsat needs.
In this case though, NASA has a fairly specific need: transport crew and cargo up to low earth orbit, and bring crew back down safely. Unlike what seems to have happened with Landsat, there are a number of commercial companies who are pursuing this same need.
My wife didn't want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is "bad for your psyche," and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too. I concur with one of the comments on dVice, that I'm rather in disbelief that the guys who made the video work for the SciFi channel, and yet passed up on an opportunity while choking the Pleo to say, "If this is a consular ship, then where is the ambassador?"
It's kind of funny, but when I was kid for quite a while I would -only- listen to video game music, and had sort of a disdain for "normal" music. I guess that changed sometime in middle school, and I like all sorts of music now, but I still have a fondness for VG music. Here's a few more of my personal favorites, not listed in the article:
* "Radio" from Command and Conquer: Red Alert
* menu song from Forsaken (it's track 6 or 7 on the game CD... not sure if it has an actual title but the band that performed it is "The Swarm")
* "Tangerine" from Earthworm Jim 2 (soundtrack by Tommy Tallarico)
* the intro song from Earthworm Jim 2... I don't think I've ever seen it on a CD, but it's probably the first "a cappella" song I ever saw in a video game, even though it was just samples on a SNES/Genesis
* most of Mechwarrior II
* most of Katamari Damacy
* "Beyond the Bounds" from Zone of the Enders: Second Runner
* the operatic tracks from Heroes of Might & Magic II
* most of the Interstate '76 soundtrack
* one of the songs from Dr. Mario ("fever"?).
* "Skyward Fire" and "Save Me" from Unreal Tournament
Also, for those of you who haven't seen it already, OverClocked Remix has plenty of great freely-downloadable remixes of video game songs:
http://www.ocremix.org/
That video will probably be one of the first exhibits in the Case for the Robot Uprising.
Another exhibit would probably have to be this Pleo torture video. It's actually pretty disturbing, as the little robot dinosaur seems to make whimpering noises if you dangle it by its tail, and choking noises if you grab its neck.
> Two guys were just cartoonists who made fun of their local government! But it took over a year at least for them to be released.
Citation?
> Run that by me again... where in the Constitution, or any of it's amendments does it claim that the rights are only for citizens.
Ah, so in that case is it unconstitutional for the U.S. to spy on foreign countries?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gholam_Ruhani#Administrative_Review_Board_hearing The following primary factors favor continued detention:
a. Commitment
1. Detainee admitted being a member of the Taliban. A supervisor of Taliban Civilian Intelligence recruited the detainee into the Taliban.
2. Detainee served as the driver for a Taliban Intelligence Service member and performed clerical work for the Intelligence Service in Kabul, AF, from 1999 or 2000 until his capture by U.S. forces in December of 2001. The detainee was required to carry a pistol in this job.
3. Detainee was captured with a senior Taliban intelligence member, Abdul Haq Wasiq, by U.S. forces on 9 December of 2001. The detainee was in possession of 7.62MM [sic] rounds when captured.
4. During confinement the detainee has made death threates to guards.
b. Connections / Associations
1. For years the detainee worked for the Taliban in the Operations Department of the Ministry of Intelligence in Kabul. The detainee supervised several associates.
2. The detainee and his 13-14 associated were members of a quasi-police organization affiliated with Taliban Internal Affairs. The detainee and others in the unit were armed.
3. The detainee's sister is married to a Taliban Intelligence Officer.
4. The Taliban Chief of Intelligence led a group of 600 to 700 armed Taliban fighters in an Afghan province.
5. The detainee couriered a letter between the Taliban Chief of Intelligence and a Taliban military commander.
6. The Taliban military commander is associated with Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin (HIG). The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Terrorist Organization Reference Guide, states that HIG has long established ties with Usama Bin Laden [sic] and has staged attacks in attempts to force United States troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
c. Intent
After the fall of Kabul the detainee and his associated fled the city in a pick-up truck armed with two RPG-7's [sic], twenty AK-47's [sic] and two PK machine guns.
A: It's always hard to figure out the actual numbers on this, but I definitely get the feeling that having a more open attitude with MP3s has contributed to my ability to actually make a living. More and more, people don't like to buy things that they haven't heard first, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. This is why they have listening stations in record stores (er, I mean, when they used to have record stores). And because I depend so heavily on word of mouth marketing, it's extremely important that it's as easy as possible to hear my stuff. Again, it comes down to the extremely low cost that comes with digital content -- it's okay if only a small percentage of listeners buy, as long as the number of listeners is very high. That can only happen if you let people listen.
Q: When you wrote "Still Alive" for Portal did you have any idea how well the synergy would be with the game? I don't think that there has every been ending credits in any media that has matched the love that people have for the end of Portal. Have you been asked to work on any other video game music since the release of Portal?
A: One of the reasons I agreed to do it was that I understood the character so well -- it was one of those things where I looked at what they had created and it made absolute sense to me. We didn't know all the details of how we were going to finish the game, but I really could sort of feel how it was supposed to end up. Of course I'm thrilled with the reception, and it's been much larger and more positive than I could have imagined. There's nothing else in the works at the moment, but I'm definitely open to doing more things like that if it's the right project.
Q: When will Valve release a video game that is also a full musical comedy?
A: Yes please. That would be a great deal of fun to do, whether or not it was any fun to play. I'll put you in touch with Gabe and you can insist that he make it happen.
Is there really much Slashdot/Facebook overlap? Everyone I know on this forum just hosts their own personal site(s). Facebook seems like more of a newbie technology than would normally be attractive to the average Slashdotter: kind of one step up from "what's your favorite desktop background image?"
I've got a 4-digit slashdot ID (whatever that counts for) and I use Facebook intensively, primarily to keep in touch with my friends from high school, college, and grad school.
The vast majority of my techie friends from my undergrad CS program at Carnegie Mellon use Facebook, and the majority of my friends in PhD programs at Caltech also use Facebook. It'd be rather a stretch to consider either of those demographics newbie-heavy.
Actually it only has something like 2.5 stars on Amazon. Not a good sign.
In all fairness though, just about all of the 1-star ratings seem to be from people who haven't even used the product yet.
If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences -- high energy physics being the one I know best -- then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened. The researchers would have been be so scared of screwing up that cascades would never have been allowed to start (string theory, perhaps, being the exception to the rule).
You can think of this kind of brutal response to bad science as an immune system that serves to protect reliable knowledge from infection by the infinite number of bogus but compelling ideas that are out there. The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack.
That said, even though NASA could probably use more funding, misallocation of resources is still a huge problem. I agree heartily with this recent comment by Clark Lindsay over at RLV News:
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=4926 Keith Cowing responds to Mike Griffin's claim that he did not cause the VSE budget problems: Mike Griffin on VSE Woes: "I did not put us into this position" - NASA Watch - Nov.15.07
You most certainly did get the agency into the predicament that it is in today. Instead of going off and reinventing the wheel (Ares 1) you could have bought EELVs off the shelf from a ULA catalog and focused only on CEV development. You forced a rigid and recycled architecture upon the agency - one that requires large monolithic launchers - when in fact you could have come up with one that used existing launchers or straightforward derivations thereof.
I can certainly support that scolding. I think Ares 1 is a disaster and Ares V is a bad dream. However, rather than NASA choosing an EELV outright, I would have preferred a Super-COTS competition in 2006 that went something like the following:
* A budget of two or three billion dollars for Phase 1
* As with COTS, the systems proposed should be capable of supplying a minimum amount cargo to the ISS per year but be upgradable to crew operations no later than 2011.
* The ULA firms would be invited to enter their proposals along with the entrepreneurial rocket firms
* Four commercial launcher proposals would be selected for Phase 1
* The entrants would decide for themselves whether a capsule or lifting body or whatever is the most cost effective system for cargo/crew delivery.
* Assuming at least two firms successfully fulfilled Phase 1, the two with the lowest cost/kg to the ISS would each be guaranteed half of all NASA launches to LEO in, say, the period 2010-2015.
* NASA would focus on lunar exploration systems that would work within the capabilities of the COTS transports. (This would no doubt involve a more modular approach than is currently envisioned.)
Too late now, of course, to run such a COTS competition. It's possible, though, that Lockheed-Martin has used the current studies with Bigelow and SpaceDev to prepare a proposal for NASA launch services just in case the next administration cancels Ares 1. On the other hand, if the Falcon 9 initial flights go well, there will be no need for such alternatives.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
My heart goes out to your wife and what happened to her, but I don't think this is the case with the patient from the experiment. He already is able to answer yes/no questions via eye movements, and I'd be very surprised if they haven't already asked him about his consent to remain on life support.
From one of their research posters:
http://www.neuralsignals.com/SFN2007%5B4%5D.pdf
The ultimate goal of this project is to restore speech communication to a patient, Erik, who suffered a brain stem stroke as a result of an auto accident, and is currently locked-in. He has minimal control of eye movements, and can answer yes/no questions by moving his eyes up or down. Approximately 3 years ago, two neurotrophic electrodes were implanted 6 mm deep in a region of the cortex controlling speech posterior to Broca's area. In these experiments, Erik attempted to produce a series of phonemes. We used the recorded data to discriminate the intended phonemes.
Why can't NASA work on a mission which will deposit 10's or 100's of rovers ?
Launch costs. Granted, having a massive demand for launches like that might be able to induce economies of scale in the current launch industry.
While this is indeed promising, and I hope that this 'unlocks' this poor fellow, this 'unlocking' has not happened yet.
It's a little unclear from the BBC article, but going from their research posters, they have in fact tested the translation already, using a data set compiled from neural recordings made while having the subject try to produce different phoneme sounds. However, this analysis was done "offline," not in real-time. I think what they're referring to doing in the "next few weeks" is getting the analysis working in real-time, so the guy could actually use it to communicate.
For those curious, this speech prosthesis research was presented in a number of posters at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference a couple weeks ago. Their six SfN posters can be found on their website here, covering topics like the circuitry they developed, Bayesian signal analysis, and so forth:
http://migrate.speechprosthesis.org/DNN2/SpeechProsthesisHome/tabid/52/Default.aspx
There's also a nice blog entry on this over at Neurophilosophy:
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/11/speech_prosthesis.php