Actually, I'm pretty sure that in the event of an unsuccessful launch, the launch costs are refunded. After all, Musk has stated that he could afford up to 3 launch failures; if he was able to just pocket the full price after each failure, I'm sure he could afford far more.
Chuck Norris once visited the Virgin Islands. They are now The Islands.
Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting implies the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
Chuck Noris puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter".
If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.
When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.
Chuck Norris thought up some of the funniest Chuck Norris facts ever, but he hasn't submitted them to the site because he doesn't believe in any form of submission.
'The analogy I've used before is to imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on. However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?'
Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns?... Private companies cannot be relied upon to have the best interests of anything but their own pocketbook.
Sure, but space launch is a situation where safety has a direct impact on the company's pocketbook, which is why space launch companies are so paranoid about it.
I'm pretty bummed out about this, but hopefully they'll figure things out and the next flight will go better. My sentiments are pretty much the same as this commentary from Clark Lindsay:
Well, this is fairly typical for the first launch of a new vehicle. I hope they will figure out the problem soon and be ready for a second attempt not long after. Elon Musk has said he can afford up to three straight failures before he will decide if they should give up or not.
Also, an interesting comment from that page:
According to Astronautix, the Ariane 1 had failures on the 2nd and 5th launches and Aerospatiale spent a lot more than SpaceX.
Both SpaceflightNow and the forum on NasaSpaceFlight are speculating it was an ablative engine failure. If so, I would imagine they'll hold off on any more launches until the regen Merlin 1B is ready. According to an SpaceX update in mid-2005, they should already have a dozen 1Bs by the end of the 2005. Or it could be the turbopump which according to SpaceX engine page is also responsible for roll control. That might explain why it started to roll after launch.
But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done, and nobody wants to launch that many sats again. The geosync comsat market is saturated; everybody is going fibre optic. There's just not that much going up.
It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem: There is much being launched, because launch costs are so high, and there isn't much of a motivation to improve launch economics, because there's so little demand. Hopefully SpaceX can break the shell.
That said, between the SpaceX Dragon manned capsule and Bigelow Aerospace's private space station modules, there should hopefully be quite a bit of new demand for launches in the near future.
As the first link mentions, the launch is scheduled for Thursday, 1PM PST (4PM EST).
Oops, never mind... looks like there's going to be a day's delay:
No major issues were discovered following the static fire, but, as a cautionary measure, we are going to take one more day to review data and verify system functionality. Launch is now scheduled for Friday at 1 p.m. California time.
Recently Sam Dinkin of the Space Review had a chance to tour SpaceX's facility, and wrote a 4-part article series about it. It's a pretty neat read, and gives you a good idea of the culture of SpaceX and where it's headed. Also, they're apparently looking for good people to hire.;)
Also, an interesting bit of recent news: Apparently the President of Sea Launch, which is "arguably the world's most successful commercial launch company," has left Sea Launch to join SpaceX. Anybody care to speculate about why he would leave such a cushy position for a start-up?
As the first link mentions, the launch is scheduled for Thursday, 1PM PST (4PM EST). According to RLV News, here's a few good sources for real-time commentary and info about the launch:
Also, it was recently revealed that SpaceX has been secretly developing their SpaceX Dragon orbital capsule, which will be able to carry up to 7 people to and from orbit. A full-size prototype of the capsule has already been constructed, and the capsule is expected to enter service by 2009 (several years before NASA's CEV).
I'm not too familiar with more recent work, but there's a well-cited paper by Fleck, Forsyth & Bregler (1996) on using image analysis to determine whether or not there were naked people in an image. My inner juvenile always found the title kind of amusing, "Finding Naked People". Fleck also has a web page with some descriptions.
I'm not so sure about its applications, but it's certainly an interesting vision problem.
I should point out that when basic research is privatized, there will be much less incentive for rare medical defects to be investigated. If there is not an economic incentive, then the work would not be done.
What about private non-profit groups, like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?
Actually, some sort of WikiTranslate or WikiTranslation sounds like a great idea, assuming something similar doesn't already exist. One could use it to translate not just these documents, but any documents/speeches/videos which are under a compatible license. It would also be quite a useful training corpus for machine-translation software.
So "open source" is now anything that's a free/community project?
Coincidentally, the use of the phrase "open source" in the intelligence community actually predates its use regarding software, using it to refer to intelligence gathered from publically-available sources. From wikipedia:
Open source intelligence or "OSINT" refers to an intelligence gathering discipline based on analyzing information collected from open sources, i.e. information available to the general public. These sources include newspapers, the internet, books, phone books, scientific journals, radio broadcasts, television, and others. The term OSINT is unrelated to the term open source as that term is used in the computer software community to refer to programs whose source code is publicly available (and modifiable). OSINT should also not be generally confused with OSIF (Open Source Information) on which OSINT is based. OSIF is any information that is publicly available; OSINT is analytically-tailored OSIF designed to answer a specific tasking or to support decision-making.
(From a comment I posted previously, for which I still haven't seen any good answers to)
This makes me wonder what the legality will be (or is) of gambling in MMORPGs and other virtual realities, particularly those like Second Life where in-game items and currency can be bought and sold with real-world money. If you make in-game gambling illegal, that seems like an unreasonable (and perhaps unconstitutional?) constraint placed on creators of games. On the other hand, if in-game gambling is legal, that's a pretty big loophole for the "evils of gambling" to get through.
On that note, couldn't all for-pay MMORPGs be considered a form of gambling? Players pay a certain amount each month, and there's a certain chance that you'll be able to accumulate in-game items which can be sold for real-world money. There's of course an entertainment aspect to the game, but there's also an entertainment aspect for going to a casino.
A week or two ago I was watching the Colbert Report (a spin-off of the Daily Show), and was highly amused by a little fireside chat by Colbert about the release of Dungeons & Dragons Online. Here's a transcript (and video):
Earlier this week marked the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons: Storm Reach a new on-line version of the popular swords and sorcery game. I myself played a lot of the D and D way back when. Actually I once met Len Lakofka at Gen Con Ten. [pause] Anybody? [applause]
I'll never forget when I lost *Faraneeth, my level 21 Lawful Good Paladin. Heh. I know, that's redundant. He was on a campaign searching for Tenser, wizard of the Circle of Light, on rout from the *Shel-du-mar valley to the *Filronian Peninsula. He got cornered by a Displacer Beast and a Mind Flayer and he failed to save against Psionic attack. See, he'd already lost a lot of hit points battling a Beholder and the cleric in the party couldn't regenerate enough hit points with his Heal Light Wounds spell. All in all a sad day in *Badabascore.
But I gave up D&D in 1984. My parents were concerned I was being possessed by demons. So one summer they sent me to an exorcism day camp. Eight weeks of sailing, casting out the devils within me and making lanyards did the trick. Oh, and I got a girlfriend.
Anyway, it is the end of an era. And as the cyber-elves and the e-wizards log onto the digital dungeon, I sadly place on my shelf these now obsolete polyhedral dice. The good news is with D&D now on the inter net, the social outcasts of today's junior high schools are relieved of the agony of any human contact.
Enjoy your magnificent isolation.
Don't forget to bathe.
There's definitely a good bit of that which had to have been written by somebody pretty familiar with D&D. I was pleased to find that Colbert himself actually played for a few years back in high school, as mentioned in this Onion AV Club interview:
AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?
SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981--four years.
AVC: What's the appeal?
SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.
On a tangential note, Colbert is the only person/source I can think of that successfully managed to predict 5/5 Oscar winners. Heck, he even got Crash.
Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation. Later, syringes placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. About 40 divers thought to have been killed
I wonder what's the BBC's source for those stories. I've heard the story about tearing off the diving gear before, but it's generally regarded as an urban legend -- after all, it would be pretty difficult to keep the hypothetical killer dolphins from attacking divers on your side.
Also, I've never heard the thing about making divers explode by injecting them with CO2 syringes -- is that even physically possible? I'm fairly surprised, as I usually think of the BBC as being good about checking their facts.
The US Armed forces have an unfortunate history with animals doing the dirty work, at least with bats carrying incendiary bombs during WWII.
Don't forget the pigeon-guided missile, which was planned by B.F. Skinner during WWII. Wikipedia actually has a nice article on the use of military animals throughout history. The description of Project Pigeon from wikipedia:
During World War II, Project Pigeon (or Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviourist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.
The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognise the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule.
Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was apparently too radical for the military establishment; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously.
Lifting off from Canaveral in a SpaceShip 2 and landing in Spain would make the old Concorde record time look pretty pathetic.
Actually, Branson has mentioned that even though his first spaceport will be in New Mexico, they're considering building a spaceport at Cape Canaveral later on. The shuttle runway would be an ideal place for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo to operate from.
Let's spend hundreds of billions of the dollars that we currently mostly waste on Pentagon corporate welfare that makes the US feared around the world instead spent on NASA investment in infrastructure to support private corporations.
Coincidentally, NASA recently announced plans to create Red Planet Capital, a venture capital fund for private spaceflight startups. Hopefully it won't be killed off by overzealous congresscritters.
A description from NASA's page:
In order for NASA to specifically focus on entrepreneurial innovation in support of its mission objectives, the Agency has laid the foundation for a private equity investment vehicle (working name "Red Planet Capital") aimed at early-stage companies.
Red Planet Capital (the "Fund") will be an investment vehicle used to support innovative, dual-use technologies which will help NASA achieve its mission, but will also help better position these technologies for future commercial use. Portfolio companies should not anticipate the government as the primary customer. However, NASA anticipates that this approach might help some of NASA's mission directorates in their future "make-versus-buy" decision-making processes.
That's not preemptive managment - it's spin control. GIOVE-A is the backup bird, GIOVE-B is the 'full meal deal'. What is now GIOVE-B was supposed to fly first and -A was a sop to critics of the pork inherent in the program.
Do you happen to have a source for this? I think I'd like to add the information to the wikipedia article on GIOVE.
Really? Fascinating! Explain to me the technology we have to produce CVD diamond panels for rentry shielding, and for more efficient carbon-carbon production. Explain to me the technology we have for alane rocket boosters and metastable helium. Explain to me the technology we have for scramjet engines. Explain to me the tech we have for gas/plasma injection during reentry. Explain to me the technology we have for MPD thrusters. Explain the technology we have for our nuclear thermal rockets.
SpaceX doesn't have any of those technologies, and yet they've still managed to develop an orbital rocket which costs much less than the competition. Granted, I'm sure they'll eventually reach a limit to how much they can reduce costs until they'll have to pursue some of the technologies you describe, but it'll be a while until they reach that limit. By that time, SpaceX will hopefully have generated enough of a market for their lower-priced rockets that it'll be economically justifiable to invest money in more advanced launch technologies.
A couple of weeks ago I tried to submit the following story to slashdot, without any luck. I think it's fairly related to the current topic, and has a rather interesting video showing the helicopter firing its rapid-fire shotgun:
A small company called Neural Robotics has produced a robotic mini-helicopter armed with a rapid-fire shotgun. Based on their off-the-shelf AutoCopter, the UAV uses neural network-based flight control algorithms to fly in either a self-stabilizing semi-autonomous mode controlled by a remote operator, or a fully-autonomous mode which can follow GPS waypoints. A video of the AutoCopter Gunship is available.
Stepping aside the ethical issues of replacing soldiers with flying shotgun-wielding robots for the moment, their "neural network-based" flight control system seemed like an interesting technical accomplishment. This PDF briefing has a few details.
Taking a look at page 14 of their PDF though, perhaps their control system is a little on the simplistic side. It seems to just update roll and pitch based on the current movement and facing of the helicopter, without making use of visual information or other sensors. I'm not too familiar with flight control, but using a neural network for that seems like overkill. When in fully-autonomous mode, I wonder if they make use of sensors for crash-avoidance at all, or if they just hope that nothing's in the way of the chosen GPS coordinates.
Assuming they haven't done so already, it would be rather neat to load some range-finding sensors on the helicopter and have it automatically avoid nearby obstacles; the basic algorithms should be fairly straightforward.
Another idea is to allow the robot to visually track a point of laser light, potentially allowing somebody to control the robot with a designated laser. The military application of this is pretty obvious: You could quickly point a laser wherever the people shooting at you are hiding, so that the robot knows what area to scope out. A laser could also be used to trace out a patrol route for the robot, so that a user doesn't have to deal with typing in cumbersome GPS coordinates.
As for civilian applications, the AutoCopter with a stabilized camera might be useful for filming video. One could imagine a system of two designated laser pointers, one for each hand. One pointer would designate a spot for the robot to hover over, while another pointer would indicate where the robot should direct its camera. Of course, one could alternatively just hire a dedicated RC operator, so perhaps this would be of limited usefulness.
If a computer can shoot down an artillery shell with a laser I wonder if we could make a machine that could navigate to a lat/long coordinate and shoots at everything that moves.
Sure, or you could drop a fuel-air bomb on that set of coordinates and have pretty much the same effect.
Slashdot Mirror
That's $6.7 million taken from tax payers.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that in the event of an unsuccessful launch, the launch costs are refunded. After all, Musk has stated that he could afford up to 3 launch failures; if he was able to just pocket the full price after each failure, I'm sure he could afford far more.
When did we start this Chuck Norris meme?
k
Probably about the time this site started up:
http://www.4q.cc/index.php?pid=top100&person=chuc
A few samples:
Chuck Norris once visited the Virgin Islands. They are now The Islands.
Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting implies the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
Chuck Noris puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter".
If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.
When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.
Chuck Norris thought up some of the funniest Chuck Norris facts ever, but he hasn't submitted them to the site because he doesn't believe in any form of submission.
There's actually a quote from an interview with Elon Musk which answers a related question:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4254
'The analogy I've used before is to imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on. However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?'
Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns? ... Private companies cannot be relied upon to have the best interests of anything but their own pocketbook.
Sure, but space launch is a situation where safety has a direct impact on the company's pocketbook, which is why space launch companies are so paranoid about it.
I'm pretty bummed out about this, but hopefully they'll figure things out and the next flight will go better. My sentiments are pretty much the same as this commentary from Clark Lindsay:
Well, this is fairly typical for the first launch of a new vehicle. I hope they will figure out the problem soon and be ready for a second attempt not long after. Elon Musk has said he can afford up to three straight failures before he will decide if they should give up or not.
Also, an interesting comment from that page:
According to Astronautix, the Ariane 1 had failures on the 2nd and 5th launches and Aerospatiale spent a lot more than SpaceX.
Both SpaceflightNow and the forum on NasaSpaceFlight are speculating it was an ablative engine failure. If so, I would imagine they'll hold off on any more launches until the regen Merlin 1B is ready. According to an SpaceX update in mid-2005, they should already have a dozen 1Bs by the end of the 2005. Or it could be the turbopump which according to SpaceX engine page is also responsible for roll control. That might explain why it started to roll after launch.
But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done, and nobody wants to launch that many sats again. The geosync comsat market is saturated; everybody is going fibre optic. There's just not that much going up.
It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem: There is much being launched, because launch costs are so high, and there isn't much of a motivation to improve launch economics, because there's so little demand. Hopefully SpaceX can break the shell.
That said, between the SpaceX Dragon manned capsule and Bigelow Aerospace's private space station modules, there should hopefully be quite a bit of new demand for launches in the near future.
As the first link mentions, the launch is scheduled for Thursday, 1PM PST (4PM EST).
Oops, never mind... looks like there's going to be a day's delay:
No major issues were discovered following the static fire, but, as a cautionary measure, we are going to take one more day to review data and verify system functionality. Launch is now scheduled for Friday at 1 p.m. California time.
Recently Sam Dinkin of the Space Review had a chance to tour SpaceX's facility, and wrote a 4-part article series about it. It's a pretty neat read, and gives you a good idea of the culture of SpaceX and where it's headed. Also, they're apparently looking for good people to hire. ;)
*Part 1
*Part 2
*Part 3
*Part 4
Also, an interesting bit of recent news: Apparently the President of Sea Launch, which is "arguably the world's most successful commercial launch company," has left Sea Launch to join SpaceX. Anybody care to speculate about why he would leave such a cushy position for a start-up?
As the first link mentions, the launch is scheduled for Thursday, 1PM PST (4PM EST). According to RLV News, here's a few good sources for real-time commentary and info about the launch:
* Mission Status Center - Falcon Launch Report - Justin Ray
* Out of the Cradle
* NASASpaceflight.com - LIVE: SpaceX/Falcon 1 - 23rd March: launch coverage thread
Also, it was recently revealed that SpaceX has been secretly developing their SpaceX Dragon orbital capsule, which will be able to carry up to 7 people to and from orbit. A full-size prototype of the capsule has already been constructed, and the capsule is expected to enter service by 2009 (several years before NASA's CEV).
I'm not too familiar with more recent work, but there's a well-cited paper by Fleck, Forsyth & Bregler (1996) on using image analysis to determine whether or not there were naked people in an image. My inner juvenile always found the title kind of amusing, "Finding Naked People". Fleck also has a web page with some descriptions.
I'm not so sure about its applications, but it's certainly an interesting vision problem.
I should point out that when basic research is privatized, there will be much less incentive for rare medical defects to be investigated. If there is not an economic incentive, then the work would not be done.
What about private non-profit groups, like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?
Perhaps if they opened up a WikiIraqi?
Actually, some sort of WikiTranslate or WikiTranslation sounds like a great idea, assuming something similar doesn't already exist. One could use it to translate not just these documents, but any documents/speeches/videos which are under a compatible license. It would also be quite a useful training corpus for machine-translation software.
So "open source" is now anything that's a free/community project?
e nce
Coincidentally, the use of the phrase "open source" in the intelligence community actually predates its use regarding software, using it to refer to intelligence gathered from publically-available sources. From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_intellig
Open source intelligence or "OSINT" refers to an intelligence gathering discipline based on analyzing information collected from open sources, i.e. information available to the general public. These sources include newspapers, the internet, books, phone books, scientific journals, radio broadcasts, television, and others. The term OSINT is unrelated to the term open source as that term is used in the computer software community to refer to programs whose source code is publicly available (and modifiable). OSINT should also not be generally confused with OSIF (Open Source Information) on which OSINT is based. OSIF is any information that is publicly available; OSINT is analytically-tailored OSIF designed to answer a specific tasking or to support decision-making.
How are the buttons themselves? Are they noisy/clicky? Are they easy to press, and do they feel responsive?
(From a comment I posted previously, for which I still haven't seen any good answers to)
This makes me wonder what the legality will be (or is) of gambling in MMORPGs and other virtual realities, particularly those like Second Life where in-game items and currency can be bought and sold with real-world money. If you make in-game gambling illegal, that seems like an unreasonable (and perhaps unconstitutional?) constraint placed on creators of games. On the other hand, if in-game gambling is legal, that's a pretty big loophole for the "evils of gambling" to get through.
On that note, couldn't all for-pay MMORPGs be considered a form of gambling? Players pay a certain amount each month, and there's a certain chance that you'll be able to accumulate in-game items which can be sold for real-world money. There's of course an entertainment aspect to the game, but there's also an entertainment aspect for going to a casino.
A week or two ago I was watching the Colbert Report (a spin-off of the Daily Show), and was highly amused by a little fireside chat by Colbert about the release of Dungeons & Dragons Online. Here's a transcript (and video):
Earlier this week marked the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons: Storm Reach a new on-line version of the popular swords and sorcery game. I myself played a lot of the D and D way back when. Actually I once met Len Lakofka at Gen Con Ten.
[pause] Anybody?
[applause]
I'll never forget when I lost *Faraneeth, my level 21 Lawful Good Paladin. Heh. I know, that's redundant. He was on a campaign searching for Tenser, wizard of the Circle of Light, on rout from the *Shel-du-mar valley to the *Filronian Peninsula. He got cornered by a Displacer Beast and a Mind Flayer and he failed to save against Psionic attack. See, he'd already lost a lot of hit points battling a Beholder and the cleric in the party couldn't regenerate enough hit points with his Heal Light Wounds spell. All in all a sad day in *Badabascore.
But I gave up D&D in 1984. My parents were concerned I was being possessed by demons. So one summer they sent me to an exorcism day camp. Eight weeks of sailing, casting out the devils within me and making lanyards did the trick. Oh, and I got a girlfriend.
Anyway, it is the end of an era. And as the cyber-elves and the e-wizards log onto the digital dungeon, I sadly place on my shelf these now obsolete polyhedral dice. The good news is with D&D now on the inter net, the social outcasts of today's junior high schools are relieved of the agony of any human contact.
Enjoy your magnificent isolation.
Don't forget to bathe.
There's definitely a good bit of that which had to have been written by somebody pretty familiar with D&D. I was pleased to find that Colbert himself actually played for a few years back in high school, as mentioned in this Onion AV Club interview:
AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?
SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981--four years.
AVC: What's the appeal?
SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.
On a tangential note, Colbert is the only person/source I can think of that successfully managed to predict 5/5 Oscar winners. Heck, he even got Crash.
Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation. Later, syringes placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. About 40 divers thought to have been killed
I wonder what's the BBC's source for those stories. I've heard the story about tearing off the diving gear before, but it's generally regarded as an urban legend -- after all, it would be pretty difficult to keep the hypothetical killer dolphins from attacking divers on your side.
Also, I've never heard the thing about making divers explode by injecting them with CO2 syringes -- is that even physically possible? I'm fairly surprised, as I usually think of the BBC as being good about checking their facts.
Darn, it took me forever to realize this wasn't real and I couldn't order it...
Same here. I actually did a froogle search for it before realizing it wasn't real.
The US Armed forces have an unfortunate history with animals doing the dirty work, at least with bats carrying incendiary bombs during WWII.
Don't forget the pigeon-guided missile, which was planned by B.F. Skinner during WWII. Wikipedia actually has a nice article on the use of military animals throughout history. The description of Project Pigeon from wikipedia:
During World War II, Project Pigeon (or Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviourist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.
The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognise the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule.
Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was apparently too radical for the military establishment; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously.
Lifting off from Canaveral in a SpaceShip 2 and landing in Spain would make the old Concorde record time look pretty pathetic.
Actually, Branson has mentioned that even though his first spaceport will be in New Mexico, they're considering building a spaceport at Cape Canaveral later on. The shuttle runway would be an ideal place for WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo to operate from.
Let's spend hundreds of billions of the dollars that we currently mostly waste on Pentagon corporate welfare that makes the US feared around the world instead spent on NASA investment in infrastructure to support private corporations.
Coincidentally, NASA recently announced plans to create Red Planet Capital, a venture capital fund for private spaceflight startups. Hopefully it won't be killed off by overzealous congresscritters.
A description from NASA's page:
In order for NASA to specifically focus on entrepreneurial innovation in support of its mission objectives, the Agency has laid the foundation for a private equity investment vehicle (working name "Red Planet Capital") aimed at early-stage companies.
Red Planet Capital (the "Fund") will be an investment vehicle used to support innovative, dual-use technologies which will help NASA achieve its mission, but will also help better position these technologies for future commercial use. Portfolio companies should not anticipate the government as the primary customer. However, NASA anticipates that this approach might help some of NASA's mission directorates in their future "make-versus-buy" decision-making processes.
That's not preemptive managment - it's spin control. GIOVE-A is the backup bird, GIOVE-B is the 'full meal deal'. What is now GIOVE-B was supposed to fly first and -A was a sop to critics of the pork inherent in the program.
Do you happen to have a source for this? I think I'd like to add the information to the wikipedia article on GIOVE.
We have the technology
Really? Fascinating! Explain to me the technology we have to produce CVD diamond panels for rentry shielding, and for more efficient carbon-carbon production. Explain to me the technology we have for alane rocket boosters and metastable helium. Explain to me the technology we have for scramjet engines. Explain to me the tech we have for gas/plasma injection during reentry. Explain to me the technology we have for MPD thrusters. Explain the technology we have for our nuclear thermal rockets.
SpaceX doesn't have any of those technologies, and yet they've still managed to develop an orbital rocket which costs much less than the competition. Granted, I'm sure they'll eventually reach a limit to how much they can reduce costs until they'll have to pursue some of the technologies you describe, but it'll be a while until they reach that limit. By that time, SpaceX will hopefully have generated enough of a market for their lower-priced rockets that it'll be economically justifiable to invest money in more advanced launch technologies.
A couple of weeks ago I tried to submit the following story to slashdot, without any luck. I think it's fairly related to the current topic, and has a rather interesting video showing the helicopter firing its rapid-fire shotgun:
A small company called Neural Robotics has produced a robotic mini-helicopter armed with a rapid-fire shotgun. Based on their off-the-shelf AutoCopter, the UAV uses neural network-based flight control algorithms to fly in either a self-stabilizing semi-autonomous mode controlled by a remote operator, or a fully-autonomous mode which can follow GPS waypoints. A video of the AutoCopter Gunship is available.
Stepping aside the ethical issues of replacing soldiers with flying shotgun-wielding robots for the moment, their "neural network-based" flight control system seemed like an interesting technical accomplishment. This PDF briefing has a few details.
Taking a look at page 14 of their PDF though, perhaps their control system is a little on the simplistic side. It seems to just update roll and pitch based on the current movement and facing of the helicopter, without making use of visual information or other sensors. I'm not too familiar with flight control, but using a neural network for that seems like overkill. When in fully-autonomous mode, I wonder if they make use of sensors for crash-avoidance at all, or if they just hope that nothing's in the way of the chosen GPS coordinates.
Assuming they haven't done so already, it would be rather neat to load some range-finding sensors on the helicopter and have it automatically avoid nearby obstacles; the basic algorithms should be fairly straightforward.
Another idea is to allow the robot to visually track a point of laser light, potentially allowing somebody to control the robot with a designated laser. The military application of this is pretty obvious: You could quickly point a laser wherever the people shooting at you are hiding, so that the robot knows what area to scope out. A laser could also be used to trace out a patrol route for the robot, so that a user doesn't have to deal with typing in cumbersome GPS coordinates.
As for civilian applications, the AutoCopter with a stabilized camera might be useful for filming video. One could imagine a system of two designated laser pointers, one for each hand. One pointer would designate a spot for the robot to hover over, while another pointer would indicate where the robot should direct its camera. Of course, one could alternatively just hire a dedicated RC operator, so perhaps this would be of limited usefulness.
If a computer can shoot down an artillery shell with a laser I wonder if we could make a machine that could navigate to a lat/long coordinate and shoots at everything that moves.
Sure, or you could drop a fuel-air bomb on that set of coordinates and have pretty much the same effect.