Russel and Norvig, 2003. Paraphrasing (because I don't have the book with me), AI systems perceives its environment and works to maximize its chances of success. As a matter of technical implementation, this is traditionally framed as an error minimization problem.
Interesting. So given that this is artificial intelligence, real intelligence is an error minimization problem to maximize chances of success?
rd
My house is artificial; that doesn't mean it's not real.
Shred and the like are only useful when you don't have a journaling filesystem. So that means anything but ext2 (including ext3) defeats it.
That's why you copy files you want to keep onto another partition, then run shred on the original partition's block device, then recreate the filesystem.
Your post outlines the reason I stopped playing EVE. Is that it is anarchy. Even staying and mining in 1.0 space, one can get ganked by a suicide mob using clones or expendable toons.
Sir, I only suicide gank on my main. It's more exciting that way! Also, high sec. space is not safe space.
There is even a specific day for killing mining vessels.
"Hulkageddon" is an in-game event organised by, funded by and supported by players. It's exactly the sort of emergent gameplay that EVE's all about. A properly-run mining operation in 1.0 with decent fit barges and support ships is 100% safe from any suicide gankers. Mining in deep alliance 0.0 is also pretty much completely safe from suicide gankers. If you lose ships to Hulkageddon, you should (a) pay better attention to the news and (b) make some friends.
I like the mining side but there is no reason to pursue it if half the mineral, and it is the most profitable half, are only available in lowsec.
Join a corp, move to 0.0, profit! Look ma, no "???"!
I like the industrial side, but there is no reason to pursue it if the market price for an item is less than the cost of the minerals that go in to it, let alone the cost of production.
Train reprocessing skills, by under-priced ships, reprocess them, sell materials, profit! Look, still no "???"!
I liked the idea of industrial and business sides of the game, but they have just become a way to get gear for PVP. Mining ships are under armed and under armored, unless one wants to give over most of the mining capabilities.
...join a corp, use an Orca, watch local. Or mine in a Rokh. It's a trade-off: greater income, at the expense of greater vulnerability. If you choose to fly a ship you can't afford to lose, then it's your fault when you inevitably lose it.
Freighters are completely unarmed in a universe with no law enforcement.
There is law enforcement; it's called CONCORD. Choose your mode of transport appropriately to your cargo. If you need to transport high-value items in high sec, use a collateralised courier contract or use the corp hangar on an Orca. If you need to transport bulk low-value items in high sec, use a freighter -- because it has ludicrous HP, suicide gankers won't attack it if they can't get enough profit to cover the ships they'll lose. If you need to transport items in low sec or 0.0, use a blockade runner and a scout (avoid transporting bulk low-value stuff around there, it's not worth it)! Since the insurance nerf, the likelihood of being suicided has gone way down, if you take basic precautions and don't AFK.
By the way, have you ever looked into the transportation trade side of the game? I don't think I saw a single transportation job that wasn't a setup to be ganked so one would lose both one's deposit, one's freight, and one's freighter.
"If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." Corps like Red Frog Freight are doing really well out of bulk transport, and they're always recruiting freighter pilots, so it clearly can be done.
CCP touts the multifaceted nature of the game, but it has turned into nothing but PVP.
When you click "Undock" you're consenting to PvP. It's what EVE's about. Even so, unless you do something blindingly stupid (like flying a cargo expanded cargo rigged officer fit Hulk during Hulkageddon, or undocking in a cyno Kestrel with 74 PLEX in the hold while wardecced), then it's dead easy to avoid PvP, and you'll never lose something you can't easily replace.
Any MP will tell you one well written letter in an envelope with a stamp is worth uncounted numbers of emails, because someone has bothered to communicate, and where one person takes action, many others think the same but cannot be bothered.
Sorry, but some of us painstakingly write carefully-thought-out e-mails to our MPs. There's a difference between a cut-and-paste job and an e-mail that's had effort put into it. Indiscriminately stopping constituents from e-mailing you is ridiculous in the 21st century.
a public official doesn't want to be contacted by the public? No one likes to hear the peasants out. Where's the story here?
No he doesn't want to be deluged in shit by a multitude of "campaign" sites. Quite understandable really. The public most MPs want to hear from are the people who elected them in their borough not some random lunatic cutting and pasting a form letter from a website.
What about some lunatic who elected them in their constituency cutting and pasting a form letter from a website?
Falcon 1 Flight 3 definitely did not make orbit. As you noted though, that still puts SpaceX on even footing in terms of 'vehicles lost' vs 'vehicles that made orbit'. And since they're 3 for 3 on the last 3 launches, and 1 for 1 on the newest design, I'd say that throwing around "50% success rate" is a little bit misleading.
That marketese has gotten him a company successfully launching rockets into orbit.
That marketese has put more rockets into the drink than it has into orbit.
Factually incorrect. SpaceX have launched six rockets, only the first two of which (Falcon I Flights 1 & 2) failed to make orbit. Falcon I Flight 3 was a partial failure. That makes it, at worst, a 50% success rate, which is hardly abysmal given that SpaceX launches cost less than half what their competitors charge.
You know perfectly well that I'm talking about copyright law.
Highly intelligent and well educated men and women don't understand copyright law?
Correct. I'm quite happy to admit that I don't understand all the ins-and-outs of the CPDA 1988 (as amended umpteen times) with its bizarre and eclectic selection of exceptions and special cases -- but I'm getting there slowly. Then I'll have to start on the case law.
If you define "highly intelligent" as "they can tie their own laces", and "well educated" as "passed kindergarten", then ok, we can agree. Otherwise, you're out to lunch.
No, I define a "highly intelligent" and "well educated" as someone who's graduated from a good university with a Honours degree. Much the same as the normally accepted definition.
You can discuss semantics with me all you like, but it won't change the laws. Nor should it, as long as we have a cash-based economy.
It's not semantics, it's highly relevant. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was writing his works, there was a cash-based economy without copyrights, but nevertheless he managed just fine, turning out some of the best music in history. See also Leonardo da Vinci, for instance. Copyrights are not property, and copyright infringement is not theft and is clearly distinguishable from theft.
That would be a fair rebuttal if we were discussing some obscure rule about underwater crocheting being forbidden at 11:35 on the 2nd of march during a full moon.
Strawman. You know perfectly well that I'm talking about copyright law. In my previous post I was referring to the people -- of all ages and all backgrounds -- who don't realise it's against the law to borrow their friends' CDs and copy them onto their portable media players. I meet them every day. And the people who think it's fine to install the same piece of software onto multiple computers, as long as it's from the original CD.
It doesn't really fly when we're talking about the concept of a nation being able to shut down organizations which blatantly violate theft laws.
Copyright infringement isn't theft. If I steal your car, you don't have your car any more. If I copy your car you still have it. How hard is it to understand the distinction?
No, you're just too stupid to understand the laws. I find that to be a common factor amongst anti-government, anti-capitalism, anti-corporatism, anti-anything-that-doesn't-say-"organic"-or-"revolution" fear-mongers. If you'd limit yourself to criticizing actual violations of laws, you'd look a lot less silly.
I know many very highly intelligent and extremely well-educated men and women who don't understand the law. This includes some of our members of parliament.
The law is too complicated for any person to fully understand even a small area of it without making it their full-time job. In today's world, the fact that "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" is a travesty.
I think we agree on the ultimate aims here, but private companies aren't ready to man-launch yet... Elon Musk has openly said he'll need hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies to get SpaceX's products man rated.
Don't forget that SpaceX has already developed and successfully launch two families of launch systems from scratch for less than half of the cost of the Ares-1X launch (which didn't actually contain any actual Ares-1 flight hardware).
At the moment, it seems that giving a couple of hundred million to Musk would be a far better use of it than frittering it away on the congressmen's bacon breakfast that is Constellation.
Man, that sucks, having to have an emergency meeting on a holiday weekend.
Firstly, July 1st is a Thursday. Secondly, the weekend of the 4th July is not a holiday weekend in the UK, which is where the British Computer Society is based.
That's not t say that some kind of accreditation service for software engineers / IT professionals is a bad thing but the BCS isn't that service. Anyone with a hundred quid to spend annually and some years in the industry would qualify for an MBCS, so what's the point of accreditation at all?
They also run on their own closed-circuit network, so good luck causing trouble without physical access or making yourself pretty obvious digging up the cables.
They also have fixed electromechanical failsafes. I think that most electrical engineers are sufficiently aware of the fact that computers go wrong not to put protection solely in the hands of software.
Hopefully this will reinvigorate the US market for launch vehicles. The satellite-manufacturing spin-off company of the research centre where I work currently launches most if not all of its payloads on decommissioned Russian ICBMs. I hope that in a couple of years, SpaceX's stable of launchers will be a practical and economical alternative!
I mean, if you disagree with the church's or pope's interpretation of the bible in public, you're a heretic.
Yes. But I don't think any modern Catholic would argue that you shouldn't be free to choose to be a heretic, if you so wish. It's your immortal soul, not mine. I do of course reserve the right to disagree with you and possibly even to attempt to explain to you where you've gone wrong.;-)
Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to harm you? Last time I checked, I was spending large amounts of my time and money fighting hard to protect people's privacy and freedom of expression. Now you're calling for my death?
It also makes it considerably more difficult when a launch provider like SpaceX wants to sell launch services, which is a large part of why Russian and European launch providers are currently creaming US launch providers on the international market. For example, the following difficulty occurred when SpaceX's Falcon 1 was launching a Malaysian satellite:
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocket's upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
Just one of many examples, sadly. Unless Congress acts promptly to introduce some sanity into the ITAR provisions, I fear that ITAR is inevitably going to drive innovative and competitive launch providers like SpaceX out of business, and prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the US space industry.
Certainly not true. ITAR is export controlled only. Typically DoD stuff. The model being looked into will be that of procurement only. The government will no longer have any ownership of the systems. Just like government cars and trucks that are bought for every day use are assembled in Mexico/Canada from parts from China or wherever GM/Ford builds them. Oh the contract winning company may be US based, but that's where it stops. There is no protection for the workers underneath.
Oh, sure, this is entirely correct. Maybe I should apologise for calling you an idiot, despite your hideously misinformed opinions on the constitution of the SpaceX workforce and supply chain.:-P
But think about it this way. If you, the US taxpayer, have just spent a billion dollars on a set of instruments for use in orbit and have four of your best and brightest young people sitting on top of it, surely you'll want to make sure that you have the best performing and most reliable launcher money can buy?
If that can be sold to you by a company based in the US and doing all of its manufacturing and assembly in the US, so much the better. After all, this is exactly the type of very high tech project that your country still prides itself on. But given that the cost of the launch is a relatively small proportion of the cost of a space mission, but contributes a very large proportion of the risk, wouldn't it be reasonable to buy flights from the best provider available, whether based in the US or not, in order to minimize the risk to the taxpayer's investment in the equipment and personnel to be launched?
This all depends on how you perceive the US space programme. If you consider the missions to be a good in themselves (e.g. provision of high quality meteorological data, monitoring of high-altitude ash clouds from volcanos, measuring ground displacement and urban damage in the wake of an earthquake), weighing up only the results of each programme against its final budget, then you come to one conclusion. On the other hand, if you -- like several US Senators, apparently -- consider it most important that NASA is the mechanism for a large taxpayer subsidy towards jobs in the high-tech industries, then you'll come to another.
Parent is a complete idiot. Elon no longer has any involvement in PayPal. SpaceX's technology is completely covered by ITAR; I should know, because I considered applying for a job there and was told that, as a non-US citizen, I shouldn't even bother. The Falcon 9 is very much an American rocket built by Americans. There are indeed "no foreign nationals, no outsourced jobs."
It's unusual to hear someone praising ITAR. ITAR is the reason that non-US organisations generally don't use US launchers for their payloads -- they can't work closely with the launch provider, particularly with respect to the sort of detailed technical information that's often very important in ensuring payload-launcher compatibility. People I've spoken to in the space industry while at conferences in the US frequently bemoan the fact that ITAR heavily restricts their hiring practices, meaning that they often miss out on being able to employ top people.
ITAR is what's holding the US space programme back.
Slashdot Mirror
If I write 2+2=4 on a piece of paper, is the pattern of graphite math or is the math a pure idea in my mind (and the minds of those who read it)?
Ooh, Platonic Realism!
Russel and Norvig, 2003. Paraphrasing (because I don't have the book with me), AI systems perceives its environment and works to maximize its chances of success. As a matter of technical implementation, this is traditionally framed as an error minimization problem.
Interesting. So given that this is artificial intelligence, real intelligence is an error minimization problem to maximize chances of success?
rd
My house is artificial; that doesn't mean it's not real.
P=NP is a question in computer science, not mathematics. The two fields split about 50 years ago.
But computer science is mathematics, or rather a subset thereof.
Shred and the like are only useful when you don't have a journaling filesystem. So that means anything but ext2 (including ext3) defeats it.
That's why you copy files you want to keep onto another partition, then run shred on the original partition's block device, then recreate the filesystem.
Your post outlines the reason I stopped playing EVE. Is that it is anarchy. Even staying and mining in 1.0 space, one can get ganked by a suicide mob using clones or expendable toons.
Sir, I only suicide gank on my main. It's more exciting that way! Also, high sec. space is not safe space.
There is even a specific day for killing mining vessels.
"Hulkageddon" is an in-game event organised by, funded by and supported by players. It's exactly the sort of emergent gameplay that EVE's all about. A properly-run mining operation in 1.0 with decent fit barges and support ships is 100% safe from any suicide gankers. Mining in deep alliance 0.0 is also pretty much completely safe from suicide gankers. If you lose ships to Hulkageddon, you should (a) pay better attention to the news and (b) make some friends.
I like the mining side but there is no reason to pursue it if half the mineral, and it is the most profitable half, are only available in lowsec.
Join a corp, move to 0.0, profit! Look ma, no "???"!
I like the industrial side, but there is no reason to pursue it if the market price for an item is less than the cost of the minerals that go in to it, let alone the cost of production.
Train reprocessing skills, by under-priced ships, reprocess them, sell materials, profit! Look, still no "???"!
I liked the idea of industrial and business sides of the game, but they have just become a way to get gear for PVP. Mining ships are under armed and under armored, unless one wants to give over most of the mining capabilities.
...join a corp, use an Orca, watch local. Or mine in a Rokh. It's a trade-off: greater income, at the expense of greater vulnerability. If you choose to fly a ship you can't afford to lose, then it's your fault when you inevitably lose it.
Freighters are completely unarmed in a universe with no law enforcement.
There is law enforcement; it's called CONCORD. Choose your mode of transport appropriately to your cargo. If you need to transport high-value items in high sec, use a collateralised courier contract or use the corp hangar on an Orca. If you need to transport bulk low-value items in high sec, use a freighter -- because it has ludicrous HP, suicide gankers won't attack it if they can't get enough profit to cover the ships they'll lose. If you need to transport items in low sec or 0.0, use a blockade runner and a scout (avoid transporting bulk low-value stuff around there, it's not worth it)! Since the insurance nerf, the likelihood of being suicided has gone way down, if you take basic precautions and don't AFK.
By the way, have you ever looked into the transportation trade side of the game? I don't think I saw a single transportation job that wasn't a setup to be ganked so one would lose both one's deposit, one's freight, and one's freighter.
"If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." Corps like Red Frog Freight are doing really well out of bulk transport, and they're always recruiting freighter pilots, so it clearly can be done.
CCP touts the multifaceted nature of the game, but it has turned into nothing but PVP.
When you click "Undock" you're consenting to PvP. It's what EVE's about. Even so, unless you do something blindingly stupid (like flying a cargo expanded cargo rigged officer fit Hulk during Hulkageddon, or undocking in a cyno Kestrel with 74 PLEX in the hold while wardecced), then it's dead easy to avoid PvP, and you'll never lose something you can't easily replace.
Any MP will tell you one well written letter in an envelope with a stamp is worth uncounted numbers of emails, because someone has bothered to communicate, and where one person takes action, many others think the same but cannot be bothered.
Sorry, but some of us painstakingly write carefully-thought-out e-mails to our MPs. There's a difference between a cut-and-paste job and an e-mail that's had effort put into it. Indiscriminately stopping constituents from e-mailing you is ridiculous in the 21st century.
a public official doesn't want to be contacted by the public? No one likes to hear the peasants out. Where's the story here?
No he doesn't want to be deluged in shit by a multitude of "campaign" sites. Quite understandable really. The public most MPs want to hear from are the people who elected them in their borough not some random lunatic cutting and pasting a form letter from a website.
What about some lunatic who elected them in their constituency cutting and pasting a form letter from a website?
Falcon 1 Flight 3 definitely did not make orbit. As you noted though, that still puts SpaceX on even footing in terms of 'vehicles lost' vs 'vehicles that made orbit'. And since they're 3 for 3 on the last 3 launches, and 1 for 1 on the newest design, I'd say that throwing around "50% success rate" is a little bit misleading.
I agree entirely.
Hauling metals down to Earth makes no sense.
Precious metals might be viable and were what I was thinking of. They currently have good price for the mass and are used in decent volume on Earth.
Find me an asteroid with significant coltan deposits, and I will show you viable space industry.
That marketese has put more rockets into the drink than it has into orbit.
Factually incorrect. SpaceX have launched six rockets, only the first two of which (Falcon I Flights 1 & 2) failed to make orbit. Falcon I Flight 3 was a partial failure. That makes it, at worst, a 50% success rate, which is hardly abysmal given that SpaceX launches cost less than half what their competitors charge.
You know perfectly well that I'm talking about copyright law.
Highly intelligent and well educated men and women don't understand copyright law?
Correct. I'm quite happy to admit that I don't understand all the ins-and-outs of the CPDA 1988 (as amended umpteen times) with its bizarre and eclectic selection of exceptions and special cases -- but I'm getting there slowly. Then I'll have to start on the case law.
If you define "highly intelligent" as "they can tie their own laces", and "well educated" as "passed kindergarten", then ok, we can agree. Otherwise, you're out to lunch.
No, I define a "highly intelligent" and "well educated" as someone who's graduated from a good university with a Honours degree. Much the same as the normally accepted definition.
You can discuss semantics with me all you like, but it won't change the laws. Nor should it, as long as we have a cash-based economy.
It's not semantics, it's highly relevant. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was writing his works, there was a cash-based economy without copyrights, but nevertheless he managed just fine, turning out some of the best music in history. See also Leonardo da Vinci, for instance. Copyrights are not property, and copyright infringement is not theft and is clearly distinguishable from theft.
That would be a fair rebuttal if we were discussing some obscure rule about underwater crocheting being forbidden at 11:35 on the 2nd of march during a full moon.
Strawman. You know perfectly well that I'm talking about copyright law. In my previous post I was referring to the people -- of all ages and all backgrounds -- who don't realise it's against the law to borrow their friends' CDs and copy them onto their portable media players. I meet them every day. And the people who think it's fine to install the same piece of software onto multiple computers, as long as it's from the original CD.
It doesn't really fly when we're talking about the concept of a nation being able to shut down organizations which blatantly violate theft laws.
Copyright infringement isn't theft. If I steal your car, you don't have your car any more. If I copy your car you still have it. How hard is it to understand the distinction?
No, you're just too stupid to understand the laws. I find that to be a common factor amongst anti-government, anti-capitalism, anti-corporatism, anti-anything-that-doesn't-say-"organic"-or-"revolution" fear-mongers. If you'd limit yourself to criticizing actual violations of laws, you'd look a lot less silly.
I know many very highly intelligent and extremely well-educated men and women who don't understand the law. This includes some of our members of parliament.
The law is too complicated for any person to fully understand even a small area of it without making it their full-time job. In today's world, the fact that "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" is a travesty.
I think we agree on the ultimate aims here, but private companies aren't ready to man-launch yet... Elon Musk has openly said he'll need hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies to get SpaceX's products man rated.
Don't forget that SpaceX has already developed and successfully launch two families of launch systems from scratch for less than half of the cost of the Ares-1X launch (which didn't actually contain any actual Ares-1 flight hardware).
At the moment, it seems that giving a couple of hundred million to Musk would be a far better use of it than frittering it away on the congressmen's bacon breakfast that is Constellation.
Man, that sucks, having to have an emergency meeting on a holiday weekend.
Firstly, July 1st is a Thursday. Secondly, the weekend of the 4th July is not a holiday weekend in the UK, which is where the British Computer Society is based.
That's not t say that some kind of accreditation service for software engineers / IT professionals is a bad thing but the BCS isn't that service. Anyone with a hundred quid to spend annually and some years in the industry would qualify for an MBCS, so what's the point of accreditation at all?
Considered the IET?
They also run on their own closed-circuit network, so good luck causing trouble without physical access or making yourself pretty obvious digging up the cables.
They also have fixed electromechanical failsafes. I think that most electrical engineers are sufficiently aware of the fact that computers go wrong not to put protection solely in the hands of software.
I saw liftoff taking place at T -0:00:02.
Yes, I was puzzled by that too. The rocket had clearly left the ground before the on-screen countdown timer reached zero.
I'm making a note here -- huge success!
Hopefully this will reinvigorate the US market for launch vehicles. The satellite-manufacturing spin-off company of the research centre where I work currently launches most if not all of its payloads on decommissioned Russian ICBMs. I hope that in a couple of years, SpaceX's stable of launchers will be a practical and economical alternative!
The Church is opposed to freedom of expression.
Wrong.
Doesn't that make you at best, a bad catholic?
No.
I mean, if you disagree with the church's or pope's interpretation of the bible in public, you're a heretic.
Yes. But I don't think any modern Catholic would argue that you shouldn't be free to choose to be a heretic, if you so wish. It's your immortal soul, not mine. I do of course reserve the right to disagree with you and possibly even to attempt to explain to you where you've gone wrong. ;-)
Kill catholics (a good idea in general)
Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to harm you? Last time I checked, I was spending large amounts of my time and money fighting hard to protect people's privacy and freedom of expression. Now you're calling for my death?
It also makes it considerably more difficult when a launch provider like SpaceX wants to sell launch services, which is a large part of why Russian and European launch providers are currently creaming US launch providers on the international market. For example, the following difficulty occurred when SpaceX's Falcon 1 was launching a Malaysian satellite:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=13078
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocket's upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
Just one of many examples, sadly. Unless Congress acts promptly to introduce some sanity into the ITAR provisions, I fear that ITAR is inevitably going to drive innovative and competitive launch providers like SpaceX out of business, and prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the US space industry.
Certainly not true. ITAR is export controlled only. Typically DoD stuff. The model being looked into will be that of procurement only. The government will no longer have any ownership of the systems. Just like government cars and trucks that are bought for every day use are assembled in Mexico/Canada from parts from China or wherever GM/Ford builds them. Oh the contract winning company may be US based, but that's where it stops. There is no protection for the workers underneath.
Oh, sure, this is entirely correct. Maybe I should apologise for calling you an idiot, despite your hideously misinformed opinions on the constitution of the SpaceX workforce and supply chain. :-P
But think about it this way. If you, the US taxpayer, have just spent a billion dollars on a set of instruments for use in orbit and have four of your best and brightest young people sitting on top of it, surely you'll want to make sure that you have the best performing and most reliable launcher money can buy?
If that can be sold to you by a company based in the US and doing all of its manufacturing and assembly in the US, so much the better. After all, this is exactly the type of very high tech project that your country still prides itself on. But given that the cost of the launch is a relatively small proportion of the cost of a space mission, but contributes a very large proportion of the risk, wouldn't it be reasonable to buy flights from the best provider available, whether based in the US or not, in order to minimize the risk to the taxpayer's investment in the equipment and personnel to be launched?
This all depends on how you perceive the US space programme. If you consider the missions to be a good in themselves (e.g. provision of high quality meteorological data, monitoring of high-altitude ash clouds from volcanos, measuring ground displacement and urban damage in the wake of an earthquake), weighing up only the results of each programme against its final budget, then you come to one conclusion. On the other hand, if you -- like several US Senators, apparently -- consider it most important that NASA is the mechanism for a large taxpayer subsidy towards jobs in the high-tech industries, then you'll come to another.
In this case, Commercial Space means Outsourced.
And, I ask, is this an inherently bad thing?
Parent is a complete idiot. Elon no longer has any involvement in PayPal. SpaceX's technology is completely covered by ITAR; I should know, because I considered applying for a job there and was told that, as a non-US citizen, I shouldn't even bother. The Falcon 9 is very much an American rocket built by Americans. There are indeed "no foreign nationals, no outsourced jobs."
It's unusual to hear someone praising ITAR. ITAR is the reason that non-US organisations generally don't use US launchers for their payloads -- they can't work closely with the launch provider, particularly with respect to the sort of detailed technical information that's often very important in ensuring payload-launcher compatibility. People I've spoken to in the space industry while at conferences in the US frequently bemoan the fact that ITAR heavily restricts their hiring practices, meaning that they often miss out on being able to employ top people.
ITAR is what's holding the US space programme back.