Its because there are certain American's (who happen to be a large voting group) who confuse the idea of a competitive market with laissez faire capitalism.
This leads to the twisted logic that because competitive, free markets bring efficiency, lower prices, and innovation, any regulation of private enterprises is bad, even if there is barely a market due to government sanctioned monopolies.
ISPs are government granted monopolies in most places, and thus need to be regulated to protect the consumer.
Free markets and competition are great (I'm registered Republican even), but internet infrastructure tends to fall under the category of "natural monopoly," which means that some variety of regulation is necessary, whether it be net neutrality, or my preferred option, enforced line-sharing.
Sadly this is an example of a reasonable wariness of regulation transforming into an unreasonable knee-jerk reaction that any form of regulation is automatically bad.
I'm an engineer at JPL and of course they define where were going. The scientists are our most direct customers. Most decisions we make are a trade against how effectively we can perform the science mission.
Granted, as with any customer relationship, it can be a bit adversarial, since they expect all that we do to be easy, and we don't tend to think losing a day of science to make sure we hit the right orbit is a big deal. But that's what happens when you have smart people with different perspectives working on a complex project.
And it's not like the decadal survey is a ridiculous wish list, it's a definition of priorities with descope options and contingincies for different funding situations. I cant say I'm not a bit disappointed we won't get to do a Mars Sample Return mission coming up, but that's the way it goes. Venus or Europa or Uranus will provide interesting challenges still.
From what I gather, it would be far more unstable for us to have 50-100 nukes than the huge number we have right now.
The problem is that there are only 2 countries with very large numbers of weapons, while a lot of countries have ~100. The two-party balance is theoretically stable (or at least it appears to be given the past 60 years), while a multi-party balance leaves a lot of room for alliances and power plays that could start nukes flying. The most dangerous part of a 'Road to zero' nuclear reduction plan is the time when everyone has a few hundred.
The other problem is that with ~100s of weapons, it is conceivable for a country to 'win' a nuclear war, since it would be conceivable to eliminate the enemies capabilities while inflicting serious damage. However, with the ridiculous number we have now, there is simply no way to attack the other country and keep from being wiped out yourself.
Or at least thats the theory. I'm no expert on the matter though, I just learned from my roommate who is in grad school for these kind of things.
In some ways it would be harder (due to the lack of local water), but in other ways much easier. The equatorial region can be reached from any orbit, while the poles require a polar orbit. Anything coming from Earth is going to have an easier time getting into low-inclination orbits, making movement back and forth more feasible for an equatorial base.
As far as what they'd do, the earliest stages would mostly involve simply setting up the base and keeping it running. After that you can focus on science and exploration. Following this, my hope is that real settlement, with real industry (mining?) and people simply living, (agriculture, service, export) -- but of course that depends on a lot of what-ifs and how successful the first two stages are.
Plenty of experiments rely on microgravity -- as an aerospace engineer most of my experience has been in testing devices for use in space, but I know theres a lot of biology and materials work done as well.
There is certainly a market. Consider that Zero G Corp and the old Vomet Comet got plenty of research done, and there you were stuck with less than a minute of microgravity at a time. Suborbital flights are a midpoint between parabolic flights and orbital flight both in terms of cost and time.
Also, I know that another point of research that there's a lot of interest in isn't so much for the microgravity environment, but that the vehicles are travelling through the least understood parts of the atmosphere. This provides a great opportunity to learn about the upper atmosphere.
I realize that. In fact my second sentence states as much. I was simply correcting the misconception that the distance matters in the same way the size does for an occultation method.
The distance from the star doesn't matter much for occultation methods. The difference between the Earth orbital radius and the Jupiter orbital radius from tens or hundreds of light years is negligible. The place where the radius does make a difference is in the time to repeat an observation. To get the orbital period of a planet in an Earthlike orbit will take around a year, while a jupiterlike orbit would require 16 years. The "wobble" method that found the first planets is the one that is really sensitive to hot Jupiters.
Also, Kepler was specifically sized (and placed above the atmosphere) to be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars.
As you point out, the orbit plane is a problem, but often these things can be de-biased. If you assumed that ecliptic plane distributions were uniform it would be easy to extrapolate Kepler statistics to get a good estimate of the general population. While that uniform distribution is probably not true (I just don't know), a combination of models and distributions of ecliptic plane angles from other detection methods may give enough information to get a good estimate. The point isn't to detect every planet out there, but to get an estimate of the total number and distribution.
Why even send the fuel? Build it from the environment once you get there. A phased array antenna could avoid the need for a de-spun bus on the vehicle as well.
Of course, the really hard technical part (not to diminish the political and psychological challenges) is the landing on the surface. There is no 'best practice' for Mars EDL (Entry/Descent/Landing), and landing something big enough to hold people is very much an open problem.
I'm pretty sure Elon knows Zubrin. Its really a quite small community, and I've been to conferences where they are both there. And I'm pretty sure they agree on a lot of things, including the desire to extend a human presence to that planet.
We have ways to get to Mars just fine. An Atlas V 541 is enough to get the massive MSL Curiosity Rover there, and a measly Atlas V 401 is plenty for the Maven orbiter coming after that.
The hard part is getting back. I imagine grabbing resources from the surface and air to create rocket fuel while performing its mission will be the right way to go.
A Mars Sample Return is where the Mars program is headed, and we have a roadmap to get there. And it will force the development of In-Situ Resource Development (ISRU), while will be of huge benefit to all future manned and unmanned programs.
I hear this all the time whenever this comes up, but quite frankly, there are a lot of good new albums out there. Its just that they're not the 'blockbusters' of years yore, and as such are harder to find. Personally I like rock with a folk twinge... or maybe folk with a rock twinge, however you want to swing it. Also, plain old singer/songwriters with soft hearts and a nice voices. Some great *whole* albums from the past 5 years that I like are:
Bishop Allen - The Broken String Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound Jakob Dylan - Women and Country She & Him - Volume 1 Metric - Fantasies Ben Lee - Ripe The Weepies - Hideaway Ingrid Michaelson - Everybody Ben Folds - Way To Normal Train - Save Me San Francisco (Yes, its super cheesy and poppy, but I love it nonetheless)
Now, there is no accounting for taste, and I'm sure many of you would feel tortured to listen to these a lot. However, I'm sure most people could find new stuff they liked if they knew where to look.
Quite frankly, more than anything else, the music industry needs to accept the so-called long tail, stop relying solely on broad appeal (though Gaga and Ke$ha will always have their place) and learn to spend less but on a lot more markets. Streaming radio helps with that tremendously, particularly customized stations like Pandora, and should be embraced. Change is hard, and while I don't necessarily sympathize with the labels, I understand where they're coming from. Hopefully they come to their senses though, just as they did with music DRM, because that will benefit us all.
Presumably the navigation data is filtered intelligently. A talented undergrad can write a decent Kalman filter, so I'd assume the one Google uses is decent also.
Taking the precision into account, knowing that cars move in straight lines and curves (not jaggies), and that the velocities change relatively smoothly, you can get a much better estimate of the velocity than simply taking the difference of two positions and dividing the time. It won't account for constant biases, but those won't affect your velocity estimate anyway.
14% of buyers accounting for 56% of business sounds pretty normal. They're called enthusiasts. And I would bet a lot of that 14% probably do a lot of free streaming too.
I'm guessing that I'm one of that 14% (I buy a new album every 2 weeks-ish lately), at least in the past three or four months. The main reason for that is that I started a job that involves a lot of sitting at my desk, and i listen to a lot of pandora.
The market is changing, diversifying and reducing the power of "blockbuster" artists, and that's scary for these companies. However, streaming services like pandora make it *easier* to make money off of a diversifying music market, by making it easier to find new music even as tastes narrow. Hopefully theyll figure that out sooner rather than later.
There are two different components of Microsoft Office:
1. The applications. Popular software that I personally feel are the best of the breed for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets. While I prefer LaTeX for documents and Matlab or Python/Scipy/Numpy for math (rather than spreadsheets), I've always had much better experiences with MS Office than Open/LibreOffice. Other options are nice but are less featureful (part of what makes them nice of course). I haven't really tried the Apple options though.
2. The formats. Obfuscated formats justified as standards by bribing the appropriate organizations (ISO). By being de facto as well as de jure standards, MS Office cannot easily be competed with, since there will always be that one thing (for me equations mostly) that never translate to other software.
This move attacks the second aspect of Office, by offering an alternative format with real advantages. This second aspect is the truly insidious (and dare I say, evil) part, and I would be glad to see it go, even if I would likely still use the MS Office applications where possible (i.e. not Linux) in an ODF-dominated world.
Orion+Ares 1 wasn't going to be finished until 2017 at the earliest.
The first test-article of Dragon has flown, and its launch vehicle (the long pole of the system) has flown twice. Everything I hear about the Boeing offering is going well, and will probably be on a Delta IV (a flying vehicle). Orion is even still alive, and Lockheed is planning to fly a version on an Atlas V (again flying).
No one is ready to go to the moon yet, but developing a real multi-supplier infrastructure to get to LEO is a critical first step. Even more importantly, if the next administration changes plans again, the infrastructure will remain in place and make it easy to do whatever the powers that be decide.
Tempel-1 was the comet that the Deep Impact probe visited (and impacted) on July 4 2006. So this is a different spacecraft (Stardust-NExT) returning to that same comet after its close approach to the sun. The fact that its a return is interesting because we've never seen how a comet changes after perihelion (where all the volatility peaks), or in fact seen any indication of how comets change at any time. Since they are the most dynamic bodies in the solar system, this is highly valuable science.
You're probably right, I hadn't thought much about the magnitudes, and the comet is highly elliptical and inside the orbit of Earth so its going extremely fast.
I was just basing my opinion on the fact that the JPL navigation system will default to the solar system barycenter if nothing else, so that might be where the number came from. However, a moment's thought tells me that of course the velocity would be queried with respect to the comet and that would be the number they quote.
Did your company do the work involved with keeping the spacecraft attached to the asteroid while you drilled as well? If so how did you go about it?
In grad school we looked at a similar project, and ended up abandoning the idea because the gravity is so low and we couldn't find a good way to attach without a really strong impact or using a chemical laser to burrow into the surface upon arrival. Each of those we thought were too risky to go with.
I'm not sure, but its probably quoted in an inertial frame relative to the solar system barycenter. However, its conceivable that it could be quoting the relative velocity of one object to the other (i.e. the distance between the two of them was changing at a rate of 10.6 km/s).
Most things nearby each other in Earth orbit are in similar orbits and thus have fairly low relative speeds. However, if you have polar or retrograde vehicles passing near conjuction with more typical near equatorial objects, then the typical LEO orbital velocity of ~7.8 km/s could produce similar speeds. However, in those cases you're not trying to take pictures of one with the other so it doesn't make much difference.
80 vs. 120 micronewtons isn't too bad. If by 'sensitivity' you mean the expected standard deviation for measurement noise, and assuming such noise is roughly gaussian, then you can almost achieve the precision of a silicon sensor by using two paper sensors and averaging the results (120/sqrt(2) = 84.9).
Throw together 25 of them (for a total cost of $1.00) and you can achieve 24 micronewton 1-sigma precision.
Also, Re: "Liberty," if you read the press release it refers to ESA as specifically NATO-alligned. I guess that has a better connotation than simply being European.
Clearly they're trying to play politics here and play up shallow patriotism to win over some in congress rather than simply compete on technical merit. Par for the course for ATK.
The nannies are already involved. In most locations cable is the one technologically superior option, and the operators have been granted monopolies by the state (natural monopoly kind of thing).
Alternatives exist, but they have disadvantages. DSL is slower, WiMax/4G/etc. are nice but tend to have caps, Satellite is expensive and has major latency problems, and fiber is costly to deploy so doesn't have significant penetration.
If you consider the cable companies as agents of the state (since their monopolies are sanctioned by the state), then the enforcement of network neutrality is simply a codification of first amendment rights. If you consider them as monopolies than its a pre-emptive description of how anti-trust laws will be applied to ISPs.
I admit, I think Net Neutrality has its issues: it limits innovations in consumer-friendly QOS implementations, and who knows what else. However, I'd rather have that than let the cable companies stop new business models from growing on the internet (I'm sure Comcast is salivating to be able to legally crush Netflix through 'helpful' throttling). A better solution would be to treat internet providers as common carriers and enforce line-sharing, create a real market and let the invisible hand do its thing. But if we can't do that, net neutrality is the best way to keep the internet as the dynamic force it is today.
DoD has always been intricately linked to NASA efforts. While, the separation of civilian and military space programs was an important policy decision by Eisenhower, it was never completely separated. Doing so, particularly at the infrastructure level, would have been unnecessarily expensive and inefficient.
DoD launch requirements are the reason we have robust and fairly reliable EELV services, which are great for NASA as they insulate NASA's unmanned programs from the drama associated with the shuttle program, and give the manned program a good option for the future of the manned program. However, they're also responsible for the huge wings on the shuttle (USAF wanted cross-track landing capability for military operations), and the continued use of solid rocket motors for the shuttle (since this subsidizes military missile production). Sometimes its good, and sometimes its bad, but having military concerns involved in NASA is nothing new.
What is new here is that DoD is getting behind the idea of encouraging competition and market-based reforms within the space-related portion of the defense industry. And this does warm my heart since these policies will enable a capable and flexible space program without Apollo-level funding.
Slashdot Mirror
Its because there are certain American's (who happen to be a large voting group) who confuse the idea of a competitive market with laissez faire capitalism.
This leads to the twisted logic that because competitive, free markets bring efficiency, lower prices, and innovation, any regulation of private enterprises is bad, even if there is barely a market due to government sanctioned monopolies.
ISPs are government granted monopolies in most places, and thus need to be regulated to protect the consumer.
Free markets and competition are great (I'm registered Republican even), but internet infrastructure tends to fall under the category of "natural monopoly," which means that some variety of regulation is necessary, whether it be net neutrality, or my preferred option, enforced line-sharing.
Sadly this is an example of a reasonable wariness of regulation transforming into an unreasonable knee-jerk reaction that any form of regulation is automatically bad.
I'm an engineer at JPL and of course they define where were going. The scientists are our most direct customers. Most decisions we make are a trade against how effectively we can perform the science mission.
Granted, as with any customer relationship, it can be a bit adversarial, since they expect all that we do to be easy, and we don't tend to think losing a day of science to make sure we hit the right orbit is a big deal. But that's what happens when you have smart people with different perspectives working on a complex project.
And it's not like the decadal survey is a ridiculous wish list, it's a definition of priorities with descope options and contingincies for different funding situations. I cant say I'm not a bit disappointed we won't get to do a Mars Sample Return mission coming up, but that's the way it goes. Venus or Europa or Uranus will provide interesting challenges still.
From what I gather, it would be far more unstable for us to have 50-100 nukes than the huge number we have right now.
The problem is that there are only 2 countries with very large numbers of weapons, while a lot of countries have ~100. The two-party balance is theoretically stable (or at least it appears to be given the past 60 years), while a multi-party balance leaves a lot of room for alliances and power plays that could start nukes flying. The most dangerous part of a 'Road to zero' nuclear reduction plan is the time when everyone has a few hundred.
The other problem is that with ~100s of weapons, it is conceivable for a country to 'win' a nuclear war, since it would be conceivable to eliminate the enemies capabilities while inflicting serious damage. However, with the ridiculous number we have now, there is simply no way to attack the other country and keep from being wiped out yourself.
Or at least thats the theory. I'm no expert on the matter though, I just learned from my roommate who is in grad school for these kind of things.
In some ways it would be harder (due to the lack of local water), but in other ways much easier. The equatorial region can be reached from any orbit, while the poles require a polar orbit. Anything coming from Earth is going to have an easier time getting into low-inclination orbits, making movement back and forth more feasible for an equatorial base.
As far as what they'd do, the earliest stages would mostly involve simply setting up the base and keeping it running. After that you can focus on science and exploration. Following this, my hope is that real settlement, with real industry (mining?) and people simply living, (agriculture, service, export) -- but of course that depends on a lot of what-ifs and how successful the first two stages are.
Plenty of experiments rely on microgravity -- as an aerospace engineer most of my experience has been in testing devices for use in space, but I know theres a lot of biology and materials work done as well.
There is certainly a market. Consider that Zero G Corp and the old Vomet Comet got plenty of research done, and there you were stuck with less than a minute of microgravity at a time. Suborbital flights are a midpoint between parabolic flights and orbital flight both in terms of cost and time.
Also, I know that another point of research that there's a lot of interest in isn't so much for the microgravity environment, but that the vehicles are travelling through the least understood parts of the atmosphere. This provides a great opportunity to learn about the upper atmosphere.
I realize that. In fact my second sentence states as much. I was simply correcting the misconception that the distance matters in the same way the size does for an occultation method.
The distance from the star doesn't matter much for occultation methods. The difference between the Earth orbital radius and the Jupiter orbital radius from tens or hundreds of light years is negligible. The place where the radius does make a difference is in the time to repeat an observation. To get the orbital period of a planet in an Earthlike orbit will take around a year, while a jupiterlike orbit would require 16 years. The "wobble" method that found the first planets is the one that is really sensitive to hot Jupiters.
Also, Kepler was specifically sized (and placed above the atmosphere) to be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars.
As you point out, the orbit plane is a problem, but often these things can be de-biased. If you assumed that ecliptic plane distributions were uniform it would be easy to extrapolate Kepler statistics to get a good estimate of the general population. While that uniform distribution is probably not true (I just don't know), a combination of models and distributions of ecliptic plane angles from other detection methods may give enough information to get a good estimate. The point isn't to detect every planet out there, but to get an estimate of the total number and distribution.
Why even send the fuel? Build it from the environment once you get there. A phased array antenna could avoid the need for a de-spun bus on the vehicle as well.
Of course, the really hard technical part (not to diminish the political and psychological challenges) is the landing on the surface. There is no 'best practice' for Mars EDL (Entry/Descent/Landing), and landing something big enough to hold people is very much an open problem.
I'm pretty sure Elon knows Zubrin. Its really a quite small community, and I've been to conferences where they are both there. And I'm pretty sure they agree on a lot of things, including the desire to extend a human presence to that planet.
I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Huh?
We have ways to get to Mars just fine. An Atlas V 541 is enough to get the massive MSL Curiosity Rover there, and a measly Atlas V 401 is plenty for the Maven orbiter coming after that.
The hard part is getting back. I imagine grabbing resources from the surface and air to create rocket fuel while performing its mission will be the right way to go.
A Mars Sample Return is where the Mars program is headed, and we have a roadmap to get there. And it will force the development of In-Situ Resource Development (ISRU), while will be of huge benefit to all future manned and unmanned programs.
I hear this all the time whenever this comes up, but quite frankly, there are a lot of good new albums out there. Its just that they're not the 'blockbusters' of years yore, and as such are harder to find. Personally I like rock with a folk twinge... or maybe folk with a rock twinge, however you want to swing it. Also, plain old singer/songwriters with soft hearts and a nice voices. Some great *whole* albums from the past 5 years that I like are:
Bishop Allen - The Broken String
Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound
Jakob Dylan - Women and Country
She & Him - Volume 1
Metric - Fantasies
Ben Lee - Ripe
The Weepies - Hideaway
Ingrid Michaelson - Everybody
Ben Folds - Way To Normal
Train - Save Me San Francisco (Yes, its super cheesy and poppy, but I love it nonetheless)
Now, there is no accounting for taste, and I'm sure many of you would feel tortured to listen to these a lot. However, I'm sure most people could find new stuff they liked if they knew where to look.
Quite frankly, more than anything else, the music industry needs to accept the so-called long tail, stop relying solely on broad appeal (though Gaga and Ke$ha will always have their place) and learn to spend less but on a lot more markets. Streaming radio helps with that tremendously, particularly customized stations like Pandora, and should be embraced. Change is hard, and while I don't necessarily sympathize with the labels, I understand where they're coming from. Hopefully they come to their senses though, just as they did with music DRM, because that will benefit us all.
Presumably the navigation data is filtered intelligently. A talented undergrad can write a decent Kalman filter, so I'd assume the one Google uses is decent also.
Taking the precision into account, knowing that cars move in straight lines and curves (not jaggies), and that the velocities change relatively smoothly, you can get a much better estimate of the velocity than simply taking the difference of two positions and dividing the time. It won't account for constant biases, but those won't affect your velocity estimate anyway.
14% of buyers accounting for 56% of business sounds pretty normal. They're called enthusiasts. And I would bet a lot of that 14% probably do a lot of free streaming too.
I'm guessing that I'm one of that 14% (I buy a new album every 2 weeks-ish lately), at least in the past three or four months. The main reason for that is that I started a job that involves a lot of sitting at my desk, and i listen to a lot of pandora.
The market is changing, diversifying and reducing the power of "blockbuster" artists, and that's scary for these companies. However, streaming services like pandora make it *easier* to make money off of a diversifying music market, by making it easier to find new music even as tastes narrow. Hopefully theyll figure that out sooner rather than later.
There are two different components of Microsoft Office:
1. The applications. Popular software that I personally feel are the best of the breed for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets. While I prefer LaTeX for documents and Matlab or Python/Scipy/Numpy for math (rather than spreadsheets), I've always had much better experiences with MS Office than Open/LibreOffice. Other options are nice but are less featureful (part of what makes them nice of course). I haven't really tried the Apple options though.
2. The formats. Obfuscated formats justified as standards by bribing the appropriate organizations (ISO). By being de facto as well as de jure standards, MS Office cannot easily be competed with, since there will always be that one thing (for me equations mostly) that never translate to other software.
This move attacks the second aspect of Office, by offering an alternative format with real advantages. This second aspect is the truly insidious (and dare I say, evil) part, and I would be glad to see it go, even if I would likely still use the MS Office applications where possible (i.e. not Linux) in an ODF-dominated world.
Orion+Ares 1 wasn't going to be finished until 2017 at the earliest.
The first test-article of Dragon has flown, and its launch vehicle (the long pole of the system) has flown twice. Everything I hear about the Boeing offering is going well, and will probably be on a Delta IV (a flying vehicle). Orion is even still alive, and Lockheed is planning to fly a version on an Atlas V (again flying).
No one is ready to go to the moon yet, but developing a real multi-supplier infrastructure to get to LEO is a critical first step. Even more importantly, if the next administration changes plans again, the infrastructure will remain in place and make it easy to do whatever the powers that be decide.
Tempel-1 was the comet that the Deep Impact probe visited (and impacted) on July 4 2006. So this is a different spacecraft (Stardust-NExT) returning to that same comet after its close approach to the sun. The fact that its a return is interesting because we've never seen how a comet changes after perihelion (where all the volatility peaks), or in fact seen any indication of how comets change at any time. Since they are the most dynamic bodies in the solar system, this is highly valuable science.
You're probably right, I hadn't thought much about the magnitudes, and the comet is highly elliptical and inside the orbit of Earth so its going extremely fast.
I was just basing my opinion on the fact that the JPL navigation system will default to the solar system barycenter if nothing else, so that might be where the number came from. However, a moment's thought tells me that of course the velocity would be queried with respect to the comet and that would be the number they quote.
Sorry for the misinformation.
Did your company do the work involved with keeping the spacecraft attached to the asteroid while you drilled as well? If so how did you go about it?
In grad school we looked at a similar project, and ended up abandoning the idea because the gravity is so low and we couldn't find a good way to attach without a really strong impact or using a chemical laser to burrow into the surface upon arrival. Each of those we thought were too risky to go with.
7.6 km x 4.9 km. So somewhere in between a baseball stadium and Hawaii.
A small town may be the best 'library of congress' to use.
I'm not sure, but its probably quoted in an inertial frame relative to the solar system barycenter. However, its conceivable that it could be quoting the relative velocity of one object to the other (i.e. the distance between the two of them was changing at a rate of 10.6 km/s).
Most things nearby each other in Earth orbit are in similar orbits and thus have fairly low relative speeds. However, if you have polar or retrograde vehicles passing near conjuction with more typical near equatorial objects, then the typical LEO orbital velocity of ~7.8 km/s could produce similar speeds. However, in those cases you're not trying to take pictures of one with the other so it doesn't make much difference.
80 vs. 120 micronewtons isn't too bad. If by 'sensitivity' you mean the expected standard deviation for measurement noise, and assuming such noise is roughly gaussian, then you can almost achieve the precision of a silicon sensor by using two paper sensors and averaging the results (120/sqrt(2) = 84.9).
Throw together 25 of them (for a total cost of $1.00) and you can achieve 24 micronewton 1-sigma precision.
Also, Re: "Liberty," if you read the press release it refers to ESA as specifically NATO-alligned. I guess that has a better connotation than simply being European.
Clearly they're trying to play politics here and play up shallow patriotism to win over some in congress rather than simply compete on technical merit. Par for the course for ATK.
The nannies are already involved. In most locations cable is the one technologically superior option, and the operators have been granted monopolies by the state (natural monopoly kind of thing).
Alternatives exist, but they have disadvantages. DSL is slower, WiMax/4G/etc. are nice but tend to have caps, Satellite is expensive and has major latency problems, and fiber is costly to deploy so doesn't have significant penetration.
If you consider the cable companies as agents of the state (since their monopolies are sanctioned by the state), then the enforcement of network neutrality is simply a codification of first amendment rights. If you consider them as monopolies than its a pre-emptive description of how anti-trust laws will be applied to ISPs.
I admit, I think Net Neutrality has its issues: it limits innovations in consumer-friendly QOS implementations, and who knows what else. However, I'd rather have that than let the cable companies stop new business models from growing on the internet (I'm sure Comcast is salivating to be able to legally crush Netflix through 'helpful' throttling). A better solution would be to treat internet providers as common carriers and enforce line-sharing, create a real market and let the invisible hand do its thing. But if we can't do that, net neutrality is the best way to keep the internet as the dynamic force it is today.
DoD has always been intricately linked to NASA efforts. While, the separation of civilian and military space programs was an important policy decision by Eisenhower, it was never completely separated. Doing so, particularly at the infrastructure level, would have been unnecessarily expensive and inefficient.
DoD launch requirements are the reason we have robust and fairly reliable EELV services, which are great for NASA as they insulate NASA's unmanned programs from the drama associated with the shuttle program, and give the manned program a good option for the future of the manned program. However, they're also responsible for the huge wings on the shuttle (USAF wanted cross-track landing capability for military operations), and the continued use of solid rocket motors for the shuttle (since this subsidizes military missile production). Sometimes its good, and sometimes its bad, but having military concerns involved in NASA is nothing new.
What is new here is that DoD is getting behind the idea of encouraging competition and market-based reforms within the space-related portion of the defense industry. And this does warm my heart since these policies will enable a capable and flexible space program without Apollo-level funding.