I find it sort of funny how the Texas delegation to Congress is now becoming very supportive of SpaceX and its activities. The Florida delegation also is no longer playing favorites and trying to at least be neutral with regards to the ULA-SpaceX disputes and PR battles. California has long been in the tank with SpaceX (especially Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who just happens to have the Hawthorn, CA plant in his district), so it isn't like SpaceX is without allies in Congress either.

SpaceX is spreading stuff to other districts, and it is helping out, including non-geeks who are angry that tax dollars are being spent to prop up ULA. give it time and ULA will really start to lose political capital in a hurry.

It was a secondary payload that was even capable of having its mission completed. The one glitch is that there was an outside chance (more like one in a hundred thousand possibility or something like that, but still a possibility) that by firing up the 2nd stage to deliver that secondary payload to its previously agreed to flight parameters that if subsequently there was a failure of the 2nd stage engine during that burn, the satellite and that 2nd stage could have potentially crashed into the International Space Station.

It was NASA that prevented SpaceX from completing that secondary payload burn. Admittedly if the first stage had worked perfectly without the loss of engine event that for most other rockets would have resulted in a complete mission failure (especially at that stage of the launch), SpaceX would have even avoided the problem with the ISS. I can also understand NASA's paranoia about the ISS, as a hundred billion dollar investment is definitely worth more than a mere satellite costing tens of millions, not to mention potential loss of life on the ISS. But to call this a failure on the part of SpaceX is just over the top and silly. If only all space related problems were this minor.

I think a flat out bribe is unlikely, but it is very likely that one of their campaign contributors (most notably ULA or its parent companies of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin) have gone to these congressmen with this list of complaints, pointing out the problems that SpaceX has had trying to get into space, and definitely blown those problems way out of proportion to those members of congress. They aren't tech geeks, but when a group of tech geeks from your district come into your office (that they can get at any time due to those previously mentioned campaign contributions) with a complaint that has a whole bunch of techno-geek language, they gloss over the other problems and simply think "jobs" and "re-election".

The campaign contributions really are a legalized form of bribing, but what can be done to change that?

It would be amazing if Lockheed-Martin simply developed an advanced attack fighter and offered it up for sale to any government who wanted it. The problem with the F-35 program is that it has precisely a single customer, the U.S. government. This is really a monopsony situation where potentially many people could sell stuff to the government, but there is only one buyer.

If, on the other hand, every state's Air National Guard had the option of spending their portion of their military budget as they saw fit (to give an example), at least there would be multiple customers potentially for this airplane and be assured that they could sell at least a few of them. Or if the government of America wasn't so paranoid about potential future enemies of America getting advanced aircraft (like how Howard Hughes designed the Japanese Zeros that bombed Pearl Harbor), they might have other customers there as well.

Luckily for SpaceX, they have other customers for their launch services. So much so that over half of their manifest is for non-government contracts, not to mention about half of their launches to date have also been for non-government customers too. That is what makes the situation with SpaceX so different, and why ULA is having a hard time trying to compete with SpaceX to the point they are encouraging congressmen to write silly letters like the one mentioned in the original post. The European Space Agency, explicitly Arianespace (the manufacturer of the ESA's launch fleet), is definitely in a panic trying to figure out how to compete against SpaceX and win back the customers now lost to SpaceX. If they don't change, the ESA will be stuck launching only payloads for European governments alone... but that is precisely the situation that ULA sits in right now in terms of only flying payloads for the U.S. government.

The question that needs to be asked though is if the money confiscated from citizens at gunpoint and run through government contractors, with noted and acknowledged corruption that exists for all governments no matter how hard people try to stop that corruption, is better spent through the government or if private individuals acting on their own self-interest are going to be far more productive with the economic resources at their disposal and simply making a better life for themselves with those resources.

I'm not talking billionaires or even millionaires. I'm talking ordinary people living very ordinary lives. Is it better that somebody buys a Nintendo Wii instead of sending that money to Washington DC to be used to build a tank instead? What about paying for an NSA computer that monitors your phone calls?

There certainly are some very intelligent people who might know more than a typical average citizen about how money could be spent, but is even a committee of the smartest people in the world about economics necessarily going to be predicting the future about what even the immediate needs if not future needs of ordinary people might be than simply the collective intelligence of those ordinary citizens? I argue that ordinary citizens usually get it right far more often than that select super-committee of very bright people, no matter their IQ, education, or experience. Your argument is that the smart people know better and that we are better off as slaves to those smart people.

History has shown that planned economies simply fail to predict future consumption needs very well, even with very good intentions. That is pretty much all you are saying when you are insisting that government spending should happen.

I'll admit there are some things that simply must be done by a government for the collective good of society. Maintaining the rule of law (meaning those who are weaker than average get protection from the government so they can be productive in doing things that brawn can't necessarily accomplish), enforcing contracts, resolving territorial disputes in a peaceful manner, and preventing outsiders to that society from subverting and taking over the society are all proper functions of government. The question that needs to be asked though is if some of the things currently being done by a government, any government, is better done by that government or simply left alone and handled by private citizens? That is the real question, and one you are not answering in your reply.

NASA engineers are intimately involved with the development, procurement, and more important.... the R&D that is going into the the development of the SLS.

The EELV is a total red herring to your argument because the EELV program is something the Air Force, not NASA, created. NASA doesn't have anything to do with EELV rockets except to use them on occasions for flying payloads into space.... payloads that were originally supposed to be launched by the Space Shuttle but couldn't because it was thought that launching these payloads wasn't worth risking a crew (and a roughly 2% chance per flight of total loss of crew).

It is also a huge oversimplification that SLS is being built by ATK. Yes, ATK is a major contractor for the SLS, but literally hundreds of other contractors are involved too. But that doesn't even scratch the surface of this lie you have said by saying "NASA doesn't build a damn thing".

The most important thing to note is that NASA, through Congressional appropriations, is paying for the development of SLS. That is not true for the Falcon 9. While some NASA funds have been used for getting the commercial transport services contract going as well as the commercial crew program, that is a fixed price seed money contract where SpaceX is required to provide the bulk of the funding. More importantly, if there are any cost overruns, delays, or other problems... especially of a financial nature... SpaceX is required to take care of the difference from its own investors and cash reserves. If the SLS gets delayed by another decade and costs another $10 billion, that will be entirely paid for by taxpayers, not ULA, ATK, Aerojet, or any other contractor.

I think that difference is important, and something that is totally missed by your comment.

I currently have a network router that has similar capabilities. If you can download some firmware and flash it into a device for an update, some malware can certainly do the same thing without your permission.

If on the other hand you need a serial cable of some sort that as a completely separate port for updating the firmware that is code-wise unaddressable from the CPU, it is much harder to do that kind of update. It doesn't stop a co-worker from pulling a prank or somebody with physical access to the computer introducing malware, but it definitely is much harder. Still, if you have physical access to a computer you can do all sorts of other mischief that is harder to do through pure software processes.

Most hardware is moving in the direction of internal software updates though, where the NASA thing isn't really all that remarkable and more of the rule rather than the exception.

You write this response as if Windows XP has no market share at all, and that somehow software written for XP won't run on any newer operating systems or computers.

We aren't talking about something written in floating-point BASIC running on ProDOS 1.0 Surprisingly, emulators to run even that software exist on modern computers, so even that can be used.

There is the OpenBTS software & equipment if you want to seriously get into hacking cell phone networks. The authors of that software have even used it for setting up a cell phone network at the Burning Man festivals. They chose this venue in part because being in the middle of nowhere that the Burning Man stuff happens also was unlicensed to commercial cell phone providers, thus they could get experimental FCC licenses for their project and not interfere with existing networks.

In theory, somebody could set up their own "pirate cell station" and have a whole lot of semi-legal or flat out illegal fun with this equipment. It does cost a few thousand dollars to get the rig set up, which is why more teens likely don't go playing with the technology more.

On the positive side, these guys have been setting up cell networks in pretty remote places like sub-Saharan Africa and some Pacific islands to provide people with cell phone coverage that otherwise couldn't afford to have this kind of luxury. Commercial equivalents to this equipment are at least 10x or 100x the price.

One example of some hardware that is really trying to be "open hardware all the way down" is RepRap. While not completely successful, the goal of the project is to eventually have the hardware build itself. As an open source project, if they are successful, will be quite an accomplishment. Fab@Home is another very similar project with similar goals and an open source hardware implementation. I'm personally partial to Fab@Home, but they are both worthy projects in their own right.

The Open Cores Project also tries to encourage such total vertical integration of hardware, but it is very slow in getting stuff going right now. I agree that "one example" of completely open source hardware (where all technical drawings, specs, parts, and everything from the raw plastic & metal parts) is simply not done at the moment.

True, but it would take some sort of hardware port to access the programming in the device and be capable of performing that sort of extremely low-level programming to rewrite the chip. I agree with you that it isn't impossible, but to be able to not just detect to also explicitly exploit that vector from much higher level protocols would be very tricky.

This sort of remote reworking of a FPGA was done with the Spirit & Opportunity rovers that are currently on Mars, where NASA (specifically the Jet Propulsion Lab) uploaded some new firmware through the Deep Space Network to another planet. If you can do that on Mars, having a home desktop computer reload new firmware as some sort of malware is trivial by comparison.

While this is good, not all open software is restricted to just Linux or Linux-based software.

I'm pretty certain that any attempt to do precisely what you are asking for here is going to be a pretty potent driver for significant AI research, if nothing else. There are some chat-bots which do a pretty good job of simulating a lewd conversation. All you are asking is for that to be coupled with robotics like Disney's anamatronics for a Las Vegas theme park.

Maybe Westworld isn't so far away after all. One of the scenes in that film which I found sort of funny at the time was when the protagonist took a couple of whores in the Saloon up to a room and tried to bed them... only to discover they weren't completely anatomically correct.

We know so little about what self-awareness, intelligence, or sentience actually is that every attempt to simulate the concept is usually met with dead ends in terms of research. There is some usefulness that comes from legitimate AI research, but at this point it is parlor tricks and a few novel programming concepts that have some usefulness in a practical sense.

The only thing that is fairly certain is that somehow a raw physical process is involved with establishing consciousness. Some real effort has been done with trying to understand the physical process from which neural cells interact with each other, and it is fairly certain that the brain is a key component (not the only one though) of what establishes thoughts and reason. Still, there is a long way to go from being able to mathematically describe a neuron to being able to completely simulate, much less actually implement consciousness in the sense that we see with human children emerging after they are born.

You can say that ocean tides act with what apparently is some intelligent behavior, yet if you really study the phenomena it turns out that it isn't. Sometimes complex behavior comes from some very simple rules, sometimes it doesn't. Don't confuse those simple rules with actual intelligence, which is precisely what you are doing here. Even assuming that somehow we could almost completely duplicate the nervous system of a human in electronics, I seriously doubt it would be something you could simply flip on a switch and have working within minutes of starting up the computer.

Nice try. If you want to continue the Soviet era propaganda that was trying to convince the west that they really were one big happy family and that the Soviet Union was just as friendly to each other as the European Union is right now, continue that daydream. It should be telling as soon as the opportunity to bolt out from under Russian control, that the former Soviet Republics all left. Heck, you even have admitted the "-stan" republics were quick to expel the Russians as soon as they could. This would have been unthinkable during the Soviet era.

Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, most western politicians and news media still referred to that part of the world in general as "Russia", at least in terms of the primary opponent of America during the Cold War. That started to change by the 1970's, but by then it really didn't matter.

Yes, there were some people of talent who were able to rise to power like Stalin who came to power in spite of their ethnic background. That doesn't stop it from being an exception rather than the typical situation. BTW, Nikita Khrushchev, while his ancestry certainly was Ukrainian, was born in Russia and considered himself to be Russian. It does get messy though so it isn't nearly so clear... but the Russian culture certainly pervaded everything that happened in the Soviet Union.