I'm glad to know that you are so cognizant of the future that you can possibly anticipate that nobody in the future will possibly develop any sort of technique or capability for capturing or restoring intelligences and personalities of those who currently are alive, may have been in the past, or will be in the future.

That is the kind of prophecy that really requires some sort of religious faith.

I'm not asserting that such technology will ever be developed, but it is silly to think it could never happen too.

I would tend to disagree with your assertion. There is something a little different in terms of a soul, or self-awareness, or however you want to describe that thing which is an intelligence. It is more than merely a pile of facts and data.

While the physical structure which is me is certainly a pile of data stored as DNA and developed over time that is my lifetime and the various environments I have lived in, not to mention my memories, there is much more to what is "me" than just that physical structure and data. There is also much more to "you" as well.

This is BTW one of my largest complaints about those who talk about artificial intelligence being something other than a bunch of tools which mimic but never achieve actual intelligence. Those who claim self-aware computers are just around the corner and a few years or decades from being developed don't have a clue as to what actual intelligence involved. This includes those who try to make claims as to how big of a computer must be to have human-like intelligence.

Data without that intelligence is meaningless, which I guess is the point I was trying to make. Yes, that thing which is "me" or my children for that matter does represent a huge pile of data, but I am more than just that data.

I wish the internet was any good at preserving information. In reality, I have lost far more data to network servers, including some rather important information, than anything I've ever lost from moves, water damage, or even fire. As a medium of information exchange it works really good, but it does a damn lousy job of preserving data for more than a few years. It is also odd what information does get preserved, as some things sort of stick around and persist for a very long time, while other stuff goes away... and I can't predict at the moment which kind of data will persist in terms of content I've generated.

The only kind of information that I've been able to preserve on the internet for certain is stuff that I am very active in preserving. It really doesn't get saved in multiple locations though.

It would help to know a little bit of his history though. Both Tesla and SpaceX were at several points in the history of those companies within a week or two of going bankrupt. Both companies had some real struggles. SpaceX in particular was in really bad shape after the failure of the third Falcon 1. If that fourth rocket had not been successful, that company would not exist today. Similarly Tesla was falling apart as a company when the transmission for the Roadster wasn't working (at about the same time SpaceX was having problems). Deep cuts and firing a whole bunch of people at Tesla including the company president were sort of needed.

In other words, it isn't hyperbole, it is simply fact. Elon Musk was just a couple of weeks from going bankrupt. He took risks and lucked out.

The only proven method of preserving information is to duplicate that information and spread it out over a wide geographical area... the larger the area the better it is. Better yet, if you can provide religious rationale for preserving that information it tends to survive for even longer periods of time (which is precisely what kept the ancient Greek literature preserved... by religious fanatics who wanted to be able to understand the words of their messiah).

What gets that information duplicated is by having people there to perform the duplication and have a need for that information, hence why Elon Musk's proposal totally makes sense. How else are you proposing to safeguard information then?

Duplicating data and sending it to random places in the universe is counter productive and pointless too. Sending data to people who can use that information and add to the database makes much more sense.

The method Elon Musk is choosing to do it is to drop the price for getting to Mars so cheap that anybody from the Earth who wants to get there can. Musk claims he can send people to Mars for about $500k per passenger. While that may seem like a whole lot of money, it really is comparable to costs that it took for people to get to America in the 1700's on boats that would be more dangerous than the ones people will use for getting to Mars.

I don't know what technology could get a ticket to Mars from the Earth down to say $100 USD, but if it is easy to get there, the numbers won't really matter and you won't need to select for intelligence. If only 0.1% of the world's population decides to migrate to Mars, that would be close enough to the million emigrants that the difference would be trivial. It would certainly be way more than the hundred people you are talking about.

Other than the contract wasn't for building a launcher in the first place, hence why the remarks about experience in building a launcher is irrelevant. The contract was for building a spacecraft that would sit on top of a launch vehicle. In the case of SNC, they were using the services of United Launch Alliance, a company who has experience in launching stuff into orbit. ULA has been putting stuff into orbit (at least their parent companies) since the 1950's. Is that enough experience?

It helps to read the fine print.

The contract is not about launching the spacecraft, it is about building them and having the work in space.

Besides, SNC is going to be launched on the same vehicle that Boeing is using. The Atlas V. The only difference is that the Dream Chaser could also be launched on an Orbital Antares rocket or the Falcon 9 as well (at least it is being designed to fly on multiple launchers).

That isn't even a consideration for why SNC lost the bid.

With the money Mr. Carmack earned from the sale of Oculus, do you think he cares? He has suggested that he wouldn't mind simply going back to running his spaceship company, so can Samsung give him a good reason to do that?

This definitely sounds like somebody who doesn't give a damn.

In other words, before tenure they are simply like everybody else in the real world. In industry (as opposed to academia), you are always on the knife's edge of being terminated. Some employers more so than others I'll grant, but I fail to see how it is any worse.

Mind you, I've played the academia game too. The pecking order in academia is more being at a very prestigious position or university as opposed to working at a state college/university and perhaps if you can't cut it you end up teaching at a community/junior college. Sometimes people don't want to play the game so they simply stick to that junior college where they can teach rather than fighting the publish or perish mentality.... or move onto even a high school where somebody with a PhD is treated with respect and not horrible pay (although perhaps less than a university although they will earn more than somebody with a BS). My 7th Grade English teacher had a PhD, and stuck around because he loved to teach kids in middle school even though he was offered a professorship elsewhere. He even published academic papers based on stuff he was doing in the classroom. There is nothing equivalent to that kind of system in private industry.

This is actually why I like to drive a manual transmission, because it keeps me awake longer on a long-haul drive. This was something originally pointed out to me by a bus driver, who noted that the bus company refused to put automatic transmissions into their buses at the time explicitly to keep the minds of the drivers engaged in the operation of the vehicle instead of other distractions. I also find that a manual transmission give me both a better feel of the road conditions, and more options to apply when operating the vehicle too. The tactile feel of the gears in the transmission through the gear shift can actually give you quite a bit of information that an experienced driver can incorporate into their driving habits, something I definitely find missing in an automatic transmission.

As for the Google cars, the scary thing is that they are currently driving on the roads right now. Supposedly they've already racked up several million miles of travel on public roads. They have moved well past the test track stage. The main issues right now are legal and social, not engineering, although I agree with you that I'm not convinced they are ready for prime time yet.

Tesla has been able to build their supercharger stations that can charge up about a hundred miles or more worth of charge in less than an hour... where you can stop to eat lunch and have the car charge up while you are eating.... on a long drive. Basically drive for about 2-3 hours and take about an hour break. There are enough of these stations available that you can now drive across North America with this kind of driving pattern and Tesla is working on Europe.

As for the short commute, most people generally live within 50 miles of where they work. Of those who live further away, many of them even carpool or use mass transit.

For those who think golf carts powered by lead-acid batteries are the ideal of an electric automobile, your sentiment is pretty much spot on. Welcome to the 21st Century where you can buy an electric automobile that doesn't suck any more and uses Li-ion batteries for storage. If you don't like Tesla, you can always get the Nissan Leaf. Or if you don't like either, there are shops that will swap out internal combustion engines in nearly any other automobile and refit your car to an electric motor too.

I was mainly responding to the presumption that somehow self-driving automobiles are somehow technologically equivalent to automated trains. Doing stuff like Google is doing with self-driving cars is far more complex due to the need to evaluate your position on the road, varying kind of pavement, working in conjunction with other vehicles of multiple sizes that are also moving mere feet away, and requires that 3D spatial recognition that is not trivial to create a computational model to deal with potential situations that may arise when driving on a highway that lacks rails. A locomotive is far more simple of a computational model and 30 year old technology works just fine. Upgrading the technology is mainly doing something like replacing a suitcase size box of electronics with the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi.

I agree, going into manual operation is not going to be easy for an operator who hasn't been practicing routinely and trying to get the job done.

As for the 1mm travel on the throttle and other complications like that, I call that damn lousy engineering and poor user interface design. That such things exist in the real world is unfortunate, and sometimes equipment operators need to fight such issues because they get the equipment which is handed to them and simply try to do the best job they can.

The main controls on a train are to go forward and backward. Hardly something that needs advanced artificial intelligence and 3D spacial comprehension. It is basically a one dimensional problem when operating a train, and monitoring the rails to make sure that one dimension situation doesn't change into a 3D problem. Sure, there is monitoring the equipment on the train itself where the motors are far more complex, but even that has its limits and isn't too complicated.

Everybody who has paid for their own trip to the ISS so far has gone through cosmonaut training at Star City (at least a six month training effort where they learn all of the sub-systems of the Soyuz spacecraft) and have become fully qualified astronauts in their own right. They usually have been involved with experiments done on the ISS as well, and usually bring up something to do. They are also responsible for performing "chores" while at the station.

About the only thing these "private astronauts" don't perform is an EVA to do repairs on the outside of the ISS.

I would imagine that when Boeing or SpaceX does the same thing, a similar kind of training is going to be required. If anything, because they are American companies needing to work with NASA a whole lot more, they will be required to be much more active in regards to NASA experiments (the previous astronauts were guests of the Russian Federation). The most certainly won't be merely floating in space and staring out windows.