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.

Telling an astronaut with several actual missions in space that they know jack about engineering, science, or math is pretty damn bold.

What a load of dung here.

This is not the first time that SpaceX has launched from Cape Canaveral (technically no longer Kennedy.... that is only the VAB and the NASA facility itself although Florida at one time did call it Cape Kennedy... and changed that back in the 1990's).

The facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (who actually "owns" the property... although SpaceX does have a long term lease) is known as SLC-40... the pad just next to LC-39 A&B where the Space Shuttle and the Apollo rockets all were launched from. This launch was number nine from that same location BTW. The Florida government is also trying to encourage other private launch companies to launch from that general location, and United Launch Alliance also has flights from there as well, including a pure commercial launch fairly recently (even though most of their stuff is national security payloads for the NRO, NSA, and other alphabet soup agencies).

Even the booster recovery is not really that remarkable as it is the third time they've tried, and technically they've tried on nearly every launch since the first Falcon 1 went boom about a thousand feet above the launch pad due to insane levels of galvanometric corrosion that wasn't anticipated. The earlier attempts tried to use parachutes, which ended up not working very well and have since been abandoned by SpaceX.

On the whole, at least for SpaceX, this was a rather ordinary launch. The 1st stage recovery attempt (or at least testing the recovery systems... which is a more accurate description of what happened with this OrbComm flight) is certainly impressive and can eventually lead to cheaper prices for future customers.

The really remarkable thing though, and what makes this get hardcore geeks excited for this flight, is that customers can go to SpaceX and drop a bag of cash to get a launch slot to go into space. It really is that simple. SpaceX will deal with all of the government red tape and flight clearances, so all you need to do is drop off the payload. Some other minor things like telemetry and some bus configurations are available for the engineers building satellites for Falcon 9, but that is technical and not legal issues. EELV payloads still need government permission if you want to fly one of them. Of course Arianespace has been doing this for customers as well for a couple of decades, so even that isn't all that remarkable.

I suppose it helps that you can obtain SpaceX media under the terms of the Creative Commons licenses (I think it is CC-by-SA) and are quite open about what it is that they are doing.

The previous telemetry that they recovered from the previous Falcon 9 rocket (not the one that flew today) was literally recovered from a pizza pan that somebody bent over their knee and stuck a radio receiver to the back and then pointed it out of a private aircraft towards the rocket during descent in one of the most jury rigged pieces of apparatus you could possibly imagine. That they got any kind of data at all is freaking amazing.

This has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, but rather that the telemetry is using some FM band (so the signal can actually get through the ionosphere when it is in or at least near space) and that ground stations capable of receiving the signal simply weren't really handy near the landing site.

It will be interesting to see what video comes from this current attempt, as I think something perhaps a little better might be recovered. I also doubt that SpaceX would mind if a video of the rocket landing in the water was shown for the evening news, even if it blew up after a wave crested over the middle of the rocket afterward. Perhaps the general public might learn a thing or two about rockets and aerospace engineering because of that too.

Right... Charles Bolden must be white.... as is his boss too.

That is just scratching the surface. BTW, Bolden didn't get his job because of his skin color either, and IMHO he is also one of the best qualified NASA administrators that America has ever had. The general stars that he earned (in the USMC no less) weren't honorary either.... and his degree is in engineering.

You ought to read links before spouting off drivel that you don't understand. The museum is one dedicated to Nikola Tesla, the namesake of Tesla Motors to be sure, but somebody of very significant historical interest. The building that the museum is housed in happens to be formally recognized already as a National Historic Landmark. There will not be anything in this museum (except very tangentially) about Tesla Motors or any other Elon Musk company except perhaps a small note listing donors to the museum on a plaque.

I don't suppose you've heard of Nikola Tesla? Thank Thomas Edison for that (if you believe the stories).

Russia as a country has assumed all treaty obligations and considers itself to be the legitimate heir to the Soviet Union. Very few people really disagree.

Besides, the Soviet Union really was a greater Russian empire anyway. The language, the culture, and in many cases the people at the top were all from Russia. That is also one of the causes of the issues in the Ukraine as the "Russification program" to deliberately wipe out whole cultures was occurring there to transplant culturally Russian peoples into the conquered areas (like Ukraine) and then do a similar transplantation of the "locals" to other areas still so they would lose their cultural identity. They expected this would take several generations, and was incomplete, but in areas where it was done there are now ethnically Russian people (like the Crimea) who want to "return home".

So yes, "Soviet Union" == "Russia" for all practical purposes. Especially in the realm of spaceflight.