SudarshanP

A board/committee or whatever that oversaw what was happening at the university. They could have censored it as being too taboo. I've heard a lot of fuss about resistance to Stem Cell Research/Creationist textbooks etc. But as another commenter said, the speakers are a lot more autonomous and free. Nice to hear.

http://www.space.com/14936-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-60-minutes-i...

Won't it be amazing that NASA will be able to focus on "real exploration" rather than transport. NASA does not have to shrink. In fact the money that is saved on transport could end up creating more jobs for Americans... More fruitful jobs.

Hmmm but 2033 mars rendezvous... hmmm maybe tourist camp on moon was better :-(

"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"

http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120307_IEEE_Pre...

http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_re...

http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120314_ESA_ESTE...

I had to dig around for sometime and I thought these papers must be behind some pay-wall. I was surprised to find them on the KISS website. It is not that they are clueless about how to bring back an asteroid and extract resources from it. They just want their MVP to the be the act of prospecting itself. Also I was really surprised to learn that Ion Engines have been routinely used before for asteroid missions like Dawn(http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ion_prop.asp). The scaling they need to achieve for these missions is much smaller than the average non space geek would expect. Does anyone here know if the scalability requirements of solar ion propulsion systems they need for the mission of tugging an asteroid into lunar orbit is realistically achievable by 2020?

I had to dig around for sometime and I thought these papers must be behind some pay-wall. I was surprised to find them on the KISS website. It is not that they are clueless about how to bring back an asteroid and extract resources from it. They just want their MVP to the be the act of prospecting itself. Also I was really surprised to learn that Ion Engines have been routinely used before for asteroid missions like Dawn(http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ion_prop.asp). The scaling they need to achieve for these missions is much smaller than the average non space geek would expect.

Does anyone here know if the scalability requirements of solar ion propulsion systems they need for the mission of tugging an asteroid into lunar orbit is realistically achievable by 2020?

Trimble is sponsoring development of several projects in different research areas involving 3D perception, as part of the second PCL code sprint.

PCL is the Point Cloud Library from Willowgarage that also created ROS, PR2 and Turtlebot. These guys are surely trying to do some good stuff for 3D. Hope the sketchup community benefits from this acquisition

Of course these students who enrolled were mostly self driven knowledge hungry programmers. I have no idea how it generalizes to something like learning long division or historical facts by students who would rather play video games than attend school.

But "student centered education" is definitely a boon to those who crave knowledge and who are not lucky enough to have the best teachers or the best text books to learn from.

Anyone who creates a clone of a closed app is providing the starting point for derivative work. Even if the "first author" did nothing more than clone functionality, subsequent authors shall build new awesome features on top of that.

If you want to prevent OSS from getting in your way of making money, all you need to ensure is that you care about delighting customers. For Eg consider Google. they use android for controlling the platform on which search happens. The linux kernel hackers actually care very little about whether ur mom can use the phone. The non cool aspects of project get very little attention. To run a business, all you need to do is pay as much attention to the non cool parts of a project.

Apple still sells devices with huge margins. So all Dustin Curtis needs to do is "be the steve jobs" of his niche. He can make money off of it, if he chooses to, and get credit for what he creates true value from and the open implementations can co-exist.