Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

John Siracusa: Antacid Tablet

Antacid tablet: T]here are obvious answers to most of the common questions about the tablet—obvious and boring answers, that is, which is why everyone wants to talk about more fantastic scenarios, I suppose.... Instead of being all that people can imagine, it'll just be what people expect: a mostly unadorned color touch screen that's bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook... it must be a touch screen, it must be color, and it must support video.... So how will an Apple tablet distinguish itself without any headline technological marvels? It'll do so by leveraging all of Apple's strategic strengths....

• Customers - Apple has over 100 million credit-card-bearing customer accounts thanks to the success of iTunes.

• Developers - Over 125,000 developers have put over 100,000 iPhone OS applications up for sale on the App Store. Then there are the Mac OS X developers (though of course there's some overlap). Apple's got developers ready and able to come at the tablet from both directions.

• Relationships - Apple has lucrative and successful relationships with the most important content owners in the music and movie businesses.

These are Apple's most important assets when it comes to the tablet.... It will provide an easy way for people to find, purchase, and consume all kinds of media and applications right from the device. It's that simple. (And if that sounds a lot like what defined the success of the iPhone to you, well, you're right. But it's a winning formula, and Apple's not going to pass it by just to satisfy the technology press's desire for radical change.)

Apple's doing the hard work... courting a new class of content owners whose wares are a good fit for a tablet-scale device: print publishers.... Other tablet-like devices have their own content owner relationships and stores, but none so far have anything to rival Apple's third-party application might. What Apple has is a platform, with all that entails. And it's a lot harder to establish a successful platform than it is to make digital retailing deals with content owners. Apple actually has at least two platforms so far: Mac OS X and iPhone OS. The tablet will add another.... Like I said, it's all so obvious it's boring. But even a merely competent execution of this simple plan will result in a product with advantages none of its current competitors can match. And an Apple-caliber execution could really shake things up....

I promised concrete predictions, and burying them in a thousand words of rhetoric hardly seems fair, so let's get on with it. If and when Apple finally does release a tablet product, we'll need much more succinct statements to quote in triumph... or in shame. First, the sure things. The Apple tablet will have a color, video-capable touchscreen, about 10 inches diagonal. It will have flash storage, WiFi networking, and few ports and hardware buttons. There will be a software keyboard. Its operating system will be based on the same core as Mac OS X and iPhone OS, and its GUI API will be an evolution of Cocoa Touch. The platform will (eventually) be open to third-party developers. You will be able to buy media and applications right on the device using your existing iTunes account. Some of that media will be new territory for Apple: print media like magazines, newspapers, and books.

Next, the good bets. The heart of the hardware will be silicon designed in-house at Apple by the PA Semi guys... a slight price/power/performance advantage versus other similar devices. Apple will define its own format for electronic print media distribution... based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format... like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there'll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually....

Finally the wildcards. Cellular networking is the biggest question.... I would not be surprised if the tablet starts out as WiFi only. I think there'll be a user-facing camera..... My final wildcard is a hardware keyboard—not attached permanently to the tablet, and certainly not required, but as an optional peripheral. After all, if Apple doesn't make one, a third party certainly will—SDK allowing, of course.

Despite all the crazy hardware speculation, I think the biggest surprises will be software-based. There's only so much you can do with hardware within a given price range. Software has far fewer limitations. Think of the prosaic grid of pixels that makes up an iPhone screen. Any hardware vendor in the world could have commissioned the production of such a thing; it's what Apple did with those pixels in its software that made the iPhone the iPhone. So, too, will it be with the tablet...

Charlie Stross: Back to the Moon?

Charlie's Diary: Back to the Moon?: I was thinking I ought to be looking for something creative to say here — blogging gets old, after the first eight years — when a bright young thing at $PUBLISHING_COMPANY emailed me to say: "on the 20th, it's going to be the 40th anniversary of moon landing day, wanna blog about where you were and what it means to you on our corporate soapbox?"

To which I said "sure, but I was only four years old at the time ..."

I hope to live long enough to be four years old that way all over again, some day.

Why didn't Apollo stick?

Well, for one thing, it was a stunt.

Wernher von Braun and his colleagues didn't see it as a stunt, of course. They saw it as a stepping-stone, a valuable intermediate step in establishing a metaphorical beachhead in space. And rightly so (given the state of knowledge of how biological organisms handle zero gravity and high radiation environments at that time).

Unfortunately, the real goal of the rocketry pioneers called for something a bit bigger than an ICBM. Funding their requirements ... not easy. The price of a launch to orbit scales roughly in proportion to the cube of the payload. A modern, miniaturized H-bomb weighs about 200-400Kg (more for the really big stuff, but they're not terribly effective militarily). An ICBM that can lob 3 warheads around the world is actually only lifting about one ton of payload, and it doesn't even reach orbital velocity: it's around the bottom end of a viable space launcher. Von Braun and his Soviet counterparts like Sergein Korolyov knew this well. Korolyov had the relative luxury of the USSR's plutonium shortage and lack of proficiency in guidance technology to help him justify building big rockets: these factors forced the Soviet ballistic missile forces to use single multi-megaton H-bombs (weighing several tons), which in turn needed a 300 ton monster like the R-7 Semyorka to achieve their military goals. The R-7 was big enough to throw a small satellite into orbit without upgrades; with incremental improvements, it has continued to evolve (long after its military obsolescence) into the R-7 family of space launchers, one of the safest and most reliable multi-stage liquid fuel rockets ever.

But the United States had much better guidance technology, and more plutonium (and could therefore use numerous small, efficient, accurately-targeted warheads to do the job for which the Soviets had to rely on a few cumbersome city-busters). While the early US ICBMs were reconfigurable as space launchers, the really big job of going to the moon required something new — the Saturn series of boosters. And the Saturn V configurations that eventually flew to the moon and launched Skylab were far from the largest variants planned.

Let me put it this way: the goal of going to the moon by 1970 forced design compromises on NASA. The objective of putting a man on the moon and bringing him back would be achieved using the lightest lunar lander conceivable — one so flimsily built that, on one occasion, an engineer working in the cabin of one of the LEMs dropped a screwdriver point-down and it punched right through the spacecraft's skin. The LEM weighed under 15 tons, fully fuelled; the ascent stage, in which the crew were to live until they returned to dock with the command module, weighed barely 2000 kilograms (plus crew and 2350Kg of fuel).

Not only does the cost of putting a payload into orbit increase with the cube of the payload weight — this rule holds true in the opposite direction, too. Stick a LEM on the moon and bring the contents back? Easy. Increase the mass that the LEM brings back? Very expensive — the price goes up as the sixth power of the weight you're returning from the lunar surface (because you have to loft the heavier LEM into Earth orbit to begin with).

Think about it. The real mission wasn't to go to the moon; it was to bring two astronauts and 100Kg of moon rocks back from the lunar surface and into lunar orbit (to rendezvous with the CSM stack for the journey home) — and it took a 3000 ton behemoth to accomplish this. Launching a bigger, more useful LEM (one that could carry 3 or 4 astronauts to the lunar surface, along with a decent-sized rover and supplies for a couple of weeks) would have added tonnes to the LEM payload ... and hundreds, if not thousands of tons to the launch stack. With cost scaling as the cube of the vehicle mass, you don't need to be an accountant to realize that the US government, stuck fighting a war in South East Asia, wasn't going to give NASA the money to build in even one kilogram more of payload than was strictly necessary. Indeed, the mushrooming weight of the LEM (it gained about 15-20% during development) threatened to jeopardize the whole mission profile — except that the Saturn V performance exceeded expectations. The per-launch cost of even a minimal Apollo moon shot was $431M, in 1967 dollars — call that $5-10Bn today.

So: the original Apollo moon shots couldn't have easily scaled up to achieve more — not without throwing a lot more money at the program in 1968-70, at a point when NASA was already consuming 0.5% of US GDP. For comparison, NASA's budget in FY 2008 was $17.3Bn; if NASA was funded at 1967 levels today, its budget would be closer to $75Bn.

Is NASA capable of going back to the moon?

I want to believe. But ...

First the argument in favour. The Soviet manned lunar program (cancelled in 1969) were running on less than a tenth of NASA's budget; they nevertheless got four flights into the test program for the N1 before it was cancelled, and may have been on the edge of solving its engine problems. Today, with better simulation and modelling techniques, new materials science, and much better electronics — not to mention 30 years more experience in space exploration — we ought to be able to design and build better (and importantly, cheaper) spacecraft.

Moreover, on the basis of the current estimates, a lunar round trip in Orion/Altair will represent a huge bargain compared to Apollo — delivering 60% of the lunar astronaut surface duration of the entire Apollo program, for a tenth to a fifth the price of a single 1960s moon shot. Even if it undergoes a 100% cost overrun, it'd be cheap compared to Apollo.

But there are problems. Today we lack a vital resource that both Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev took for granted: thousands of engineers with the experience of designing, building, and launching new types of rocket in a matter of years or even months. We used to have them, but some time in the past 40 years they all retired. We've got the institutions and the data and the better technology, but we don't have the experience those early pioneers had. And I'm betting that the process of rebuilding all that institutional competence is going to run over budget. While NASA's Constellation program might work, and while it could deliver far more valuable lunar science than Apollo ever did, it will inevitably cost much more than NASA's official estimates suggest, because it's too big a project for today's NASA — NASA, and indeed the entire space industrial sector in the USA, would have to grow, structurally, to make it work.

Constellation won't survive a 100% cost overrun — or even a 25% one. Instead, it will almost certainly be cancelled. The fiscal realities of the second decade of the 21st century are horrendously worse than those of the sixth decade of the 20th. The sixties were a boom decade; a better comparison would be the stagflation era of the seventies (never mind the Great Depression). The Shuttle program survived the 1970s but only just — its budget scraped through by a single senate vote at one point. And the Shuttle's specifications were mutilated by the political need for it to support an Air Force mission (one that it never flew, but which nevertheless ultimately doomed the Columbia). Project Constellation has no such USAF mission to cling on to for dear life when the budget axe is swinging.

And so I very much fear that I'm going to have to stay fit and aim to live for a very long time if I want to feel four years old all over again.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga: Obama's Idiocy

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: I get spam:

We will not back down

From: President Barack Obama to Markos

Markos --

As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo. So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down. But do not doubt -- the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you to fight alongside me. We must continue to build out our campaign -- to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep this 50-state movement for reform going strong.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today: http://my.democrats.org/...

Let's win this together,

President Barack Obama

Really? All we have to do is send the DNC $5 and we get ponies? The same DNC that is enabling corporatist Democrats to water down and destroy any hope for health care reform? That DNC?

This is so freakin' obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a "reform" package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of shit to raise money?

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we're supposed to get excited about whatever end result we're about to get, so much so that we're going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I'm certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I'll pass.

Democrats are demoralized, and have little incentive to turn out next year. The teabaggers will turn out. If this is how the Obama camp thinks we can energize the base -- by promising them a health care pony for $5 to the same Democratic Party that is home to the likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman, and the rest of the obstructionist gang -- then we're in for a world of hurt in 2010.