Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie
Oh c'mon, figuring out how to use a clip doesn't take that much extra IQ
You've clearly never worked at McDonalds. I worked the grill in college. They walked me back to the grill, said "you're the cook" and walked away. The instructions are large pictograms hung in front of the grill. You could literally not be able to read, be color blind and only able to see 3 feet in front of your face and still do that job. It's amazing how well they have that procedure designed that anyone could do it.
Right, we use similar software to dispatch field techs. Techs all have company smartphones now, they dont even come into work unless they need supplies. We wrote an app that figures out where they are and where the closest job is to them. They head over there, do their work, update the ticket with any changes they made so records can be updated and it then gives them the next closest. The productivity increases were staggering and there were even other benefits like decrease vehicle wear and such, but calling it an "AI" is a bit of a joke. It's just some clever rule sets and scripting.
It's human nature. That's why people in positions of power should be required to follow a strict set of guidelines rather than apply them arbitrarily to whomever they seem to think deserves scrutiny. "Gut feelings" don't work. The people trying to get stuff on planes know this, and know to be cooperative and smile. The guy waring the "Don't tread of me" tshirt, refusing to be strip searched, may be a jerk... but he's not trying to hurt anyone.
This was specifically for international flights into the US originating from certain countries, not a TSA-wide procedure.
Yet... give it a month. I know a couple of TSA people for some reason. Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie. A lot of their "procedures" are only there because they heard it was a good idea on the news yesterday. Granted, I'm near Chicago so maybe they have smarter people working in the newyork airports but I doubt it.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
The majority of what they catch are people trying to smuggle things they shouldn't like plants and animals or people that try to take legit firearms into the cabin when they should have put it in their luggage: http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/01/ts...
Keep in mind, that while he has had a lot of papers published, the majority of the physical models of the universe he's supported have now been proven wrong (or are pretty close to being proven wrong) He seems to support science that he thinks would be "Cool" if it were true, rather than based on evidence. His tendency to support sensational science applies to his academic work as well. He's even trying the Einstein crazy hair look. He's all show, and no go. I've never liked the guy.
The intelligence oversight act of 1974 gave small groups in congress the ability to oversee intelligence activities that breach rights -- the basis being that warranting evidence would then lead to permissions of privacy violations, etc. I don't understand why this isn't still important. It was important in August 2001. It was important on September 10th 2001.
You're seriously going to cite the dust bowl to refute climate change? The most ass backwards thing I've read in months. You do not understand what climate change even IS, yet you're still arguing that it doesn't exist.
They're using unfamiliar units to define their made up measurements.
The oceans are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers (that's a lot of engineering!) That's 45,909,066,700,000,000,000 square feet The Library of congress is 2,100,000 square feet So the whales are engineering over 21 trillion libraries of congress!
Gravity isn't a scientific fact, exaggerating your position doesn't make it stronger.
Yes it is. The argument you're making is silly, and old. It's called href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance">Ad ignorantiam
Using that argument I could disprove every "Fact" that's ever occurred. Are we all living in the matrix? Is this all the dream of a sleeping baby floating on a cloud? Yes, anything is possible, there are no "facts."
But baring the dreams of floating sleeping babies, gravity is a FACT. Just like climate change. In science we deal with probobilities, and the probobility of climate change being real surpassed the threshold of being a "Fact" in the 1940s. Not in 2000, not in the 1980s, the nineteen forties. The difraction effects of CO2 in the atmosphere have been studied and well understood since the 1800's! The effects on planetary scale were studied on venus and confirmed. CO2 measurements were made and confirmed the rise of CO2 as well as warming in the 1940s. Studies showing their effect on the modern climate were proven in the 1970s.
And, just in case you do believe in the sleeping baby theory, if the sleeping baby is using any sort of logic to imagine our fictitious universe, then climate change is still a problem and we still need to address it, baby or not.
Well, they're using the excuse that they are forced to lie because the programs are top secret, congress isn't authorized to see the data so congress should stop asking questions so they don't have to lie to them.
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
Since the latter is a violation of my constitutional rights and the former is not, I'm going to say intercepting peoples messages. Any more inane questions or can we move onto the topic of why our federal government has torn up the constitution and is currently using it to wipe their ass?
I'll believe in CAGW when the scientists quit fudging the numbers and it still shows it...
They aren't "fudging" numbers. This is climate data, it's HARD to deal with. You're talking about millions, even billions of measurements over periods of centuries. There are more moving parts to this data than you can possible conceive of. And companies that make profits off of fossil fuels have armies of people scouring their data for the tiniest errors. Surprise surprise they find some on occasion.
when they can explain historical data that contradicts the theory...
It doesn't. It's dead on.
and when they can explain why the warming has stopped for the last couple of decades.
It hasn't, at all. You are confusing local and short term temperature variations with a global, long term problem. People working for... well... whomever doesn't want you to believe in climate change, pick and chose data from a specific time, or location, or both... and show a cooling period in that specific area or at a specific time and then claim "Global warming is reverse! It's all lies" but this isn't about that specific area or time. This is about then GLOBAL AVERAGE temperature of the entire planet. That is, without a doubt, increasing. It's very slow, but it's like compound interest. It just keeps growing and growing, melting ice, heating bogs, and compounding the issue further. Temperatures in North Dakota falling for the past 10yrs is not relevant. The climate is a very, very, complicated machine.
As it is, he fudging is so blatant that "climate science" is nothing of the sort...it's a Trojan horse for the same lod tired leftist government takeoff of economies. That trick never works.
Plenty of scientists are republicans or even further right. Yet, less than 10 (that's ten0 out of hundreds of thousands, disagree with the simple finding that humans are altering the average global temperature of the planet. A global conspiracy to make your gas more expensive could never have that kind of influence. This is a consensus of unquestionable proportions. Either all the wind turbine makers and solar panel manufacturers have a hell of a lot more money than we thought and are using it to bribe the scientific community on a scale unprecedented in human history, or we really do have a problem.
I think that if there's one thing everyone could agree on, dumping crap into our atmosphere is a bad thing. We can fix it, and become a world leader in cheap power or we can sit back and hope all our scientists are lying to us. I, personally, am going with the former. And no, I'm not a democrat or a leftist.
Yes, but climate change is scientific fact. The opposing view that you're referring to would be that Liberal republicans could believe in the fantasy that climate change does not exist... and while it's true there are such democrats out there, they are not relevant to this topic. I think that, if you wanted to include democrats in a similar light you'd have to ask them about nuclear power. They tend to completely disregard science when it comes to technologies they fear. Thought this is a generalization. Which is the funny thing about this story. They seem to be reporting "Generalizations about an entire group of people are not 100% accurate!" Well, duh...
I used to work DMCA requests for a moderately large ISP. They are NOT disconnecting people for repeat abuse. They would never disconnect you because some 3rd party doesn't like what your using your connection for. You're a paying customer, and the rights hold is not. There is no financial incentive for them to disconnect you.
They will disconnect you if you're costing them money however. But for an ISP, that's a difficult thing to do. There are laws, and franchise agreements with the city. They're pretty much required to give you service, even if you cost them money... unless they can find an excuse to disconnect you. Like if you were a software pirate.
The moral of the story? If you live in an upscale apartment complex, where everyones got 1gig fiber connections, you're never getting disconnected. EVER. If you're 10 miles outside of town in a sparsely populated area with old decaying lines that the ISP has to constantly come out and repair, and every time you start up your torrent client the entire neighborhoods network crawls to a halt, it may be in your best interest to avoid doing things that would give your ISP and excuse to boot you.
Notice how they said a bunch of small rural ISPs were the only ones who'd started doing this. Yea, this has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with getting rid of customers that are costing them money.
Companies have been pumping water (usually wastewater or seawater) down wells since the start of the latter half of the 20th century, to restore pressure in oil reservoirs. So how is this anything new and anything connected with fracking?
Also, I don't unerstand why people make such a big deal out of these minor earthquakes which are general to small too feel even if you're paying attention for them. The amount of energy they're dealing with is only in the ballpark of these tiny quakes; compared to a large earthquake, it'd be like a mouse trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Either the boulder is ready to go or it's not, the mouse makes essentially no difference.
The difference is where the fluid is going. In a normal oil well, the introduce pressurize fluids to increase pressure and push the oil up the well. They're introducing fluid to a geological area that's had fluid in it for millions of years. There's no real change there, no reason for the earth to shift.
What this study shows is that after they are done fracking they need to dispose of their fluids so they're digging a NEW well and pumping the fluid down to an area that's been dry for millions of years. They are changing the deep geological structure of the rock, and therefor causing shifting and of course, earthquakes. They likely do this because the fluids they are using are highly toxic, they wont admit what's in them. It seems more and more likely that fracking itself isn't so bad, the feds just need to regulate the fluid they are using to do it. If they were just using brine, they could have just left it near the surface without fear of contamination.
How do you know they represent the content owner? Or are even really lawyers? Or that the claimed content owner owns the song in question?
They have to state under penalty of perjury that they are or represent the content owner. And they have to give you a contact address. As they make a statement under penalty of perjury, they are either right or criminals. If they are criminals, that will get sorted out.
You must have missed that part where I said the complaints come via email, and you have no way of knowing who sent them. There may be words on paper that state "This must be so" but there's no practical way to enforce that what-so-ever. I got complaints about content that didn't even exist, so it's pretty clear a lot of the complaints were complete BS. There's a whole cottage industry where theses companies get hired to police the content owners IP, and to make money they just make up nonses. "Look, we sent 5000 take down notices last month!" The IP owner has no way to verify any of its true.
Sounds like there's a simple solution to DMCA. Start a Kickstarter project for a system to send everyone DMCA requests for everything. Either a website takes their entire website offline, or they start ignoring DMCA requests.
It's basically impossible to enforce the part of the DMCA that says you can't make false claims. But if you started a kickstarter for it? Yea, they'd be all over that in a heartbeat.
I don't understand the criticism regarding the use of modified space shuttle engines and a coolant system from the Air Force. As far as I am aware, we never lost a shuttle due to main engine failure, and the Air Force is pretty good at not blowing things up. I have been following the SLS for awhile, and if they can manage to pull off the overall designs they have in mind without budget cuts or severe cost overruns ruining things, I believe it will be a fine rocket. Otherwise SpaceX is well on their way toward manned flight and their heavy lifter among other things, so I think were pretty well covered.
So what is "deep" space supposed to mean? I came in thinking that it must be outside the solar system, but apparently "deep-space" rockets take you to the moon.
Which really by my definition is hardly even space. On the moon you are still basically still at Earth, it is part of the system of the planet as much as the gasses that are trapped by its gravity (which we call its atmosphere).
Deep Space is considered "outside the gravitational affect of the earth/moon system" So if this really is a deep space rocket, it's designed to go beyond the moon, and likely would be good to take us to mars or anywhere else in the local solar system. The hard part is getting out of our gravity well, once you've done that the only difference between the moon and mars is how long the car ride is.
. Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware, spurring criticism that it's a "Frankenstein rocket," with much of it assembled from already developed technology.
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design. A new design would take extra years of testing before it is ready for use but if we can tweak existing tech, and make it useful for deep space why not??
Based on the next sentence it tells me that they are more concerned with bringing home the bacon than making progress in space.
It's the standard problem when you're a tech. The client likes to give you a solution and ask you to build it, rather than give you a problem and ask you to solve it.
If their goal is to save money, then state that in the requirements. If you want it to work with existing tech, then state that. By instead putting what you think the solution is directly into the requirements you're not only limiting your techs ability to solve the problem, you're also hiding your true goals from them. That tech probably has far better solutions for that problem than you could possibly think of so let them work on it.
Better requirements would be: We want to go to mars for less than $20 billion.
Short, simple, Let the technical experts run with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie
Oh c'mon, figuring out how to use a clip doesn't take that much extra IQ
You've clearly never worked at McDonalds. I worked the grill in college. They walked me back to the grill, said "you're the cook" and walked away. The instructions are large pictograms hung in front of the grill. You could literally not be able to read, be color blind and only able to see 3 feet in front of your face and still do that job. It's amazing how well they have that procedure designed that anyone could do it.
Right, we use similar software to dispatch field techs. Techs all have company smartphones now, they dont even come into work unless they need supplies. We wrote an app that figures out where they are and where the closest job is to them. They head over there, do their work, update the ticket with any changes they made so records can be updated and it then gives them the next closest. The productivity increases were staggering and there were even other benefits like decrease vehicle wear and such, but calling it an "AI" is a bit of a joke. It's just some clever rule sets and scripting.
about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train
Crazy Unit of the Year award!
Given the location a better unit would have been: ...about the same length as 8 million slices of Canadian bacon on the longest hoagy ever!
Wealth and power breed a sense of entitlement:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
It's human nature. That's why people in positions of power should be required to follow a strict set of guidelines rather than apply them arbitrarily to whomever they seem to think deserves scrutiny. "Gut feelings" don't work. The people trying to get stuff on planes know this, and know to be cooperative and smile. The guy waring the "Don't tread of me" tshirt, refusing to be strip searched, may be a jerk... but he's not trying to hurt anyone.
With Science!
This was specifically for international flights into the US originating from certain countries, not a TSA-wide procedure.
Yet... give it a month. I know a couple of TSA people for some reason. Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie. A lot of their "procedures" are only there because they heard it was a good idea on the news yesterday. Granted, I'm near Chicago so maybe they have smarter people working in the newyork airports but I doubt it.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
In tests, they fail to stop devices from getting on the plane pretty much every time:
http://nypost.com/2013/03/08/t...
They've no evidence that they have ever stopped anything:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
The majority of what they catch are people trying to smuggle things they shouldn't like plants and animals or people that try to take legit firearms into the cabin when they should have put it in their luggage:
http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/01/ts...
it is the same as stealing money from old women at knifepoint.
What's wrong with that?
Keep in mind, that while he has had a lot of papers published, the majority of the physical models of the universe he's supported have now been proven wrong (or are pretty close to being proven wrong) He seems to support science that he thinks would be "Cool" if it were true, rather than based on evidence. His tendency to support sensational science applies to his academic work as well. He's even trying the Einstein crazy hair look. He's all show, and no go. I've never liked the guy.
The intelligence oversight act of 1974 gave small groups in congress the ability to oversee intelligence activities that breach rights -- the basis being that warranting evidence would then lead to permissions of privacy violations, etc. I don't understand why this isn't still important. It was important in August 2001. It was important on September 10th 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Watch the Frontline special on the NSA:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
You're seriously going to cite the dust bowl to refute climate change? The most ass backwards thing I've read in months.
You do not understand what climate change even IS, yet you're still arguing that it doesn't exist.
...what does that make beavers?
A dam nuisance.
No mater which way you take that statement it ironically turns out to be true.
They're using unfamiliar units to define their made up measurements.
The oceans are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers (that's a lot of engineering!)
That's 45,909,066,700,000,000,000 square feet
The Library of congress is 2,100,000 square feet
So the whales are engineering over 21 trillion libraries of congress!
You're right, I got them mixed up. :-p
You get my point though.
Gravity isn't a scientific fact, exaggerating your position doesn't make it stronger.
Yes it is. The argument you're making is silly, and old.
It's called href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance">Ad ignorantiam
Using that argument I could disprove every "Fact" that's ever occurred. Are we all living in the matrix? Is this all the dream of a sleeping baby floating on a cloud? Yes, anything is possible, there are no "facts."
But baring the dreams of floating sleeping babies, gravity is a FACT. Just like climate change. In science we deal with probobilities, and the probobility of climate change being real surpassed the threshold of being a "Fact" in the 1940s. Not in 2000, not in the 1980s, the nineteen forties. The difraction effects of CO2 in the atmosphere have been studied and well understood since the 1800's! The effects on planetary scale were studied on venus and confirmed. CO2 measurements were made and confirmed the rise of CO2 as well as warming in the 1940s. Studies showing their effect on the modern climate were proven in the 1970s.
And, just in case you do believe in the sleeping baby theory, if the sleeping baby is using any sort of logic to imagine our fictitious universe, then climate change is still a problem and we still need to address it, baby or not.
Well, they're using the excuse that they are forced to lie because the programs are top secret, congress isn't authorized to see the data so congress should stop asking questions so they don't have to lie to them.
What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?
Since the latter is a violation of my constitutional rights and the former is not, I'm going to say intercepting peoples messages. Any more inane questions or can we move onto the topic of why our federal government has torn up the constitution and is currently using it to wipe their ass?
I'll believe in CAGW when the scientists quit fudging the numbers and it still shows it...
They aren't "fudging" numbers. This is climate data, it's HARD to deal with. You're talking about millions, even billions of measurements over periods of centuries. There are more moving parts to this data than you can possible conceive of. And companies that make profits off of fossil fuels have armies of people scouring their data for the tiniest errors. Surprise surprise they find some on occasion.
when they can explain historical data that contradicts the theory...
It doesn't. It's dead on.
and when they can explain why the warming has stopped for the last couple of decades.
It hasn't, at all.
You are confusing local and short term temperature variations with a global, long term problem. People working for... well... whomever doesn't want you to believe in climate change, pick and chose data from a specific time, or location, or both... and show a cooling period in that specific area or at a specific time and then claim "Global warming is reverse! It's all lies" but this isn't about that specific area or time. This is about then GLOBAL AVERAGE temperature of the entire planet. That is, without a doubt, increasing. It's very slow, but it's like compound interest. It just keeps growing and growing, melting ice, heating bogs, and compounding the issue further. Temperatures in North Dakota falling for the past 10yrs is not relevant. The climate is a very, very, complicated machine.
As it is, he fudging is so blatant that "climate science" is nothing of the sort...it's a Trojan horse for the same lod tired leftist government takeoff of economies. That trick never works.
Plenty of scientists are republicans or even further right. Yet, less than 10 (that's ten0 out of hundreds of thousands, disagree with the simple finding that humans are altering the average global temperature of the planet. A global conspiracy to make your gas more expensive could never have that kind of influence. This is a consensus of unquestionable proportions. Either all the wind turbine makers and solar panel manufacturers have a hell of a lot more money than we thought and are using it to bribe the scientific community on a scale unprecedented in human history, or we really do have a problem.
I think that if there's one thing everyone could agree on, dumping crap into our atmosphere is a bad thing. We can fix it, and become a world leader in cheap power or we can sit back and hope all our scientists are lying to us. I, personally, am going with the former. And no, I'm not a democrat or a leftist.
Yes, but climate change is scientific fact. The opposing view that you're referring to would be that Liberal republicans could believe in the fantasy that climate change does not exist... and while it's true there are such democrats out there, they are not relevant to this topic. I think that, if you wanted to include democrats in a similar light you'd have to ask them about nuclear power. They tend to completely disregard science when it comes to technologies they fear. Thought this is a generalization. Which is the funny thing about this story. They seem to be reporting "Generalizations about an entire group of people are not 100% accurate!" Well, duh...
I used to work DMCA requests for a moderately large ISP. They are NOT disconnecting people for repeat abuse. They would never disconnect you because some 3rd party doesn't like what your using your connection for. You're a paying customer, and the rights hold is not. There is no financial incentive for them to disconnect you.
They will disconnect you if you're costing them money however. But for an ISP, that's a difficult thing to do. There are laws, and franchise agreements with the city. They're pretty much required to give you service, even if you cost them money... unless they can find an excuse to disconnect you. Like if you were a software pirate.
The moral of the story? If you live in an upscale apartment complex, where everyones got 1gig fiber connections, you're never getting disconnected. EVER. If you're 10 miles outside of town in a sparsely populated area with old decaying lines that the ISP has to constantly come out and repair, and every time you start up your torrent client the entire neighborhoods network crawls to a halt, it may be in your best interest to avoid doing things that would give your ISP and excuse to boot you.
Notice how they said a bunch of small rural ISPs were the only ones who'd started doing this. Yea, this has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with getting rid of customers that are costing them money.
Companies have been pumping water (usually wastewater or seawater) down wells since the start of the latter half of the 20th century, to restore pressure in oil reservoirs. So how is this anything new and anything connected with fracking?
Also, I don't unerstand why people make such a big deal out of these minor earthquakes which are general to small too feel even if you're paying attention for them. The amount of energy they're dealing with is only in the ballpark of these tiny quakes; compared to a large earthquake, it'd be like a mouse trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Either the boulder is ready to go or it's not, the mouse makes essentially no difference.
The difference is where the fluid is going. In a normal oil well, the introduce pressurize fluids to increase pressure and push the oil up the well. They're introducing fluid to a geological area that's had fluid in it for millions of years. There's no real change there, no reason for the earth to shift.
What this study shows is that after they are done fracking they need to dispose of their fluids so they're digging a NEW well and pumping the fluid down to an area that's been dry for millions of years. They are changing the deep geological structure of the rock, and therefor causing shifting and of course, earthquakes. They likely do this because the fluids they are using are highly toxic, they wont admit what's in them. It seems more and more likely that fracking itself isn't so bad, the feds just need to regulate the fluid they are using to do it. If they were just using brine, they could have just left it near the surface without fear of contamination.
How do you know they represent the content owner? Or are even really lawyers? Or that the claimed content owner owns the song in question?
They have to state under penalty of perjury that they are or represent the content owner. And they have to give you a contact address. As they make a statement under penalty of perjury, they are either right or criminals. If they are criminals, that will get sorted out.
You must have missed that part where I said the complaints come via email, and you have no way of knowing who sent them. There may be words on paper that state "This must be so" but there's no practical way to enforce that what-so-ever. I got complaints about content that didn't even exist, so it's pretty clear a lot of the complaints were complete BS. There's a whole cottage industry where theses companies get hired to police the content owners IP, and to make money they just make up nonses. "Look, we sent 5000 take down notices last month!" The IP owner has no way to verify any of its true.
Sounds like there's a simple solution to DMCA. Start a Kickstarter project for a system to send everyone DMCA requests for everything. Either a website takes their entire website offline, or they start ignoring DMCA requests.
It's basically impossible to enforce the part of the DMCA that says you can't make false claims. But if you started a kickstarter for it? Yea, they'd be all over that in a heartbeat.
I don't understand the criticism regarding the use of modified space shuttle engines and a coolant system from the Air Force. As far as I am aware, we never lost a shuttle due to main engine failure, and the Air Force is pretty good at not blowing things up. I have been following the SLS for awhile, and if they can manage to pull off the overall designs they have in mind without budget cuts or severe cost overruns ruining things, I believe it will be a fine rocket. Otherwise SpaceX is well on their way toward manned flight and their heavy lifter among other things, so I think were pretty well covered.
reliability isn't the problem. Cost is.
So what is "deep" space supposed to mean?
I came in thinking that it must be outside the solar system, but apparently "deep-space" rockets take you to the moon.
Which really by my definition is hardly even space. On the moon you are still basically still at Earth, it is part of the system of the planet as much as the gasses that are trapped by its gravity (which we call its atmosphere).
Deep Space is considered "outside the gravitational affect of the earth/moon system" So if this really is a deep space rocket, it's designed to go beyond the moon, and likely would be good to take us to mars or anywhere else in the local solar system. The hard part is getting out of our gravity well, once you've done that the only difference between the moon and mars is how long the car ride is.
. Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware, spurring criticism that it's a "Frankenstein rocket," with much of it assembled from already developed technology.
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design. A new design would take extra years of testing before it is ready for use but if we can tweak existing tech, and make it useful for deep space why not??
Based on the next sentence it tells me that they are more concerned with bringing home the bacon than making progress in space.
It's the standard problem when you're a tech. The client likes to give you a solution and ask you to build it, rather than give you a problem and ask you to solve it.
If their goal is to save money, then state that in the requirements. If you want it to work with existing tech, then state that. By instead putting what you think the solution is directly into the requirements you're not only limiting your techs ability to solve the problem, you're also hiding your true goals from them. That tech probably has far better solutions for that problem than you could possibly think of so let them work on it.
Better requirements would be:
We want to go to mars for less than $20 billion.
Short, simple, Let the technical experts run with that.