Ideology is practice. There isn't another Republican party other than the one that held power in the recent past, and there isn't another Democratic party than the one that's holding power now. You can imagine some mystical Republican party that didn't expand government more than the Democrats and start two land wars in Asia, and I can imagine some Democratic party that didn't continue the War on Our Rights and save the banksters at the expense of everyone else, but that's all it is, mystical. There aren't shadow parties out there who are going to win elections and practice some idealized ideology. That has never happened. What you see is what you get.
That's exactly how it works. You claim the home office deduction on your 1040 exactly as you describe (or report income from a home business), and the city will ask you for a business license. You get the tax deduction and have to cough up $300. Authors and consultants have been doing exactly this since the tax code was instituted. There's a whole series of IRS forms for this.
The real story here is that the blogger doesn't have a decent accountant. Boring.
Or you could write a nice letter to the city explaining that you don't have clients come to your home office and your income was less than the business license, and they'll likely give you a waiver. Win win.
(sorry, couldn't RTFA as the link wasn't responding, so don't know if this was covered)
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
We would have loved to use it for group collaboration, in our group spanning several continents, timezones, and institutions. Problem is, with any kind of sensitive info, there is no way the lawyers are going to let us put that information on Google's servers. We're not allowed to use Google mail for work use, and not allowed to forward work email to Google addresses (or anyone else's either). If Google had released the code so that we could run it on our own servers, it might have taken off for us.
That right there just stopped any discussion of using Wave for anything serious.
Yep. The idea has been around for a long time. Radio interferometers have used moving delay lines for a long time. SIM was planning on using moving delay lines in the 90s. CHARA uses moving delay lines.
No, I didn't. I was not consulted.
I meant "you" in the general sense of/., and the resulting pressure on Congress. Go back and read the/. threads at the time, lots of Hubble fanboy-ism, and that sentiment carried on to Congress. Hubble is expensive to maintain and operate - shuttle missions cost an appreciable fraction of $1B, let alone refurbishing and operations - and that money came out of the NASA science budget. So new science got chopped.
To quote the hamsters, "You can get with this, or you can get with that." But make no mistake, it's an OR decision.
Actually the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Interferomete, TPF-I, (as opposed to TPF-Coronograph), studied both a fixed length deployable structural interferometer and a four telescope + beam combiner = five spacecraft mission. The latter was downselected for a pre-phase A mission, due to the larger telescopes available to a spacecraft which didn't require a deployable boom, and the ability to fine-tune the spacecraft separation to best tune in individual targets. The larger telescopes (4 m) were the deciding factor, however. There's no substitute for photons when you're getting about 1 per second from the planet you want to study. We understood how to measure the distance between the spacecraft and maintain a fixed distance using movable delay lines on each spacecraft to maintain a two-octave wide null in the white light received from a distant planet, to a level of one part in 10 billion. There were no insurmountable technical issues with this design, it was completely feasible, and testbeds were implemented which demonstrated these capabilities. TPF-I would have been a remarkable Earth-like planet finder, surveying hundreds of stars, and doing spectroscopy on the atmospheres of any earth-like planets found during the survey. While not imaging the planet itself, a spectrum of the gases of the planet would have told us much about the potential for life on those planets. Certainly more than we'll be able to get any other way in the near future.
These missions were put on hold (read: cancelled) not because of any technical isssues, but because NASA decided to continue to fund Hubble. This mission was completely technically feasible. You could have had either an Earth-like planet finder and spectroscopy from earth-like planets, or a few more years of pretty pictures from Hubble, and you chose Hubble. So no Terrestrial Planet Finders any time in the next ten, and probably twenty years.
They've been through medical school, so yeah, I'd say they are some of the smartest people in the world...
Many people have been to lots of school, and have varying numbers of letters after their names, and still manage to be polite.
Except that "lives are at stake" is likely to actually be true.
Many people work in professions where lives are at stake, and still manage to be polite. Some of them are smart and have been to lots of school, and some are not, and have not. They're usually still expected to be polite.
Some of my docs call me by my (earned) title and some call me by my first name, and I reciprocate appropriately. Either way, I'm (usually) polite.
I assumed because you said that more people will be needed to do it, that it would involve manual labor. If there's some method of planting, tilling, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting that doesn't involve 1) machines or 2) backbreaking labor, please send me a link and I'll educate myself.
I often find it more rewarding than the time I spend punching keys. YMMV I guess.
Maybe because you choose to, and it's not you and your families livelihood? Perhaps because you don't have to do it sunup to sundown, six days a week, in weather good or bad, whether you want to or not? If it's raining or snowing or 110 in the shade, you get to say, "Eh, not today"? Or I'll take a three hour lunch break and come back when it's cool? Maybe you don't, but you could.
Me, I couldn't get an education and find a desk to sit behind fast enough. But then I started farming when I was big enough to pick up a hoe. My mileage definitely varied.
People wanted out of farm work because it was unrewarding.
Spoken like someone who's never actually worked on a farm.
People wanted (and still want) out of farm work because it's backbreaking labor. It was hard when I was 18, I can't imagine doing it at age 60, though my father, and his father, and his father before did. Even with machinery, it's hard physical work. There's a reason why farmers don't live as long as an office worker, and a reason why life expectancies went up as labor moved off the farm. And there's a reason why farming is one of the most dangerous professions, and why you see lots of missing fingers and limbs in those communities.
Think about all the cases where police officers have shot people because they 'thought' the person had a gun - the victims in this case vary from having cell phones, food, to even being bare handed.
It's no different in combat. In either case, to make a bad 'no shoot' call can end up with you or your fellow team members ending up dead.
That's the chance they take when they put on the badge. That's what they're supposed to do: hold their fire if they're not sure. That's what they get paid for. Not to stay alive no matter what, and the heck with whoever gets killed in the process if they 'think' someone has a gun.
Same with soldiers. There are rules of engagement that are supposed to keep gunships from firing on civilians, even if sometimes soldiers have to get shot at first to know that they're not civilians. That's the job. Not to kill indiscriminately anything that might be a target.
If you don't like the conditions, don't take the job.
The great majority of people at JPL don't require any clearance at all. Only about 100 people out of 5000 need any sort of clearance, be it Secrit, Duper Super Secrit, or Pinky Swear. The point is, all 5000 would be required to undergo the background check, clearance or no.
JPL employees do not work for the government; they work for Caltech. NASA data is not classified; just the opposite. By law it is required to be made available to the public (subject to ITAR restrictions). Very few projects at JPL require any kind of clearance. 5% of JPL works on non-NASA projects, i.e., something that could be classified, so 250 people of 5000. Of those, probably less than 100 need a clearance (most non-NASA projects at JPL are not classified, rather the money comes from NSF or industry or some other grant). Those projects that are sensitive, are not "highly" secret, as those things go. It just isn't that kind of lab. On those that are sensitive, the people working on them do go through the background checks. On the usual need-to-know basis, why does that mean that everyone else working there (4900 people of 5000) need to have a clearance or this sort of intrusive background check? If the 100 people with clearance do their job, no one else has access to anything classified. If they don't, having the other 4900 people have a background check won't help because security has already failed. I've had a clearance elsewhere so I'm familiar with the drill. If you have clearance to one thing, that doesn't mean you have clearance to anything else, whether at that level or below. One of the reasons I took this job is because it had no background check.
These sorts of checks haven't been required at JPL for the last 50 years, through wars cold and hot. Why now?
Or are you suggesting that anyone who works for the government, directly or indirectly, be subject to this sort of background check? Teachers? Dept. of Interior? Fish and Wildlife? USGS? Highway subcontractors? After all, it's all federal funds. No one has a right to government money. Do your rights go out the window if you get paid by the government first, second, or third hand?
Clearly it's ridiculous to suggest that USFS employees go through a background check, as it is the guys pushing shovels on the highway. So the question is, where is the line drawn? For the past 50 years, it's been drawn on the other side of JPL employees with no issues. Why so eager to toss our rights down the drain, and for what benefit?
I'd like to find the owner of the cat that did a couple thousand dollars worth of damage to the paint job on my car and have them tell me how they have to let their cat out otherwise it would destroy their furniture.
moon-based telescopes (optical and radio) would probably far outperform anything we've got today.
No, they wouldn't. The extreme temperature changes, dust, and 50% duty cycle are killers. Believe it or not, when people design new missions, they consider the moon seriously. Seriously. The moon goes into the spreadsheet. Then it falls right out again when options start getting ranked.
L2 or earth-trailing is where you want to be (further out is good but then you lose mission time to cruise time). Telescopes like stable thermal environments. Hubble being in LEO is an aberration based on political, not scientific, considerations.
the right to express one's opinion -on any subject- should not be subject to persecution by any person. That is why it is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". It says nothing about "any person", or about prohibiting one from getting fired from one's non-government job for expressing one's opinion on any subject. So anonymity seems fairly important to me, as it did to the Founding Fathers who made extensive use of it, the cowards.
Preseidents will be elected by large cities (Los Angeles, New York City, etc) of a handfull of states. Executive decisions will be based on the needs of those few zones rather than the country as a whole.
As opposed to the current system, where those cities and states have effectively no influence on either selection of candidates during the primaries nor election of candidates at all. Executive decisions are made on the basis of the needs of OH, FLA, NH, IA, etc. rather than the country as a whole. The most populous parts of the nation (and the net positive tax contributors) are increasingly ignored to benefit of the shrinking farm and industrial belts. Yes, this system is way better than actually making the votes of the cities where most people actually live count in elections.
Most large ranches are based on public land with grazing rights, and not actual ownership.
I grew up on a 6000 acre ranch, which is large by most standards. All of it privately owned, none of it with public grazing rights. Depends on where you are. All our trucks had gun racks and two-way Motorola radios (not CBs). Since theft of tools and fuel (we kept 1000 gallon tanks since it was a fair drive into town, and we had to keep the tractors and engines running) and various other supplies was always a problem, strangers would be met with at least a fair bit of suspicion. This was in pre-meth days, so I can't imagine what it's like now.
You might have good intentions, but the fellow who made off with 200 gallons of diesel and the arc-welder while we were at the football game Friday night did not. And the sheriff, good intentioned as he might be, might not be able to show up for hours.
on the face of it you should be held to the same requirements of a 'full' government employee in terms of employment, background checks, access to classified information, and your employment rights in general.
Ok, fine, then I'll take civil servant unions, protections, and pensions with that job, please.
Is there too much cognitive dissonance to recognize that the US government is the largest spender in the US and just because someone somewhere wins a competed contract doesn't make that someone (or company, or university) a government employee, and that their employment agreements might be different than those who actually did agree to work for the US government, i.e., civil servants? That in fact, they might have taken this job over another specifically because they weren't working for the government, even if, in the end, the money does come from the taxpayers?
I used to work on a big high energy physics experiment, completely paid for by the US government, at a US government facility. Did that make me a government employee? Somehow I don't think so. Funny, I thought I was attending a private university and paying for the privilege of doing so. If so, I want my pension to start accumulating back when I was in grad school, and I wish I had civil servant hours back then.
The old equipment most likely costs a fortunate to maintain and operate.
I doubt it costs a fortunate, or even a fortune. It sits in the corner and ticks away.
It most certainly swallows a lot of power compared to modern equipment.
They move a 70m (!) dish around constantly, which is pretty damn impressive to watch when it switches from one mission to another. Not to mention the other smaller dishes (only 10 or 20 m). So the power difference between the old equipment and the new has got to be lost in the noise. Certainly lost in the noise of continuing mission costs.
Not to mention that it could be harder in the future to get spare parts that blow out, manufacturers going bankrupt or simply ceasing to build something where you are the only possible customer. And those parts will be more expensive than current parts.
Still probably cheaper than paying a couple of engineers for a couple of years to build, debug, and test thoroughly a new system. Engineers at NASA typically run $200-300k/year in budget costs, including overhead (they do at your place of employment also). Could you get one of the smartasses above to build it cheaper using a Dell and spare parts from their mom's microwave oven? Sure. Would you trust it to run two priceless irreplaceable probes? Not without paying the two NASA engineers to test it anyway and have it run through several review committees. So you wouldn't save much. And wouldn't you rather spend that money on a new mission? It is a zero-sum game after all. Any money spent upgrading equipment that's working perfectly fine is money that doesn't get spent on something new elsewhere.
Seems like risk is high, cost is relatively high, utility is low, opportunity cost is high, benefit is low, opportunity to screw up is high. So who's going to look at that cost/benefit ratio and make the decision? And who's going to want to do the work? Sounds pretty unfun to me, I'd rather work on something new.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking ideology here not practice.
Ideology is practice. There isn't another Republican party other than the one that held power in the recent past, and there isn't another Democratic party than the one that's holding power now. You can imagine some mystical Republican party that didn't expand government more than the Democrats and start two land wars in Asia, and I can imagine some Democratic party that didn't continue the War on Our Rights and save the banksters at the expense of everyone else, but that's all it is, mystical. There aren't shadow parties out there who are going to win elections and practice some idealized ideology. That has never happened. What you see is what you get.
That's exactly how it works. You claim the home office deduction on your 1040 exactly as you describe (or report income from a home business), and the city will ask you for a business license. You get the tax deduction and have to cough up $300. Authors and consultants have been doing exactly this since the tax code was instituted. There's a whole series of IRS forms for this.
The real story here is that the blogger doesn't have a decent accountant. Boring.
Or you could write a nice letter to the city explaining that you don't have clients come to your home office and your income was less than the business license, and they'll likely give you a waiver. Win win.
(sorry, couldn't RTFA as the link wasn't responding, so don't know if this was covered)
We would have loved to use it for group collaboration, in our group spanning several continents, timezones, and institutions. Problem is, with any kind of sensitive info, there is no way the lawyers are going to let us put that information on Google's servers. We're not allowed to use Google mail for work use, and not allowed to forward work email to Google addresses (or anyone else's either). If Google had released the code so that we could run it on our own servers, it might have taken off for us.
That right there just stopped any discussion of using Wave for anything serious.
So I was right. Others did think of it.
Yep. The idea has been around for a long time. Radio interferometers have used moving delay lines for a long time. SIM was planning on using moving delay lines in the 90s. CHARA uses moving delay lines.
No, I didn't. I was not consulted.
I meant "you" in the general sense of /., and the resulting pressure on Congress. Go back and read the /. threads at the time, lots of Hubble fanboy-ism, and that sentiment carried on to Congress. Hubble is expensive to maintain and operate - shuttle missions cost an appreciable fraction of $1B, let alone refurbishing and operations - and that money came out of the NASA science budget. So new science got chopped.
To quote the hamsters, "You can get with this, or you can get with that." But make no mistake, it's an OR decision.
Actually the Terrestrial Planet Finder-Interferomete, TPF-I, (as opposed to TPF-Coronograph), studied both a fixed length deployable structural interferometer and a four telescope + beam combiner = five spacecraft mission. The latter was downselected for a pre-phase A mission, due to the larger telescopes available to a spacecraft which didn't require a deployable boom, and the ability to fine-tune the spacecraft separation to best tune in individual targets. The larger telescopes (4 m) were the deciding factor, however. There's no substitute for photons when you're getting about 1 per second from the planet you want to study. We understood how to measure the distance between the spacecraft and maintain a fixed distance using movable delay lines on each spacecraft to maintain a two-octave wide null in the white light received from a distant planet, to a level of one part in 10 billion. There were no insurmountable technical issues with this design, it was completely feasible, and testbeds were implemented which demonstrated these capabilities. TPF-I would have been a remarkable Earth-like planet finder, surveying hundreds of stars, and doing spectroscopy on the atmospheres of any earth-like planets found during the survey. While not imaging the planet itself, a spectrum of the gases of the planet would have told us much about the potential for life on those planets. Certainly more than we'll be able to get any other way in the near future.
These missions were put on hold (read: cancelled) not because of any technical isssues, but because NASA decided to continue to fund Hubble. This mission was completely technically feasible. You could have had either an Earth-like planet finder and spectroscopy from earth-like planets, or a few more years of pretty pictures from Hubble, and you chose Hubble. So no Terrestrial Planet Finders any time in the next ten, and probably twenty years.
simply because they were the first to survive doing it.
There, fixed that for ya.
Some science is getting a boost. Mostly earth observing sciences. Astrophysics is taking a cut.
They've been through medical school, so yeah, I'd say they are some of the smartest people in the world...
Many people have been to lots of school, and have varying numbers of letters after their names, and still manage to be polite.
Except that "lives are at stake" is likely to actually be true.
Many people work in professions where lives are at stake, and still manage to be polite. Some of them are smart and have been to lots of school, and some are not, and have not. They're usually still expected to be polite.
Some of my docs call me by my (earned) title and some call me by my first name, and I reciprocate appropriately. Either way, I'm (usually) polite.
I assumed because you said that more people will be needed to do it, that it would involve manual labor. If there's some method of planting, tilling, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting that doesn't involve 1) machines or 2) backbreaking labor, please send me a link and I'll educate myself.
I often find it more rewarding than the time I spend punching keys. YMMV I guess.
Maybe because you choose to, and it's not you and your families livelihood? Perhaps because you don't have to do it sunup to sundown, six days a week, in weather good or bad, whether you want to or not? If it's raining or snowing or 110 in the shade, you get to say, "Eh, not today"? Or I'll take a three hour lunch break and come back when it's cool? Maybe you don't, but you could.
Me, I couldn't get an education and find a desk to sit behind fast enough. But then I started farming when I was big enough to pick up a hoe. My mileage definitely varied.
People wanted out of farm work because it was unrewarding.
Spoken like someone who's never actually worked on a farm.
People wanted (and still want) out of farm work because it's backbreaking labor. It was hard when I was 18, I can't imagine doing it at age 60, though my father, and his father, and his father before did. Even with machinery, it's hard physical work. There's a reason why farmers don't live as long as an office worker, and a reason why life expectancies went up as labor moved off the farm. And there's a reason why farming is one of the most dangerous professions, and why you see lots of missing fingers and limbs in those communities.
more people need to go back into that industry
You first.
An 8% rake? That is a losers game. Hardly anyone will be able to get a long-term positive EV out of that.
Think about all the cases where police officers have shot people because they 'thought' the person had a gun - the victims in this case vary from having cell phones, food, to even being bare handed.
It's no different in combat. In either case, to make a bad 'no shoot' call can end up with you or your fellow team members ending up dead.
That's the chance they take when they put on the badge. That's what they're supposed to do: hold their fire if they're not sure. That's what they get paid for. Not to stay alive no matter what, and the heck with whoever gets killed in the process if they 'think' someone has a gun.
Same with soldiers. There are rules of engagement that are supposed to keep gunships from firing on civilians, even if sometimes soldiers have to get shot at first to know that they're not civilians. That's the job. Not to kill indiscriminately anything that might be a target.
If you don't like the conditions, don't take the job.
The great majority of people at JPL don't require any clearance at all. Only about 100 people out of 5000 need any sort of clearance, be it Secrit, Duper Super Secrit, or Pinky Swear. The point is, all 5000 would be required to undergo the background check, clearance or no.
Yeah, like Qian Xuesen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsien_Hsue-shen. That worked out well for the US.
"It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."
Let's do that again.
JPL employees do not work for the government; they work for Caltech. NASA data is not classified; just the opposite. By law it is required to be made available to the public (subject to ITAR restrictions). Very few projects at JPL require any kind of clearance. 5% of JPL works on non-NASA projects, i.e., something that could be classified, so 250 people of 5000. Of those, probably less than 100 need a clearance (most non-NASA projects at JPL are not classified, rather the money comes from NSF or industry or some other grant). Those projects that are sensitive, are not "highly" secret, as those things go. It just isn't that kind of lab. On those that are sensitive, the people working on them do go through the background checks. On the usual need-to-know basis, why does that mean that everyone else working there (4900 people of 5000) need to have a clearance or this sort of intrusive background check? If the 100 people with clearance do their job, no one else has access to anything classified. If they don't, having the other 4900 people have a background check won't help because security has already failed. I've had a clearance elsewhere so I'm familiar with the drill. If you have clearance to one thing, that doesn't mean you have clearance to anything else, whether at that level or below. One of the reasons I took this job is because it had no background check.
These sorts of checks haven't been required at JPL for the last 50 years, through wars cold and hot. Why now?
Or are you suggesting that anyone who works for the government, directly or indirectly, be subject to this sort of background check? Teachers? Dept. of Interior? Fish and Wildlife? USGS? Highway subcontractors? After all, it's all federal funds. No one has a right to government money. Do your rights go out the window if you get paid by the government first, second, or third hand?
Clearly it's ridiculous to suggest that USFS employees go through a background check, as it is the guys pushing shovels on the highway. So the question is, where is the line drawn? For the past 50 years, it's been drawn on the other side of JPL employees with no issues. Why so eager to toss our rights down the drain, and for what benefit?
I'd like to find the owner of the cat that did a couple thousand dollars worth of damage to the paint job on my car and have them tell me how they have to let their cat out otherwise it would destroy their furniture.
moon-based telescopes (optical and radio) would probably far outperform anything we've got today.
No, they wouldn't. The extreme temperature changes, dust, and 50% duty cycle are killers. Believe it or not, when people design new missions, they consider the moon seriously. Seriously. The moon goes into the spreadsheet. Then it falls right out again when options start getting ranked.
L2 or earth-trailing is where you want to be (further out is good but then you lose mission time to cruise time). Telescopes like stable thermal environments. Hubble being in LEO is an aberration based on political, not scientific, considerations.
JPL employees are not Federal employees. They work for a private university, Caltech.
the right to express one's opinion -on any subject- should not be subject to persecution by any person. That is why it is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". It says nothing about "any person", or about prohibiting one from getting fired from one's non-government job for expressing one's opinion on any subject. So anonymity seems fairly important to me, as it did to the Founding Fathers who made extensive use of it, the cowards.
Preseidents will be elected by large cities (Los Angeles, New York City, etc) of a handfull of states. Executive decisions will be based on the needs of those few zones rather than the country as a whole.
As opposed to the current system, where those cities and states have effectively no influence on either selection of candidates during the primaries nor election of candidates at all. Executive decisions are made on the basis of the needs of OH, FLA, NH, IA, etc. rather than the country as a whole. The most populous parts of the nation (and the net positive tax contributors) are increasingly ignored to benefit of the shrinking farm and industrial belts. Yes, this system is way better than actually making the votes of the cities where most people actually live count in elections.
Most large ranches are based on public land with grazing rights, and not actual ownership.
I grew up on a 6000 acre ranch, which is large by most standards. All of it privately owned, none of it with public grazing rights. Depends on where you are. All our trucks had gun racks and two-way Motorola radios (not CBs). Since theft of tools and fuel (we kept 1000 gallon tanks since it was a fair drive into town, and we had to keep the tractors and engines running) and various other supplies was always a problem, strangers would be met with at least a fair bit of suspicion. This was in pre-meth days, so I can't imagine what it's like now.
You might have good intentions, but the fellow who made off with 200 gallons of diesel and the arc-welder while we were at the football game Friday night did not. And the sheriff, good intentioned as he might be, might not be able to show up for hours.
Try LA to Sydney or Bangkok then let us know how you feel. Like everything else, it gets worse the older you get, too.
on the face of it you should be held to the same requirements of a 'full' government employee in terms of employment, background checks, access to classified information, and your employment rights in general.
Ok, fine, then I'll take civil servant unions, protections, and pensions with that job, please.
Is there too much cognitive dissonance to recognize that the US government is the largest spender in the US and just because someone somewhere wins a competed contract doesn't make that someone (or company, or university) a government employee, and that their employment agreements might be different than those who actually did agree to work for the US government, i.e., civil servants? That in fact, they might have taken this job over another specifically because they weren't working for the government, even if, in the end, the money does come from the taxpayers?
I used to work on a big high energy physics experiment, completely paid for by the US government, at a US government facility. Did that make me a government employee? Somehow I don't think so. Funny, I thought I was attending a private university and paying for the privilege of doing so. If so, I want my pension to start accumulating back when I was in grad school, and I wish I had civil servant hours back then.
The old equipment most likely costs a fortunate to maintain and operate.
I doubt it costs a fortunate, or even a fortune. It sits in the corner and ticks away.
It most certainly swallows a lot of power compared to modern equipment.
They move a 70m (!) dish around constantly, which is pretty damn impressive to watch when it switches from one mission to another. Not to mention the other smaller dishes (only 10 or 20 m). So the power difference between the old equipment and the new has got to be lost in the noise. Certainly lost in the noise of continuing mission costs.
Not to mention that it could be harder in the future to get spare parts that blow out, manufacturers going bankrupt or simply ceasing to build something where you are the only possible customer. And those parts will be more expensive than current parts.
Still probably cheaper than paying a couple of engineers for a couple of years to build, debug, and test thoroughly a new system. Engineers at NASA typically run $200-300k/year in budget costs, including overhead (they do at your place of employment also). Could you get one of the smartasses above to build it cheaper using a Dell and spare parts from their mom's microwave oven? Sure. Would you trust it to run two priceless irreplaceable probes? Not without paying the two NASA engineers to test it anyway and have it run through several review committees. So you wouldn't save much. And wouldn't you rather spend that money on a new mission? It is a zero-sum game after all. Any money spent upgrading equipment that's working perfectly fine is money that doesn't get spent on something new elsewhere.
Seems like risk is high, cost is relatively high, utility is low, opportunity cost is high, benefit is low, opportunity to screw up is high. So who's going to look at that cost/benefit ratio and make the decision? And who's going to want to do the work? Sounds pretty unfun to me, I'd rather work on something new.
Actually, since it is a government job
It isn't a government job. JPL'ers are employed by Caltech, which is a private university.