My source of disgust is directed towards the tech media punditry. Because what they're demonstrating is that they don't have a clue what reddit management did wrong. They're just either covering up management's (Pao's) fuckup in the name of professional "sisterhood", or just care about how another startup is going to have lost investor money.
I dunno, I thought my write up on Ars was pretty good. -Lee
Yes, I contacted JSC PAO and they unequivocally said that there are no "virus epidemics" on the ISS. There is no current outbreak of anything, stuxnet or otherwise. Kaspersky's comments weren't about an ongoing event—rather, they are off-the-cuff unsourced remarks that could refer to any number of past incidents.
That's insane. If someone steals my credit card number, there's fast and quick legal redress. The most inconvenient part is waiting for the credit card company to overnight me a new card.
Paypal, on the other hand, can lift actual money right out of the checking account they insist on linking to my account and actually defraud me. There is literally no instance where simply using a credit card number is less safe than dealing with paypal.
Probably too late to pick up any moderation points, but no. The CAD files are considered export-controlled technology and are not publicly available. I asked this specifically when I was talking with the engineers involved in the effort. It's also why the article I wrote (linked up-thread) lacks images of the disassembled F-1 engine and its components. I desperately wanted to photograph the lab and its awesome assortment of rocket parts, but NASA and the US government did not allow pictures of export-controlled technology.
The "paperwork" has never been lost—every shred of documentation is intact and on file. In fact, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center have been spending the past year busily disassembling and working with components from several stored F-1 engines. They've constructed highly detailed CAD models of the engines, and even done hot firing on one of the gas generator segments.
I penned a very detailed piece on this over at Ars Technica earlier this year, including photos and video of one of the gas generator hot-fires. The piece includes multiple interviews with senior propulsion scientists at MSFC, and thoroughly debunks the "but the blueprints are lost!" urban myth.
I'd very much have to disagree. Atari games were often quite opaque—Yar's Revenge is a good example of a game that didn't make a lick of sense unless you'd read the manual. There wasn't room on the ROM for any handholding. Plus, most games had dozens of different modes of play available through the game select switch (like Combat, or Space Invaders), and figuring out the differences between them absolutely required a manual.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.
It may be valid to worry that unrestricted copying of things—be those things paintings, songs, sculptures, stories, programs, or whatever—could potentially lead to a reduction in people who earn a living exclusively from creating those things, but it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
MOCR 2 was used for every manned Gemini flight except for Gemini 3, and every manned Apollo flight except Apollo 7. MOCR 1 was used for ASTP and all Skylab flights.
I use Windows at work, because work says I have to. I have a Windows 7 laptop loaded down with management agents and security agents and update agents and all kinds of other agents, which makes IT security comfortable. If I wiped it and loaded Linux, or God forbid if I brought my MacBook from home in to work, my network port would be disabled within seconds and I'd get a fun walk-up visit from security a minute later.
My job requires me to shuffle around MS Office documents, do e-mail, and use web-based tools. There's nothing there that can't be done on another platform, but Windows lets my work keep tight, locked-down tabs on my laptop. The need for that control is at least in part driven by the vendors selling those lock-down solutions. There is a fear- and risk-management-based culture in IT security these days, and Windows is the platform that has the tools that companies have been told they have to deploy to keep things safe.
I'm 33, and I've worked for a single large aerospace company since getting my undergrad degree 11 years ago. I started off as a desktop support guy making $42k, and then was bumped to $43k after a year, then to $45k after another year, then to $46k after another year. In late 2004 I was promoted to junior sysadmin and was bumped to $50k, and through yearly raises got that up to $55k by 2006, when I transferred formally from sysadmin to the enterprise architect side of the house. That got me a bump to $68k, which brought me up to the minimum salary level for that position, and then between 2006 and mid-2010 the pay rose to $74k through those yearly incremental raises.
In 2010 I was a senior architect, making decisions that directly affected the technology direction of a Fortune 50 company with $65B in revenue, making $74k a year. It was nice, of course, and the job was fun, but the compensation just hadn't scaled to the job. There were other benefits--outstanding and near-zero-cost insurance, stock, a functioning pension program, and as near a thing to stability as it's possible to get in an American job--but I wanted more money, so I left. Now I work as a presales engineer (that's "engineer," not real engineer) at one of the same vendors that used to sell to me, making $120k. I would have had to stay at the first job for another 20 years to hit the same level of salary. More, I left on excellent terms, and I wouldn't mind going back there some day.
This experience echoes that of my much-older peers at the aerospace job, where I was one of the only folks in the group less than 50 years old. All of them, without exception, had left at some point for between 1-5 years and then come back, bringing with them a large salary bump. Even in a company that gives you near-guaranteed 2-5% incremental raises, the only way to get a massive salary increase is by leaving.
I don't have a Facebook account--nor do I have a Myspace page, LinkedIn profile, or any other social networking connection. I don't even show up in the Google results for my real name until somewhere around the 20th page of results. This is yet another occasion where I'm glad I don't have those potential huge liabilities hanging around my neck, but I have to wonder: would an attorney consider this kind of non-presence a desirable characteristic, or a non-desirable one?
Awesome! Now two brands that have become totally irrelevant to my online experience can curl up together and die! Good riddance! Don't let the door hit your collective ass on the way out!
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone.
GOD DAMN IT. I really, really wish people would quit perpetuating this wildly incorrect urban legend. The original design details, down to the very last nut and bolt, are on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Absolutely nothing at all is "gone". Source.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
Also ridiculously incorrect. You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right? That they're rebuilt between missions, and that the design has improved and evolved over the life of the program? That as of right now there are in fact nine fully-built spare ones in storage at KSC? The engineers didn't just build a bunch of them in 1980 and then zap themselves with the Men In Black flashy-thing--SSMEs have been constantly built for the past almost thirty years. If my tone is coming across as a little coarse, it's because I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a highly-moderated post to Slashdot when thirty seconds of research would refute almost everything you just said.
The reason why building a Saturn V today from the old plans is impossible has nothing to do with "cheaper labor" or "people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty" or whatever stupidness you wrote. Rather, you can't build a Saturn V today because a Saturn V isn't just a bunch of tanks with engines strapped to it--it's half of a complex launch system, with the other half being the Apollo CSM that sits on top of it. A Saturn V is an end-to-end system designed around the IBM-produced instrumentation unit, two tons of analog and basic digital computers and instrumentation. It's not that you can't build it--it's that building it wouldn't make any sense. You'd need to completely de-Apollo the rocket for it to work right, and guess what? That's exactly what NASA has been doing, although the political will to make it happen is sorely lacking.
Please educate yourself before you spout off such a mixture of urban legend and outright incorrect craziness.
Why is it so surprising that kids from a culture that produces names like "Sivasubramaniam Raveendranath" and "Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad" are good at spelling?
You're being disingenuous, whether you mean to or not. I drive past that same corner every day on the way to and from work at one of the major subs, and while the turnout today might be low, I've at times seen dozens of folks with signs standing on that same spot. Couple that with the signs that are pasted up in the windows of business up and down NASA rd 1 and Bay Area Blvd, along with the words of coworkers in my group and in other groups, and the impression I get is that the Obama plan is wildly unpopular among the people doing the wrench-turning.
I actually read the Augustine report, cover to cover, and it most emphatically did not say that the current plan is broken and unworkable--it said that the current plan is $3B/yr underfunded, and that given the correct amount of funding, would be perfectly viable. Given that you can pretty much trip on $3B while walking down the hallway on the way to the bathroom at the Capital building, it's shameful that those monies can't be allocated to NASA. Further, the direction being pushed by the administration is a half-assed take on one of the Augustine "Flexible Path" options, and the implementation details and goals are disgustingly vague. It makes me wonder if the folks responsible for drafting the plan bothered to read more than Augustine's executive summary.
The most disheartening thing happening right now, though, is that everyone at the subs--from the major players of Lockheed & Boeing all the way down to the tiny shops--is still doing what they were doing in December, prior to the new budget announcement, because nothing's actually been passed yet. So all the folks working Ares I are still working Ares I, all the folks working full-mission Orion are still working full-mission Orion, and so on, and everyone pretty damn depressed about it. It's one thing to be told that the project on which you've killed yourself for three or four years is now dead; it's quite another thing to be told that the project on which you've killed yourself for three or four years is almost certainly about to be dead, but for now just keep slaving away at it full-tilt because nothing's actually happened yet.
Imagine the hilarity when they realize they paid twice for the project, and one of the costs is already in the house...
Judging by how most workplaces function, his employer would immediately source the in-house cost. Then they'd end up with one offshore code house fixing another offshore code house's mistake. They'd still pay twice for the work, but now it would be "aligned to strategy."
Sweet merciful crap, is Spamford Wallace still around? We were stabbing voodoo dolls with his picture on them more than ten years ago. His C.V. reads like list of things that are wrong with the Internet. If there were ever someone that the world would be a better place without, it's this guy.
I don't know any other business that can successfully release a broken product and then charge their customers full price for what essentially amounts to a product upgrade.
Canada comes from the Iroquois word 'Kanata', which means villiage, or settlement. It was in common use anywhere the Iroquois were - which includes the area above the Great Lakes - but also below, and around
Really? I thought the name "Canada" came from the two folks who first discovered it.
"Great country, eh?," said the first one. "What should we name it, eh?"
"I know," said the second one. "We'll put some letters in a hat, eh, and then we'll take turns drawing the letters out, eh, and that's how we'll name the place!"
"Good idea, eh!" said the first one. He pulled off his toupe, scribbled some letters on some paper scraps, dumped them into the toupe, shook it up, and they began to draw.
Damn it, I *JUST YESTERDAY* posted to correct this fallacy. When will the Internet learn?
The blueprints for everything, down to the last nut and bolt, are on file at MSFC. Source.
Further, rebuilding a Saturn from them won't work. You can't get the parts made any more, nor would you want to. You can't duplicate IBM's work and make another Instrument Unit--two tons of 1960s-vintage analog computers and gyroscopes, including equipment designed to determine the rocket's launch azimuth based on star sightings, not GPS like we'd use today. Then there's all the other analog and early digital equipment that's integral to the design. Remember, it's not just a giant fuel tank and some engines--it's a launch vehicle. It's got a flight manual, and it's designed to be used in conjunction with an Apollo command and service module pair flying it.
Re-design the rocket to use new technology? By the time you've de-Apollo'd Saturn, you've made a whole new launch vehicle. Which is exactly what Ares is.
The Saturn V is an awesome piece of technology, yes. An awesome piece of 1960s technology. Rebuilding it today would not work, period, no matter how cool it might be.
You going to find a "mom and pop engineering company" to duplicate IBM's work and make another Instrument Unit to fly it? Manufacture two tons of 1960s-vintage analog computers and gyroscopes? Rebuild equipment designed to determine the rocket's launch azimuth based on star sightings, not GPS like we'd use today? What about all the other analog and early digital equipment that's integral to the design? It's not just a giant fuel tank and some engines--it's a launch vehicle. It's got a flight manual, and it's designed to be used in conjunction with an Apollo command and service module pair flying it.
Re-design the rocket to use new technology? By the time you've de-Apollo'd Saturn, you've made a whole new launch vehicle. Which is exactly what Ares is.
The Saturn V is an awesome piece of technology, yes. An awesome piece of 1960s technology. Rebuilding it today would not work, period, no matter how cool it might be.
No, actually we don't. The tooling's been long-since destroyed, and there are no blueprints for many of the parts because they were farmed out to contractors, let alone information on things like what precise alloys to use for said parts, and other methods of manufacture.
You are wrong. The blueprints for everything, down to the last nut and bolt, are on file at MSFC. Source.
There are a couple Saturn Vs left, yes, but they were left out to the elements for many years and may have been scavenged for parts.
You are wrong. There are three, but none of them is "one" rocket. The one at the Johnson space center, made up of three flight-rated stages from different rockets, was left out for 20+ years but has been restored to pristine (though obviously not flight-worthy) condition. The one at MSFC is all static test stages and has been similarly restored. The one at KSC is two flight stages and one test stage, and has been kept in perfect (but again, obviously not flight-worthy) condition since the day it was rolled in. NONE of the rockets were ever "scavenged" for parts--they're all property of the Smithsonian and are maintained in trust as artifacts by NASA.
Recreating a Saturn V isn't impossible because we don't have the plans--it's impossible because the blueprints call for standard parts and items that don't exist any more (like a left-handed widget with widget gauge #12, which was used by, say, Boeing in 1960, but not any more).
Slashdot Mirror
My source of disgust is directed towards the tech media punditry. Because what they're demonstrating is that they don't have a clue what reddit management did wrong. They're just either covering up management's (Pao's) fuckup in the name of professional "sisterhood", or just care about how another startup is going to have lost investor money.
I dunno, I thought my write up on Ars was pretty good.
-Lee
Yes, I contacted JSC PAO and they unequivocally said that there are no "virus epidemics" on the ISS. There is no current outbreak of anything, stuxnet or otherwise. Kaspersky's comments weren't about an ongoing event—rather, they are off-the-cuff unsourced remarks that could refer to any number of past incidents.
That's insane. If someone steals my credit card number, there's fast and quick legal redress. The most inconvenient part is waiting for the credit card company to overnight me a new card.
Paypal, on the other hand, can lift actual money right out of the checking account they insist on linking to my account and actually defraud me. There is literally no instance where simply using a credit card number is less safe than dealing with paypal.
Probably too late to pick up any moderation points, but no. The CAD files are considered export-controlled technology and are not publicly available. I asked this specifically when I was talking with the engineers involved in the effort. It's also why the article I wrote (linked up-thread) lacks images of the disassembled F-1 engine and its components. I desperately wanted to photograph the lab and its awesome assortment of rocket parts, but NASA and the US government did not allow pictures of export-controlled technology.
The "paperwork" has never been lost—every shred of documentation is intact and on file. In fact, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center have been spending the past year busily disassembling and working with components from several stored F-1 engines. They've constructed highly detailed CAD models of the engines, and even done hot firing on one of the gas generator segments.
I penned a very detailed piece on this over at Ars Technica earlier this year, including photos and video of one of the gas generator hot-fires. The piece includes multiple interviews with senior propulsion scientists at MSFC, and thoroughly debunks the "but the blueprints are lost!" urban myth.
I'd very much have to disagree. Atari games were often quite opaque—Yar's Revenge is a good example of a game that didn't make a lick of sense unless you'd read the manual. There wasn't room on the ROM for any handholding. Plus, most games had dozens of different modes of play available through the game select switch (like Combat, or Space Invaders), and figuring out the differences between them absolutely required a manual.
"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."
The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.
It may be valid to worry that unrestricted copying of things—be those things paintings, songs, sculptures, stories, programs, or whatever—could potentially lead to a reduction in people who earn a living exclusively from creating those things, but it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
MOCR 2 was used for every manned Gemini flight except for Gemini 3, and every manned Apollo flight except Apollo 7. MOCR 1 was used for ASTP and all Skylab flights.
I use Windows at work, because work says I have to. I have a Windows 7 laptop loaded down with management agents and security agents and update agents and all kinds of other agents, which makes IT security comfortable. If I wiped it and loaded Linux, or God forbid if I brought my MacBook from home in to work, my network port would be disabled within seconds and I'd get a fun walk-up visit from security a minute later.
My job requires me to shuffle around MS Office documents, do e-mail, and use web-based tools. There's nothing there that can't be done on another platform, but Windows lets my work keep tight, locked-down tabs on my laptop. The need for that control is at least in part driven by the vendors selling those lock-down solutions. There is a fear- and risk-management-based culture in IT security these days, and Windows is the platform that has the tools that companies have been told they have to deploy to keep things safe.
I'm 33, and I've worked for a single large aerospace company since getting my undergrad degree 11 years ago. I started off as a desktop support guy making $42k, and then was bumped to $43k after a year, then to $45k after another year, then to $46k after another year. In late 2004 I was promoted to junior sysadmin and was bumped to $50k, and through yearly raises got that up to $55k by 2006, when I transferred formally from sysadmin to the enterprise architect side of the house. That got me a bump to $68k, which brought me up to the minimum salary level for that position, and then between 2006 and mid-2010 the pay rose to $74k through those yearly incremental raises.
In 2010 I was a senior architect, making decisions that directly affected the technology direction of a Fortune 50 company with $65B in revenue, making $74k a year. It was nice, of course, and the job was fun, but the compensation just hadn't scaled to the job. There were other benefits--outstanding and near-zero-cost insurance, stock, a functioning pension program, and as near a thing to stability as it's possible to get in an American job--but I wanted more money, so I left. Now I work as a presales engineer (that's "engineer," not real engineer) at one of the same vendors that used to sell to me, making $120k. I would have had to stay at the first job for another 20 years to hit the same level of salary. More, I left on excellent terms, and I wouldn't mind going back there some day.
This experience echoes that of my much-older peers at the aerospace job, where I was one of the only folks in the group less than 50 years old. All of them, without exception, had left at some point for between 1-5 years and then come back, bringing with them a large salary bump. Even in a company that gives you near-guaranteed 2-5% incremental raises, the only way to get a massive salary increase is by leaving.
I have to nominate the Sandra Bullock abortion The Net--the entire film. Compared to that movie, Goldblum's antics are totally plausible.
I don't have a Facebook account--nor do I have a Myspace page, LinkedIn profile, or any other social networking connection. I don't even show up in the Google results for my real name until somewhere around the 20th page of results. This is yet another occasion where I'm glad I don't have those potential huge liabilities hanging around my neck, but I have to wonder: would an attorney consider this kind of non-presence a desirable characteristic, or a non-desirable one?
Awesome! Now two brands that have become totally irrelevant to my online experience can curl up together and die! Good riddance! Don't let the door hit your collective ass on the way out!
Not at all surprising--there have been conclusive studies done in the past on just how stupid babies are.
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone.
GOD DAMN IT. I really, really wish people would quit perpetuating this wildly incorrect urban legend. The original design details, down to the very last nut and bolt, are on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Absolutely nothing at all is "gone". Source.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
Also ridiculously incorrect. You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right? That they're rebuilt between missions, and that the design has improved and evolved over the life of the program? That as of right now there are in fact nine fully-built spare ones in storage at KSC? The engineers didn't just build a bunch of them in 1980 and then zap themselves with the Men In Black flashy-thing--SSMEs have been constantly built for the past almost thirty years. If my tone is coming across as a little coarse, it's because I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a highly-moderated post to Slashdot when thirty seconds of research would refute almost everything you just said.
The reason why building a Saturn V today from the old plans is impossible has nothing to do with "cheaper labor" or "people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty" or whatever stupidness you wrote. Rather, you can't build a Saturn V today because a Saturn V isn't just a bunch of tanks with engines strapped to it--it's half of a complex launch system, with the other half being the Apollo CSM that sits on top of it. A Saturn V is an end-to-end system designed around the IBM-produced instrumentation unit, two tons of analog and basic digital computers and instrumentation. It's not that you can't build it--it's that building it wouldn't make any sense. You'd need to completely de-Apollo the rocket for it to work right, and guess what? That's exactly what NASA has been doing, although the political will to make it happen is sorely lacking.
Please educate yourself before you spout off such a mixture of urban legend and outright incorrect craziness.
Why is it so surprising that kids from a culture that produces names like "Sivasubramaniam Raveendranath" and "Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad" are good at spelling?
You're being disingenuous, whether you mean to or not. I drive past that same corner every day on the way to and from work at one of the major subs, and while the turnout today might be low, I've at times seen dozens of folks with signs standing on that same spot. Couple that with the signs that are pasted up in the windows of business up and down NASA rd 1 and Bay Area Blvd, along with the words of coworkers in my group and in other groups, and the impression I get is that the Obama plan is wildly unpopular among the people doing the wrench-turning.
I actually read the Augustine report, cover to cover, and it most emphatically did not say that the current plan is broken and unworkable--it said that the current plan is $3B/yr underfunded, and that given the correct amount of funding, would be perfectly viable. Given that you can pretty much trip on $3B while walking down the hallway on the way to the bathroom at the Capital building, it's shameful that those monies can't be allocated to NASA. Further, the direction being pushed by the administration is a half-assed take on one of the Augustine "Flexible Path" options, and the implementation details and goals are disgustingly vague. It makes me wonder if the folks responsible for drafting the plan bothered to read more than Augustine's executive summary.
The most disheartening thing happening right now, though, is that everyone at the subs--from the major players of Lockheed & Boeing all the way down to the tiny shops--is still doing what they were doing in December, prior to the new budget announcement, because nothing's actually been passed yet. So all the folks working Ares I are still working Ares I, all the folks working full-mission Orion are still working full-mission Orion, and so on, and everyone pretty damn depressed about it. It's one thing to be told that the project on which you've killed yourself for three or four years is now dead; it's quite another thing to be told that the project on which you've killed yourself for three or four years is almost certainly about to be dead, but for now just keep slaving away at it full-tilt because nothing's actually happened yet.
Imagine the hilarity when they realize they paid twice for the project, and one of the costs is already in the house...
Judging by how most workplaces function, his employer would immediately source the in-house cost. Then they'd end up with one offshore code house fixing another offshore code house's mistake. They'd still pay twice for the work, but now it would be "aligned to strategy."
Sweet merciful crap, is Spamford Wallace still around? We were stabbing voodoo dolls with his picture on them more than ten years ago. His C.V. reads like list of things that are wrong with the Internet. If there were ever someone that the world would be a better place without, it's this guy.
Factoid -- in one stage of development, the impeller was informally referred to as the "Whopper Chopper".
I don't know any other business that can successfully release a broken product and then charge their customers full price for what essentially amounts to a product upgrade.
...Apple?
Really? I thought the name "Canada" came from the two folks who first discovered it.
"Great country, eh?," said the first one. "What should we name it, eh?"
"I know," said the second one. "We'll put some letters in a hat, eh, and then we'll take turns drawing the letters out, eh, and that's how we'll name the place!"
"Good idea, eh!" said the first one. He pulled off his toupe, scribbled some letters on some paper scraps, dumped them into the toupe, shook it up, and they began to draw.
"Oh, I got a 'c', eh!"
"I got an 'n', eh!"
Damn it, I *JUST YESTERDAY* posted to correct this fallacy. When will the Internet learn?
The blueprints for everything, down to the last nut and bolt, are on file at MSFC. Source.
Further, rebuilding a Saturn from them won't work. You can't get the parts made any more, nor would you want to. You can't duplicate IBM's work and make another Instrument Unit--two tons of 1960s-vintage analog computers and gyroscopes, including equipment designed to determine the rocket's launch azimuth based on star sightings, not GPS like we'd use today. Then there's all the other analog and early digital equipment that's integral to the design. Remember, it's not just a giant fuel tank and some engines--it's a launch vehicle. It's got a flight manual, and it's designed to be used in conjunction with an Apollo command and service module pair flying it.
Re-design the rocket to use new technology? By the time you've de-Apollo'd Saturn, you've made a whole new launch vehicle. Which is exactly what Ares is.
The Saturn V is an awesome piece of technology, yes. An awesome piece of 1960s technology. Rebuilding it today would not work, period, no matter how cool it might be.
You going to find a "mom and pop engineering company" to duplicate IBM's work and make another Instrument Unit to fly it? Manufacture two tons of 1960s-vintage analog computers and gyroscopes? Rebuild equipment designed to determine the rocket's launch azimuth based on star sightings, not GPS like we'd use today? What about all the other analog and early digital equipment that's integral to the design? It's not just a giant fuel tank and some engines--it's a launch vehicle. It's got a flight manual, and it's designed to be used in conjunction with an Apollo command and service module pair flying it.
Re-design the rocket to use new technology? By the time you've de-Apollo'd Saturn, you've made a whole new launch vehicle. Which is exactly what Ares is.
The Saturn V is an awesome piece of technology, yes. An awesome piece of 1960s technology. Rebuilding it today would not work, period, no matter how cool it might be.
No, actually we don't. The tooling's been long-since destroyed, and there are no blueprints for many of the parts because they were farmed out to contractors, let alone information on things like what precise alloys to use for said parts, and other methods of manufacture.
You are wrong. The blueprints for everything, down to the last nut and bolt, are on file at MSFC. Source.
There are a couple Saturn Vs left, yes, but they were left out to the elements for many years and may have been scavenged for parts.
You are wrong. There are three, but none of them is "one" rocket. The one at the Johnson space center, made up of three flight-rated stages from different rockets, was left out for 20+ years but has been restored to pristine (though obviously not flight-worthy) condition. The one at MSFC is all static test stages and has been similarly restored. The one at KSC is two flight stages and one test stage, and has been kept in perfect (but again, obviously not flight-worthy) condition since the day it was rolled in. NONE of the rockets were ever "scavenged" for parts--they're all property of the Smithsonian and are maintained in trust as artifacts by NASA.
Recreating a Saturn V isn't impossible because we don't have the plans--it's impossible because the blueprints call for standard parts and items that don't exist any more (like a left-handed widget with widget gauge #12, which was used by, say, Boeing in 1960, but not any more).