How do you pay for rent, survival costs, and saving, if you have a baby and use that infant care?
Silly Europeans, we refinance our mortgage and max out our credit cards! Endless debt, it is the American way. In fact we can barely afford our finance charges. We even have trillion dollar wars! Who needs childcare?
Perhaps we should round up all those Best Western hotels and put them in prison.
Or perhaps we could just turn them into prisons (which would hardly be worse than the present level of accommodations at most locations anyway). That way, we alleviate both prison overcrowding and the horror of Best Western accommodations being inflicted upon the unsuspecting business traveler, killing two birds with one stone.
Compared with what passes for a periodical these days the Economist is the paragon of journalistic rigor and integrity and even when judged from an academic standpoint the articles, econometrics, and original research stand up quite well. You could do a lot worse than the Economist for your business and world events news.
The issue is one of negligence not the relative efficacy of the available security technologies. If a company is found, upon discovery, to have exhibited a complete or reckless disregard for the potential consequences of a breach then some liability is in order. The "reasonable man" test can be used by juries to decided whether or not the circumstances surrounding the breach amount to negligence and what the appropriate remedy should be. The negligence tort has already been well litigated in common law countries (like the US, UK, and Australia) so the only thing different here are the details (IT technical details) which might require expert witnesses to testify or offer their opinions, but the basic law in negligence is well settled (at least as far as I understand it, but IANAL so please do not take this as formal legal advice) once the details or facts of a particular matter have been determined.
Wrong. This may increase the difficulty of the MITM attack by some constant amount (the number of notary servers checked) but does not foreclose the possibility that the notary requests themselves might be intercepted and impersonated by the MITM so the attack remains theoretically viable. That is the problem with MITM, it has more lives than Schrödinger's cat. Just when you thought that you had gotten rid of it it comes back in a revised form. The best solution thus far is and remains the inclusion of trusted root certs with the hash verified build of the OS that you are using which can then be used for checks and even this solution is not perfect (although it makes breaking the authentication at least as difficult as breaking the encrypted session itself which tends to discourage attacks on the authentication or at least not to favor them over simply breaking the session encryption).
It is ironic, given what Sony has become in the intervening years, that one of the toughest and most ruthless anti-copying companies today began the modern consumer electronics recording era by selling a copying device and defending it in front of the US Supreme Court. If there is one case that Sony now regrets arguing and winning then surely that must be it.
Why should they have to do anything? As long as they can show that there are substantial non-infringing uses for their products (i.e. that the products have not been designed expressly and solely for the purpose of copyright infringement...which would be trivialy easy to show btw) then they have no legal obligation as a third party, and rightly so, to help the software industry police their contracts and license agreements with regard to use of the software. If the hardware industry could be held responsible for software piracy then the RIAA and the MPAA would pile on like flies on shit in a new york minute to get the government into the hardware regulation business (in fact they have lobbied for this type of concession from Congress on numerous occasions in the past). The hardware industry is accountable only to their paying customers (the consumers) and that is the way that it should be.
Silly citizen, we don't need oversight because we have George Dubya "The Decider" Bush using his own impeccable best judgment to decide who the evil doers are. You aren't one of the evil doers are you? You are with us right?
Karl Rove is a politically well connected and powerful person whereas the average citizen is not. Try giving the next police officer who asks you to do something some lip and you see what happens (i.e. don't taze me bro! Ahhhhhh!).
The FBI is a law enforcement agency, not an foreign or even a domestic intelligence gathering agency. What is the point of gathering information in an unconstitutional manner when it will ultimately be of ZERO use in securing a conviction? If the defense attorney can show that warrantless spying or other unconstitutional methods generated the initial leads then everything else which follows from that, even if gathered legitimately, can be thrown out of court on the basis that none of it would have ever been obtained if not for the initial unconstitutional leads. With no evidence of any wrongdoing (because everything was thrown out) there is no case against the defendant.
That said, the algebraic degree associated with modern block codes is far beyond this.
Would not a modern block cipher, AES for example, be of at least order 128 or possibly higher with at least as many variables? It was also mentioned in the summary of TFA that older or lower power devices might be vulnerable, but really where are these devices being used right now? It has been my experience that if something is encrypted at all (i.e. someone actually bothered to think about security) then a stronger algorithm is generally selected (AES, 3-DES, Twofish, etc...); otherwise, and this happens all too often, encryption is simply not employed even though it easily could have been and probably should have been.
I think you are confusing all muslims with fundamentalists.
Not at all. However, what matters is not necessarily the people of a country but who has the power to make decisions or to "push the button" in this case. In Iran that power belongs (presumably) to the Ayatollahs and the supreme religious council who are fully (or at least outwardly so) behind their (I say their because basically the Ayatollahs and supreme council chooses the president and the government in Iran because they control with absolute veto who does and does not stand for office on the ballots. The elections are merely a formality in Iran, either candidate was pre-approved by the Ayatollahs and the supreme council) President. So you can bet that just about any official statement by the President or any other significant Iranian official has the full backing of the Ayatollahs unless they specifically say otherwise, which they have rarely done in practice so as to present a unified front. So when the President says, "I am going to wipe Israel off the map" then we in the West must take that as a credible and serious threat. The problem with Iran is that the fundamentalists are the ones in power so their position is the one that counts as far as the official policy of Iran is concerned. That is why we must take their threats and actions seriously because they have shown that they have the means (or are fast acquiring them), motive, and will to make good on their threats (which they have done in the past on numerous occasions).
It's hard to justify who can and can't have such weapons when the palying field is so uneven. Why can some countries have them and some not? Why are some nations on a treaty and some not? The world would likely be a better place if no one had nuclear weapons. Howerver, you can't have countries with weapons telling those without that they can never have them.
I agree. Ideally, nobody would have them, but what began with such high hopes, namely the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has collapsed into a nuclear club status quo to the long term detriment IMHO of the human race. I think that it is fair to say that the United States and George W Bush especially share a portion of the blame for this (not all, but a substantial portion). I know that it is not an excuse, but practically speaking the hope that nuclear weapons would someday no longer menace mankind was and is unrealistic. The best that we can probably hope for is to control the status quo and if that means a bit of "unfairness" (i.e. Iran cannot have nukes) then so be it. They have been offered reasonable alternatives and guarantees (things which Iraq and Saddam were never offered or abandoned of their own free will) of security and respect for their sovereignty by the rest of the world IF they would just be reasonable...unfortunately they (the Iranians) have chosen to be unreasonable.
They will never be able to match their arsenal to that of US or UK or France or Russia or Israel.
They don't care. That is the problem. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that kept the peace (at least relatively, proxy wars were still fought in a limited fashion but only up to a point) for nearly fifty (50) years during the Cold War was based upon one simple notion: the other side might no like us but at least they are not crazy OR in the words of our late great President John F. Kennedy,
"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."
Iran is a theocracy officially governed by religion which doesn't cherish the future of its children (instead it glorifies suicide bombing) and believes in immortality with Allah and 70 virgins in heaven. Now you begin to see why allowing such people to have even one bomb is such a concern. There is more than an outside chance that they might choose to use their bomb against Israel or the United States or Europe regardless of the consequences (i.e. in their minds they all die in the retaliatory strike and go to their reward of 70 virgins). Religion and powerful weapons are and have always been a dangerous mix.
The bands should pay the fee (~$20 or so I think) to get an official notarized filing receipt with the United States Copyright office stating the name of the song(s) and the date and time of the filing. That way, when the RIAA causes damages (i.e. a canceled gig and legal hassles) you can shove a copy of the letter in their face and demand a settlement for damages out of them for using your already copyrighted song name(s) to promote their crap and loss of business.
I like the way that the Head First Design Patterns poster explains this with the "Zen of Patterns" section:
The Beginner Mind:
The beginner uses patterns everywhere. This is good: the beginner gets lots of experience with, and practice using patterns. The beginner also thinks, "The more patterns I use, the better the design." The beginner will learn that this is not so, that all designs should be as simple as possible. Complexity and patterns should only be used where they are needed for practical extensibility.
The Intermediate Mind:
As learning progresses, the intermediate mind starts to see where patterns are needed and where they aren't. The intermediate mind still tries to fit too many square patterns into round holes, but also begins to see that patterns can be adapted to fit situations where the canonical pattern doesn't fit.
The Zen Mind:
The Zen mind is able to see patterns where they fit naturally. The Zen mind is not obsessed with using patterns; rather, it looks for simple solutions that best solve the problem. The Zen mind thinks in terms of the object principles and their trade-offs. When a need for a pattern naturally arises, the Zen mind applies it, knowing well that it may require adaptation. The Zen mind also sees relationships to similar patterns and understands the subtleties of differences in the intent of related patterns. The Zen mind is also a beginner mind, it doesn't let all that pattern knowledge overly influence design decisions.
So don't pay him by the hour but rather by what he gets done and if he is consistently late or doesn't meet standard then you are free to fire him at any time. Do you really care how something gets done as long as it gets done in a reasonable amount of time at the price that you are willing to pay and the level of quality that you desire?
Did you get the initial clearance as part of your graduate research assistanceship thing? If so, then the research grants probably covered the cost (I presume that you personally didn't get the bill)? Then, once you have that covered you can get into the private sector defense contractors much more easily (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup, etc) since they are definitely hiring competent people who already have clearances (defense is big business these days, what with the never ending war on terror and such). I did not say that private defense companies will not under any circumstances sponsor new clearances, merely that they are very reluctant to do so if they can possibly avoid it (since it costs extra $$$).
In fact the local college will sponsor security clearances if you are working on a project for a professor as a GRA in collaboration with the Army, etc.
Alright, but again your school has to be involved in these projects and you have to know the professor or get to know him and then become involved with his research work. That opportunity is not always available to everyone, even if one is qualified and wants to work in defense (I wasn't personally interested in a defense job, but some of my friends in college were).
If only it were that easy (perhaps it is better that it isn't easy given all of the Chinese spying going on these days). One cannot apply independently for a security clearance. You must have a sponsor who is doing secret government work and is willing to sponsor your application and pay (thousands or even tens of thousands depending upon the level of clearance) to process the application (the money goes to pay for teams of government investigators to track down and interview everyone you ever knew in addition to all of the standard paperwork that goes with any regular background investigation). Naturally, US companies (being cheap as they are) would rather hire someone who already has an active clearance so that they don't have to pay thousands of dollars and sponsor you to get one (they will only do that as a last resort and most engineers simply are not that valuable to them). Hence, whenever defense contractors appear at job fairs they only want to talk to you if you already have a security clearance and you cannot just go out and get one for yourself even if you are willing to pay the fees so it is a chicken and egg problem. The only other way is to come out of the military or government job with a clearance still active (in which case the government paid for all of the background investigations). These jobs may not be going to India, but you have to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time to get the security clearance in the first place.
Will the engineers who actually know about these things be able to prevent this kludge from becoming operational or will NASA management and political appointee administrators strike again? It is probably the dream of every rocket engineer to design a new vehicle from scratch and somehow NASA manages to squander this once in a generation chance to "get it right" after years of just gritting their teeth and "making it work" with the shuttle. I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised, but it is still disappointing to see so much money being wasted on dumb designs, like Ares is shaping up to be, when it could be going instead to Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites or the guys at SpaceX if it has to get spent at all. Personally, I would prefer more advanced propulsion research and unmanned missions with a minimal manned program just to keep the technology going rather than more high-cost, low-science, space cowboy-style boots on the ground and flag in the sand missions to the moon and mars. The big manned program should wait until we have somewhere really interesting to go and a better way to get there than chemical rockets (think NX-01).
still, liquid fuel has a lot of advantages over solid fuel rockets and the complexities of fuel pumps, storage, and throttling are well understood and well solved by now. Solid fuel makes sense for military applications were unmanned missiles must sit for long periods of time inactive until they are called upon to launch at a moments notice, but manned launches will always be planned affairs so that particular benefit of solid fuel will be wasted on the Ares. What they really ought to be doing is partnering with companies like SpaceX to further develop more sensible launch platforms, like their falcon rocket, using all of the knowledge and experience that we have gained over the years instead of attempting to "save money" by re-using parts from the Space Shuttle which were full of compromises related to politics and not engineering.
Yes, but if the alternative is to reduce the power of the engines to have less vibration in the first place, then the net loss of payload may be greater than simply using the more powerful engines with the extra weight and shock absorbers. I suppose that I could be mistaken, I am not a rocket scientist after all, but if the goal is to maximize payload (which appears to be the case) then some inefficiencies in other areas (like shock absorbers and weights) might be tolerable provided that such problems are not the result of more fundamental design flaws in the Ares rocket.
Fix it yourself with Asterisk. Numbers not on the white list are dumped into recorded phone tree maze with endless loops of meaningless choices and no way out except to hang up. It would be even better with a plugin that could try and string them on for a while without actually divulging any meaningful information by responding at pauses with phrases like "that sounds interesting", "uh-huh", and "I'm not sure" the goal being to waste as much of the telemarketer's time as possible on a dead end call (i.e. no sale) before they hang up in frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
How do you pay for rent, survival costs, and saving, if you have a baby and use that infant care?
Silly Europeans, we refinance our mortgage and max out our credit cards! Endless debt, it is the American way. In fact we can barely afford our finance charges. We even have trillion dollar wars! Who needs childcare?
Perhaps we should round up all those Best Western hotels and put them in prison.
Or perhaps we could just turn them into prisons (which would hardly be worse than the present level of accommodations at most locations anyway). That way, we alleviate both prison overcrowding and the horror of Best Western accommodations being inflicted upon the unsuspecting business traveler, killing two birds with one stone.
Compared with what passes for a periodical these days the Economist is the paragon of journalistic rigor and integrity and even when judged from an academic standpoint the articles, econometrics, and original research stand up quite well. You could do a lot worse than the Economist for your business and world events news.
The issue is one of negligence not the relative efficacy of the available security technologies. If a company is found, upon discovery, to have exhibited a complete or reckless disregard for the potential consequences of a breach then some liability is in order. The "reasonable man" test can be used by juries to decided whether or not the circumstances surrounding the breach amount to negligence and what the appropriate remedy should be. The negligence tort has already been well litigated in common law countries (like the US, UK, and Australia) so the only thing different here are the details (IT technical details) which might require expert witnesses to testify or offer their opinions, but the basic law in negligence is well settled (at least as far as I understand it, but IANAL so please do not take this as formal legal advice) once the details or facts of a particular matter have been determined.
Wrong. This may increase the difficulty of the MITM attack by some constant amount (the number of notary servers checked) but does not foreclose the possibility that the notary requests themselves might be intercepted and impersonated by the MITM so the attack remains theoretically viable. That is the problem with MITM, it has more lives than Schrödinger's cat. Just when you thought that you had gotten rid of it it comes back in a revised form. The best solution thus far is and remains the inclusion of trusted root certs with the hash verified build of the OS that you are using which can then be used for checks and even this solution is not perfect (although it makes breaking the authentication at least as difficult as breaking the encrypted session itself which tends to discourage attacks on the authentication or at least not to favor them over simply breaking the session encryption).
It is ironic, given what Sony has become in the intervening years, that one of the toughest and most ruthless anti-copying companies today began the modern consumer electronics recording era by selling a copying device and defending it in front of the US Supreme Court. If there is one case that Sony now regrets arguing and winning then surely that must be it.
Why should they have to do anything? As long as they can show that there are substantial non-infringing uses for their products (i.e. that the products have not been designed expressly and solely for the purpose of copyright infringement...which would be trivialy easy to show btw) then they have no legal obligation as a third party, and rightly so, to help the software industry police their contracts and license agreements with regard to use of the software. If the hardware industry could be held responsible for software piracy then the RIAA and the MPAA would pile on like flies on shit in a new york minute to get the government into the hardware regulation business (in fact they have lobbied for this type of concession from Congress on numerous occasions in the past). The hardware industry is accountable only to their paying customers (the consumers) and that is the way that it should be.
You know Dick Cheney would be an almost perfect substitute for Hugo Drax in that film (i.e. "Look after Mr. Bond, see that some harm comes to him").
Silly citizen, we don't need oversight because we have George Dubya "The Decider" Bush using his own impeccable best judgment to decide who the evil doers are. You aren't one of the evil doers are you? You are with us right?
Karl Rove is a politically well connected and powerful person whereas the average citizen is not. Try giving the next police officer who asks you to do something some lip and you see what happens (i.e. don't taze me bro! Ahhhhhh!).
The FBI is a law enforcement agency, not an foreign or even a domestic intelligence gathering agency. What is the point of gathering information in an unconstitutional manner when it will ultimately be of ZERO use in securing a conviction? If the defense attorney can show that warrantless spying or other unconstitutional methods generated the initial leads then everything else which follows from that, even if gathered legitimately, can be thrown out of court on the basis that none of it would have ever been obtained if not for the initial unconstitutional leads. With no evidence of any wrongdoing (because everything was thrown out) there is no case against the defendant.
That said, the algebraic degree associated with modern block codes is far beyond this.
Would not a modern block cipher, AES for example, be of at least order 128 or possibly higher with at least as many variables? It was also mentioned in the summary of TFA that older or lower power devices might be vulnerable, but really where are these devices being used right now? It has been my experience that if something is encrypted at all (i.e. someone actually bothered to think about security) then a stronger algorithm is generally selected (AES, 3-DES, Twofish, etc...); otherwise, and this happens all too often, encryption is simply not employed even though it easily could have been and probably should have been.
I think you are confusing all muslims with fundamentalists.
Not at all. However, what matters is not necessarily the people of a country but who has the power to make decisions or to "push the button" in this case. In Iran that power belongs (presumably) to the Ayatollahs and the supreme religious council who are fully (or at least outwardly so) behind their (I say their because basically the Ayatollahs and supreme council chooses the president and the government in Iran because they control with absolute veto who does and does not stand for office on the ballots. The elections are merely a formality in Iran, either candidate was pre-approved by the Ayatollahs and the supreme council) President. So you can bet that just about any official statement by the President or any other significant Iranian official has the full backing of the Ayatollahs unless they specifically say otherwise, which they have rarely done in practice so as to present a unified front. So when the President says, "I am going to wipe Israel off the map" then we in the West must take that as a credible and serious threat. The problem with Iran is that the fundamentalists are the ones in power so their position is the one that counts as far as the official policy of Iran is concerned. That is why we must take their threats and actions seriously because they have shown that they have the means (or are fast acquiring them), motive, and will to make good on their threats (which they have done in the past on numerous occasions).
It's hard to justify who can and can't have such weapons when the palying field is so uneven. Why can some countries have them and some not? Why are some nations on a treaty and some not? The world would likely be a better place if no one had nuclear weapons. Howerver, you can't have countries with weapons telling those without that they can never have them.
I agree. Ideally, nobody would have them, but what began with such high hopes, namely the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has collapsed into a nuclear club status quo to the long term detriment IMHO of the human race. I think that it is fair to say that the United States and George W Bush especially share a portion of the blame for this (not all, but a substantial portion). I know that it is not an excuse, but practically speaking the hope that nuclear weapons would someday no longer menace mankind was and is unrealistic. The best that we can probably hope for is to control the status quo and if that means a bit of "unfairness" (i.e. Iran cannot have nukes) then so be it. They have been offered reasonable alternatives and guarantees (things which Iraq and Saddam were never offered or abandoned of their own free will) of security and respect for their sovereignty by the rest of the world IF they would just be reasonable...unfortunately they (the Iranians) have chosen to be unreasonable.
They will never be able to match their arsenal to that of US or UK or France or Russia or Israel.
They don't care. That is the problem. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that kept the peace (at least relatively, proxy wars were still fought in a limited fashion but only up to a point) for nearly fifty (50) years during the Cold War was based upon one simple notion: the other side might no like us but at least they are not crazy OR in the words of our late great President John F. Kennedy,
"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."
Iran is a theocracy officially governed by religion which doesn't cherish the future of its children (instead it glorifies suicide bombing) and believes in immortality with Allah and 70 virgins in heaven. Now you begin to see why allowing such people to have even one bomb is such a concern. There is more than an outside chance that they might choose to use their bomb against Israel or the United States or Europe regardless of the consequences (i.e. in their minds they all die in the retaliatory strike and go to their reward of 70 virgins). Religion and powerful weapons are and have always been a dangerous mix.
The bands should pay the fee (~$20 or so I think) to get an official notarized filing receipt with the United States Copyright office stating the name of the song(s) and the date and time of the filing. That way, when the RIAA causes damages (i.e. a canceled gig and legal hassles) you can shove a copy of the letter in their face and demand a settlement for damages out of them for using your already copyrighted song name(s) to promote their crap and loss of business.
I like the way that the Head First Design Patterns poster explains this with the "Zen of Patterns" section:
The Beginner Mind:
The beginner uses patterns everywhere. This is good: the beginner gets lots of experience with, and practice using patterns. The beginner also thinks, "The more patterns I use, the better the design." The beginner will learn that this is not so, that all designs should be as simple as possible. Complexity and patterns should only be used where they are needed for practical extensibility.
The Intermediate Mind:
As learning progresses, the intermediate mind starts to see where patterns are needed and where they aren't. The intermediate mind still tries to fit too many square patterns into round holes, but also begins to see that patterns can be adapted to fit situations where the canonical pattern doesn't fit.
The Zen Mind:
The Zen mind is able to see patterns where they fit naturally. The Zen mind is not obsessed with using patterns; rather, it looks for simple solutions that best solve the problem. The Zen mind thinks in terms of the object principles and their trade-offs. When a need for a pattern naturally arises, the Zen mind applies it, knowing well that it may require adaptation. The Zen mind also sees relationships to similar patterns and understands the subtleties of differences in the intent of related patterns. The Zen mind is also a beginner mind, it doesn't let all that pattern knowledge overly influence design decisions.
I expect that even C# has regexp libraries
System.Text.RegularExpressions
So don't pay him by the hour but rather by what he gets done and if he is consistently late or doesn't meet standard then you are free to fire him at any time. Do you really care how something gets done as long as it gets done in a reasonable amount of time at the price that you are willing to pay and the level of quality that you desire?
In fact the local college will sponsor security clearances if you are working on a project for a professor as a GRA in collaboration with the Army, etc.
Alright, but again your school has to be involved in these projects and you have to know the professor or get to know him and then become involved with his research work. That opportunity is not always available to everyone, even if one is qualified and wants to work in defense (I wasn't personally interested in a defense job, but some of my friends in college were).
If only it were that easy (perhaps it is better that it isn't easy given all of the Chinese spying going on these days). One cannot apply independently for a security clearance. You must have a sponsor who is doing secret government work and is willing to sponsor your application and pay (thousands or even tens of thousands depending upon the level of clearance) to process the application (the money goes to pay for teams of government investigators to track down and interview everyone you ever knew in addition to all of the standard paperwork that goes with any regular background investigation). Naturally, US companies (being cheap as they are) would rather hire someone who already has an active clearance so that they don't have to pay thousands of dollars and sponsor you to get one (they will only do that as a last resort and most engineers simply are not that valuable to them). Hence, whenever defense contractors appear at job fairs they only want to talk to you if you already have a security clearance and you cannot just go out and get one for yourself even if you are willing to pay the fees so it is a chicken and egg problem. The only other way is to come out of the military or government job with a clearance still active (in which case the government paid for all of the background investigations). These jobs may not be going to India, but you have to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time to get the security clearance in the first place.
Will the engineers who actually know about these things be able to prevent this kludge from becoming operational or will NASA management and political appointee administrators strike again? It is probably the dream of every rocket engineer to design a new vehicle from scratch and somehow NASA manages to squander this once in a generation chance to "get it right" after years of just gritting their teeth and "making it work" with the shuttle. I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised, but it is still disappointing to see so much money being wasted on dumb designs, like Ares is shaping up to be, when it could be going instead to Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites or the guys at SpaceX if it has to get spent at all. Personally, I would prefer more advanced propulsion research and unmanned missions with a minimal manned program just to keep the technology going rather than more high-cost, low-science, space cowboy-style boots on the ground and flag in the sand missions to the moon and mars. The big manned program should wait until we have somewhere really interesting to go and a better way to get there than chemical rockets (think NX-01).
still, liquid fuel has a lot of advantages over solid fuel rockets and the complexities of fuel pumps, storage, and throttling are well understood and well solved by now. Solid fuel makes sense for military applications were unmanned missiles must sit for long periods of time inactive until they are called upon to launch at a moments notice, but manned launches will always be planned affairs so that particular benefit of solid fuel will be wasted on the Ares. What they really ought to be doing is partnering with companies like SpaceX to further develop more sensible launch platforms, like their falcon rocket, using all of the knowledge and experience that we have gained over the years instead of attempting to "save money" by re-using parts from the Space Shuttle which were full of compromises related to politics and not engineering.
It's not like all that weight is gonna come free.
Yes, but if the alternative is to reduce the power of the engines to have less vibration in the first place, then the net loss of payload may be greater than simply using the more powerful engines with the extra weight and shock absorbers. I suppose that I could be mistaken, I am not a rocket scientist after all, but if the goal is to maximize payload (which appears to be the case) then some inefficiencies in other areas (like shock absorbers and weights) might be tolerable provided that such problems are not the result of more fundamental design flaws in the Ares rocket.
Fix it yourself with Asterisk. Numbers not on the white list are dumped into recorded phone tree maze with endless loops of meaningless choices and no way out except to hang up. It would be even better with a plugin that could try and string them on for a while without actually divulging any meaningful information by responding at pauses with phrases like "that sounds interesting", "uh-huh", and "I'm not sure" the goal being to waste as much of the telemarketer's time as possible on a dead end call (i.e. no sale) before they hang up in frustration.