You do realize that you linked to a study on the perception of corruption of a given government, not an actual empirical measure of corruption. Those are two very different things. Your final statement, which I agree with, does not rest on the incorrect statement before it.

Do not forget the chief component of acid rain and in gaseous form it is a greenhouse gas. Also, if inhaled at room temperature it is fatal.

I truly mean anything with a lot of hydrogen. It attenuates the high-charge, high-energy radiation better (less secondary particle production). Water is good, liquid hydrogen is very good, polyethylene is also something that is often studied. I am ONLY talking about materials for radiation shielding here. Realistically, single function materials are not good for design engineers for space. The problem is actually things you want to build structures out of (space certified materials) don't tend to be high in hydrogen.

A small storm shelter can mean many things. One idea would be to have a region of the living compartment (say where ever sleeping quarters are) and have the sleeping quarters walls be always (or simply be able) to be filled with the drinking water from the long duration mission. In the case of emergency, the crew goes there. There have been studies using thick poly blankets where the crew needs to climb in bed during the storm. There was even a small study done of putting the crew's cabin surrounded by the hydrogen fuel tanks (done by Nealy et al. if memory serves). Fun to think about.

For the magnetic shielding, all that matters is the B-field strength. You need something strong enough to constantly deflect approximately 1 GeV protons and below. Don't forget that most realistic magnetic shielding schemes rely on a dipole. Just like on Earth, the "poles" of the dipole are the most susceptible will have to have some other sort of shielding since galactic cosmic rays are basically isotropic in the solar system. You are spot on when you say there are practical engineering issues with large B-fields.

These have/are being looked into. See this review by Townsend from a few years ago: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1559364

Nothing has really changed in the state of the art of active shielding. They all fail miserably at even the theory stage or practical engineering stage.

You are not quite right. For this sort of radiation, lead is not so great. You want shielding that contains lots of low-Z nuclei. The more hydrogen the better. This is because you get a lot of secondary nuclear fragments and hydrogen minimizes these sort of interactions. For Mars, it actually isn't the solar storms that are worrying - it is the fairly constant galactic cosmic ray background that is more difficult to shield against. It is has a high energy tail that is quit penetrating.

Solar storms are important, but a small storm shelter inside the craft can, in principal, handle this. Storms are typically short, so confining the crew to this area is typically reasonable.

Your question has nothing to do with my statement. It is like me saying the Sun is yellow and you respond with, why are trees green then? What does charging developers have to do with it? To answer your question naively, it is likely to create some semblance of quality by making sure a developer is serious about making an app and to provide an initial quality check. It probably also helps subsidize the whole app review process. Or maybe I am completely wrong... I actually know nothing about Apple app development.

You should see Dan Ariely speak. I didn't realize I had seen him previously until I read his bio on the linked website. He is really a great speaker and has a great amount of insight into irrational thinking. He gave a really great talk on 'cheating' that I saw earlier this year.

That being said, I think he has a point in his quick little blurb. But I also think it wouldn't fit into Apple's business plan to have all the apps cost something. They are not in the business of selling you apps - they want you to buy the hardware that runs that apps.

I am sure they went with the lowest bidder since federal requires that. But this was awarded before they announced their exit from the desktop market.

Servers are typically done outside the ODIN contract, so this is mainly for desktops and laptops. The question, and the one I see all of the top brass having issue with, is what will happen with their treasured iPhones when the contract switches over?

Yes, I understand that. I guess you missed the point that they were using this contract to force NASA to buy HP hardware... sorry not buy but lease since NASA no longer is in the business of owning desktop hardware.

They were just awarded a huge NASA contract to provide HARDWARE and desktop support (the old Lockheed ODIN contract)... Seems odd. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110428a.html
Since they are replacing all the Dells at NASA with HP (at HP's request when they started the contract) - why would they now be looking to get out of hardware?