The US Military gets a smaller portion of the US budget now than at any time in the nation's past. We spend far more on checks to senior citizens. Even a large portion of the pentagon budget goes to retired senior citizens who put-in full careers in uniform rather than to the current personnel or their weapons systems

if we are any sort of something-or-other "complex", we are a banking and wealth re-distributing complex that is dedicated to transferring as much money as possible from young workers to old AARP members on a scale never before seen in human history. The geezers built the government systems to provide for themselves while leaving the bills to future generations, then they maxed-out their investment income by demanding corporations maximize profits by transferring manufacturing out of the US, replacing pensions with 401Ks, and globalizing the banks. Now they are using schemes like "reverse mortgages" to make sure they leave nothing to their kids when they die (no previous generation of Americans has ever done all this to the generations that followed them). In the past, a generation might leave a little debt to their kids, but that generation of kids also inherited the assets of the previous generation. Not this time. This time the multinational banks will get the assets.

Or maybe you think we should make decisions about NASA based on the film "Mars Attacks".....

Oh, I get it, you think Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and The Onion are actually news. (eyes rolling)

Do you have any idea how completely clueless you make yourself look to those of us who have worn a uniform?

In a macro sense, the U.S. military is a security organization. It is an extreme example of a hierarchical structure and it is designed for the security of the nation, so it is ideally-suited to handle security of all things nuclear. The U.S. military is far from perfect (because it it composed of imperfect human beings) but it actually is far more competent than many other human institutions. Each and every member is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution (not some person, or political party) and it is under the control of the elected civilians in the government (the money is provided by congress, the highest leaders are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Congress, and the orders come from the President; most people do not realize it but even the officer promotions notifications go through to the congress, which generally does not intervene but is kept aware and COULD intervene with laws or budgets if it felt the need). The U.S. military is not allowed to unionize, and its legal system (while appearing strange and sometimes more lax than the civilian system) is actually tailored for security and often results in problems being dealt with quietly before they become big enough to require the intervention of the civilians (who have more important things to worry about than discipline matters that were stopped before they became a problem)

You're not in a position to "guarantee" anything from your mother's basement.

Is there anybody on this site who does not know that within the next decade or two we will all be able to design and 3D-print any sort of firearm we can imagine???

So-called "gun control" is a fantasy of two groups: left-wing politicians and activists who are living in the 1960's, and totalitarian governments (how shocking is it that Putin and China have both chimed-in on the subject?) who believe that they will be able to control their populations by controlling access to firearms (a scheme that used to work) while stupidly imagining they will be able to have modern competitive economies without rapid prototyping systems.

We have a very short time to solve the real problem: how do we deal with the small portion of any population who either refuses, or is incapable of, controlling it's own behavior.

As always, it's the simple common-sense reasons and not some crypto-fascist evil corporate gunmaker conspiracy to control the population by putting "murder machines" into the hands of psychopaths. Occam's Razor.

A gun that only fires it if recognizes your grip? um, so when you get injured trying to fight-off a thug before finally resorting to the gun, and your throbbing/bleeding hand makes you hold the thing a little differently - oooops! the thing won't fire!

A gun that indicates whether it's loaded or there's a round in the chamber? dumb. Many Americans have held home invaders, would-be rapists or muggers, etc at bay with unloaded guns (this is safer than keeping the weapon in the nightstand in a fully-loaded and chambered state, and the doubt is often enough to stop a bad guy)

A gun that only fires for the registered owner? Stupid. Somebody breaks into your house, knocks you down, and - oh, wait - your gun won't fire when your wife needs it!

Many of these stupid schemes to make a machine NOT do the very thing it's intended to do just add cost and extra risk, while often being offered by some inventor who hopes lawmakers will mandate his new invention (so he can get rich from the royalties every gun maker will be ordered to pay). Just imagine all the patent litigation and all the royalty checks! Just the added IP activity our society so-desperately needs, right? These things are then also waved before a gullible public by politicians whose real goal (not a conspiracy, many are on-the record for bans/gun-siezures) is tighter gun control (often by either making guns too expensive or so useless that most won't buy them, or by convincing voters that gun makers are evil (since it's obvious that it they were good else they'd already be including the "features"))

These things are not in current guns because most gun buyers are not dumb enough to want to buy a gun that costs more in exchange for crippled functionality - it's just that simple.

The entire thing's a distraction. Your'e supposed to notice the things and not notice your rights shrinking while the rights of crazy/evil people are expanded. Americans used to be able to own fully-automatic machine guns (before congress made them illegal for law-abiding citizens in response to misuse by criminal gangs in the 1930's) and up until much more-recently, many American boys used to carry guns to school (some schools in rural areas had gun clubs, and some boys went hunting before or after school). We NEVER used to have mass-shootings in schools. Before the 1980's we used to keep lunatics in asylums (the ACLU won a legal fight to end that) and it used to be that a thug did not KNOW that a school was an easy place for a massacre ... until the morons in government passed a bunch of "gun-free-zone" laws. We did not need armed school employees (the simple doubt about whether they MIGHT be armed was marginally deterrent) but since all those laws passed everybody KNOWS a school is a place where nobody will shoot back. There are many complex reasons for the massacres of the past few years, but stupidly constructed and rapidly passed laws are not the solution. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US and many millions of "violent video games" and DVDs of "action movies", but only a tiny number of massacres; in any politics-free zone, the obvious point would be that none of these physical items make a 99.999% of the population commit murder; these physical objects are not the common thread. Only an evil bastard opportunist who is grinding some other axe would try to penalize all the law-abiding people by depriving them of their rights, while refusing to go after the tiny screwed-up minority who are the actual common denominator in all these crimes - and wrap it all in the shroud of a bunch of dead children.

The USAF has dreamed of a small space plane like this for decades. They tried to build one in the early sixties (X-20 DynaSoar, with a crew of one) and were actually quite close to flying before MacNamera (yeah, Mr. Vietnam, himself) killed it to spend the money some place else. You are free to guess where he needed more money. Neil Armstrong actually flew the launch abort tests for the X-20 in a modified aircraft at Edwards long before he transferred to NASA and the Gemini and Apollo programs. It must have seemed like a miracle to some in the USAF when NASA and a stupidly short-sighted congress abandoned the X-37 program. The Air Force essentially got the program for free from the NASA junk pile (though they have, of course, spent a bunch on it since).

A little unmanned plane like this is a sports car; you don't use it for day-to-day trips, but you use it on special occasions and for special things. A zippy little platform like that can be used to test lots of cool new tech like new sensors. New sensors could generate massive amounts of raw data and be tested looking at most of the earth in all seasons and looking through all weather. You could fill the payload bay with solid state drives or even regular hard drives and save everything in a completely raw, lossless, uncompressed format along with extra data for analysis while downloading only small subsets of the data live. When the vehicle returns, you get back all the raw data, any performance/diagnostic data you chose not to downlink, and the sensors as well (for further analysis, and possible upgrade and re-flight)

It's the ultimate spy satellite development platform

The author could have easily chose to say "protected" rather than "hidden". The word "hidden" carries implications ... but in this case the implications are a joke; Even without a payload shroud, the contents of the vehicle would have been blocked from view because they are in a payload bay just like on the shuttles

This would be more accurate: A standard Atlas payload shroud protects the Atlas from the aerodynamics of having an asymmetrical winged vehicle on its nose during the climb to space.

The Atlas was never designed to have a set of wings and tail fins up on its nose generating unbalance lift and drag vectors during ascent (think: arrow with tail feathers relocated to the nose). That's NOT to say that the Atlas could not handle the situation, but rather that the money has not been spent to study the matter sufficiently and to alter the flight software for the guidance system of the Atlas.

It's also important to note that the X-37 was never designed to be exposed during ascent; the wings and tails might not be up to the loads and parts of the top might not be up to the thermal environment (things get pretty hot on the way up from air friction as you accelerate past mach 2 before you get out of the atmosphere) and the vehicle has a different orientation to the airflow from what it has during reentry). As a NASA project, the X-37 was intended to ride to orbit within the payload bay of the shuttle, where it would be deployed for its test mission and then return home on its own. It was only a test vehicle and was not intended to make many operational flights that way.

First, the shuttle was not a camel designed by committee, nor was it a bloated whale. In actual use, it ended-up being far cheaper to operate than the old Saturns it replaced (NASA has finally run and published the numbers now that the program is over) it just never came close to the goals that were set for it.

NASA spent years studying many different shuttle system designs and took designs and bids from Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, etc and compared many of these designs not just on paper but with an amazing amount of engineering analysis. In the end, they were forced by a bi-partisan political consensus (including President Nixon and the Democrats who ran congress) to choose the system with the lowest up-front development costs but the highest operational costs (they all wanted small numbers while they were in office and did not care what the numbers would be later when they'd be out of office).

It's a common urban myth that the USAF drove the need for a delta wing; it's not true. The USAF needed that for polar launches from VAFB with aborts back to California instead of mid-ocean (need 1K miles of cross-range in that scenario because the Earth keeps turning after you launch... ) but NASA came to the conclusion that they too needed about the same capability. The USAF gets blamed for this feature only because they were smart enough to see their need first. It is true that the USAF needed the big payload bay with specific dimensions for a certain payload but here, again, the requirement was not particularly different from what NASA wanted anyway.

Finally, the USAF did not happily turn its back on the shuttle; At the time the Challenger exploded, there was a shuttle on the pad at VAFB in California (not for launch, but for facility checkout ahead of the first California launch) and they were gearing-up for many military flights to come. The USAF was ordered to transition to other vehicles in the aftermath of the Challenger accident and investigation. Part of the investigation was a re-assessment of the risks of shuttles and that lead to a decision to abandon the use of systems like the Centaur upper stage for shuttle, which were thought to add far too much risk to an already risky vehicle. If the US had had a mush larger fleet (perhaps 10 orbiters) and the ability to remotely operate them on the riskiest missions, the USAF would likely have continued to use shuttles. As it was, there were military missions and payloads even after Challenger during the transition to EELVs.

The shuttle rode on the side of the stack for a reason - so it could use it's three main engines for the entire climb to orbit. These engines were designed to be the best rocket engines ever developed (which meant they'd be very complex and expensive) and, therefore, to be re-usable. They were on the back of the orbiter not as an error, but precisely because that meant they would come home for re-use instead of being thrown-away on each flight. What you seem to think was a mistake, was in fact a design feature and part of the argument for making the scheme both technically and financially workable. As long as going to space requires throwing away most of the vehicle, it will remain the exclusive domain of governments and rich businesses/businessmen. Nobody but the super rich could afford to fly from NY to LA if the entire airliner was discarded during the flight and the passenger parachuted onto the LA runway in a small escape pod.

In actual practice, nothing about the shuttle system turned out to be as cheap as initially intended; that rarely happens on the first-generation of any world-leading technology. Had we built a 2nd generation of shuttles they likely would have performed far better with lower turn-around times and costs.

Any missile with enough altitude and horizontal velocity to place a payload into orbit (something an IRBM or ICBM does not need - see: V-2), can easily do a sub-orbital launch of a heavier payload; that's called a ballistic missile, and it's just a matter of physics and aerodynamics.

First, Clinton and Bush 43 fiddled while the North Koreans built "the bomb". Now Obama has fiddled while the North Koreans built the missile. Now the whacko maniac mini dictator of the north can threaten any population anywhere on Earth. Sure, we'll hear the experts "tut tut" over the notion and they'll explain that we can drag our feet because it will take time to make a nuke small enough for the missile or to make a reentry vehicle for the warhead, but these are the easier tasks and will be hard to monitor. The evidence before us is that western diplomats will similarly entertain themselves with talk while Iran also gets the bomb and a launch vehicle. Dark days are ahead when civilized men stand by while barbarians from the dark ages get their hands on weapons uniquely capable of returning us all to the dark ages.

Unfortunately, most average citizens have no understanding of wireless technology, so when a guy like Steve Jobs came along and offered them a consumer gadget that requires loads of bandwidth they buy it by the millions. Now they, and the politicians they elect, and vendors who seek some of their money are locked in a battle for unlimited quantities of something that is limited... bandwidth within the RF spectrum.

The hard truth is that there is a limit to the available spectrum, and that limited resource should only be allocated to uses that can only be performed wireless. It borders on the criminal to have smartphone companies building video and web browsing into phones... individuals filling their vacant cranial cavities with individual streams of Youtube cat videos, Justin Bieber music, and other individualized streams of pablum should not be competing for use of the nation's RF spectrum with satellite communications, GPS signals, firefighters, police, air traffic controllers, national security, TV and Radio broadcasters (who each serve millions with their broadcast pablum) and so on. Broadcast signals (like GPS, radio, and TV) should have priority since they each serve an unlimited number of people with their bit of the spectrum. Signals that only serve a single civilian user should be the absolute lowest-priority in the system.

Want to make a phone call from your home to your office? Use a land line.

Want to make a call from your car? Cell phone is fine... it's the only way to solve the problem

Want your laptop to talk to a printer? Plug in a cable (network, USB, etc)

Want a security camera? Run a wire

Want you pilot to talk to the control tower? That requires wireless

Want to know where you are while hiking, boating, flying or driving? GPS is great, it uses little bandwidth and serves millions of people, and cannot be done with wires.

With hard-wired networks, there is no limit to the bandwidth... you can just pull more cables when and where needed and your use of bandwidth has no impact upon your neighbor's use of bandwidth (he can pull all the cables he wants on his property). With wireless, on the other hand, each user is consuming a slice of a national asset which he/she does not individually own. There is no way to increase the available RF spectrum... if you want more for something then something else must get by with less. Additionally, most people do not understand that some frequencies of RF energy work better for short-range communication and others for long-range... and some frequencies can be used with small-and-cheap electronics while other frequencies require bigger and more expensive circuits (although this latter limit changes over time of course as technology advances).

Unfortunately, as long as carnival barkers like Steve Jobs keep offering consumers new shiny baubles that need more bandwidth, there will be other jerks like Lightsquared who will try to make a buck by promising consumers more of the RF spectrum (and gambling that public pressure from the uninformed masses for more will force the government to allocate more) for stupid shiny objects at the expense of vital things like navigation, public safety, national security, etc.

2. Frequency adjust hearing aids- these are actually tiny computers that slightly shift the frequency of the waveform for people who have frequency-specific hearing disorders. The cost for them is about $500 base, plus a couple of weeks of software engineering to tune them to the INDIVIDUAL User. It is the second type that the original author's mother needs, and yes, in a way it is a supply and demand problem as *each unit* (even in a pair) has to be tuned to the disability of the individual ear.

Bogus argument

We have these cool things called "algorithms" and "parameters" which we implement in these things called "computers". A generic hearing aid could easily be made and the customer could sit in an automated booth at wallmart, listen to some automated test sounds, give feedback to the booth computer and the booth computer could tweak the parameters for an individual hearing aid, flash the parameters, and provide the "custom" hearing aids for the user to checkout. If you REALLY wanted to get exotic and custom, you could have the booth tell the user to put-in the new aid, re-test, and tweak the values and re-flash the parameters before sending him/her to the checkout. This is the sort of innovation that would have appeared years ago if hearing aids had never been classed as "medical devices". This is like the guys who supply a bunch of uber-expensive "medical equipment" to docs and hospitals trying to explain why they charge so much for a slow two-trace oscilliscope with a different label on the face and some slightly different firmware...

The government in a fit of do-gooder activity declared hearing aids to be "medical devices" which means they are tightly regulated by the government. The existing makers were able to easily hop through the regulatory gates that were initially in place... but anybody who comes along later (after all the bureaucrats have written their thousands of pages of regulations) finds the cost of entering the market prohibitive (you need LOTS of money to hire lawyers to read and understand the regulations, and you need to get your product through all the regulatory hurdles). This creates a government-enforced near monopoly and destroys the ability of normal market forces to drive down prices while driving up performance and features. If anybody tries to remove hearing aids from the medical device category, millions of dollars will flow to the right politicians (establishment Democrats AND establishment Republicans) to defeat the effort. There are big, wealthy companies who depend upon their products being protected from new upstart competitors like this... Look to every industry where the government has stepped in to "protect" us all with regulations: Automobiles, Aviation, Medical devices, etc. In every one of these areas, all significant competitors got into the market BEFORE the government started regulating it, and the regulations were established to "protect the public". This is why BIG companies often side WITH big government in supporting regulations (see big pharma and their deal with Obama on Obamacare, or the big aerospace companies with their hand-in-glove relationship with the FAA) when you would expect them to be opposed to government intervention. Everybody on Slashdot knows full-well how cheap a battery, a mic, a speaker and a microchip would be if they were available from any manufacturer and hanging on a shelf at Frys, etc.