Or you can save the expense and skip the second factor altogether--which is an acceptable risk for almost everyone.

Side note: a second factor token isn't buying much for the attacks we're seeing in the real world. (Compromised endpoint; and no, it doesn't take personal targeting for someone to go active once a user on a compromised host has been identified as using a bank with a scripted attack pattern.) What you really want to stop theft in that scenario is an out of band channel, like SMS confirmation. But then you've got a different set of problems with mobile malware potentially being able to spoof that. Picking just one attack vector, choosing an arbitrary mitigation, then criticizing the banks for implementing the mitigation in too stringent a fashion because your arbitrary standard is "good enough" seems...myopic at best.

You can add a petty subjective clause if you want to, but the point remains--choose the tool that's right for the job you're trying to do.

And crap code or not, it's probably keeping more accurate time than the NTP server that you wrote. ;-)

The NTP people are generally more concerned about accurate & precise network time than about security. If security is your goal (and you're willing to compromise on highly accurate time) you're almost certainly better off with a SNTP solution intended to be simple and secure.

Note that most machines running OSX would be vulnerable to spoofed packets from the same IP (the apple NTP server)...

Firewalls which do stateful inspection of NTP conversations are exceedingly rare. So if you follow the normal practice and have a "stateful" UDP port open on the firewall to a given external NTP server, it's not possible for the firewall to distinguish between a response packet from the external NTP server and a query packet spoofed to appear to be originating from the external NTP server. That is, a client will be potentially vulnerable to spoofed packets from any IP it uses as a server.

It's nice that you think you've managed to define a rigid standard of what risk is acceptable to everybody, but I'm not sure that's actually true.

Of course, this old urban legend ignores the reality of different rail gauges. There maybe some link there, but it's pretty darn tenuous.

Apparently the american pallet is about 30% larger than a euro pallet

Interestingly, the same seems to be true of the american palate.

quite a bit, since the engine is attached to the frame rather than leviated in the vacuum.

Only small engines can be tested currently at stennis (luckily? that's all we have in the inventory). Firing off an F-1 would break a lot of things.

As far is always having been pork, NASA OIG criticized the decision made to build a new stand rather than modifying either of *two* underutilized facilities: http://oig.nasa.gov/audits/rep... The bottom line is that the decision was made without public discussion with all of the stakeholders and was always at high risk of being late and over budget due to the lousy decision making at NASA. (Don't blame all of this on Congress.) Interestingly, the initial cost estimate for A-3 was $390M, but Stennis talked that down to $173M to make it more attractive.

So no, there's very little chance that this will turn out to be great in the end, or that we won't end up paying for modifications to A-3 which would be similar to the modifications needed to use one of the existing facilities for a future engine (except that those could have been modified without an intervening $350M capital expediture). And it's very likely that when the time comes, it will look better on paper to build a new stand than to reuse A-3.

So yes, always pork.

I'll disable ad blocker when the ad industry starts taking responsibility for not serving up malware.

You'd have a cogent argument if NASA didn't already have more than one vacuum rocket test stand. They built this one because it was too hard/expensive to modify the others for the new engine. What are the chances that won't happen again? Nope, it's pure pork. Note that the entire Stennis facility was built to test saturn rocket engines far from anything that might break due to the sonic shock. If NASA was in this to preserve infrastructure, *that* is the feature they would have kept. Instead, Stennis now hosts computer facilities for a number of civilian agencies--because the jobs program was more important than being able to test really big rocket engines at the rocket engine test facility.

Quiet is important, active sonar resistance is less so. The submarine post WWII was important as a strategic deterrence asset (survivable ICBM platform) whose primary threat was other submarines. Neither the missile subs nor the attack subs were going to be pinging away, as that would be suicidal. One of the problems with the rubber coatings were that they'd come lose and bang on the hull as the flapped around -- and [i]that[/i] is something to give a modern submariner nightmares. I doubt that the USA and USSR completely ignored the technology, but they definitely had to solve that adhesive problem first.

The arctic route is difficult without a nuclear submarine. (Diesels can't run submerged, and batteries aren't going to get you that far.) I can't imagine what you have in mind as the "central route", as a submarine in a canal is not exactly a hard target. So, yes, the southern routes are the only possible approaches.