It's probably more accurate to say that the war generation and Germany have, but I think you underestimate humanity's ability to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Not have, but did.
In any case, you know the old saying: "Those who don't remember their history are doomed to repeat it."
Given the U.S. government and its actions in recent years, I'd say that there are a hell of a lot of young people today who flunked history.
"I'm just doing my job." Just like you they have families too that need to be fed.
NO. Absolutely not. Won't fly.
The entire world rejected the "I was just doing my job" and "I was just taking orders" excuses during the Nuremberg trials.
There comes a point at which anyone who can lay claim to being human has to either say "No, I won't do that", or accept personal responsibility for their actions by NOT saying it.
If your system is vulnerable to attack by corrupt "leaders", that's the system's fault. It's the problem with Marxism and it's also the problem with capitalism: when people get power, via state-backed control of capital or via a "dictatorship of the proletariat", these use that power in their own interests.
Nonsense.
As I mentioned earlier: just about ANY system can be corrupted. And some more than others. Socialism, for example, has proven to be the world's ripest breeding ground for corruption, because it is designed to be led by a relatively few people in the first place.
The U.S. has the longest-standing Constitutional government in the last milennium or two. That says an awful lot for this system, as opposed to others that have been tried in the same period. (That is to say: all of them. Except Communism, because there has never been a real Communist government in written history.)
Like a casino. The currency still has the same value, but the thing being bet on is meaningless and valueless in and of itself.
I've been saying exactly that, right here on Slashdot, for 5 years or more now.
Surprising how much argument I've gotten about it, too. But here comes an "expert" saying the same thing, 5 years later, and now it's legitimate.
Not trying to pat myself on the back or anything. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people are slow on the uptake. Not pointing fingers at anybody in particular.
It's interesting how (what we perceive as) capitalism is the opposite of (what we perceived as) communism in every aspect, yet the results are the same: A small leading group has everything, the rest of the population has nothing. The main difference is that in communism there was nothing you could buy, in capitalism you could buy anything but you lack the money. The net result is the same: You don't have anything.
I've been fighting this MYTH for many years.
Free-market Capitalism, as defined by Adam Smith (although he did not use the exact phrase, it's pretty much agreed that he defined it), included a strong body of anti-trust laws to prevent monopolies and oligopolies from forming. But government, particularly in recent years, has been failing to enforce any kind of effective regulation which is necessary for the system to work.
The revolving-door government has been corrupting and abusing the system. But that isn't the fault of the system, capitalism. That's the fault of corrupt "leaders". They are not even close to the same things. Any system can be abused. That doesn't mean the system is bad. It only means that it is being abused.
Spoken by somebody that has not a clue about exploration.
I'm not an "explorer", if that's what you mean. But I would have been, had I the opportunity. More to the point, though: I do have some knowledge about physics that you seem to be lacking.
Considering your prior comment, I think you should be taking a good long look in the mirror.
No, I would say that the sufferer is yourself.
You neo-con/tea-party type continue to push us towards the SLS as well as going to the moon, while ignoring real facts.
You put your foot in your mouth the moment you opened it.
I am neither "neo-con" or "tea party". The fact that I disagree with you does not put me in the same camp as those people.
O has kept private space going.
You can hardly give "O" credit for that. He had no choice, once Congress and NASA dropped the ball.
O did NOT come up with the asteroids, but it was NASA that came forward with the Idea. He is simply supporting it.
You missed the point. It isn't that he told them to go after the asteroids. There were plans to do that anyway, as you say. The point was that he told them to STOP working on manned Mars missions.
BUT, it can also mean moving a small-medium asteroid to earth, to enable processing of various elements.
Again, you miss the point. What are you going to do with it, once you get it here?
Working in micro-gravity is just too damned slow and difficult. The best thing to do is drop it on some dark place on the Moon, and work on it there. Getting it back OFF the Moon is easy. Think: how big of a rocket did it take to get the Apollo manned module back up to lunar orbiit? And how big of a rocket did it take to get it off of Earth? (It isn't quite a fair comparison, because the Earth rocket had to carry the command module and its engines, too. But the point is still valid.)
Sadly, you neo-cons continue to destroy private space while pushing your massively expensive nightmare, without a thought of the future.
Sadly, you're a dumbshit who doesn't even know a neo-con when he sees one. Or a friend of the space program, for that matter.
Then you are NOT paying attention.
We are making progress in early 90's, when the neo-cons killed off NASA's efforts to go to Mars.
No, sorry, that's just wrong.
Congress may have been tight on the budget, but in fact NASA had active manned Mars mission plans ongoing until Obama told them to stop and concentrate on asteroids instead. It's a matter of public record.
Your use case sounds like it doesn't really need the extra CPU threads, but does need disk speed. For that, I say SSD for your boot plus a real RAID controller (preferably with battery backup) with spinning disks for bulk storage and lots of RAM for cache. The same system with the E5-2630 v2 has 64GB of RAM, a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and five 2TB WD Red drives in RAID-5 connected to an Adaptec 6805 with battery backup. Reads and writes to the SSD and the array are at similar speeds (between 400MB/sec and 600MB/sec), and more than one app hitting the disk at the same time doesn't make things slow to a crawl.
I appreciate the advice, but I've been building systems a long time. I was just curious what you thought about processor choices for that use-case.
The ECC is an angle I hadn't thought of, though. That does makes sense. As for the rest, because I'm probably going with OS X the selection of boards is limited, and so are the GPUs. They're good, don't get me wrong. But there aren't that many of them that work well.
And I don't use Samsung drives if I can help it. I know Apple uses them a lot, but they aren't really celebrated for their high performance. WD is fine with me and I've had excellent experience with them. Right now I have a good SSD, a secondary HDD, and 2 x 2TB WD Re drives, which is adequate for my needs for now.
Being a personal-use system (albeit heavy use), I really don't want a 5-drive RAID array spinning all the time. While I have many apps open at a time, they're not usually in heavy use all at the same time (except sometimes playing video). I'm not doing heavy ray-tracing or anything like that on a regular basis. So I'm really not doing that heavy I/O most of the time. Occasionally there will be some heavy database access alongside the video.
If I need a big drive array I can add it later (the case has room & the PSU is adequate). The SSD and secondary HDD are good for most of my use. The 2TB drives are for storage and backup. They can sleep most of the time.
Essentially, if your disk can't support the I/O for all those services, going from 8 to 12 CPU threads won't really buy you much. You can then add any GPU you want (I have a Radeon R9 270).
Yes, well, it looks like I'll stick with the inexpensive Haswell i7 refresh. I might switch when the newer 6- or 8-core units come out later, but maybe not. We'll see. The main reason being, as I say: I may be running many apps simultaneously but very seldom are more than 3 very "active" at any one time.
Because it's OS X, good Xeon boards with ECC are even harder to find and then set up.
You've just described every business, not just banks. Well, at least the successful ones. They are all in it for their needs. Your needs only come into play only to the extent it's necessary for them to meet their needs.
And YOU'VE just described what my father explained to me, when I was small, is called "doing bad business". Sadly, many in the U.S. these days have seen these big corrupt corporations, and assumed things were always that way. They weren't. In fact they still aren't, in most cases, that don't involve giant corporations or government.
"Good business" is when both people walk away from a transaction satisfied that they got a fair deal. And ideally, when each thinks they got the better deal.
"Bad business" is gouging customers for services that aren't really what they want. Only one party is happy, and the other is greatly dissatisfied.
Free markets depend on the first kind of business. Many economists say the second kind doesn't exist for long without government collusion.
You're just an example - we have a broad coordination problem. We either need to solve that or get a message to future generations to not adopt this kind of system.
I agree with you on many things, Bill, but this isn't one of them. I mean yes, we do need to put a foot on the head of Congress until they wise up. BUT...
The system is just fine. It isn't broken. What's broken are the corrupt people in it. And they have taken every opportunity to corrupt it further, even when their actions were blatantly illegal.
If everything went according to the rules -- even the existing rules -- we wouldn't be having these problems.
Just about any system imaginable can be abused. That doesn't mean the system is bad. It just means the abusers are bad.
This is 100% irrelevant to the point that was being made: long ago Obama publicly directed NASA to cease any significant efforts toward manned missions to Mars. (Which was the subject under discussion here: human exploration.)
There's no reason to go to the bottom of another gravity well. We should be travelling to, learn from, and eventually exploit the asteroids. It makes more sense for the long term viability of the human race.
There are ALL KINDS of legitimate reasons to go to the bottom of another gravity well. Especially the Moon's.
If we can figure out efficient ways to extract them, resources such as minerals, and even oxygen, are abundant. Moon rocks have lots of oxygen... and why do you think Mars is red?
But perhaps more to the point: we have learned that construction in microgravity is intolerably slow and tedious. Precisely because there is no gravity. BUT... in a shallow gravity well, such as Mars and even more so the Moon, most of those problems go away. And so does the difficulty of launching from a deeper gravity well.
So if we ever DO manage to harness resources from space, where should they go to maximize further space exploration? Very obviously to Mars, or to the Moon. Anything else would be just dumb.
I think it's most people's impression that NASA is just going through the motion, making empty noises wrt Mars human exploration. There simply is no viable plan nor adequate budget to come up with a viable plan.
There WAS, until Obama got hold of it and redirected resources toward asteroid capture instead, 6 years ago.
I'm not sure, but I think Obama is a long-time sufferer from assterhoids.
The problem is not sarcastic political speech vs sincere political speech; it's sarcastic threats vs sincere threats.
Only if you really believe that's as far as it goes. The Obama administration has been known to -- shall we say -- stretch the bounds of propriety. That's a pretty major understatement.
Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.
They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.
Now, they might have a benign purpose, but from the description in TFA it doesn't seem so. After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.
Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.
They have always had issues with write endurance, since Day One. It has been their Achilles Heel. In fact, the MLC chips have less endurance than the older SLC chips. They partially get around that with extra capacity and better controllers. But it's still their sole weak point.
I have 7- and 8-year-old hard drives with nary a problem. Not all last that long, but many do. And when they fail it's usually mechanically, not due to limited life of the platters.
The fact is, we don't even know if these new units will live up to their rated endurance. They use estimates and statistical methods to come up with those figures. They haven't been around long enough to know. But if the earlier models are any indication of real life vs. rated life, a lot of people are in for a nasty surprise.
They already last very long. Enterprise SSD drives for the most part has longer expected life times than HDD, and are less prone to failure. They just put in extra capacity, and use clever controllers. Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.
Yes, I know all this, BUT... they are not cost-competitive with hard drives, except perhaps for the enterprise.
Yes. I'm FREE to voluntarily opt in to a system of my choosing. When things are required by the government, that's a different situation.
There has often been no real difference.
Many people freely opted in to have their data collected by online services. They did not suspect that later, the government would be demanding that data from those services.
So there you have a case in which voluntarily opting in, and the government forcing it from you, have exactly the same result. Do you honestly think it would be limited to such cases?
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably more accurate to say that the war generation and Germany have, but I think you underestimate humanity's ability to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Not have, but did.
In any case, you know the old saying: "Those who don't remember their history are doomed to repeat it."
Given the U.S. government and its actions in recent years, I'd say that there are a hell of a lot of young people today who flunked history.
There is a difference between a normal union, and public employee union.
You got that right. Well said.
"I'm just doing my job." Just like you they have families too that need to be fed.
NO. Absolutely not. Won't fly.
The entire world rejected the "I was just doing my job" and "I was just taking orders" excuses during the Nuremberg trials.
There comes a point at which anyone who can lay claim to being human has to either say "No, I won't do that", or accept personal responsibility for their actions by NOT saying it.
Period.
If your system is vulnerable to attack by corrupt "leaders", that's the system's fault. It's the problem with Marxism and it's also the problem with capitalism: when people get power, via state-backed control of capital or via a "dictatorship of the proletariat", these use that power in their own interests.
Nonsense.
As I mentioned earlier: just about ANY system can be corrupted. And some more than others. Socialism, for example, has proven to be the world's ripest breeding ground for corruption, because it is designed to be led by a relatively few people in the first place.
The U.S. has the longest-standing Constitutional government in the last milennium or two. That says an awful lot for this system, as opposed to others that have been tried in the same period. (That is to say: all of them. Except Communism, because there has never been a real Communist government in written history.)
Like a casino. The currency still has the same value, but the thing being bet on is meaningless and valueless in and of itself.
I've been saying exactly that, right here on Slashdot, for 5 years or more now.
Surprising how much argument I've gotten about it, too. But here comes an "expert" saying the same thing, 5 years later, and now it's legitimate.
Not trying to pat myself on the back or anything. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people are slow on the uptake. Not pointing fingers at anybody in particular.
For about 6 months now, I've had an Android app that does this for free.
It's interesting how (what we perceive as) capitalism is the opposite of (what we perceived as) communism in every aspect, yet the results are the same: A small leading group has everything, the rest of the population has nothing. The main difference is that in communism there was nothing you could buy, in capitalism you could buy anything but you lack the money. The net result is the same: You don't have anything.
I've been fighting this MYTH for many years.
Free-market Capitalism, as defined by Adam Smith (although he did not use the exact phrase, it's pretty much agreed that he defined it), included a strong body of anti-trust laws to prevent monopolies and oligopolies from forming. But government, particularly in recent years, has been failing to enforce any kind of effective regulation which is necessary for the system to work.
The revolving-door government has been corrupting and abusing the system. But that isn't the fault of the system, capitalism. That's the fault of corrupt "leaders". They are not even close to the same things. Any system can be abused. That doesn't mean the system is bad. It only means that it is being abused.
Free market first of all depends on a free market. If you can still find one somewhere, please gimme a call so I know where to go.
Why are you paraphrasing what I already wrote? "I agree" would have been sufficient.
Spoken by somebody that has not a clue about exploration.
I'm not an "explorer", if that's what you mean. But I would have been, had I the opportunity. More to the point, though: I do have some knowledge about physics that you seem to be lacking.
Considering your prior comment, I think you should be taking a good long look in the mirror.
No, I would say that the sufferer is yourself.
You neo-con/tea-party type continue to push us towards the SLS as well as going to the moon, while ignoring real facts.
You put your foot in your mouth the moment you opened it.
I am neither "neo-con" or "tea party". The fact that I disagree with you does not put me in the same camp as those people.
O has kept private space going.
You can hardly give "O" credit for that. He had no choice, once Congress and NASA dropped the ball.
O did NOT come up with the asteroids, but it was NASA that came forward with the Idea. He is simply supporting it.
You missed the point. It isn't that he told them to go after the asteroids. There were plans to do that anyway, as you say. The point was that he told them to STOP working on manned Mars missions.
BUT, it can also mean moving a small-medium asteroid to earth, to enable processing of various elements.
Again, you miss the point. What are you going to do with it, once you get it here?
Working in micro-gravity is just too damned slow and difficult. The best thing to do is drop it on some dark place on the Moon, and work on it there. Getting it back OFF the Moon is easy. Think: how big of a rocket did it take to get the Apollo manned module back up to lunar orbiit? And how big of a rocket did it take to get it off of Earth? (It isn't quite a fair comparison, because the Earth rocket had to carry the command module and its engines, too. But the point is still valid.)
Sadly, you neo-cons continue to destroy private space while pushing your massively expensive nightmare, without a thought of the future.
Sadly, you're a dumbshit who doesn't even know a neo-con when he sees one. Or a friend of the space program, for that matter.
Then you are NOT paying attention.
We are making progress in early 90's, when the neo-cons killed off NASA's efforts to go to Mars.
No, sorry, that's just wrong.
Congress may have been tight on the budget, but in fact NASA had active manned Mars mission plans ongoing until Obama told them to stop and concentrate on asteroids instead. It's a matter of public record.
Your use case sounds like it doesn't really need the extra CPU threads, but does need disk speed. For that, I say SSD for your boot plus a real RAID controller (preferably with battery backup) with spinning disks for bulk storage and lots of RAM for cache. The same system with the E5-2630 v2 has 64GB of RAM, a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and five 2TB WD Red drives in RAID-5 connected to an Adaptec 6805 with battery backup. Reads and writes to the SSD and the array are at similar speeds (between 400MB/sec and 600MB/sec), and more than one app hitting the disk at the same time doesn't make things slow to a crawl.
I appreciate the advice, but I've been building systems a long time. I was just curious what you thought about processor choices for that use-case.
The ECC is an angle I hadn't thought of, though. That does makes sense. As for the rest, because I'm probably going with OS X the selection of boards is limited, and so are the GPUs. They're good, don't get me wrong. But there aren't that many of them that work well.
And I don't use Samsung drives if I can help it. I know Apple uses them a lot, but they aren't really celebrated for their high performance. WD is fine with me and I've had excellent experience with them. Right now I have a good SSD, a secondary HDD, and 2 x 2TB WD Re drives, which is adequate for my needs for now.
Being a personal-use system (albeit heavy use), I really don't want a 5-drive RAID array spinning all the time. While I have many apps open at a time, they're not usually in heavy use all at the same time (except sometimes playing video). I'm not doing heavy ray-tracing or anything like that on a regular basis. So I'm really not doing that heavy I/O most of the time. Occasionally there will be some heavy database access alongside the video.
If I need a big drive array I can add it later (the case has room & the PSU is adequate). The SSD and secondary HDD are good for most of my use. The 2TB drives are for storage and backup. They can sleep most of the time.
Essentially, if your disk can't support the I/O for all those services, going from 8 to 12 CPU threads won't really buy you much. You can then add any GPU you want (I have a Radeon R9 270).
Yes, well, it looks like I'll stick with the inexpensive Haswell i7 refresh. I might switch when the newer 6- or 8-core units come out later, but maybe not. We'll see. The main reason being, as I say: I may be running many apps simultaneously but very seldom are more than 3 very "active" at any one time.
Because it's OS X, good Xeon boards with ECC are even harder to find and then set up.
You've just described every business, not just banks. Well, at least the successful ones. They are all in it for their needs. Your needs only come into play only to the extent it's necessary for them to meet their needs.
And YOU'VE just described what my father explained to me, when I was small, is called "doing bad business". Sadly, many in the U.S. these days have seen these big corrupt corporations, and assumed things were always that way. They weren't. In fact they still aren't, in most cases, that don't involve giant corporations or government.
"Good business" is when both people walk away from a transaction satisfied that they got a fair deal. And ideally, when each thinks they got the better deal.
"Bad business" is gouging customers for services that aren't really what they want. Only one party is happy, and the other is greatly dissatisfied.
Free markets depend on the first kind of business. Many economists say the second kind doesn't exist for long without government collusion.
How do you know it's not a case so important and transcendental that absolute secrecy is required to protect British society as a whole?
Yeah. Maybe those secretly on trial are Barack Obama and George Bush.
You're just an example - we have a broad coordination problem. We either need to solve that or get a message to future generations to not adopt this kind of system.
I agree with you on many things, Bill, but this isn't one of them. I mean yes, we do need to put a foot on the head of Congress until they wise up. BUT...
The system is just fine. It isn't broken. What's broken are the corrupt people in it. And they have taken every opportunity to corrupt it further, even when their actions were blatantly illegal.
If everything went according to the rules -- even the existing rules -- we wouldn't be having these problems.
Just about any system imaginable can be abused. That doesn't mean the system is bad. It just means the abusers are bad.
Yeah, at this point, we'll NEVER learn ANYTHING about Mars!
http://www.space.com/12404-mar...
Thanks, Obama!
This is 100% irrelevant to the point that was being made: long ago Obama publicly directed NASA to cease any significant efforts toward manned missions to Mars. (Which was the subject under discussion here: human exploration.)
/sarcasm
Yes, thanks, Obama! Indeed.
FCC regulation does not make them immune from antitrust laws.
There's no reason to go to the bottom of another gravity well. We should be travelling to, learn from, and eventually exploit the asteroids. It makes more sense for the long term viability of the human race.
There are ALL KINDS of legitimate reasons to go to the bottom of another gravity well. Especially the Moon's.
If we can figure out efficient ways to extract them, resources such as minerals, and even oxygen, are abundant. Moon rocks have lots of oxygen... and why do you think Mars is red?
But perhaps more to the point: we have learned that construction in microgravity is intolerably slow and tedious. Precisely because there is no gravity. BUT... in a shallow gravity well, such as Mars and even more so the Moon, most of those problems go away. And so does the difficulty of launching from a deeper gravity well.
So if we ever DO manage to harness resources from space, where should they go to maximize further space exploration? Very obviously to Mars, or to the Moon. Anything else would be just dumb.
I think it's most people's impression that NASA is just going through the motion, making empty noises wrt Mars human exploration. There simply is no viable plan nor adequate budget to come up with a viable plan.
There WAS, until Obama got hold of it and redirected resources toward asteroid capture instead, 6 years ago.
I'm not sure, but I think Obama is a long-time sufferer from assterhoids.
but at what point does it violate the law?
It started violating Federal and State antitrust laws many, many years ago.
The deeper question you should really be asking is: why haven't they been called on it?
The problem is not sarcastic political speech vs sincere political speech; it's sarcastic threats vs sincere threats.
Only if you really believe that's as far as it goes. The Obama administration has been known to -- shall we say -- stretch the bounds of propriety. That's a pretty major understatement.
Nobody seems to be asking WHY.
Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.
They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.
Now, they might have a benign purpose, but from the description in TFA it doesn't seem so. After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.
Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.
They have always had issues with write endurance, since Day One. It has been their Achilles Heel. In fact, the MLC chips have less endurance than the older SLC chips. They partially get around that with extra capacity and better controllers. But it's still their sole weak point.
I have 7- and 8-year-old hard drives with nary a problem. Not all last that long, but many do. And when they fail it's usually mechanically, not due to limited life of the platters.
The fact is, we don't even know if these new units will live up to their rated endurance. They use estimates and statistical methods to come up with those figures. They haven't been around long enough to know. But if the earlier models are any indication of real life vs. rated life, a lot of people are in for a nasty surprise.
They already last very long. Enterprise SSD drives for the most part has longer expected life times than HDD, and are less prone to failure. They just put in extra capacity, and use clever controllers. Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.
Yes, I know all this, BUT... they are not cost-competitive with hard drives, except perhaps for the enterprise.
Yes. I'm FREE to voluntarily opt in to a system of my choosing. When things are required by the government, that's a different situation.
There has often been no real difference.
Many people freely opted in to have their data collected by online services. They did not suspect that later, the government would be demanding that data from those services.
So there you have a case in which voluntarily opting in, and the government forcing it from you, have exactly the same result. Do you honestly think it would be limited to such cases?