Thanks for an extremely informative and well thought-out reply. But wouldn't drastically reducing foreign aid like you suggest lead to a greater percentage of any remaining resources being embezzled by whoever is in charge? If government officials are as corrupt as you've wrote, I'm assuming they won't care about breaking contracts and won't pay attention to international sanctions.
Thanks for your reply. Well, a reasonable estimate of the percentage of aid that gets diverted is around 90 - 95 %. This is from what I have seen, and from members of family that have done work for NGOs. There's not much more for them to steal; if you cut aid by more than 5% they would feel it. Many of those officials only have power because of the resources they steal. The others wouldn't be there if there weren't so much low-hanging fruit.
The government officials we are talking about regularly break contracts because they know there is no downside. Tomorrow they can fleece another aid program.
It's true that they would ignore international criticism, but at least it would get the word out to the rest of the world about what should and should not be tolerated.
It is true that no one thing I have suggested will help. Things have to happen in concert.
In addition, won't what you suggest only help countries which already have the basic facilities to support foreign investment? IT requires quite a large infrastructure behind it, and I had assumed that the discussion here was supposed to discuss only the poorest of African countries. For example, the only country mentioned in the article (Uganda) qualified for Highly Indebted Poor Countries relief; South Africa and Nigeria (the only African countries I can think of off the top of my head with a sizable telecom base, sorry) are not in nearly as bad a shape. Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about African socioeconomics, but wouldn't basic necessities take precedence over things like Internet presence?
The only facility required for foreign investment is someone honest to manage the money locally, and a some form of negative feedback for malefactors. I speak as someone who knows people that have done business in Africa by smuggling American dollars across African borders, and make deals on a handshake.
It's true that investment in High Tech alone will not help, but you suggested diverting the money from such investment into basic sanitation facilities, which I think is a bad idea.
My experience is that if you build such facilities for people in Africa that need them, they won't use them, because they don't believe they need them. If they thought they needed them, they would have made the effort themselves. You can only tempt them with wealth given in exchange for honest work, and help them help themselves.
It is not for you or me to decide what they consider their basic necessities. Their choices would surprise us both. Plus, I don't see how you could arrange for them to get these necessities without giving them to them, and that is a well trodden path to disaster, as I have already shown.
I think in the end all you can do is offer honest money in exchange for honest effort, in a system geared to reward those who provide value, and punish those who attempt to steal. Such investment would happen wherever there would be money to be made by investors, which I think would cover the entire spectrum of goods and services.
I make no claim to be the mystical purveyor of a perfect solution, but I think the points I outlined in the post you replied to are a vast improvement over the status quo.
How will you feed, house, deliver basic utilities to, and do the hundred other things that this new workforce needs to do their jobs? What happens in five, ten, twenty years when the equipment they've invested in is hopelessly obsolete and these countries are once again on the brink of disaster? How will new handouts be paid for? And who says they're even going to be interested in doing IT in the first place? No, I think that's one of the worst ways to go about helping Africa.
The first step for Third World recovery is to write off the debts as they stand right now. Next, instead of subsidizing Midwest farmers to grow weeds instead of food, have them grow actual food and ship it overseas; the destination countries only pay transportation costs (a way to collect even just a little on the previous debts). Then take any funds earmarked for high-tech investment and put them towards basic sanitation facilities instead and you'd have a good start.
Eeek. I was born in Zimbabwe and have lived there and South Africa. Please whatever you do, DONT do what you suggest above.
One of the MAJOR things holding back Africa is foreign aid. The two strongest economies in Southern Africa were at their peak during sanctions. The problem boils down to the following:
1) Forgiving debt wont make any difference, because any spare cash will be stolen by corrupt government officials. They will waste any money available and demand you forgive their debt again.
2) Foreign aid is encouraged by African government officials because the checks and balances on stealing that aid for personal gain are much lower. This is exacerbated by aid people holding the opinion "that as long as something gets through, we're helping". This is not the case.
3) The best way to ensure that local farmers will not grow food is to ship them food, and by so doing, completely destroy local market prices for that food.
4) Much foreign aid is provided through organisations that benefit from skimming a small amount of the aid for "operating costs". Those organisations do not want to help people - they want people to be dependent on them, so they can ship more aid next year. "Give a man a fish a day for a week, and he'll forget how to fish"
Your suggestion of rerouting aid for high tech investment to sanitation is an awful idea. Africa needs investment, not aid. Investment of real money by people that expect real returns, meaning that kleptocrats will not be tolerated. The people that die for lack of sanitation often do so for culteral reasons, not lack of facilities.
One of the problems in Africa is that modern health care guarantees a low death rate amongst children. Coupled with a third world cultural outlook on children, this results in an explosion of young people, which strains education systems. The only real solution to this is to bring the standard of living up to a point where people decide they would rather have a few well-educated children rather than many children to till farmland.
Those children will be there regardless. If they are somehow drawn in real industry instead of subsistance farming, their children and their country benefits. Don't forget that they can support themselves and their families for a year on a hundredth of your salary.
Africa does not need people destroying their markets, and paying their officials to be corrupt and cling to power. It needs:
a) A cessation of foreign aid, unless it is foreign aid with extremely harsh strings attached, and it is provided in such a way that it does not damage local economies, or prop up corrupt governments.
b) Strong investment in countries that make strong attempts to rein in kleptocrats. Hopefully this should end a positive feedback loop.
c) Nothing for nothing and nothing for free, coupled with very harsh criticism and diplomatic pressure when an official is caught embezzling. Put strings on everything.
d) Very strong international criticism of non-democratic govern
I think that advertising is slowly losing ground as a way to inflict pain on people in the name of commerce. I live in the hope that it dies the ugly death it deserves (though I know my hope is very probably a dream).
Damned selfish attitude. Don't screw up the free party for those of us who actually have the ability to focus.
Not selfish at all. Unlike you, I dont make the assumption that advertising is necessary. Also, I dispute that it is "free". It has a cost - your time (in the case of TV), or your attention in other cases.
I am annoyed at being called selfish, when at the end of the day the only thing speaking is your pre-assumptions. Also, I didn't notice me actually screwing with any advertisers. I don't even use an ad blocker, and I stated that actually do pay for services.
Good... stay off the free service and leave bandwidth for those of us who have the amazing innate ability to ignore ads.
Hm. It seems I do not have this ability. Any motion draws my eye. I feel obligated to absorb everything about me. Adverts are a cancer growing on my existence. I dispise them with all my soul, because I have to consciously ignore them, and it degrades the quality of my existence.
Not everyone is like you. Your "amazing innate ability" is not an ability everyone has, or wants. For the record, I like being interested in everything around me. I'm not going to change that just because of some social leeches.
It's a good thing you run a website free of ads. Oh... wait... shoot. Now, why again do you have ads? Oh... that's right, to pay for shit.
I am a paid slashdot subscriber, for the reasons I have cited above. I think that advertising is slowly losing ground as a way to inflict pain on people in the name of commerce. I live in the hope that it dies the ugly death it deserves (though I know my hope is very probably a dream).
Fair enough. I don't dispute that. We just don't have enough data and knowledge to come up with really useful models (yet).
Plus understanding of basic physics.
:-) This is one thing that caused many arguments between me and my physics lecturers. They invariably thought that because they understood the equations, they understood the behaviour of the equations. I think this is (understandable) hubris. Even simple equations have behaviour that an intelligent individual wouldn't be able to predict. The classic example is the Foxes and Rabbits difference equation. Hell, even Newton's method chaotically selects the solution root it provides, and most people don't realise this.
I don't challenge your assertion that humans being on the earth have caused some warming. I don't think it's a given, but it certainly seems probable.
btw, _all_ models predict that the earth will be warming up over the next century.
My apologies for not being more specific in time. My point merely was that some models point to things getting really cold "within a human timeframe", and other's don't.
There is still uncertainty involved, but it is a lot more than just "speculation"
I guess my definition of speculation is not quite yours: I see speculation as a prediction based on theory. There is good speculation (accurate models/short confidence interval) and bad speculation (no model/what's a confidence interval?).
My understanding is that over the next (say) 250 years, the models are widely divergent in their results, and we can't point to one and say it's better than the others. I do not think my original assertion is too strong given that understanding.
I call bullshit. This is like saying average height is a human concept. Climate is the average of weather, and would exist regardless of humans, therefore not a human concept.
You are assuming it is meaningful to average something that is chaotic. Similarly, you are assuming that that average will help you predict the weather in the future, over a similar time period. My assertion is that this is not so.
I label "climate" as the assumption that because some place had a particular kind of weather for a thousand years, it will have a similar kind of weather in the future, over a similar period.
I am not claiming you cannot average a number. I am claiming that a human rule of thumb being used is only useful to use because we think in such short periods, and we tend to adjust the rule when we find it breaks, and then forget we changed it.
The problem with this is that it really means nothing. It's useful data to have, but with our current state of knowledge, we can't infer anything from it.
The Earth's weather is a chaotic system. About the only thing you can be sure of is that things will be different tomorrow, compared to today. With a lot more research, we may be able to find strange attractors for some places at certain times, and use them to predict what is going to happen.
The human concept of "climate" is entirely that: a human concept. Eighteen years of observations is a miniscule speck in the age of this planet, and we can't say with any certainty that any trends in those eighteen years will carry to the next eighteen years. A thousand years of observations falls into the same category - a tiny sample of a big and complex system.
The Earth's weather changes on many scales: years, decades, centuries, millenia, and more. At each of those scales, there is change. Until we can understand or predict its behaviour across all those scales, we are practising voodoo when we make predictions.
I have seen arguments and models that predict that the world will heat up dramatically in the next century. I have also seen others that predict that we will be entering a new ice age. The thing is, the models for both predictions are quite reasonable.
So. We have a little data, and that's all we have. Conclusions may follow in the indeterminate future. Until then we have speculation.
This is all fine and well, but the part that annoys me is that the media (in general) are treating the speculation as fact, and only covering the speculation that fits their agenda. Please beware!
I've always been a little confused by the anti-TV sentiment here. Everyone says "there's nothing to watch, all tv is garbage."
In my case, I don't object to the shows. I object to the way they are presented. If I could pay for the channels I wanted, and never see a commercial, I would have a TV. I don't, which means I usually end up watching stuff I like on DVD or not at all.
I object to paying for something and _still_ having advertising rammed down my throat. I had the misfortune of having a satellite TV service (before I came to the USA) that didn't add in commercials, as their line was you had already paid for your programming. It was heaven. I was spoilt, and I can't go back. I can't get that service here, so no TV for me.
jagged. Very jagged. Check out Finale or Sibelius's slurs.......not jagged.
You are confusing the artifacts generated by a non-perfect conversion to PDF with problems in the output of Lilypond.
I have been using it to typeset music for around six months now, and it generates pure vector output that is, quite frankly, stunning. Producing music notation that looks good is a surprisingly subtle problem, and so far I have no complaints about Lilypond.
The drivers are free, but if a competitor got their hands on the code, they can use that development and "stand on the shoulders of giants" and further their own products enough to play Intel's game. That smaller manufacturer would be in a real position to take sales away from Intel, which obviously Intel doesn't want. That's what's going on here.
Sorry. I make electronics hardware for a living, and you are very wrong. Only in the most extreme of circumstances can releasing open software drivers for your devices help your competitors.
Typically, releasing source helps your friends far more than your enemies. Interfacing to a device is harder than copying useful ideas out of its implementation. Typically, copying useful bits is unnecessary anyway, because it is very rare that your competitor doesn't know exactly how you did something just from their own experience.
I get paid to fix or improve other people's hardware and firmware, among other things. So far, I have yet to see something in the firmware that I couldn't deduce from simply watching the device work for ten minutes. Sometimes I can diagnose hardware problems from doing the same. This stuff really isn't that hard - reality constrains your approaches to most problems, so reverse engineering is just a matter of doing some trivial tests to see which approach was used.
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...
I design hardware for a living, and you are wrong. There is no real benefit to hiding your hardware internals from the rest of the world. It's a knee-jerk PHB thing. It has no bearing on reality.
If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:
1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway. 2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.
There might be "IP" issues, which usually means there is stuff in there protected by a stupidly restrictive license with another company. In my experience, the IP usually isn't worth the bother, or if it is, the license is only restrictive because lawyers simply assume it has to be. They come from a zero sum world, and never think of any other possibilities unless you start witholding cookies.
Usually, being closed will cost your partners much more than a week - they don't just want to learn what you did, they need to interface to it, and that is _hard_. It requires much better information than simply figuring out a trick your competitor used.
I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.
I can't say I care at all about the traditional media companies locking themselves behind barriers. I only read weblogs anyway.
I suppose it might be a self defense manoever for them - it stops them from having to look like complete idiots when some blogger points out they made something up, or spun a story beyond recognition.
As long as you can read maybe three commercial news sources, you can can tell what all the others are saying anyway. Commercial news is designed to package and disseminate the same information to many people, rather than many different kinds of information about the same event. It's a horrible model, and it suffers particularly badly from the "who guards the guardians" syndrome.
I have little or no respect for the traditional media, so here is one person that won't be crying if they decide to marginalise themselves.
Some forms of paid-for news are probably worthwhile, but on the whole I can't help feeling that the weblog phenomenon is the first sign of a drastic change in how people will get their news in the future.
No, the microcontroller used simply selects which canned action to replay. It's not programmable other than re-ordering these canned sequences. You most certainly cannot program it with whatever behaviour you want.
*shrug* I have watched Mark Tilden's explanations of what it does. I have picked up the short comments he has made about how it is controlled. I have 7 years of university in computer science and electronics, and 6 years in the field, and my interpretation of what he said is that if I were to get into that Hitachi controller/PIC combo and insert my own machine code, I would be able to drive the motors as I liked, including screwing up the nervous net feedback systems and making it fall over.
Note I am not talking about futzing with a stupid remote control. Also, I am happy to state that the device is programmable if I can modify code on the device so that it can respond to external stimuli in ways that the original unit did not.
To pick a parallel, but obviously silly example: Do you claim a Sony Aibo is not programmable because the inbuilt systems don't allow you to tell it to explode? It can only move legs around, after all, and wiggle a head. There is no built in facility for explosions, hence it is not programmable? In parallel, on the Robosapiens, some movements are tied to other movements by the nervous net to ensure that the device doesnt fall over. Beyond that you can do what you like, but somehow it isn't programmable?
Beyond your somewhat limited definition of "programmable", you either have access to some very particular information of which I am unaware, or your hardline stance on the capabilities of the internal workings of the control systems for this device is unwarranted.
A lot of the responses to my posts seem to be from those who erroneously assume I don't think this is cool. I do think this is cool. Very cool. I just don't think it will significantly affect the price, performance, or ubiquity of the more advanced, highly-programmable, and extensible digital robots out there. It's a different kind of system that trades programmability for inexpensive robustness.
I made no claims about the impact of such techniques on more expensive or more complicated systems, but I must disagree with you. If I can use a simple analog feedback system to ensure the balance of a system, why not do so? Instead of spending money on balancing, I can spend it on something like image recognition.
The human body has balance feedback loops that terminate at the base of the spine. Because of this, I can argue with you and type with two hands, instead of having to spend concious brainpower on not falling over, or use a hand to hold my face off the table.
Similarly, you don't spend your life thinking "breathe in, breathe out". You have analog control systems running in the background that do that for you.
If there is an inexpensive way to isolate a problem and solve it, it will be used as a module for solving problems in larger more complicated systems.
Please try this test: Sit with your legs off the floor. Now swing your right leg in clockwise circles. Now hold up your right arm, hang your hand and swing it around in anticlockwise circles. Note that your leg just changed the direction of it's swing, without your violition. As far as I know, humans simply can't do the above motion successfully, due to limitations on the number of sequence generators in the spine. Does that mean we are just a purveyors of canned sequences?
If so, does this mean that: a) Canned sequences are bad? b) You are not programmable?
This is not a robot (in the opinion of the original poster and me) because it is neither autonomous nor does it have the capacity to be made autonomous-ish by adding sensors and a brain (microcontroller). It can only perform canned macro-functions and sequences of these canned macro-functions. Micro-scale control of its functions is not available.
It already has a microcontroller, and if you changed the code on the microcontroller, you could program it with whatever behaviour you want.
Sure, it uses nervous networks to control the motors, but the networks are excited by a microcontroller.
Note to mods: parent is clearly wrong. How did this get +5? As others have stated, the AMD rating is an estimation of how fast their processor is compared to an Intel Pentium 4 running at the PR speed in megahertz.
No. You are clearly wrong. The PR rating is relative to an AMD Thunderbird Core. If you don't know what you are talking about, you should just shut up. Here is a link and here is another.
Intel are shouting about megahertz because its all they have. For most real world applications (ie. Not encoding video) the Pentium 4 cores are abysmally inefficient. Anything that is branch heavy (such as a compiler, for example) is a complete nightmare for a P4.
For that matter, I'm writing a video encoder in my spare time, and the AMD chips are still a better match for the sort of stuff I am doing.
Have a look at rdiff-backup. It uses ssh to login and to run the server on the other side, and runs through the SSH tunnel. Nice from a security perspective. I use it for all of my backup needs. Along with careful use of ssh and private/public key pairs, you can automate it and still keep it fairly secure.
Same level of quality? Have you actually seen the code coming from India?
It can't be any worse than a lot of the stuff I have had to fix here. On the whole, the American education system is pretty awful. One of the most eye opening experiences I've ever had was interviewing potentials for a programming position.
My experience is that Americans tend to vastly overrate the quality of their schooling compared to Europe, India and a few other places. America seems to produce "cowboy" programmers rather than Computer Scientists that can program. I'm making this judgement from the number of race conditions I've had to fix in other people's unmaintainable code, amongst other things.:-P
"Computer Science is about computers like Astronomy is about telescopes." I think Djikstra said that.
I think you can be a good Computer Scientist without being a Programmer. I do not think the reverse is true.
There are many reasons not to outsource, but assumptions about code quality are probably not on the list.
Really? I'm not reading the books because I hate reading books. A friend of mine highly recommended the books years ago, and after watching the first movie it's definately on the very top of my list of books to read. I'm actually thinking about holding off on watching the movie, because I want to be surprised. I guess I'm the opposite of the average Joe.
Hmm. Well, Tolkien is one of the slowest writers out there. This series may not be the best way to test your enthusiasm.
I am a voracious reader and I had trouble getting through Tolkien's stuff. It's good, but man does he beat around the bush.:-) For entertainment value, I prefer many other authors.
Some of the problems might have been that you had to run one of the mass market distros to even get the installer to run.
Obviously Gentoo was out - so I couldn't install it there.
Hm. I've installed it at verious times on various Gentoo boxes. No issues. I had some font issues on a Debian box, but so far Kylix and Gentoo has been a very comfortable combination for me.
I bought Kylix 3.0, and my biggest complaint with it is that it feels like a Windows program forced to run on Linux. Not just the IDE (which uses WINE to run), but the language implementation itself.
It feels like the developers have hardly used it itself, and I guess that's why it just isn't as much of a pleasure to use as (say) Turbo Pascal was.
I love having a decent pascal compiler for Linux, and I like the fact that I can recompile my code on Windows, but I keep bumping into things that just shouldn't be the way they are.
For example: I have triggered segfaults when exceeding boundaries on arrays. Excuse me? I'm using a typesafe language with bounds checking specifically enabled. I expect the program to halt on the line of code that is attempting to access an out of bounds address BEFORE said access happens. I expect all variables to be current and correct. I expect to be able to see exactly what went wrong exactly as it happened. That's one of the reasons to use pascal. I'm paying 5% overhead for that luxury, now hand it over!
The other reason to use pascal is the fast compile times, which is great.
I'm happy to have a pascal compiler with a nice IDE and neat rapid application development stuff for applications, and I use it by preference. It just feels unpolished and rough.
Oh, yeah, shipping apps sucks too - they require you to make wrappers and point LD_* things to shared libraries that you have to identify yourself. VERY MESSY and STUPID. Let me make static apps if I have to, but I get pissed off when the recommended solution for messiness is to wrap every executable I make in a script. Yuk. Not likely.
*sigh* So I guess Love/Hate it is.
Love pascal. Loved Turbo Pascal. Like Kylix. Hate icky stupid bits in Kylix.
Kylix devs should be forced to eat their dogfood. When they release a fully functional IDE written in Kylix, I will be willing to believe they have actually used it. Until then, I'll use it anyway, and occasionally rant in public.:-)
This is getting a bit offtopic. Feel free to send me a reply via my homepage if you would like to chat more. I don't want to bore innocent bystanders.:-)
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, though I must say I was calling a particular poster to task for forgetting the pros, not Slashdot the site. I think the Diebold voting system is terrible, and I think it needs to be fixed. Making a noise about this is a good thing.
I find myself constantly bombarded with Anti-Americanism... from Americans. I wouldn't mind this if I thought they had something substantive to say, but it really comes across as a kind of groupthink jingoism. The Democratic/left wing/"liberal" parties and supporters in the US seem to have entered a kind of babbling insanity (and they are disproportionately represented in the media), and I have no time for the religious right, so I am left talking to the potted plants.:-)
So taking me to task for castigating slashdot is I think inappropriate. I had nothing to say about their news story. I just reached my patience threshold with another drone spouting the current vogue, which is that America sucks, what it's doing sucks and where it's going sucks. It's a null stance to take because the media is filled with it, and it's very hard to find a (non-nutcase) media source that is willing to challenge that. I'm happy to let him moan as long as he takes the time to remember the good things, and I felt obligated to remind him.:-)
As an aside, I am not particularly unhappy with the current administration, so I guess I could argue that the current changes aren't that bad either. I hold liberal views, but am a libertarian, which is a fairly fundamental right-wing (which just means "concerned with individuals more than groups") philosophy. This means that my horror of the religious "right" in the USA is only equalled by my horror of the far left.:-)
I generally consider each US president to be a mixed bag and all of them to be equally amoral, so I generally couldn't be bothered with outrage over some behaviour. I prefer to just classify and then extrapolate future effects. From the perspective of an outsider, and the USA's effects beyond its borders, I have no complaints with their current behaviour.
That would be because there's not much to be pro about in america these days.
Here speaks someone who sounds like he has never been out of America.
You take most of the good things about America completely for granted, and that is because things are so stable, you don't realise just how lucky you are.
So speaks someone who is not American, and who knows how bad things can get.
Count your blessings, but first I suggest you figure out what they are.
I realise that I am assuming you are American or Canadian, or perhaps even to a lesser extent European, but my experience shows that those with their bum in the butter are typically the first to forget about the existence of butter. When was the last time you thought about the air that you breathe?
I can moan about Americans with the best of them, but I won't let that blind me to just what they have achieved, and the good parts of their life and system.
Moan about the cons, but do yourself a favour and remember the pros.
I can't believe this kind of bullshit gets posted on Slashdot. For those who didn't read the article (and I know you're out there), the guy compared how long it takes to open his maildir file in Mutt on SCSI and then IDE.
Since it went faster on his SCSI drive, he concludes that SCSI is faster. Wow! How comprehensive!
Um. Did he claim it was comprehensive? If not, why are you whining?
Did he show that the actual throughput was higher for the IDE drive in the one test? Yes, he did. Did the SCSI drive finish a job that required many file operations faster than the IDE drive? Yes.
You're probably a bright boy. Feel free to come up with your own conclusions. He did tell you everything he did. If you are unsatisfied with the test case coverage then feel free to treat it as a single anecdote, or partial data with other data to be collected from elsewhere. I don't think you can complain about his results, just the breadth of his final conclusion. Seeing as he qualified the test with why he tested what he did, I don't think you have much of a case for even that.
As for the reason the SCSI stuff does well, it allows commands to be asynchronously issued, and commands are queued and and executed across multiple drives on the SCSI bus with much less CPU intervention (and potentially, synchronous waiting) than is required with IDE.
The only thing I can say about his test is how unsurprised I am by the results.
What is stopping the "other side" from coating their shells with a reflective surface? Especially if only one particular wavelength is used by the military, it should be straightforward to create a coating that'll effectively reflect close to 100% of the LASER.
The simple answer is "dust". The laser has very high energy. It hits the mirrored surface. The dust on the surface absorbs a large amount of energy very quickly. It essentially explodes, pitting the mirror surface. At this point, your mirror isn't a mirror. Game over.
The same applies for absolutely anything that can stick to or affect the surface, like skin oil or tiny scratches. This ignores the fact that you can't make a 100% reflective mirror, so it's going to heat up, and if you have enough energy you disrupt it anyway. Even a tiny fraction of a percent of inefficiency will take you to the cleaners.
That said, never say never. In the foreseeable future, it isn't a practical solution, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for an extremely informative and well thought-out reply. But wouldn't drastically reducing foreign aid like you suggest lead to a greater percentage of any remaining resources being embezzled by whoever is in charge? If government officials are as corrupt as you've wrote, I'm assuming they won't care about breaking contracts and won't pay attention to international sanctions.
Thanks for your reply. Well, a reasonable estimate of the percentage of aid that gets diverted is around 90 - 95 %. This is from what I have seen, and from members of family that have done work for NGOs. There's not much more for them to steal; if you cut aid by more than 5% they would feel it. Many of those officials only have power because of the resources they steal. The others wouldn't be there if there weren't so much low-hanging fruit.
The government officials we are talking about regularly break contracts because they know there is no downside. Tomorrow they can fleece another aid program.
It's true that they would ignore international criticism, but at least it would get the word out to the rest of the world about what should and should not be tolerated.
It is true that no one thing I have suggested will help. Things have to happen in concert.
In addition, won't what you suggest only help countries which already have the basic facilities to support foreign investment? IT requires quite a large infrastructure behind it, and I had assumed that the discussion here was supposed to discuss only the poorest of African countries. For example, the only country mentioned in the article (Uganda) qualified for Highly Indebted Poor Countries relief; South Africa and Nigeria (the only African countries I can think of off the top of my head with a sizable telecom base, sorry) are not in nearly as bad a shape. Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about African socioeconomics, but wouldn't basic necessities take precedence over things like Internet presence?
The only facility required for foreign investment is someone honest to manage the money locally, and a some form of negative feedback for malefactors. I speak as someone who knows people that have done business in Africa by smuggling American dollars across African borders, and make deals on a handshake.
It's true that investment in High Tech alone will not help, but you suggested diverting the money from such investment into basic sanitation facilities, which I think is a bad idea.
My experience is that if you build such facilities for people in Africa that need them, they won't use them, because they don't believe they need them. If they thought they needed them, they would have made the effort themselves. You can only tempt them with wealth given in exchange for honest work, and help them help themselves.
It is not for you or me to decide what they consider their basic necessities. Their choices would surprise us both. Plus, I don't see how you could arrange for them to get these necessities without giving them to them, and that is a well trodden path to disaster, as I have already shown.
I think in the end all you can do is offer honest money in exchange for honest effort, in a system geared to reward those who provide value, and punish those who attempt to steal. Such investment would happen wherever there would be money to be made by investors, which I think would cover the entire spectrum of goods and services.
I make no claim to be the mystical purveyor of a perfect solution, but I think the points I outlined in the post you replied to are a vast improvement over the status quo.
How will you feed, house, deliver basic utilities to, and do the hundred other things that this new workforce needs to do their jobs? What happens in five, ten, twenty years when the equipment they've invested in is hopelessly obsolete and these countries are once again on the brink of disaster? How will new handouts be paid for? And who says they're even going to be interested in doing IT in the first place? No, I think that's one of the worst ways to go about helping Africa.
The first step for Third World recovery is to write off the debts as they stand right now. Next, instead of subsidizing Midwest farmers to grow weeds instead of food, have them grow actual food and ship it overseas; the destination countries only pay transportation costs (a way to collect even just a little on the previous debts). Then take any funds earmarked for high-tech investment and put them towards basic sanitation facilities instead and you'd have a good start.
Eeek. I was born in Zimbabwe and have lived there and South Africa. Please whatever you do, DONT do what you suggest above.
One of the MAJOR things holding back Africa is foreign aid. The two strongest economies in Southern Africa were at their peak during sanctions. The problem boils down to the following:
1) Forgiving debt wont make any difference, because any spare cash will be stolen by corrupt government officials. They will waste any money available and demand you forgive their debt again.
2) Foreign aid is encouraged by African government officials because the checks and balances on stealing that aid for personal gain are much lower. This is exacerbated by aid people holding the opinion "that as long as something gets through, we're helping". This is not the case.
3) The best way to ensure that local farmers will not grow food is to ship them food, and by so doing, completely destroy local market prices for that food.
4) Much foreign aid is provided through organisations that benefit from skimming a small amount of the aid for "operating costs". Those organisations do not want to help people - they want people to be dependent on them, so they can ship more aid next year. "Give a man a fish a day for a week, and he'll forget how to fish"
Your suggestion of rerouting aid for high tech investment to sanitation is an awful idea. Africa needs investment, not aid. Investment of real money by people that expect real returns, meaning that kleptocrats will not be tolerated. The people that die for lack of sanitation often do so for culteral reasons, not lack of facilities.
One of the problems in Africa is that modern health care guarantees a low death rate amongst children. Coupled with a third world cultural outlook on children, this results in an explosion of young people, which strains education systems. The only real solution to this is to bring the standard of living up to a point where people decide they would rather have a few well-educated children rather than many children to till farmland.
Those children will be there regardless. If they are somehow drawn in real industry instead of subsistance farming, their children and their country benefits. Don't forget that they can support themselves and their families for a year on a hundredth of your salary.
Africa does not need people destroying their markets, and paying their officials to be corrupt and cling to power. It needs:
a) A cessation of foreign aid, unless it is foreign aid with extremely harsh strings attached, and it is provided in such a way that it does not damage local economies, or prop up corrupt governments.
b) Strong investment in countries that make strong attempts to rein in kleptocrats. Hopefully this should end a positive feedback loop.
c) Nothing for nothing and nothing for free, coupled with very harsh criticism and diplomatic pressure when an official is caught embezzling. Put strings on everything.
d) Very strong international criticism of non-democratic govern
I think that advertising is slowly losing ground as a way to inflict pain on people in the name of commerce. I live in the hope that it dies the ugly death it deserves (though I know my hope is very probably a dream).
Damned selfish attitude. Don't screw up the free party for those of us who actually have the ability to focus.
Not selfish at all. Unlike you, I dont make the assumption that advertising is necessary. Also, I dispute that it is "free". It has a cost - your time (in the case of TV), or your attention in other cases.
I am annoyed at being called selfish, when at the end of the day the only thing speaking is your pre-assumptions. Also, I didn't notice me actually screwing with any advertisers. I don't even use an ad blocker, and I stated that actually do pay for services.
In other words: chill.
Good... stay off the free service and leave bandwidth for those of us who have the amazing innate ability to ignore ads.
Hm. It seems I do not have this ability. Any motion draws my eye. I feel obligated to absorb everything about me. Adverts are a cancer growing on my existence. I dispise them with all my soul, because I have to consciously ignore them, and it degrades the quality of my existence.
Not everyone is like you. Your "amazing innate ability" is not an ability everyone has, or wants. For the record, I like being interested in everything around me. I'm not going to change that just because of some social leeches.
It's a good thing you run a website free of ads. Oh... wait... shoot. Now, why again do you have ads? Oh... that's right, to pay for shit.
I am a paid slashdot subscriber, for the reasons I have cited above. I think that advertising is slowly losing ground as a way to inflict pain on people in the name of commerce. I live in the hope that it dies the ugly death it deserves (though I know my hope is very probably a dream).
Ah well.
Fair enough. I don't dispute that. We just don't have enough data and knowledge to come up with really useful models (yet).
Plus understanding of basic physics.
I don't challenge your assertion that humans being on the earth have caused some warming. I don't think it's a given, but it certainly seems probable.
btw, _all_ models predict that the earth will be warming up over the next century.
My apologies for not being more specific in time. My point merely was that some models point to things getting really cold "within a human timeframe", and other's don't.
There is still uncertainty involved, but it is a lot more than just "speculation"
I guess my definition of speculation is not quite yours: I see speculation as a prediction based on theory. There is good speculation (accurate models/short confidence interval) and bad speculation (no model/what's a confidence interval?).
My understanding is that over the next (say) 250 years, the models are widely divergent in their results, and we can't point to one and say it's better than the others. I do not think my original assertion is too strong given that understanding.
I call bullshit. This is like saying average height is a human concept. Climate is the average of weather, and would exist regardless of humans, therefore not a human concept.
You are assuming it is meaningful to average something that is chaotic. Similarly, you are assuming that that average will help you predict the weather in the future, over a similar time period. My assertion is that this is not so.
I label "climate" as the assumption that because some place had a particular kind of weather for a thousand years, it will have a similar kind of weather in the future, over a similar period.
I am not claiming you cannot average a number. I am claiming that a human rule of thumb being used is only useful to use because we think in such short periods, and we tend to adjust the rule when we find it breaks, and then forget we changed it.
The problem with this is that it really means nothing. It's useful data to have, but with our current state of knowledge, we can't infer anything from it.
The Earth's weather is a chaotic system. About the only thing you can be sure of is that things will be different tomorrow, compared to today. With a lot more research, we may be able to find strange attractors for some places at certain times, and use them to predict what is going to happen.
The human concept of "climate" is entirely that: a human concept. Eighteen years of observations is a miniscule speck in the age of this planet, and we can't say with any certainty that any trends in those eighteen years will carry to the next eighteen years. A thousand years of observations falls into the same category - a tiny sample of a big and complex system.
The Earth's weather changes on many scales: years, decades, centuries, millenia, and more. At each of those scales, there is change. Until we can understand or predict its behaviour across all those scales, we are practising voodoo when we make predictions.
I have seen arguments and models that predict that the world will heat up dramatically in the next century. I have also seen others that predict that we will be entering a new ice age. The thing is, the models for both predictions are quite reasonable.
So. We have a little data, and that's all we have. Conclusions may follow in the indeterminate future. Until then we have speculation.
This is all fine and well, but the part that annoys me is that the media (in general) are treating the speculation as fact, and only covering the speculation that fits their agenda. Please beware!
I've always been a little confused by the anti-TV sentiment here. Everyone says "there's nothing to watch, all tv is garbage."
In my case, I don't object to the shows. I object to the way they are presented. If I could pay for the channels I wanted, and never see a commercial, I would have a TV. I don't, which means I usually end up watching stuff I like on DVD or not at all.
I object to paying for something and _still_ having advertising rammed down my throat. I had the misfortune of having a satellite TV service (before I came to the USA) that didn't add in commercials, as their line was you had already paid for your programming. It was heaven. I was spoilt, and I can't go back. I can't get that service here, so no TV for me.
jagged. Very jagged. Check out Finale or Sibelius's slurs.......not jagged.
You are confusing the artifacts generated by a non-perfect conversion to PDF with problems in the output of Lilypond.
I have been using it to typeset music for around six months now, and it generates pure vector output that is, quite frankly, stunning. Producing music notation that looks good is a surprisingly subtle problem, and so far I have no complaints about Lilypond.
The drivers are free, but if a competitor got their hands on the code, they can use that development and "stand on the shoulders of giants" and further their own products enough to play Intel's game. That smaller manufacturer would be in a real position to take sales away from Intel, which obviously Intel doesn't want. That's what's going on here.
Sorry. I make electronics hardware for a living, and you are very wrong. Only in the most extreme of circumstances can releasing open software drivers for your devices help your competitors.
Typically, releasing source helps your friends far more than your enemies. Interfacing to a device is harder than copying useful ideas out of its implementation. Typically, copying useful bits is unnecessary anyway, because it is very rare that your competitor doesn't know exactly how you did something just from their own experience.
I get paid to fix or improve other people's hardware and firmware, among other things. So far, I have yet to see something in the firmware that I couldn't deduce from simply watching the device work for ten minutes. Sometimes I can diagnose hardware problems from doing the same. This stuff really isn't that hard - reality constrains your approaches to most problems, so reverse engineering is just a matter of doing some trivial tests to see which approach was used.
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...
I design hardware for a living, and you are wrong. There is no real benefit to hiding your hardware internals from the rest of the world. It's a knee-jerk PHB thing. It has no bearing on reality.
If you are scared of your competitors, then hiding your hardware internals costs them maybe a week, because:
1) They know how to do everything you do, anyway.
2) What they don't know they can figure out in under a week, if they put an engineer or two on it. The delta between what they do and what you do is minimal, and anything they want to know is trivial to reverse engineer.
There might be "IP" issues, which usually means there is stuff in there protected by a stupidly restrictive license with another company. In my experience, the IP usually isn't worth the bother, or if it is, the license is only restrictive because lawyers simply assume it has to be. They come from a zero sum world, and never think of any other possibilities unless you start witholding cookies.
Usually, being closed will cost your partners much more than a week - they don't just want to learn what you did, they need to interface to it, and that is _hard_. It requires much better information than simply figuring out a trick your competitor used.
I will say it again: It is very rare and unlikely that closing your software helps in a situation like this.
I can't say I care at all about the traditional media companies locking themselves behind barriers. I only read weblogs anyway.
I suppose it might be a self defense manoever for them - it stops them from having to look like complete idiots when some blogger points out they made something up, or spun a story beyond recognition.
As long as you can read maybe three commercial news sources, you can can tell what all the others are saying anyway. Commercial news is designed to package and disseminate the same information to many people, rather than many different kinds of information about the same event. It's a horrible model, and it suffers particularly badly from the "who guards the guardians" syndrome.
I have little or no respect for the traditional media, so here is one person that won't be crying if they decide to marginalise themselves.
Some forms of paid-for news are probably worthwhile, but on the whole I can't help feeling that the weblog phenomenon is the first sign of a drastic change in how people will get their news in the future.
No, the microcontroller used simply selects which canned action to replay. It's not programmable other than re-ordering these canned sequences. You most certainly cannot program it with whatever behaviour you want.
*shrug* I have watched Mark Tilden's explanations of what it does. I have picked up the short comments he has made about how it is controlled. I have 7 years of university in computer science and electronics, and 6 years in the field, and my interpretation of what he said is that if I were to get into that Hitachi controller/PIC combo and insert my own machine code, I would be able to drive the motors as I liked, including screwing up the nervous net feedback systems and making it fall over.
Note I am not talking about futzing with a stupid remote control. Also, I am happy to state that the device is programmable if I can modify code on the device so that it can respond to external stimuli in ways that the original unit did not.
To pick a parallel, but obviously silly example: Do you claim a Sony Aibo is not programmable because the inbuilt systems don't allow you to tell it to explode? It can only move legs around, after all, and wiggle a head. There is no built in facility for explosions, hence it is not programmable? In parallel, on the Robosapiens, some movements are tied to other movements by the nervous net to ensure that the device doesnt fall over. Beyond that you can do what you like, but somehow it isn't programmable?
Beyond your somewhat limited definition of "programmable", you either have access to some very particular information of which I am unaware, or your hardline stance on the capabilities of the internal workings of the control systems for this device is unwarranted.
A lot of the responses to my posts seem to be from those who erroneously assume I don't think this is cool. I do think this is cool. Very cool. I just don't think it will significantly affect the price, performance, or ubiquity of the more advanced, highly-programmable, and extensible digital robots out there. It's a different kind of system that trades programmability for inexpensive robustness.
I made no claims about the impact of such techniques on more expensive or more complicated systems, but I must disagree with you. If I can use a simple analog feedback system to ensure the balance of a system, why not do so? Instead of spending money on balancing, I can spend it on something like image recognition.
The human body has balance feedback loops that terminate at the base of the spine. Because of this, I can argue with you and type with two hands, instead of having to spend concious brainpower on not falling over, or use a hand to hold my face off the table.
Similarly, you don't spend your life thinking "breathe in, breathe out". You have analog control systems running in the background that do that for you.
If there is an inexpensive way to isolate a problem and solve it, it will be used as a module for solving problems in larger more complicated systems.
Please try this test: Sit with your legs off the floor. Now swing your right leg in clockwise circles. Now hold up your right arm, hang your hand and swing it around in anticlockwise circles. Note that your leg just changed the direction of it's swing, without your violition. As far as I know, humans simply can't do the above motion successfully, due to limitations on the number of sequence generators in the spine. Does that mean we are just a purveyors of canned sequences?
If so, does this mean that:
a) Canned sequences are bad?
b) You are not programmable?
This is not a robot (in the opinion of the original poster and me) because it is neither autonomous nor does it have the capacity to be made autonomous-ish by adding sensors and a brain (microcontroller). It can only perform canned macro-functions and sequences of these canned macro-functions. Micro-scale control of its functions is not available.
It already has a microcontroller, and if you changed the code on the microcontroller, you could program it with whatever behaviour you want.
Sure, it uses nervous networks to control the motors, but the networks are excited by a microcontroller.
Note to mods: parent is clearly wrong. How did this get +5? As others have stated, the AMD rating is an estimation of how fast their processor is compared to an Intel Pentium 4 running at the PR speed in megahertz.
No. You are clearly wrong. The PR rating is relative to an AMD Thunderbird Core. If you don't know what you are talking about, you should just shut up. Here is a link and here is another.
Intel are shouting about megahertz because its all they have. For most real world applications (ie. Not encoding video) the Pentium 4 cores are abysmally inefficient. Anything that is branch heavy (such as a compiler, for example) is a complete nightmare for a P4.
For that matter, I'm writing a video encoder in my spare time, and the AMD chips are still a better match for the sort of stuff I am doing.
Have a look at rdiff-backup. It uses ssh to login and to run the server on the other side, and runs through the SSH tunnel. Nice from a security perspective. I use it for all of my backup needs. Along with careful use of ssh and private/public key pairs, you can automate it and still keep it fairly secure.
Same level of quality? Have you actually seen the code coming from India?
:-P
It can't be any worse than a lot of the stuff I have had to fix here. On the whole, the American education system is pretty awful. One of the most eye opening experiences I've ever had was interviewing potentials for a programming position.
My experience is that Americans tend to vastly overrate the quality of their schooling compared to Europe, India and a few other places. America seems to produce "cowboy" programmers rather than Computer Scientists that can program. I'm making this judgement from the number of race conditions I've had to fix in other people's unmaintainable code, amongst other things.
"Computer Science is about computers like Astronomy is about telescopes." I think Djikstra said that.
I think you can be a good Computer Scientist without being a Programmer. I do not think the reverse is true.
There are many reasons not to outsource, but assumptions about code quality are probably not on the list.
Really? I'm not reading the books because I hate reading books. A friend of mine highly recommended the books years ago, and after watching the first movie it's definately on the very top of my list of books to read. I'm actually thinking about holding off on watching the movie, because I want to be surprised. I guess I'm the opposite of the average Joe.
:-) For entertainment value, I prefer many other authors.
Hmm. Well, Tolkien is one of the slowest writers out there. This series may not be the best way to test your enthusiasm.
I am a voracious reader and I had trouble getting through Tolkien's stuff. It's good, but man does he beat around the bush.
Good luck with it, whatever you decide...
Some of the problems might have been that you had to run one of the mass market distros to even get the installer to run.
Obviously Gentoo was out - so I couldn't install it there.
Hm. I've installed it at verious times on various Gentoo boxes. No issues. I had some font issues on a Debian box, but so far Kylix and Gentoo has been a very comfortable combination for me.
I bought Kylix 3.0, and my biggest complaint with it is that it feels like a Windows program forced to run on Linux. Not just the IDE (which uses WINE to run), but the language implementation itself.
:-)
It feels like the developers have hardly used it itself, and I guess that's why it just isn't as much of a pleasure to use as (say) Turbo Pascal was.
I love having a decent pascal compiler for Linux, and I like the fact that I can recompile my code on Windows, but I keep bumping into things that just shouldn't be the way they are.
For example: I have triggered segfaults when exceeding boundaries on arrays. Excuse me? I'm using a typesafe language with bounds checking specifically enabled. I expect the program to halt on the line of code that is attempting to access an out of bounds address BEFORE said access happens. I expect all variables to be current and correct. I expect to be able to see exactly what went wrong exactly as it happened. That's one of the reasons to use pascal. I'm paying 5% overhead for that luxury, now hand it over!
The other reason to use pascal is the fast compile times, which is great.
I'm happy to have a pascal compiler with a nice IDE and neat rapid application development stuff for applications, and I use it by preference. It just feels unpolished and rough.
Oh, yeah, shipping apps sucks too - they require you to make wrappers and point LD_* things to shared libraries that you have to identify yourself. VERY MESSY and STUPID. Let me make static apps if I have to, but I get pissed off when the recommended solution for messiness is to wrap every executable I make in a script. Yuk. Not likely.
*sigh* So I guess Love/Hate it is.
Love pascal. Loved Turbo Pascal. Like Kylix. Hate icky stupid bits in Kylix.
Kylix devs should be forced to eat their dogfood. When they release a fully functional IDE written in Kylix, I will be willing to believe they have actually used it. Until then, I'll use it anyway, and occasionally rant in public.
This is getting a bit offtopic. Feel free to send me a reply via my homepage if you would like to chat more. I don't want to bore innocent bystanders. :-)
... from Americans. I wouldn't mind this if I thought they had something substantive to say, but it really comes across as a kind of groupthink jingoism. The Democratic/left wing/"liberal" parties and supporters in the US seem to have entered a kind of babbling insanity (and they are disproportionately represented in the media), and I have no time for the religious right, so I am left talking to the potted plants. :-)
:-)
:-)
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, though I must say I was calling a particular poster to task for forgetting the pros, not Slashdot the site. I think the Diebold voting system is terrible, and I think it needs to be fixed. Making a noise about this is a good thing.
I find myself constantly bombarded with Anti-Americanism
So taking me to task for castigating slashdot is I think inappropriate. I had nothing to say about their news story. I just reached my patience threshold with another drone spouting the current vogue, which is that America sucks, what it's doing sucks and where it's going sucks. It's a null stance to take because the media is filled with it, and it's very hard to find a (non-nutcase) media source that is willing to challenge that. I'm happy to let him moan as long as he takes the time to remember the good things, and I felt obligated to remind him.
As an aside, I am not particularly unhappy with the current administration, so I guess I could argue that the current changes aren't that bad either. I hold liberal views, but am a libertarian, which is a fairly fundamental right-wing (which just means "concerned with individuals more than groups") philosophy. This means that my horror of the religious "right" in the USA is only equalled by my horror of the far left.
I generally consider each US president to be a mixed bag and all of them to be equally amoral, so I generally couldn't be bothered with outrage over some behaviour. I prefer to just classify and then extrapolate future effects. From the perspective of an outsider, and the USA's effects beyond its borders, I have no complaints with their current behaviour.
That would be because there's not much to be pro about in america these days.
Here speaks someone who sounds like he has never been out of America.
You take most of the good things about America completely for granted, and that is because things are so stable, you don't realise just how lucky you are.
So speaks someone who is not American, and who knows how bad things can get.
Count your blessings, but first I suggest you figure out what they are.
I realise that I am assuming you are American or Canadian, or perhaps even to a lesser extent European, but my experience shows that those with their bum in the butter are typically the first to forget about the existence of butter. When was the last time you thought about the air that you breathe?
I can moan about Americans with the best of them, but I won't let that blind me to just what they have achieved, and the good parts of their life and system.
Moan about the cons, but do yourself a favour and remember the pros.
Yeah. Now if only their tracker were running so the links you provided actually worked... :-/
I can't believe this kind of bullshit gets posted on Slashdot. For those who didn't read the article (and I know you're out there), the guy compared how long it takes to open his maildir file in Mutt on SCSI and then IDE.
Since it went faster on his SCSI drive, he concludes that SCSI is faster. Wow! How comprehensive!
Um. Did he claim it was comprehensive? If not, why are you whining?
Did he show that the actual throughput was higher for the IDE drive in the one test? Yes, he did. Did the SCSI drive finish a job that required many file operations faster than the IDE drive? Yes.
You're probably a bright boy. Feel free to come up with your own conclusions. He did tell you everything he did. If you are unsatisfied with the test case coverage then feel free to treat it as a single anecdote, or partial data with other data to be collected from elsewhere. I don't think you can complain about his results, just the breadth of his final conclusion. Seeing as he qualified the test with why he tested what he did, I don't think you have much of a case for even that.
As for the reason the SCSI stuff does well, it allows commands to be asynchronously issued, and commands are queued and and executed across multiple drives on the SCSI bus with much less CPU intervention (and potentially, synchronous waiting) than is required with IDE.
The only thing I can say about his test is how unsurprised I am by the results.
What is stopping the "other side" from coating their shells with a reflective surface? Especially if only one particular wavelength is used by the military, it should be straightforward to create a coating that'll effectively reflect close to 100% of the LASER.
The simple answer is "dust". The laser has very high energy. It hits the mirrored surface. The dust on the surface absorbs a large amount of energy very quickly. It essentially explodes, pitting the mirror surface. At this point, your mirror isn't a mirror. Game over.
The same applies for absolutely anything that can stick to or affect the surface, like skin oil or tiny scratches. This ignores the fact that you can't make a 100% reflective mirror, so it's going to heat up, and if you have enough energy you disrupt it anyway. Even a tiny fraction of a percent of inefficiency will take you to the cleaners.
That said, never say never. In the foreseeable future, it isn't a practical solution, though.