There's one problem with your reasoning - which is that the consistently observed pattern that when voter turn-out is high - democrats win, when it's low the republicans win. There's been a lot of trees cut down to explain that and I'm sure you know most of the likely reasons but for this discussion it's more important to understand the consequence of that observation: it means, as a mathematically provable certainty, that democrat-leaning people outnumber republican leaning people significantly in the population USA but make up a much smaller portion of the voters. So get-out-the-vote campaigns must logically be far less favorable or valuable to republican candidates than to democrats - the vast majority of republican voters are voting anyway, the closer you get to 100% the more you get diminishing returns on your efforts to encourage more people to vote. The democrats can gain big with get-out-the-vote campaigns but republicans generally can't gain nearly as much because of those factors. At this stage, without a massive switch in their platform the republicans can't win another presidency - the demographics shift has only increased the advantages to democrats in high-turn-out elections like the presidency, but at the same time favours republicans ever more in the low-turn-out ones since the very same demographics that are boosting democrats in the presidential races are the least likely to vote in midterms.
In 2000 - the demographic situation was different, hell as recently as 2006 democrats believed they had to find a way to appeal to rural whites and evangelicals to ever win another presidency. That's when you had serious contenders for the democratic nomination saying things like "this will be election for people with a congressional flag on their truck". Of course that ended his campaign - but that he even thought it would work shows how different things were then. Bush probably couldn't have increased his level in the popular vote by much even if he did run a different campaign - everybody who would ever consider voting republican pretty much *did* vote for him already.
That has changed now. There are exactly three scenarios where the republicans don't get absolutely trounced in November (to their shock and disbelieve - look up that video of Karl Rove's reaction to Romney's loss - it's the ultimate example of how deluded and out of touch the GOP has really become). 1) America has a major economic event before November, as in a massive recession. There are no indicators currently suggesting this is remotely likely. 2) A military attack of Pearl Harbour or 9/11 level - those can severely upset elections, on the other hand if spun correctly they can actually favor incumbents (as happened in to Eisenhower with Pearl Harbour and to Bush with 9/11). 3) The final race is Sanders/Kassich. Kassich is the only republican running who has a shot in hell of drawing independents, moderates and centrists to his side. Any other of the candidates would send them all running to Sanders because "too liberal" is better than "fucking crazy". Kassich is a sane republican, moderate and willing to compromise in order to get the job done (which is actually a valuable trait in a leader - unless you live in a dictatorship). Sander's is still a bit of a risky candidate (less so than I thought a year ago - but still), Kassich could cash in on that and come across as the "safe" choice. Everybody else the GOP is running comes across as "far more dangerous". The moderates, centrists and independents don't vote ideology (either left or right) they vote for the lesser of two evils (or more recently: least crazy). Kassich is the one republican who could manage to convince them he is the safer and less crazy candidate against Sanders (I haven't really thought of how he would do against Clinton - but he may manage to convince them he is more trustworthy). Unfortunately for the GOP - all those very same qualities that make Kassich their only candidate who could win the general also make him the candidate least likely to be nominated.
The party needs to return their platform to the Kassich style of conservatism to ever win the whitehouse again - or they'll split and ultimately be replaced by a party that does.
Fat chance since the result ended up giving a hair's-breath victory to the party-establishment's coronation candidate in a caucus that was otherwise just about a perfect tie. While the odds of this outcome is not impossible, it's certainly unlikely enough to raise questions - and it also severely diminishes the Clinton campaign's claim to actually winning the state. Statistically half the coins could be expected to come down the other way - which alone would probably have been enough to leave it firmly tied with equal delegates to both candidates rather than the outcome that finally made it which gave Clinton about 4 more.
>AC also only uses one cable and the ground for the other.
Maybe in the US it does, but here it definitely does not. Possibly because we use an earth leakage system with three cables for AC. Earth leakage is much safer - almost all electrocutions have the ground as the return part of the circuit so an earth leakage system means those are virtually impossible. The US I understand uses fuse boxes but we use circuit-breakers and earth leakage. On the other hand, our home power is twice the voltage of US systems so that is probably what justifies using more expensive safety systems - the risk when you get shocked is much higher at 220V.
In a previous job (now some 9 years ago) I had several big-metal servers which could only have their early boot systems (like a BIOS but not) accessed over serial ports, and for repairs and maintenance a serial terminal was critical. Everybody else used software terminal emulators with USB adapters but it was a constant nightmare, it would be months between uses and the next time one was needed, invariably something would get messed up between the drivers and the emulator. So I hunted around and bought an old discarded hardware serial terminal for around R200 (at the time just over 30 dollars) from a pawnshop. It was a breeze, when one of the old clunkers needed serial port access, you just plug it in and turn it on and everything just worked.
Sometimes old tech is actually easier to use than new, especially for interfacing with other old tech. Many of those servers were over a decade old - hell there was two original DEC alphas there that were both over 30 years old by then - those were rocksolid though, I never had a problem with them except the one time the server-room's cooling failed, those CPUS are so not designed for a South African summer without climate control... fried one. Luckily I was able to get a replacement second-hand from an Iron Refinery which still used a number of alphas and kept an entire warehouse full of old ones they'd bought up in bulk just for spares. Suffice it to say that HP service contracts for alphas are terrible, they will provide expertise but generally cannot provide parts.
The real problem is that Americans have all forgotten what their constitution is *for*. It is not holy write (and originalism is not only stupid - it flagrantly goes AGAINST the very purpose for which it was created in the first place). It is also not fair to say "it's a republic, not a democracy" as a way to shut down complaints about lack of responsiveness to the people. Monarchies were expected to be responsive to the needs of the people - and mostly they were - that's why they were so dominant for so long. Democracy was believed impossible in large communities, it worked in Athens because there were not very many Athenians, but it couldn't work in the modern world.
Monarchies had a sovereign, whose will was the foundation of the law - no artistocrats, no parliament nothing could violate that will. Sovereignity was the key stabilizing feature that made monarchies workable.
And the US Founding Fathers understood that very well - so they set out to re-invent democracy for the modern world by creating a sovereign consisting of the will of the people itself ! That sovereign was the constitution. They wrote it to be amendable - because the will of the people is not static, but it serves the same purpose as the king does in a parliamentary monarchy. But now the sovereign is not one person - it's all the people. Jefferson actively warned against losing sight of that - he envisioned caucusses leading to major ammendments to the constitution as a regular occurrence ("every 10 to 20 years" he said) as critical for that paper sovereign to work.
The constitution is a constraint on government but it's a very *special* kind of constraint - it's a constraint by the will of the people. That last aspect got lost in the intervening years, the constitution rarely changes - maybe once or twice a century - not every decade or so as Jefferson suggested, the will of the people ias barely enforced and even the supreme court judges are divided between those who treat it like holy write (the originalists - but the purpose of the constitution is to represent the will of the PEOPLE it is NOT to represent the will of the founding fathers or even those people who were involved in it 300 years ago - the people TODAY's will is what it should represent) and the other half who want to interpret it as a modernized doctrine. But that still ends up treating it like holy write, it's just the difference between a liberal religion and a fundamentalist one - both are making a religion out of a piece of paper and losing sight of what is *actually* special about that piece of paper: not it's history, not who wrote it down, but whose will it is supposed to represent - the sovereignity of the common man, that was America's great, their ONLY great and truly unique, contribution to political theory - and it's been long lost.
I don't think anybody claimed it could, but what is claimed is that a microkernel that works well can remove crashes. That's actually entirely feasible. Drivers will still have bugs, and still crash - but if drivers are in user space, it's possible to ensure that driver crashes never cause system crashes. The only way the system itself could crash is if the kernel were to crash - and because that is so small, the risk surface is incredibly tiny. With such a small risk surface, it's entirely possible to get stable enough and close enough to bug-free that no user would ever experience a system crash.
Of course, your apps are an entirely different matter - but a lot of app crashes are actually driver lock-ups and crashes so even they will appear much more stable.
The problem with microkernels is the extreme complexity of managing all those threads and the communications between them. Getting that stable is extremely hard (and that's exactly why HURD is still useless and true microkernel OS's are so rare) - whether the difficulty of doing so means that this risk surface outweighs that of a monolithic kernel is a debateable point. Most academics say no, most real-world engineers have said "yes" (or it's close counterpart: "not worth the effort").
But the GP was perfectly accurate to say it *could* become a crash-free OS one-day. It's entirely within the realm of possibility.
I'm not sure how feasible this is in the US since the powergrid there is quite different (for starters, it uses 60hz rather than our 50hz) but it's not unknown for some shack-dwellers here in South Africa to get electric lighting by building the shack beneath a high voltage line and powering it with a simple induction generator. I'm sure it's illegal though. I've heard rumors that some gas-tube bulbs can actually light up under the lines without even needing an induction converter but I have no idea if that's actually true.
The concept is sound though, if you are anywhere near those lines you can hear a persistent crackling buzz- that's the EM-field around the cables switching polarities 50 times a second - causing the force to change from attraction to repulsion and back, the cables vibrate and you get that 50hz noise as a result. Alternating current is perfect for induction - and just a few kilometers down the road we use induction based transformers to step it down to 11KV at the substation which then gets routed to the corner-box transformers where it's stepped down again to the 220v we get in our homes.
Interestingly - AC isn't always the most economic choice. DC is cheaper on cabling (you only need one, the ground itself is your return-route) - the reduced weight also means cheaper poles. But because you can't pass DC through a transformer and generators output AC - to use it you need to rectify the current at the generation point and turn it back into AC at the substation. For the vast majority of lines the convertors cost more than what you save in cabling but if the line is long enough it reaches a tipping point where it's better to run the power as DC. We have one DC line in South Africa which runs from the Cabora-Bassa hydro-electric generator (which is in another country).
While there is some worth to that reasoning the problem is that we have no idea what the value of lost science may turn out to be. When Einstein wrote that obscure paper in 1929 he didn't win a nobel prize for it, it drew very little attention. Compared to relativity it was not exactly his best work... but the equation in that paper gave us the laser. How much technology has that made possible ? How many lives has that technology saved ? How much better to get lifesaving surgery from a modern laser scalpil and have a tiny scar with greatly reduced risk than to the old way ? Nobody predicted that in 1929 - nobody had any idea what that little paper would actually mean. It's paid for whatever it cost to get that done a million times over.
The one thing worth considering is that in some way none of us can begin to fathom one picture from this telescope may unlock something our grandchildren will make trillions out of. So we spent 8 billion. We planned to spend 1. That sucks - and it's definitely worth asking "how can we be better at estimating costs so we can plan our budget more efficiently" - but it's worth remembering that even the worst cost overruns are quite possibly only a tiny, tiny fraction of the profits it will lead to.
NASA itself provides another perfect example. Back in the 1950s NASA was struggling with the fact that fuel pumps don't work very well in zero-G. They ultimately went with simply highly-pressurized fuel containers, which works and their simplicity made up for the increased risk - but along the way they experimented with a whole lot of designs. One of those designs was to mix magnetic nano-particles in with the fuel - which would give you a fuel you could pump with electro-magnets. They never did use that fuel - but the process for making ferofluid has revolutionized dozens of industries and is currently the key to not one but three seperate forms of targetted cancer treatments as well numerous other medical procedures (it's amazing what you can do when you inject a liquid magnet into some cells before doing an MRI). We don't know, of course, if that tech will pan out - it wasn't ready in time to save my friend but she was given 18 months and experimental targetted treatments kept her alive for nearly 5 years with a decent quality of life (we went to a metallica concert just 3 months before she died) - that was simply impossible even 10 years ago. Imagine were we could stand with better targetted treatments that can be non-surgiically directed exactly where you need them in another 5 years ? We will never cure cancer because "cancer" is not a diseases, it's a collective noun for dozens of diseases with different causes which just happen to have one aspect of their symptoms in common, but, in time we can probably cure every one of those diseases individually. We're making huge strides towards that with gene therapy and other targetted treatments (some of them surprisingly mechanical).
Most of what we know about quantum mechanics and how particles behave we first started suspecting after studying the heavens, much of what we learned from studying particles have changed our ideas about space. What we see in that telescope, could be the observation that gives us a unified theory of physics, or we could see a reaction happening in another galaxy that future chemical engineers will replicate to create the material that builds the technologies of the 22nd century. We simply don't know and we can't know - because the information needed to make those inventions don't exist yet. Invention always comes after discovery - often long after - and discovery usually appears to be monetarily worthless - if you forget that without it no invention can happen at all.
The argument that "we've spent too much not to finish now" is a sunk cost fallacy - it's a common thinking error that is generally terrible business. My argument was that it being terrible business is irrelevant, because the purpose of the excercise is not to make a profit - so the budget is not the primary concern, and that this is actually why public scientific organisations like NASA are so important. Somebody has to do the science where we can't see any application - because much of that science ends up driving revolutionary technologies decades later which nobody could foresee when it was being done.
Am I the only one who thinks the shots in the article look suspiciously like KSP screengrabs ? Ill charitably assume some of the engineers are players and deliberately chose a pattern that looks like the chutes in the game. Life imitating art and all that.
Yep. His post is pretty much a sunk cost fallacy. Which is perfectly sound logic for a business but not for science - and the reason why we need public funded science orgs like NASA where the budget is not the sole motivation.
Skycranes are actually in many ways simpler than other landers. The engineering is easier and since you are not setting the weight of the fueltanks down the force on the payload is less so you need less shock absorbtion. Also any object that has tge bulk of its mass below its rest point will have perfect ballance. Skycranes at least partially gain that so you need less powerful reaction wheels and monopropellants so that saves weight and power. Thats just a few of the numerous ways they are a much easier tech. Hanging from a rocket is actually a lot easier to get right than riding on top of one. The downside is your big fuel tanks arent coming down with you - which means they are far less suitable for return trips. A probe that wont need to fly again - its the perfect answer for though.
You're confusing Marx with Lenin, and Marxism with Bolshevism. Marx was absolutely against authoritarian government and revolutions - he always stated that socialism and communism alike *must* be achieved through the democratic process or it would be a disaster. The Bolshevists got impatient, had a revolution (trying to calm the Marxists by claiming the state would whither with no basis for the claim) - and ended up exactly where Marx predicted they would.
Socialism achieved democratically is not an entirely inaccurate description of what happened in most of Western Europe after world war 2- and it definitely worked a *lot* better. Even the least socialist nations kept the best ideas like universal healthcare.
In fairness his biggest help was somebody who never even won - Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was the openly racist shitspewing candidate who ran against civil rights in the 1950's. Goldwater with his copious usage of the n-word in every speech made the republican establishment crap themselves. He was the Trump of the 1950s in other words.
When he inevitably won the nomination (as Trump is likely to) while being utterly unelectable (as Trump is likely to be) the establishment members had to make a choice - to stay loyal to the nominee and go down with the ship, or to say what the majority of voters wanted to hear and ditch him. Some like Eisenhower chose the latter - and their careers crashed and burned. Nixon was one of the few to stay loyal and support Goldwater in his doomed general election campaign. Goldwater lost, but that support got Nixon the loyalty of the Goldwater voters. All he had to do was push the exact same rhetoric with slightly toned-down vocabulary ("You say tough-on-crime instead of n*gger n*gger nigger" to quote his speechwriter) and dogwhistles to get them on board without alienating the moderate republicans - and he won with essentially the same platform.
Don't be surprized if we see a similar pattern now. Trump wins - the majority of reps abandon him, he loses - but in 2020 the nominee (and possibly victor) is somebody who stayed loyal to him - my money on the most likely Nixon of this campaign is Ted Cruz. Cruz is already just as hated by the establishment so he has nothing to gain by sticking with them, he is the obvious choice for Trump's running mate (and the only one likely to accept it) and he is perfectly poised to sell the same crazy rhetoric with slightly toned down vocabulary in 2020.
Right now the democrats could run a bag of flaming dog-poop and beat Trump - but it's just possible that if he gets the nomination they'll have to face president Cruz in 2021 - and that will be the day Americans end up wishing for the mere incompetence of G.W. Bush - because Cruz is not just incompetent, he is insane.
Oh there would be a road - the US had roads before government did them, which provides the perfect example of why some things should *not* be done by the private sector. Those roads companies - they defined "efficient" by "most profitable" - which is not the same as "shortest", "safest", or any of the other criteria for "most efficient" that drivers care about.
Because the drivers aren't the only customers and they paid in pennies - the big customers were large existing businesses, who would happilly pay the roads company a handsome fee to ensure the road ran past their business. As opposed to what should happen - which is we build the roads as short and safe as possible, and those businesses who want to be near the road move to the road.
Roads were horribly convoluted, making all sorts of useless twists and turns to get to everybody who was promised a slice of the pie and the trip between two towns could easily take 3 or 4 times longer than it does on a government road.
The Randians would argue that surely competition would prevent that, as the long term income from road users is higher and somebody would build a straight road - but this is perfect proof of how that doesn't always work. Roads are a prime example of a natural monopoly (something Austrian economics denies exists but that's because Austrian economics ignores all empirical evidence and is basically the homeopathy of economics). They cost a whole lot of capital to build, and the margine per customer is extremely low by comparison - that's the economic definition of a natural monopoly, they are also a physical monopoly - there is only one best route a road can take, and they have to deal with everybody else's property rights - which sooner or later means eminent domain so even if the roads company *is* private the government has to get involved and now you have a government monopoly as well - you get that regardless of whether the road is privately funded or not.
Basically the competition doesn't arise because on three seperate levels this is a market that will always become a monopoly and the big businesses that can help offset the construction costs with their large upfront payments will always trump the convenience of the penny-paying road-using customers later as they will not have the choice to use a different road.
It's a basic fact of economics that some markets will *always* and *inevitably* have a monopoly and for all the flaws it may have, in those markets, a public utility is invariably the least evil of the possible outcomes. A private business with a government shielded monopoly is just about the one thing guaranteed to be *much* worse than a beaurocracy.
>I can only imagine that you have an interesting meaning for 'Socialist'
I always use the meaning in the dictionary - an economic system predicated on the principle that the workers own the means of production. Nothing to do with the state at all. Taxi-cabs are socialist. Worker-owned coops of all kinds are socialist. If anything, I always thought that using "state" as a substitute for "the workers" was a very bad idea - it doesn't actually achieve the goal, you still end up with bosses owning the means of production but now the very organ that is supposed to regulate industry and curb it's excesses ends up *being* industry - which leads to even worse abuses than under capitalism - there's nobody to enforce the checks and balances. But for this reason in that post I qualified my usage to "the meaning Americans know" which is roughly equivalent to "market regulation and lots of civil services". The kind of system Sanders subscribes to - which *is* in fact the same system you will find in all the places I mentioned. And only a complete moron would think I listed "western Europe" as a country as opposed to what I did list it as: a large collection of countries which has this thing in common.
Andalusia. Unless an anarchist country somehow meets your definition of "totalitarian". Dont confuse your ignorance of something for its absence. Hell parts of the USA was once anarchist socialist states: most notably quaker pennsylvania. If you go by the common (but wrong) definition of socialism Americans know then all of Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zeeland are all examples (from a very long list) of socialist countries that are absolutely not totalitarian.
Ever heard of Pinochet ? Extremes only work when enforced by a totalitarian government. Hell some totalitarians have enforced entirely opposite extremes at different times. Franco of Spain was a good example. In the 1930s he enforced fascism (a la Mussolini - a form of corporatism), after fascism fell in world war 2 he retained power by enforcing socialism instead. In the 1970s under pressure from Nixon he abandoned that and enforced capitalism instead until his death when his chosen successor (the last crown prince) shocked him by ending the dictatorship and instituting democracy. A brutal dictator. Three entirely distinct economic systems.
Less than 5000 ? And that probably represents everybody who actually uses it, and probably on average 5 usages per person (because those kinds of people never shut up) - not counting cases like me using it above to acknowledge it exists.
Yep. Very rare these days.
More importantly - when was the last time you saw a democratic *candidate* use that term to try and unseat another *democratic* candidate ostensibly from the same party ? Because I can't remember ever seeing that. On the other hand, the vast majority of teabagger campaigns were against other republicans and they all used RINO as part of their platforms.
Which is why there are no moderate or sensible republicans left. After McCain legitimized Palin, the party went full retard.
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There's one problem with your reasoning - which is that the consistently observed pattern that when voter turn-out is high - democrats win, when it's low the republicans win. There's been a lot of trees cut down to explain that and I'm sure you know most of the likely reasons but for this discussion it's more important to understand the consequence of that observation: it means, as a mathematically provable certainty, that democrat-leaning people outnumber republican leaning people significantly in the population USA but make up a much smaller portion of the voters. So get-out-the-vote campaigns must logically be far less favorable or valuable to republican candidates than to democrats - the vast majority of republican voters are voting anyway, the closer you get to 100% the more you get diminishing returns on your efforts to encourage more people to vote.
The democrats can gain big with get-out-the-vote campaigns but republicans generally can't gain nearly as much because of those factors. At this stage, without a massive switch in their platform the republicans can't win another presidency - the demographics shift has only increased the advantages to democrats in high-turn-out elections like the presidency, but at the same time favours republicans ever more in the low-turn-out ones since the very same demographics that are boosting democrats in the presidential races are the least likely to vote in midterms.
In 2000 - the demographic situation was different, hell as recently as 2006 democrats believed they had to find a way to appeal to rural whites and evangelicals to ever win another presidency. That's when you had serious contenders for the democratic nomination saying things like "this will be election for people with a congressional flag on their truck". Of course that ended his campaign - but that he even thought it would work shows how different things were then. Bush probably couldn't have increased his level in the popular vote by much even if he did run a different campaign - everybody who would ever consider voting republican pretty much *did* vote for him already.
That has changed now. There are exactly three scenarios where the republicans don't get absolutely trounced in November (to their shock and disbelieve - look up that video of Karl Rove's reaction to Romney's loss - it's the ultimate example of how deluded and out of touch the GOP has really become).
1) America has a major economic event before November, as in a massive recession. There are no indicators currently suggesting this is remotely likely.
2) A military attack of Pearl Harbour or 9/11 level - those can severely upset elections, on the other hand if spun correctly they can actually favor incumbents (as happened in to Eisenhower with Pearl Harbour and to Bush with 9/11).
3) The final race is Sanders/Kassich. Kassich is the only republican running who has a shot in hell of drawing independents, moderates and centrists to his side. Any other of the candidates would send them all running to Sanders because "too liberal" is better than "fucking crazy". Kassich is a sane republican, moderate and willing to compromise in order to get the job done (which is actually a valuable trait in a leader - unless you live in a dictatorship). Sander's is still a bit of a risky candidate (less so than I thought a year ago - but still), Kassich could cash in on that and come across as the "safe" choice. Everybody else the GOP is running comes across as "far more dangerous". The moderates, centrists and independents don't vote ideology (either left or right) they vote for the lesser of two evils (or more recently: least crazy). Kassich is the one republican who could manage to convince them he is the safer and less crazy candidate against Sanders (I haven't really thought of how he would do against Clinton - but he may manage to convince them he is more trustworthy). Unfortunately for the GOP - all those very same qualities that make Kassich their only candidate who could win the general also make him the candidate least likely to be nominated.
The party needs to return their platform to the Kassich style of conservatism to ever win the whitehouse again - or they'll split and ultimately be replaced by a party that does.
Fat chance since the result ended up giving a hair's-breath victory to the party-establishment's coronation candidate in a caucus that was otherwise just about a perfect tie.
While the odds of this outcome is not impossible, it's certainly unlikely enough to raise questions - and it also severely diminishes the Clinton campaign's claim to actually winning the state. Statistically half the coins could be expected to come down the other way - which alone would probably have been enough to leave it firmly tied with equal delegates to both candidates rather than the outcome that finally made it which gave Clinton about 4 more.
You mean armoured rugby for pussies ?
I would say for the average shack dweller, that's the least of their downsides.
>AC also only uses one cable and the ground for the other.
Maybe in the US it does, but here it definitely does not. Possibly because we use an earth leakage system with three cables for AC. Earth leakage is much safer - almost all electrocutions have the ground as the return part of the circuit so an earth leakage system means those are virtually impossible. The US I understand uses fuse boxes but we use circuit-breakers and earth leakage. On the other hand, our home power is twice the voltage of US systems so that is probably what justifies using more expensive safety systems - the risk when you get shocked is much higher at 220V.
In a previous job (now some 9 years ago) I had several big-metal servers which could only have their early boot systems (like a BIOS but not) accessed over serial ports, and for repairs and maintenance a serial terminal was critical.
Everybody else used software terminal emulators with USB adapters but it was a constant nightmare, it would be months between uses and the next time one was needed, invariably something would get messed up between the drivers and the emulator.
So I hunted around and bought an old discarded hardware serial terminal for around R200 (at the time just over 30 dollars) from a pawnshop. It was a breeze, when one of the old clunkers needed serial port access, you just plug it in and turn it on and everything just worked.
Sometimes old tech is actually easier to use than new, especially for interfacing with other old tech. Many of those servers were over a decade old - hell there was two original DEC alphas there that were both over 30 years old by then - those were rocksolid though, I never had a problem with them except the one time the server-room's cooling failed, those CPUS are so not designed for a South African summer without climate control... fried one. Luckily I was able to get a replacement second-hand from an Iron Refinery which still used a number of alphas and kept an entire warehouse full of old ones they'd bought up in bulk just for spares.
Suffice it to say that HP service contracts for alphas are terrible, they will provide expertise but generally cannot provide parts.
Cut-offs, specifically: at the legs.
We get more people on the chairs by cutting their legs off so they take less space.
Exactly what the average congresscritter needs - some agonizing pain before taking office.
The real problem is that Americans have all forgotten what their constitution is *for*. It is not holy write (and originalism is not only stupid - it flagrantly goes AGAINST the very purpose for which it was created in the first place). It is also not fair to say "it's a republic, not a democracy" as a way to shut down complaints about lack of responsiveness to the people.
Monarchies were expected to be responsive to the needs of the people - and mostly they were - that's why they were so dominant for so long. Democracy was believed impossible in large communities, it worked in Athens because there were not very many Athenians, but it couldn't work in the modern world.
Monarchies had a sovereign, whose will was the foundation of the law - no artistocrats, no parliament nothing could violate that will. Sovereignity was the key stabilizing feature that made monarchies workable.
And the US Founding Fathers understood that very well - so they set out to re-invent democracy for the modern world by creating a sovereign consisting of the will of the people itself ! That sovereign was the constitution. They wrote it to be amendable - because the will of the people is not static, but it serves the same purpose as the king does in a parliamentary monarchy. But now the sovereign is not one person - it's all the people.
Jefferson actively warned against losing sight of that - he envisioned caucusses leading to major ammendments to the constitution as a regular occurrence ("every 10 to 20 years" he said) as critical for that paper sovereign to work.
The constitution is a constraint on government but it's a very *special* kind of constraint - it's a constraint by the will of the people. That last aspect got lost in the intervening years, the constitution rarely changes - maybe once or twice a century - not every decade or so as Jefferson suggested, the will of the people ias barely enforced and even the supreme court judges are divided between those who treat it like holy write (the originalists - but the purpose of the constitution is to represent the will of the PEOPLE it is NOT to represent the will of the founding fathers or even those people who were involved in it 300 years ago - the people TODAY's will is what it should represent) and the other half who want to interpret it as a modernized doctrine. But that still ends up treating it like holy write, it's just the difference between a liberal religion and a fundamentalist one - both are making a religion out of a piece of paper and losing sight of what is *actually* special about that piece of paper: not it's history, not who wrote it down, but whose will it is supposed to represent - the sovereignity of the common man, that was America's great, their ONLY great and truly unique, contribution to political theory - and it's been long lost.
I don't think anybody claimed it could, but what is claimed is that a microkernel that works well can remove crashes. That's actually entirely feasible. Drivers will still have bugs, and still crash - but if drivers are in user space, it's possible to ensure that driver crashes never cause system crashes. The only way the system itself could crash is if the kernel were to crash - and because that is so small, the risk surface is incredibly tiny. With such a small risk surface, it's entirely possible to get stable enough and close enough to bug-free that no user would ever experience a system crash.
Of course, your apps are an entirely different matter - but a lot of app crashes are actually driver lock-ups and crashes so even they will appear much more stable.
The problem with microkernels is the extreme complexity of managing all those threads and the communications between them. Getting that stable is extremely hard (and that's exactly why HURD is still useless and true microkernel OS's are so rare) - whether the difficulty of doing so means that this risk surface outweighs that of a monolithic kernel is a debateable point. Most academics say no, most real-world engineers have said "yes" (or it's close counterpart: "not worth the effort").
But the GP was perfectly accurate to say it *could* become a crash-free OS one-day. It's entirely within the realm of possibility.
I'm not sure how feasible this is in the US since the powergrid there is quite different (for starters, it uses 60hz rather than our 50hz) but it's not unknown for some shack-dwellers here in South Africa to get electric lighting by building the shack beneath a high voltage line and powering it with a simple induction generator. I'm sure it's illegal though. I've heard rumors that some gas-tube bulbs can actually light up under the lines without even needing an induction converter but I have no idea if that's actually true.
The concept is sound though, if you are anywhere near those lines you can hear a persistent crackling buzz- that's the EM-field around the cables switching polarities 50 times a second - causing the force to change from attraction to repulsion and back, the cables vibrate and you get that 50hz noise as a result. Alternating current is perfect for induction - and just a few kilometers down the road we use induction based transformers to step it down to 11KV at the substation which then gets routed to the corner-box transformers where it's stepped down again to the 220v we get in our homes.
Interestingly - AC isn't always the most economic choice. DC is cheaper on cabling (you only need one, the ground itself is your return-route) - the reduced weight also means cheaper poles. But because you can't pass DC through a transformer and generators output AC - to use it you need to rectify the current at the generation point and turn it back into AC at the substation. For the vast majority of lines the convertors cost more than what you save in cabling but if the line is long enough it reaches a tipping point where it's better to run the power as DC. We have one DC line in South Africa which runs from the Cabora-Bassa hydro-electric generator (which is in another country).
While there is some worth to that reasoning the problem is that we have no idea what the value of lost science may turn out to be. When Einstein wrote that obscure paper in 1929 he didn't win a nobel prize for it, it drew very little attention. Compared to relativity it was not exactly his best work... but the equation in that paper gave us the laser. How much technology has that made possible ? How many lives has that technology saved ? How much better to get lifesaving surgery from a modern laser scalpil and have a tiny scar with greatly reduced risk than to the old way ? Nobody predicted that in 1929 - nobody had any idea what that little paper would actually mean. It's paid for whatever it cost to get that done a million times over.
The one thing worth considering is that in some way none of us can begin to fathom one picture from this telescope may unlock something our grandchildren will make trillions out of. So we spent 8 billion. We planned to spend 1. That sucks - and it's definitely worth asking "how can we be better at estimating costs so we can plan our budget more efficiently" - but it's worth remembering that even the worst cost overruns are quite possibly only a tiny, tiny fraction of the profits it will lead to.
NASA itself provides another perfect example. Back in the 1950s NASA was struggling with the fact that fuel pumps don't work very well in zero-G. They ultimately went with simply highly-pressurized fuel containers, which works and their simplicity made up for the increased risk - but along the way they experimented with a whole lot of designs. One of those designs was to mix magnetic nano-particles in with the fuel - which would give you a fuel you could pump with electro-magnets. They never did use that fuel - but the process for making ferofluid has revolutionized dozens of industries and is currently the key to not one but three seperate forms of targetted cancer treatments as well numerous other medical procedures (it's amazing what you can do when you inject a liquid magnet into some cells before doing an MRI). We don't know, of course, if that tech will pan out - it wasn't ready in time to save my friend but she was given 18 months and experimental targetted treatments kept her alive for nearly 5 years with a decent quality of life (we went to a metallica concert just 3 months before she died) - that was simply impossible even 10 years ago.
Imagine were we could stand with better targetted treatments that can be non-surgiically directed exactly where you need them in another 5 years ? We will never cure cancer because "cancer" is not a diseases, it's a collective noun for dozens of diseases with different causes which just happen to have one aspect of their symptoms in common, but, in time we can probably cure every one of those diseases individually. We're making huge strides towards that with gene therapy and other targetted treatments (some of them surprisingly mechanical).
Most of what we know about quantum mechanics and how particles behave we first started suspecting after studying the heavens, much of what we learned from studying particles have changed our ideas about space. What we see in that telescope, could be the observation that gives us a unified theory of physics, or we could see a reaction happening in another galaxy that future chemical engineers will replicate to create the material that builds the technologies of the 22nd century. We simply don't know and we can't know - because the information needed to make those inventions don't exist yet. Invention always comes after discovery - often long after - and discovery usually appears to be monetarily worthless - if you forget that without it no invention can happen at all.
The argument that "we've spent too much not to finish now" is a sunk cost fallacy - it's a common thinking error that is generally terrible business. My argument was that it being terrible business is irrelevant, because the purpose of the excercise is not to make a profit - so the budget is not the primary concern, and that this is actually why public scientific organisations like NASA are so important.
Somebody has to do the science where we can't see any application - because much of that science ends up driving revolutionary technologies decades later which nobody could foresee when it was being done.
Makes sense, though I was actually angling for a Funny mod - guess the joke didn't work :P
Am I the only one who thinks the shots in the article look suspiciously like KSP screengrabs ?
Ill charitably assume some of the engineers are players and deliberately chose a pattern that looks like the chutes in the game. Life imitating art and all that.
Yep. His post is pretty much a sunk cost fallacy. Which is perfectly sound logic for a business but not for science - and the reason why we need public funded science orgs like NASA where the budget is not the sole motivation.
Skycranes are actually in many ways simpler than other landers. The engineering is easier and since you are not setting the weight of the fueltanks down the force on the payload is less so you need less shock absorbtion. Also any object that has tge bulk of its mass below its rest point will have perfect ballance. Skycranes at least partially gain that so you need less powerful reaction wheels and monopropellants so that saves weight and power. Thats just a few of the numerous ways they are a much easier tech. Hanging from a rocket is actually a lot easier to get right than riding on top of one. The downside is your big fuel tanks arent coming down with you - which means they are far less suitable for return trips. A probe that wont need to fly again - its the perfect answer for though.
You're confusing Marx with Lenin, and Marxism with Bolshevism.
Marx was absolutely against authoritarian government and revolutions - he always stated that socialism and communism alike *must* be achieved through the democratic process or it would be a disaster.
The Bolshevists got impatient, had a revolution (trying to calm the Marxists by claiming the state would whither with no basis for the claim) - and ended up exactly where Marx predicted they would.
Socialism achieved democratically is not an entirely inaccurate description of what happened in most of Western Europe after world war 2- and it definitely worked a *lot* better. Even the least socialist nations kept the best ideas like universal healthcare.
In fairness his biggest help was somebody who never even won - Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was the openly racist shitspewing candidate who ran against civil rights in the 1950's. Goldwater with his copious usage of the n-word in every speech made the republican establishment crap themselves. He was the Trump of the 1950s in other words.
When he inevitably won the nomination (as Trump is likely to) while being utterly unelectable (as Trump is likely to be) the establishment members had to make a choice - to stay loyal to the nominee and go down with the ship, or to say what the majority of voters wanted to hear and ditch him. Some like Eisenhower chose the latter - and their careers crashed and burned.
Nixon was one of the few to stay loyal and support Goldwater in his doomed general election campaign. Goldwater lost, but that support got Nixon the loyalty of the Goldwater voters. All he had to do was push the exact same rhetoric with slightly toned-down vocabulary ("You say tough-on-crime instead of n*gger n*gger nigger" to quote his speechwriter) and dogwhistles to get them on board without alienating the moderate republicans - and he won with essentially the same platform.
Don't be surprized if we see a similar pattern now. Trump wins - the majority of reps abandon him, he loses - but in 2020 the nominee (and possibly victor) is somebody who stayed loyal to him - my money on the most likely Nixon of this campaign is Ted Cruz. Cruz is already just as hated by the establishment so he has nothing to gain by sticking with them, he is the obvious choice for Trump's running mate (and the only one likely to accept it) and he is perfectly poised to sell the same crazy rhetoric with slightly toned down vocabulary in 2020.
Right now the democrats could run a bag of flaming dog-poop and beat Trump - but it's just possible that if he gets the nomination they'll have to face president Cruz in 2021 - and that will be the day Americans end up wishing for the mere incompetence of G.W. Bush - because Cruz is not just incompetent, he is insane.
Oh there would be a road - the US had roads before government did them, which provides the perfect example of why some things should *not* be done by the private sector. Those roads companies - they defined "efficient" by "most profitable" - which is not the same as "shortest", "safest", or any of the other criteria for "most efficient" that drivers care about.
Because the drivers aren't the only customers and they paid in pennies - the big customers were large existing businesses, who would happilly pay the roads company a handsome fee to ensure the road ran past their business. As opposed to what should happen - which is we build the roads as short and safe as possible, and those businesses who want to be near the road move to the road.
Roads were horribly convoluted, making all sorts of useless twists and turns to get to everybody who was promised a slice of the pie and the trip between two towns could easily take 3 or 4 times longer than it does on a government road.
The Randians would argue that surely competition would prevent that, as the long term income from road users is higher and somebody would build a straight road - but this is perfect proof of how that doesn't always work. Roads are a prime example of a natural monopoly (something Austrian economics denies exists but that's because Austrian economics ignores all empirical evidence and is basically the homeopathy of economics). They cost a whole lot of capital to build, and the margine per customer is extremely low by comparison - that's the economic definition of a natural monopoly, they are also a physical monopoly - there is only one best route a road can take, and they have to deal with everybody else's property rights - which sooner or later means eminent domain so even if the roads company *is* private the government has to get involved and now you have a government monopoly as well - you get that regardless of whether the road is privately funded or not.
Basically the competition doesn't arise because on three seperate levels this is a market that will always become a monopoly and the big businesses that can help offset the construction costs with their large upfront payments will always trump the convenience of the penny-paying road-using customers later as they will not have the choice to use a different road.
It's a basic fact of economics that some markets will *always* and *inevitably* have a monopoly and for all the flaws it may have, in those markets, a public utility is invariably the least evil of the possible outcomes. A private business with a government shielded monopoly is just about the one thing guaranteed to be *much* worse than a beaurocracy.
>I can only imagine that you have an interesting meaning for 'Socialist'
I always use the meaning in the dictionary - an economic system predicated on the principle that the workers own the means of production. Nothing to do with the state at all. Taxi-cabs are socialist. Worker-owned coops of all kinds are socialist. If anything, I always thought that using "state" as a substitute for "the workers" was a very bad idea - it doesn't actually achieve the goal, you still end up with bosses owning the means of production but now the very organ that is supposed to regulate industry and curb it's excesses ends up *being* industry - which leads to even worse abuses than under capitalism - there's nobody to enforce the checks and balances. But for this reason in that post I qualified my usage to "the meaning Americans know" which is roughly equivalent to "market regulation and lots of civil services". The kind of system Sanders subscribes to - which *is* in fact the same system you will find in all the places I mentioned. And only a complete moron would think I listed "western Europe" as a country as opposed to what I did list it as: a large collection of countries which has this thing in common.
Andalusia. Unless an anarchist country somehow meets your definition of "totalitarian". Dont confuse your ignorance of something for its absence.
Hell parts of the USA was once anarchist socialist states: most notably quaker pennsylvania.
If you go by the common (but wrong) definition of socialism Americans know then all of Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zeeland are all examples (from a very long list) of socialist countries that are absolutely not totalitarian.
Ever heard of Pinochet ? Extremes only work when enforced by a totalitarian government. Hell some totalitarians have enforced entirely opposite extremes at different times. Franco of Spain was a good example. In the 1930s he enforced fascism (a la Mussolini - a form of corporatism), after fascism fell in world war 2 he retained power by enforcing socialism instead. In the 1970s under pressure from Nixon he abandoned that and enforced capitalism instead until his death when his chosen successor (the last crown prince) shocked him by ending the dictatorship and instituting democracy. A brutal dictator. Three entirely distinct economic systems.
Less than 5000 ? And that probably represents everybody who actually uses it, and probably on average 5 usages per person (because those kinds of people never shut up) - not counting cases like me using it above to acknowledge it exists.
Yep. Very rare these days.
More importantly - when was the last time you saw a democratic *candidate* use that term to try and unseat another *democratic* candidate ostensibly from the same party ? Because I can't remember ever seeing that. On the other hand, the vast majority of teabagger campaigns were against other republicans and they all used RINO as part of their platforms.
Which is why there are no moderate or sensible republicans left. After McCain legitimized Palin, the party went full retard.
>When a significant portion of the monkeys time is spent throwing feces at each other or eating said feces them selves
I have observed the same behavior from the apes known as humans all the time. It's practically all they use the internet for !
There is a term DINO - but it's very rare these days, last time it was common usage was before the Dixiecrats left to join the republicans.