The only true "fix" is to stop sending BOTH parties money... but that would be Tax Evasion, and they'd jail you for not playing their no-win games.
People love debate and arguments that lead to extremes far more than they value solid leadership, and good (small but effective) government that's 100% accountable to the taxpayers. It's more fun to bicker and pick sides, than to work out problems with compromises, quickly and efficiently.
Thus, we'll eventually follow the path of all 200 or so year-old countries, a totalitarian State begged for by the people who actually wanted true Communism (which will never happen anywhere), or bloody Revolution and a new pair of "Parties" to argue about.
Probably won't get bad enough either way in my lifetime to trigger either one, but I think our children or our children's children will see one or the other come to pass, since it's clearly a repeating theme in History...
Rome (and crazy totalitarian dictator Emperors) wasn't built in a Day! (And didn't take all that long to fall, either... historically.)
Just imagine, those same people don't know how to do a personal budget, either... to this day.
Mortgage crisis, Obamacare, just about any hot-button political topic you can find right now other than religious debates -- all tie back to that as a root-cause.
What percentage do you suppose didn't do their work in grade school? Guess what?
After they became "adults" they're often PROUD of how much of a slacker they are, and pretend to know even LESS than they actually do... and continue to slack financially their entire lives... but boy that damn pension, Social Security, and their 401K they let someone else manage -- had better be there, or they'll vote for another idiot to bail out their banks...
Ever run into this character: Person calls on phone, explains EXACTLY what they did wrong ("I know I shouldn't click on 20 different things at the same time on this PC") and then proceed to ask for tech support? (At which time you instruct them to close down everything they launched and run one thing at a time, to find the problem.) And the whole time they're on the phone they say, "I'm not good with computers."?
Yeah, thought so. Technically they already know what they're doing wrong so they're not lazy per-se, they're ACTING like they don't know what they're doing for whatever reason, to play a role they think is supposed to be "non-technical" usually. No one is allowed to berate them for saying such asinine things as "I know what I did wrong, but I'm bad with computers.", because they're a customer -- and the customer is always right.
I'd love to say, "As you've pointed out sir, you've done an incredibly stupid thing -- and you admit you're aware of that -- so why don't you start over, do the right thing, and call me back if something doesn't change in your results." LOL!
But I get paid to do technical babysitting, for the vast majority of my job. I love working with the (few and far between) clueful customers who call with well-defined problems, that they've tested and documented six-ways from sideways, and they've run out of ideas. Those are fun and interesting (as well as intelligent) people.
The actors and actresses who want to play "I don't like computers" are just as annoying and childish as they were when they were the slacker on the team projects, more than 20 years ago in school...
p.s. I've been doing this almost 20 years, and I'm still seeing "off-by-one" errors. The industry hasn't really grown-up yet, quality-wise. Had one in a web interface the other day.
To me, those are rookie coding mistakes, and I don't even code for a living anymore... in fact, only coded for a living for a year, many many years ago.
But seriously... companies have no incentives set up to reward the coders who do it right, and those who make dumb mistakes like doing the math wrong in a UI, and creating an off-by-one error that makes the company look like a bunch of retards to a customer.
Wow, where'd you go to school? I saw plenty of people who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag get passing (typically "C") grades in college.
And I've seen plenty of those people doing jobs in companies where the engineers who build their core business tools, aren't paid as well as they are. ("Technical Marketing", "Sales Engineer", etc.)
Not saying ALL people in those jobs were the ones who couldn't actually DO any engineering -- but there's a lot of them out there who are wildly successful, too. Some of it has to do with people-skills, and some of it stands to reason that they just BARELY know enough about the technical side of things to play like they know how to manage people doing that sort of work.
There's all SORTS of people out there just barely skipping by in the tech world who were the ones who leaned on those who understood how to program, how to problem-solve, how to troubleshoot logically. And many of them are paid far more than their college co-horts who did all the work for them.
Incentives are all wrong in tech... no one gets paid serious money for bug-free code. And I'm not seeing my very senior tech support role I've done for almost two decades, disappearing any time soon. Every bug some programmer writes, is just job security for me. And if you think about it, that's just plain wrong... but also the way things are.
And that's a tricky point because "understand physics" means a lot of things, since we all live in a physical world.
I'm a pilot (for fun now, not a living -- but I was studying it over a decade ago as if I were going to become a professional), and struggled like hell through a "Physics for Aviators" course that crammed classic Physics and Fluid Dynamics (air) into the same semester (the math was tough for me), but I can tell you exactly how an aircraft will behave (and sound, and feel) when the airflow separates from the top of the wing and an aerodynamic stall begins. I can even visualize it in my head. But don't try to have me prove it with math.
I can also memorize that dynamic hydroplaning occurs at 9*SQRT(Tire Pressure), but am smart enough to know that there's more than one way to hydroplane, and I have zero control over whether my approach/landing speed is above or below that magic physical number... so in reality all I need to know is... "Yeah, we're above that speed in this aircraft, and most aircraft, so we'd better get 'er slowed down aggressively both to make sure the braking action is adequate and to have enough room left to execute a go-around if things get squirrelly."
So... there's a difference between understanding "physics" and understanding "Physics". And yes, I've met pilots who struggle to understand "physics" and apply even basic physical knowledge of what's happening to the aircraft, even though they're excellent pilots who fly "by the numbers" and are safety conscious. But there's an almost intuitive "feel" for certain types of flying (like Gliding) that people with a better grasp of visualizing airflow, wind currents over terrain, etc... just do better at.
You forget, virtually all households in the U.S. are now two wage-earner households. Two $80,000/year jobs aren't "executive" positions, and voila... 95th percentile.
RADAR is not used for navigation. It's used for surveillance.
Aircraft are slowly becoming 100% dependent on GPS (unless they're large enough to have inertial navigation systems on board). The FAA has been slowly but surely decommissioning ground-based navigation transmitters of other types. (Example, the airport down the road just decommissioned its ILS Middle Marker beacon, and it's not coming back. The information it provided pilots of older aircraft without Instrument-rated GPS on board, is now gone forever. Next, the ILS itself will go away.)
In term of GPS needing a backup, instead of worrying about the military scenarios, think instead: "Large solar flare." Knock down just a few birds and accuracy-required things like aircraft instrument approaches become something you can only do every X minutes safely, because there aren't enough satellites in "view". You get a RAIM alert and go head for the holding pattern to wait, burning fuel... if you have it.
LORAN-C was a cheap and easy way to have a ground-based wide-area backup to GPS. Now it's gone, and that's wickedly short-sighted.
Actually, for a backup system, LORAN-C was cheap. Estimated price to operate it for a decade was like $22 million. In the government of "a trillion here, a trillion there", $22 million is pocket change.
... in every new language's press release of "ease of code-reuse", but it's actually quite hard to do and requires thought.
Perhaps if someone ever ACTUALLY comes through on that decades-old promise with real modules that work properly when re-used, we'll stop seeing thousands of buffer-overflow retarded bugs in code every year and software security "experts" (who rarely actually FIX the software, just find the holes in it -- which isn't getting to the root-cause problem, but there's good money in prolonging the solution) will have less to do.
a) behind all the trends (didn't buy an iPhone until the 3G and have no need/desire to go to 3GS) b) fiscally conservative, and loathe Marxism c) religious and morally black/white d) confident of myself, but aware of other's feelings even if I don't agree
Where you livin' that you meet all the weirdos?:-)
My iPhone is a tool. There is *no* phone out there that handles aviation (my real passion) better than an iPhone. Logbook, flight planning, filing of flight plans, weather information (both official FAA weather and extended forecast and mapping), checklists, easy to use pilot's operating handbook data calculators and flight calculators...
I think you're describing people who buy these gadgets not knowing what they want to USE them for. Loved my Crackberry(s) prior to my iPhone, but iPhone moved ten or fifteen different aviation applications to my pocket, on a mobile data network, that used to require a laptop and WiFi (or mobile broadband card). The fact that it also handles e-mail pretty well, Twitter, Facebook, music/podcast playback, financial tracking, simple street maps and directions, my calendar, a couple of games (not a big mobile gaming fan... too busy), checking via bar codes on prices, xkcd downloads (GRIN), youtube (most things), pandora, IM clients, text messages, and whatever else I have on there... is just icing on the cake.
It's a pocket computer with limitations. What I originally wanted my iPaq for 5 years or more earlier, that it never lived up to...
Don't forget their giant egos, which create a political and interpersonal scenario where anyone who disagrees with them, gets run over by the Freight Train of Quality.
The Malcolm Baldridge Award and the chasing of same is also why you no longer see "Texaco" on any gas stations anymore. One of the world's best brands, laid low by their own inward navel-gazing.
I got it. It's been happening since the dawn of human invention. Plenty of doctored data to go around. In fact, consider that the phrase meaning "to falsify data" includes the word "doctor" in it. That right there should tell ya something.
Oh I know all of that. Just sayin', if we stupid Americans don't get our PERSONAL over-spending under control (the average American today spends 12% of their disposable income servicing their debt interest!), and then that culture carries over into demanding our goverment stops trillions of dollars of deficit-spending on China's dime... these things are inevitable. People here are stupid and can't even do a personal budget. Or more likely, do the budget and can't stick to it because there's not enough discipline or motivation to do so. They have their daily Starbucks at $4 a cup for coffee and think that (average) $18K of unsecured credit card debt can be "paid later". Stupid, and dragging the few of us left who budget and save, into the abyss with them. Sooner or later that turns into a revolt of a different kind...
What exactly is the North Korean missile system for then? Are they building it to shoot at South Korea? Is the technology we're building/testing not eventually useful for the purpose of protecting other nation-states we consider our allies from such folly?
Define "Constructive Projects". We have the NASA Velcro (it was just an example of a government money spin-off, not military.
However... if you go back to the beginning of the Shuttle program, it is designed for its payload and size DIRECTLY due to military satellite launch requirements... and has flown a number of DoD classified missions in it's lifetime with military-only crews. Shuttle is a joint military and civilian "asset".
If you can find a reason Civilians need to use a giant sea-going one megawatt X-Band RADAR platform, or an interceptor missle, fire up some of the leadership and go knock on the door and ask to use the thing. LOL.
The vast majority of this work IS being done outside the military at Defense Contractors who have to account to their shareholders for their budgets, even when handed a "Cost Plus" contract -- which is NOT what most of these systems are being paid for under. Even "black" projects get accounted for and determined if they're "worth building" by company management.
They also have to meet project goals or risk losing the next budget appropriation of funds to their piece of the project.
Defining goals is important. Define something "worth doing" that's more "worth doing" than this project, and you stand a chance of getting a Congresscritter interested. Especially if it makes your District some moolah.
Yep, political motivation = because the people working at the Defense Contractors vote.
Ahh, you miss a larger geopolitical point... at some point, we default on our debts (China) and the world comes calling on all that fake money we're printing, by threatening War over it. We point a bigger gun funded by our money-printing and borrowing of their own money back at them and say, "Make my day."
Not saying I like it, nor that it's ethical or moral in any way, but if we keep borrowing as INDIVIDUALS when we're already at every household in America spending an average of 12% of our disposable income is SERVICING DEBT INTEREST, there's no other way that end-game can play out.
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The only true "fix" is to stop sending BOTH parties money... but that would be Tax Evasion, and they'd jail you for not playing their no-win games.
People love debate and arguments that lead to extremes far more than they value solid leadership, and good (small but effective) government that's 100% accountable to the taxpayers. It's more fun to bicker and pick sides, than to work out problems with compromises, quickly and efficiently.
Thus, we'll eventually follow the path of all 200 or so year-old countries, a totalitarian State begged for by the people who actually wanted true Communism (which will never happen anywhere), or bloody Revolution and a new pair of "Parties" to argue about.
Probably won't get bad enough either way in my lifetime to trigger either one, but I think our children or our children's children will see one or the other come to pass, since it's clearly a repeating theme in History...
Rome (and crazy totalitarian dictator Emperors) wasn't built in a Day! (And didn't take all that long to fall, either... historically.)
Just imagine, those same people don't know how to do a personal budget, either... to this day.
Mortgage crisis, Obamacare, just about any hot-button political topic you can find right now other than religious debates -- all tie back to that as a root-cause.
What percentage do you suppose didn't do their work in grade school? Guess what?
After they became "adults" they're often PROUD of how much of a slacker they are, and pretend to know even LESS than they actually do... and continue to slack financially their entire lives... but boy that damn pension, Social Security, and their 401K they let someone else manage -- had better be there, or they'll vote for another idiot to bail out their banks...
Ever run into this character: Person calls on phone, explains EXACTLY what they did wrong ("I know I shouldn't click on 20 different things at the same time on this PC") and then proceed to ask for tech support? (At which time you instruct them to close down everything they launched and run one thing at a time, to find the problem.) And the whole time they're on the phone they say, "I'm not good with computers."?
Yeah, thought so. Technically they already know what they're doing wrong so they're not lazy per-se, they're ACTING like they don't know what they're doing for whatever reason, to play a role they think is supposed to be "non-technical" usually. No one is allowed to berate them for saying such asinine things as "I know what I did wrong, but I'm bad with computers.", because they're a customer -- and the customer is always right.
I'd love to say, "As you've pointed out sir, you've done an incredibly stupid thing -- and you admit you're aware of that -- so why don't you start over, do the right thing, and call me back if something doesn't change in your results." LOL!
But I get paid to do technical babysitting, for the vast majority of my job. I love working with the (few and far between) clueful customers who call with well-defined problems, that they've tested and documented six-ways from sideways, and they've run out of ideas. Those are fun and interesting (as well as intelligent) people.
The actors and actresses who want to play "I don't like computers" are just as annoying and childish as they were when they were the slacker on the team projects, more than 20 years ago in school...
p.s. I've been doing this almost 20 years, and I'm still seeing "off-by-one" errors. The industry hasn't really grown-up yet, quality-wise. Had one in a web interface the other day.
To me, those are rookie coding mistakes, and I don't even code for a living anymore... in fact, only coded for a living for a year, many many years ago.
But seriously... companies have no incentives set up to reward the coders who do it right, and those who make dumb mistakes like doing the math wrong in a UI, and creating an off-by-one error that makes the company look like a bunch of retards to a customer.
Wow, where'd you go to school? I saw plenty of people who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag get passing (typically "C") grades in college.
And I've seen plenty of those people doing jobs in companies where the engineers who build their core business tools, aren't paid as well as they are. ("Technical Marketing", "Sales Engineer", etc.)
Not saying ALL people in those jobs were the ones who couldn't actually DO any engineering -- but there's a lot of them out there who are wildly successful, too. Some of it has to do with people-skills, and some of it stands to reason that they just BARELY know enough about the technical side of things to play like they know how to manage people doing that sort of work.
There's all SORTS of people out there just barely skipping by in the tech world who were the ones who leaned on those who understood how to program, how to problem-solve, how to troubleshoot logically. And many of them are paid far more than their college co-horts who did all the work for them.
Incentives are all wrong in tech... no one gets paid serious money for bug-free code. And I'm not seeing my very senior tech support role I've done for almost two decades, disappearing any time soon. Every bug some programmer writes, is just job security for me. And if you think about it, that's just plain wrong... but also the way things are.
And that's a tricky point because "understand physics" means a lot of things, since we all live in a physical world.
I'm a pilot (for fun now, not a living -- but I was studying it over a decade ago as if I were going to become a professional), and struggled like hell through a "Physics for Aviators" course that crammed classic Physics and Fluid Dynamics (air) into the same semester (the math was tough for me), but I can tell you exactly how an aircraft will behave (and sound, and feel) when the airflow separates from the top of the wing and an aerodynamic stall begins. I can even visualize it in my head. But don't try to have me prove it with math.
I can also memorize that dynamic hydroplaning occurs at 9*SQRT(Tire Pressure), but am smart enough to know that there's more than one way to hydroplane, and I have zero control over whether my approach/landing speed is above or below that magic physical number... so in reality all I need to know is... "Yeah, we're above that speed in this aircraft, and most aircraft, so we'd better get 'er slowed down aggressively both to make sure the braking action is adequate and to have enough room left to execute a go-around if things get squirrelly."
So... there's a difference between understanding "physics" and understanding "Physics". And yes, I've met pilots who struggle to understand "physics" and apply even basic physical knowledge of what's happening to the aircraft, even though they're excellent pilots who fly "by the numbers" and are safety conscious. But there's an almost intuitive "feel" for certain types of flying (like Gliding) that people with a better grasp of visualizing airflow, wind currents over terrain, etc... just do better at.
Because in the real world, attendance counts. There really doesn't have to be any other reason. Ask your boss if they agree. :-)
You forget, virtually all households in the U.S. are now two wage-earner households. Two $80,000/year jobs aren't "executive" positions, and voila... 95th percentile.
RADAR is not used for navigation. It's used for surveillance.
Aircraft are slowly becoming 100% dependent on GPS (unless they're large enough to have inertial navigation systems on board). The FAA has been slowly but surely decommissioning ground-based navigation transmitters of other types. (Example, the airport down the road just decommissioned its ILS Middle Marker beacon, and it's not coming back. The information it provided pilots of older aircraft without Instrument-rated GPS on board, is now gone forever. Next, the ILS itself will go away.)
In term of GPS needing a backup, instead of worrying about the military scenarios, think instead: "Large solar flare." Knock down just a few birds and accuracy-required things like aircraft instrument approaches become something you can only do every X minutes safely, because there aren't enough satellites in "view". You get a RAIM alert and go head for the holding pattern to wait, burning fuel... if you have it.
LORAN-C was a cheap and easy way to have a ground-based wide-area backup to GPS. Now it's gone, and that's wickedly short-sighted.
Actually, for a backup system, LORAN-C was cheap. Estimated price to operate it for a decade was like $22 million. In the government of "a trillion here, a trillion there", $22 million is pocket change.
... in every new language's press release of "ease of code-reuse", but it's actually quite hard to do and requires thought.
Perhaps if someone ever ACTUALLY comes through on that decades-old promise with real modules that work properly when re-used, we'll stop seeing thousands of buffer-overflow retarded bugs in code every year and software security "experts" (who rarely actually FIX the software, just find the holes in it -- which isn't getting to the root-cause problem, but there's good money in prolonging the solution) will have less to do.
Which phones did all of that in 2005?
Really?
I'm an iPhone user. I'm generally...
a) behind all the trends (didn't buy an iPhone until the 3G and have no need/desire to go to 3GS)
b) fiscally conservative, and loathe Marxism
c) religious and morally black/white
d) confident of myself, but aware of other's feelings even if I don't agree
Where you livin' that you meet all the weirdos? :-)
My iPhone is a tool. There is *no* phone out there that handles aviation (my real passion) better than an iPhone. Logbook, flight planning, filing of flight plans, weather information (both official FAA weather and extended forecast and mapping), checklists, easy to use pilot's operating handbook data calculators and flight calculators...
I think you're describing people who buy these gadgets not knowing what they want to USE them for. Loved my Crackberry(s) prior to my iPhone, but iPhone moved ten or fifteen different aviation applications to my pocket, on a mobile data network, that used to require a laptop and WiFi (or mobile broadband card). The fact that it also handles e-mail pretty well, Twitter, Facebook, music/podcast playback, financial tracking, simple street maps and directions, my calendar, a couple of games (not a big mobile gaming fan... too busy), checking via bar codes on prices, xkcd downloads (GRIN), youtube (most things), pandora, IM clients, text messages, and whatever else I have on there... is just icing on the cake.
It's a pocket computer with limitations. What I originally wanted my iPaq for 5 years or more earlier, that it never lived up to...
You can pursue happiness. You're not guaranteed to get it.
Pursue all you like.
Too late.
Don't forget their giant egos, which create a political and interpersonal scenario where anyone who disagrees with them, gets run over by the Freight Train of Quality.
The Malcolm Baldridge Award and the chasing of same is also why you no longer see "Texaco" on any gas stations anymore. One of the world's best brands, laid low by their own inward navel-gazing.
I got it. It's been happening since the dawn of human invention. Plenty of doctored data to go around. In fact, consider that the phrase meaning "to falsify data" includes the word "doctor" in it. That right there should tell ya something.
Oh I know all of that. Just sayin', if we stupid Americans don't get our PERSONAL over-spending under control (the average American today spends 12% of their disposable income servicing their debt interest!), and then that culture carries over into demanding our goverment stops trillions of dollars of deficit-spending on China's dime... these things are inevitable. People here are stupid and can't even do a personal budget. Or more likely, do the budget and can't stick to it because there's not enough discipline or motivation to do so. They have their daily Starbucks at $4 a cup for coffee and think that (average) $18K of unsecured credit card debt can be "paid later". Stupid, and dragging the few of us left who budget and save, into the abyss with them. Sooner or later that turns into a revolt of a different kind...
What exactly is the North Korean missile system for then? Are they building it to shoot at South Korea? Is the technology we're building/testing not eventually useful for the purpose of protecting other nation-states we consider our allies from such folly?
Define "Constructive Projects". We have the NASA Velcro (it was just an example of a government money spin-off, not military.
However... if you go back to the beginning of the Shuttle program, it is designed for its payload and size DIRECTLY due to military satellite launch requirements... and has flown a number of DoD classified missions in it's lifetime with military-only crews. Shuttle is a joint military and civilian "asset".
If you can find a reason Civilians need to use a giant sea-going one megawatt X-Band RADAR platform, or an interceptor missle, fire up some of the leadership and go knock on the door and ask to use the thing. LOL.
The vast majority of this work IS being done outside the military at Defense Contractors who have to account to their shareholders for their budgets, even when handed a "Cost Plus" contract -- which is NOT what most of these systems are being paid for under. Even "black" projects get accounted for and determined if they're "worth building" by company management.
They also have to meet project goals or risk losing the next budget appropriation of funds to their piece of the project.
Defining goals is important. Define something "worth doing" that's more "worth doing" than this project, and you stand a chance of getting a Congresscritter interested. Especially if it makes your District some moolah.
Yep, political motivation = because the people working at the Defense Contractors vote.
Ahh, you miss a larger geopolitical point... at some point, we default on our debts (China) and the world comes calling on all that fake money we're printing, by threatening War over it. We point a bigger gun funded by our money-printing and borrowing of their own money back at them and say, "Make my day."
Not saying I like it, nor that it's ethical or moral in any way, but if we keep borrowing as INDIVIDUALS when we're already at every household in America spending an average of 12% of our disposable income is SERVICING DEBT INTEREST, there's no other way that end-game can play out.
It's called trial and error for a reason. You don't learn from successes, you learn from mistakes.
What risks are you taking that we can make fun of? Let us know. We'll see if they're even interesting enough to care.
He's making a joke about police speed RADAR and RADAR detectors.
Some dumbass said the same thing about knives once too. Then his family was killed by knife-wielding enemies from another land.
Who bought it from Russia.