Real experts don't want to go to the trouble of battling with presumptuous morons over the Internet.
Real experts shouldn't be publishing their findings on Wikipedia either. They usually have plenty of places to publish anything they've been doing, so it really doesn't matter. Indeed it would be better for everybody involved if they simply did publish that information elsewhere, preferably in a place that is freely accessible to the general public without a paywall.
I think this is an important point. I remember the article about Richard Stallman even had RMS himself try to make a few factual edits to the article about himself. The problem was that RMS didn't source anything that he added to the article, assuming that using himself as a reference was more than sufficient.
THAT started a whole bunch of interesting discussions (especially given the particularly caustic nature of RMS in the first place) but surprisingly ended up with RMS backing off and simply letting other people edit the article about him. This was before conflict of interest policies were adopted, but it still is a pretty typical experience on Wikipedia... both for individuals and for companies. They can't believe that they must be able to back up every claim that they make in these articles.
The issue of rogue admins is something Wikipedia has never really dealt with effectively. Admins are supposed to police themselves, but having been an admin in the past (I basically gave up the rights due to time constraints and getting tired of battling trolls) it is very difficult or close enough to impossible to rein in somebody without performing some significant community action like ArbCom or getting widespread community consensus to stop that admin. English Wikipedia in particular is rough because many admins hide in the shadows of semi-anonymity as well simply due to their huge numbers involved. On smaller projects or smaller wikis, admins which go rogue usually get the ire of the editing community and are properly dealt with or the community simply abandons the project altogether.
As to if this particular PR firm has those admins under its control or on its payroll, I highly doubt they have enough to actually make some of the claims they are making not to mention that in this particular situation any admin standing up for some of the real cruft that is being made would likely have those admin rights removed. It isn't easy and certainly some editors who are voicing legitimate concerns might be silenced, but they can't really keep doing this kind of bullying too long without getting caught.
I take it that you've never maintained any sort of wiki for more than a few minutes. I dare you to start your own wiki on any topic of your own choosing and try as you might to keep the cruft off of it. Use your own definition of cruft as well, but penis enlargment pill links thrown into the middle of a discussion of Princess Leia might easily fall into most typical definitions I can imagine. Going to a place like wikia.com is one way to start your own wiki, although other wiki hosting services are plentiful.
After awhile, you will find that random nonsense and pure junk is the rule rather than the exception, and for high profile wikis like Wikipedia really get some absurd junk. For those poor souls who make a hobby of diving into the sewer of recent changes and the new page patrol, it is just freaking amazing that they don't simply say "screw it" and reject everything.
There are reasons why the Wikipedia social structure is the way that it is. Admittedly it could certainly be improved and there are some real asshats and jerks that make putting edits onto Wikipedia sort of a pain in the behind. None the less, it is possible for anybody to edit Wikipedia and to get the edits to stick as generally permanent content. It just takes more than a few seconds to get that to happen.
Much of the controversy right now is with regards to a press release and a website that claims a certain professional Wikipedia editing service indeed has a group of Wikipedia admins on its payroll that will help in terms of "protecting" those articles from edit wars and libelous statements added to those article. If those admins are doing more than simply enforcing Wikipedia policy (aka keeping trolls away from throwing in random unsourced and blatantly false information into articles), I would agree that is a significant problem.
None of the proposals even remotely address the issue of rogue admins protecting those articles, other than a requirement to disclose any conflicts of interest.
That is a little bit harsh, but if you get into a proper discussion of people who cite Wikipedia articles as factual information need to be also discussing reliable sources of information in general and what it means to find any source of information as reliable and authoritative. If you are going to be complaining about Wikipedia, you should be saying the same thing about any encyclopedia reference, as they are all tertiary sources (not even secondary reporting like is commonly done by traditional news outlets). If that teacher or professor would find the Encyclopedia Britannica as an acceptable source of information, they should have no qualms over using Wikipedia. The opposite is also true.
For most school papers, I would think that looking into primary sources would be ideal with some secondary sources helping to comprehend the information contained in those primary sources. Things like EB or Wikipedia are a good first stop to get an overview of a topic and to help that student (especially with Wikipedia) to find strongly suggested links or references to begin a proper investigation of the topic. That should be the first place to read about the topic... something I've found that even many people with a PhD would likely do as well for topics they don't have any significant background or knowledge.
That was a thought-provocative comment, thank you for writing it. As to pot, don't they have a problem with voting for a man who wants some of their friends and families in prison? I'd say that's pretty important.
The day that the folks who participated with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party groups get together, finding they have far more in common with each other than the respective political parties they are working under is the day that the Republicrats finally realize that they are screwed. Unfortunately the major political powers that be would rather keep all of the infighting going on rather than having that happen.
I happen to agree with you about the absurdity of putting people into prison for distributing and using something that just a half century earlier there were federal funds being used to subsidize the cultivation and distribution of that very same substance (the USDA even printed up a pamphlet telling farmers how to grow the stuff and even distributed seeds through county ag agents). I don't know about others, but I think it is idiotic to enforce those drug laws. It is interesting how large companies still are able to get around those laws as well (Coca-Cola still imports coca leaves on a legal basis... try to get one of those licenses yourself if you would even dare). There are more absurdities with federal law than I care to count.
Again, what are the alternatives? Vote for one guy who keeps these kind of laws on the books or vote for the other guy who will do the same thing or even support legislation to make it worse?
If it wasn't for the Soviet-developed Soyuz rockets, there wouldn't even be a manned spaceflight program.
No, if it wasn't for the Soyuz, we'd have built the fancy new shuttle instead of any of these unmanned Mars programs.
You mean like the CEV before it was transformed into the Orion capsule? How many billions of dollars more do you think would have been dumped down that rat hole had NASA not gone begging and pleading to Roscosmos to let NASA astronauts fly on the Soyuz spacecraft?
The problems at NASA are very deep and a part of the culture. As I was trying to point out, future missions to Mars are already being cut AND NASA is still using Soyuz spacecraft for getting to the ISS. That hasn't changed. Your premise and suggestion simply isn't even true.
So why then didn't they rise up early in the Bush administration when he reversed course and ran up the biggest deficit we had ever seen?
Who said "they" didn't? Do you really think that most Republicans were enamored with George Bush and thought he was the savior of America? Why do you think it won both elections in 2000 and 2004 with such utterly slim margins that people are still calling him the "illegitimate president"?
This was because even Republicans didn't like him. Oh, he was a good campaigner and knew the internal structure of the Republican Party well enough to know what people to impress in terms of getting the nomination... thus getting on the ballot as a major candidate in the general election. Still, I know for a fact that there were many dissatisfied Republicans who hated Bush and thought he (and especially "his men" inside of the party) were pretty awful. At best the reason why many Republicans and those who complain about "big government" even stuck with Bush at all is because they considered him to be a lesser evil compared to alternatives being presented, not because Bush was necessarily any decent.
If you are going to be critical of Bush and specific things like this, at least note what other alternatives were presented at the time. Also note it wasn't just the Obama budget plans that were the source of criticism, but also what the Republicans were doing with the TARP program (which was something passed in the final days of the Bush administration). Also note that the consequences of having these "tea party activists" involved has been a near total disruption of several state GOP organizations and a major reshuffling of the internals of the Republican Party.
Besides, it takes time. I should also ask the question: why didn't Democrats and their supporters object to this massive spending increase as well? Where were people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry (not to mention Barack Obama himself on the few votes he bothered to actually show up to cast when he was a senator) make much of a stink about these things too?
I'll note that the PATRIOT Act is one of the things that I have seen as a major complaint at these tea party rallies too, and it justifiably is an embarrassment to the Republican Party... as it should be.
As for the legalization of marijuana.... you might be surprised too. At least have you ever gone to a tea party gathering and asked some of the major activists what they thought on that issue? If anything, the whole issue is likely sidelined as being relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things and sort of a question of if that is something that they want to blow all of their political capital on or wait until a better opportunity comes along?
All I'm saying is don't believe all of the hyped up rhetoric that you might see in the news media about these rallies, at least not until you've actually talked with many of those who were there and involved afterward too.
When it comes to space, the primary thing you're looking for is ruggedness. You don't want to waste a several hundred million dollar launch because your solar array failed. If possible, you surface mount. If you need more power, you unfold an array with the smallest amount of moving parts you can, which means limited or no sun tracking, which means panels instead of focused solar. If your lifespan needs are limited, you may consider cheaper silicon cells. If you need longer duration, you use Ga-As cells, since they are less susceptible to UV damage.
There is also a huge difference between a solar panel that may be a dozen watts (for a nanosat) or even a few kilowatts (like a large telecom satellite) as opposed to the claims of practical space-based solar power transmitter that is in the megawatt range or higher. The only thing that has gone into space with that kind of power production (or at least anything near that scale) has been the ISS. It was built with several different payloads by a human crew involved in its assembly. If you are talking something 10x or 100x the power production (and that is supposedly a "small" solar power satellite) the complexity involved is going to be even larger and IMHO likely require some astronauts to physically work out the issues at the location directly. There certainly is no way that such an array would ever be built in one launch.
BTW, I completely agree with you in terms of cost, which is one of the things that IMHO kills even the discussion of such a concept. At the current launch prices of about $10k/kg, you could build solar panels out of pure gold & diamonds yet still be overwhelmed with launch costs. Trying to get cheap like is done for terrestrial based solar panels simply is just being silly as in penny wise and pound foolish. Actual manufacturing of the solar cells themselves might as well be geared toward high efficiency per pound rather than high efficiency per dollar... and for space-based applications they actually are built for weight and not per unit cost. Spending $100k for a kilowatt solar panel is actually a very reasonable expenditure if as you suggest it can be rugged and last as long or longer than the rest of the components on that spacecraft.
Amateur and university groups have been doing this in the past. One group that I do think is impressive is this effort by Copenhagen Suborbitals, as they are motivated by real world constraints and the fact they are going to put this spacesuit around a person who actually will be in the vacuum of space.
While it is certainly a technology that needs to be developed in order to actually get into space, it is hardly the most important thing. If they were showing how to make spacesuits on the cheap (like the Copenhagen Suborbital example) or showing an alternative design that really pushes the concept of a spacesuit (like some of the "skin tight" examples I've seen that are more like a diving wet suit as opposed to a military aviation flight suit) I'd be more impressed. There are some very real challenges for building space suits, but it is also a well developed and tested engineering regime. About a thousand people have been into space so far, which has given plenty of practical tests and mountains of data to compare against including some problems that happened in terms of the assumptions people made with those suits that simply is incorrect.
It is nice that some people are thinking about these issue, but I hardly think this group in the main parent article is going really be setting any sort of standards for suit design.
The array itself is big and powerful, but it's nothing we haven't been doing for decades, and not the kind of design you would want to use if your whole mission was power generation.
Oh, really? I've seen all kinds of whimsical proposals for space solar power that sort of presumes that the solar panels you can pick up at Harbor Freight (or whatever dealer you can find online or via Amazon) can simply be slapped together with super light weight duct tape and bailing twine and magically be able to transmit that power to the Earth.
From my perspective, the actually transmitters are the easy part of the whole space solar power, not the deal breaker. Instead, you need to find a way to scale up these arrays in a way that will actually work. You need to find ways to cool down those arrays and also find a way to actually get them built. While no doubt there might be some ways to automate the deployment of these panels, some considerable experience can be gained in terms of how the ISS was constructed in the first place and may very well require getting a few people to get "out there" to perform some EVAs in order to get such large scale structures built. Scaling structures is never easy, and I contend that the ISS, as well as experience on both MIR and Skylab for their solar arrays can prove to be invaluable in terms of realizing what real world issues you will encounter when trying to actually deploy these kind of devices.
Yes, this is something that is very different than what has been done for decades on other spacecraft. I will admit that the basic solar cell has been largely identical the whole time, but again that isn't the show stopper in terms of getting one of those large mega arrays built. The solar panel array on the ISS simply has no equal and is a real world example and something that is in current use as opposed to something that is a fairy tale and pipe dream on some designers desk. Anybody who ignores the engineering challenges that were discovered and overcome (much less some serious problems that the station has had to deal with over its lifetime) is ignoring a huge database of information that will be absolutely vital to building a real large scale solar panel array.
At the very least I would expect designers to try and explain why their design is superior to the ISS array and mention specific engineering flaws in the ISS array as something they intend to overcome with an alternate approach. That is real world engineering here, and in the literature I've read I simply don't see that kind of thing happening at all. They simply pretend that the ISS was never even built in the first place.
That may be true, but in the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of computing technology. The Apollo Guidance Computer was nearly the very first major device built with integrated circuits. So many chips were used by NASA that it represented something like 60%-70% of the global production for computer chips at the time and one of the reasons why many people associated NASA with computer technology. NASA also created the first real-time operating systems, as well as the notion of a time-share system that would have multiple users concurrently using the same computer resources. Web servers are a lasting legacy to this early technology. There was a time that NASA really did push the technology and got software and computer engineers to really do things, very basic and fundamental things, that had never been done before and helped advance the industry in ways that still are being impacted by those efforts.
While I will admit that Velcro and Tang (much less the Fischer Space Pen) had nothing to do with NASA other than NASA used all of those items, there certainly were many advances in technology that happened when NASA really pushed the boundaries. It really is remarkable realizing just how little was known about the Moon in 1961 when Kennedy made his famous speech about going to the Moon "before this decade is out". Even when the Gemini flights were happening, there was still debate going on about how many of the craters on the Moon were volcanic vents as opposed to impact craters (some apparently are, but far fewer than was thought at the time). Theories like the Late Heavy Bombardment simply had never even been considered until after the astronauts actually got to the Moon and were really examining the features up close.
My point is that NASA is no longer in the forefront of pushing technology like it was doing in the 1960's. As a result, while there certainly are some interesting things that NASA is still doing, it is just a shadow of what it was like. Simply dumping money into NASA isn't going to change that either.
Oh, I think there still are some things NASA could be doing that could really push the frontiers of technology in a similar fashion. The NAUTLUS-X spaceship (yes, spaceship as opposed to spacecraft) is one of those wacky off the wall things that IMHO should be getting much more support to actually get built. A real space program with a strong vision for what it should be doing is another. There just hasn't been a president since LBJ that cared to do any of that, which is why NASA is just a lame government agency right now.
I could have said the same thing about the Occupy movement, other than the fact that the Reform Party had almost nothing to do with what happened in that case. While the specific actions or kinds of people involved may be different, both were a reaction that something is fundamentally flawed with America and that it needs to be fixed in some fashion.
On the other hand, there were some basic principles involved with many in the Tea Party events. I don't mind if there are some basic objections to those principles and a disagreement with how they should be implemented, but I do object to people painting what happened as a sort of joke or spouting off flat out lies that are perpetuated by liberal publications by people who never even attended those events.
The most telling of what has happened occurred at the GOP National Convention last year, when several motions were presented before the convention and in spite of extremely loud "No" votes and motions asking for a poll (aka formally counting votes) of the delegates, the "chair" decided that the resolutions passed and completely ignored that the delegates even existed. They claimed to be using Robert's Rules of Order, but the whole convention was a farce. Certainly individual delegates were completely meaningless on any opinion they represented.... in stark contrast to political conventions done in the 20th Century were delegates really did matter. That wasn't being easily swayed by others, that is simply being out right ignored and sidelined.
Well, there is mountains of indisputable evidence that illustrates how the Tea Party was funded by billionaires
I wouldn't mind some of those billionaire's funds being sent my way. No doubt there were some of the events that may have had some sponsorship as you suggest, and certainly a great portion of the anger and energy from these groups has been redirected to help support sell-outs. Everything I've ever been involved with has not had a single dime of that money so I know for a fact that you are full of it to even think that it is strictly the actions of a couple of billionaires.
None the less, your "mountains" of evidence completely betray the fact that there were millions of people who did come out to these events in protest and did want to make a difference politically. That they've been betrayed from the principles that they went to support is sort of sad.
The problem I've seen is not really that they are delusional, but rather that they are extremely naive in believing that the officially published rules and the proclaimed ways of doing politics (aka showing up to meetings and speaking out, writing letters to members of congress, etc.) actually work. Especially signing some sort of silly petition. Most of the people I've met simply don't understand hard ball politics as it really is the first time they became politically active. When they realize that being politically involved is a whole lot of hard work of knocking on doors and really digging deep to try and get support on some issue or the other, most of them pretty much fade away and just bicker on the sidelines.
It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good
...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
I would rather use the number of federal employees as a yard stick of the size of the government, which certainly was larger under the FDR administration, that still doesn't give the notion that we are living under a less controlling government right now.
Hell, do you really think America as it exists today has the same freedoms that we enjoyed in 2000 (aka before 9/11)?
For myself, I don't give a damn about whatever or whoever calls themselves a "tea party conservative" as the term is meaningless at the moment. Regardless, such stereotyping nonsense that you are giving here also shows how utterly out of touch you are with those who actually tried to make a difference and have been cast off to the side as meaningless stepping stones on the careers of several politicians.
A good friend of mine was held as a political prisoner in America (his crime was getting elected as the chair of his precinct then speaking out against party officials). When the judge finally heard the case about a week later, the charges were dropped.... but still didn't get any kind of apology and indeed his "credentials" were stripped from him. Yeah, that is somebody who is full of ignorance, racism, and astroturf. Oh yeah, that week while he sat in prison was during a political convention that he was supposed to be attending. Anybody that supported him was also similarly threatened with arrest.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place.
The Koch brothers?
Nice try. If you really think the whole thing involves just two brothers who have otherwise bribed a bunch of gullible people into doing their dirty work, perhaps America is really a lost nation. Do you really think there aren't greater principles involved?
That is Zero point five percent or a half of a percent, not five percent. It was only that high (about 4%-5%) during the Apollo program with the race to the Moon, and hasn't even been close to that funding level for decades.
Since you bring up ROI, I would have to agree that the money spent on Apollo has ultimately resulted in more money going into the American economy and in the long run far more economic activity from the resulting technology developed than if the money had simply been refunded to the tax payers for them to spend on Super Bowl tickets and other frivolous things. That said, how much of that kind of extreme cutting edge technology is being developed at NASA at the moment?
Computer technology for NASA missions is using not just yesterday's technology, but even a generation or two even further back. To give an example, the computer being used for the New Horizons spacecraft (currently enroute to Pluto) has the same CPU (admittedly radiation hardened and a bit more robust) that the Sony Playstation One uses. The Space Shuttle guidance computers were 16-bit computers that were about as powerful as the original IBM-PCs.
The SLS program seems to be a reboot to the Apollo program. The engines on the SLS are going to use the Space Shuttle Main Engines (literally.... they are using the very same engines that were used on the now retired shuttles and will throw them away in the Atlantic when the 1st stage is used). They are even reviewing the J-2 engine that the Saturn V used for its 2nd stage.
I could go on, but my point is that so little is really breaking new ground and pushing technology that I fail to see what NASA is actually doing at the moment that is worth even the limited funds it is receiving at the moment. From a ROI perspective, there basically isn't any.
It should be of note that even within NASA, programs like those you have mentioned are being cut in favor of SLS & the James Webb telescope. Like all government funding, those projects which go under budget and are efficient tend to get even less funding, while wasteful projects tend to get an ever larger share of the funding. Robotic missions have been cut so severely over the last couple of budget cycles that it is simply amazing that any of the researchers are even bothering to stick around.
As Ronald Reagan said: "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
That wasn't Ronald Reagan who said that. Instead, it was Everett Dirksen, who admittedly was a Republican congressman in the 1960's. He supposedly said this on an appearance with the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
One thing that the ISS has that is of particular note is the largest solar power farm in space. For all of those who think that the future of energy needs can be obtained by harvesting power from space, I don't know why virtually none of the "space solar power" advocates use any of the lessons learned from the ISS, nor why it isn't being used more actively to conduct tests from orbit.
Keep in mind that the ISS has a solar power plant of about 100 kilowatts, with an effective 30-40 kilowatts of continuous usage. That is a considerable power reserve that could be put to use in a number of ways even if people are pulled from the station completely.
Yeah, there is a whole lot of engineering research that could happen on the ISS that simply isn't being done right now.
The human spaceflight portion of this agency should be entirely decimated. In particular we should end US participation in the ISS. Little good science is returned from that endeavor at this point.
Those who complain about human crews in space simply don't have a damn clue about what it is that people actually do in space.
I'll agree that the current manned spaceflight program is a total joke at the moment, particularly with the infatuation with the manned program for going to Mars that is really nothing more than a jobs program to keep the companies who build ICBMs in business until the next round of missiles need to be developed. The Constellation/SLS programs in particular are a complete and total joke and a waste of money on such a monumental scale that it amazes me that anybody involved can keep a straight face when they talk about it. Considering that the Manned Spaceflight Center has no vehicles currently or even under contract that can take astronauts into space, it shows how little they actually give a damn about even trying to get a crewed program going. If it wasn't for the Soviet-developed Soyuz rockets, there wouldn't even be a manned spaceflight program.
This said, I think a responsible crewed spaceflight program can most certainly be developed... even a government program that is slightly more wasteful simply because it is a government program. Realistic goals and pushing the frontier of human existence is what was the original manned spaceflight program under NASA. There was a time when astronauts really were going "boldly where nobody has gone before" instead of "meekly going where hundreds have been". There is a point to having people in space being able to react to the environment and be able to perform tasks that machines simply are horrible about doing. It certainly shouldn't be seen as "robots vs. humans", but instead as complimentary uses where each kind of exploration program can help the other.
The ISS program was certainly not done for any science, but instead needs to be viewed as a foreign aid program. From that perspective, the ISS has been a tremendous benefit for world peace and has done a whole lot of good, at least as good as any other foreign aid program of comparable size. For myself, I sort of go "meh" in terms of continued support of the ISS. It did its job and is a nice facility for the amount of money dumped on it. If continued use of the ISS doesn't cost all that much additional money, there are some real positive things that could be done there. The best would be some real research on partial gravity (not microgravity) in a rotating reference frame, trying some technologies that will be needed for crewed missions to Mars (like perhaps even inflatable modules like the Trans-Hab.... let's get that up there finally!), and running some long term duration tests with ion engines or the VASMR engine. These are all technologies that simply can't be tested on the ground and the ISS is a perfect place to perform those kind of engineering tests. Note, I'm not saying science should happen, at least not pure science. Still, there are some things that having people in space can most definitely do.
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place. It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place. I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Yes, those involved with the Tea Party also know full well that they are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of cutting pork for their home states and wanting the government to be significantly scaled back on all levels, both federal, state, and locally. It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent and thinking both Democrats and Republicans are screwing up, and that it will take a huge economic redistribution to "set things right again" that will most certainly hurt a number of people if all of those programs are cut. The hope is that if the government is cut down significantly, that those abuses of authority can be much more easily identified and removed as well. As it is, the government at all levels is so huge that many of the current abuses are really background noise.
I will agree with you that the "neo-cons" who have taken over the banner of the "Tea Party" and trashed any real progress that those involved actually tried to accomplish. These congressmen are largely stateists who really do want their their own special interests (aka campaign contributors) to get government money instead of the special interests of the other guys. The whole thing that is currently happening in DC is just churning my stomach and making me want to barf. Yes, I'm talking about you, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And they're the best of the lot. Don't get me started on guys like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who are complete sell-outs.
PS: For the great majority of ancient, we *do not* have the equivalent of FaceBook posts to augment the vast reams of inventory, royal notices and laws. The peasant's lives are reconstructed from evidence, not learned from text.
You obviously don't do much research on 19th Century historical events. There are indeed substantial amounts of written information from that time period where "peasants" were literate and left behind a considerable legacy. To name one particular historical record that IMHO is almost precisely like a bunch of Facebook posts that instead was from the 1860's is this diary of a private in the U.S. Army during the U.S. Civil War (he served in the 2nd California Infantry Regiment). He was not a great war leader or for that matter anything more than a humble farmer that was drafted into military service at the time, just like hundreds of thousands of other people where the same thing happened.
While I will agree that prior to about the 18th Century such diaries were uncommon, my point is that such things do exist, and surprisingly give an interesting bit of information when you do find such things. I have seen ancient pictographs written on the walls of caves and cliffs, put there by societies without a formal written language. More than art, they actually do convey some substantial information if you can but try to understand it.
Part of the reason why we can understand how some ancient Sumerian common villager lived is also in part by watching how similar peasants live today in 3rd world countries under similar living conditions. A surprising amount of that information comes from diaries and such as well written for modern ethnographers, or at least researched by those who are studying modern cultures in part to understand cultures of the past. Such mundane records would definitely be of interest to historians trying to get some additional information about what happened in some significant event.
Slashdot Mirror
Real experts don't want to go to the trouble of battling with presumptuous morons over the Internet.
Real experts shouldn't be publishing their findings on Wikipedia either. They usually have plenty of places to publish anything they've been doing, so it really doesn't matter. Indeed it would be better for everybody involved if they simply did publish that information elsewhere, preferably in a place that is freely accessible to the general public without a paywall.
I think this is an important point. I remember the article about Richard Stallman even had RMS himself try to make a few factual edits to the article about himself. The problem was that RMS didn't source anything that he added to the article, assuming that using himself as a reference was more than sufficient.
THAT started a whole bunch of interesting discussions (especially given the particularly caustic nature of RMS in the first place) but surprisingly ended up with RMS backing off and simply letting other people edit the article about him. This was before conflict of interest policies were adopted, but it still is a pretty typical experience on Wikipedia... both for individuals and for companies. They can't believe that they must be able to back up every claim that they make in these articles.
The issue of rogue admins is something Wikipedia has never really dealt with effectively. Admins are supposed to police themselves, but having been an admin in the past (I basically gave up the rights due to time constraints and getting tired of battling trolls) it is very difficult or close enough to impossible to rein in somebody without performing some significant community action like ArbCom or getting widespread community consensus to stop that admin. English Wikipedia in particular is rough because many admins hide in the shadows of semi-anonymity as well simply due to their huge numbers involved. On smaller projects or smaller wikis, admins which go rogue usually get the ire of the editing community and are properly dealt with or the community simply abandons the project altogether.
As to if this particular PR firm has those admins under its control or on its payroll, I highly doubt they have enough to actually make some of the claims they are making not to mention that in this particular situation any admin standing up for some of the real cruft that is being made would likely have those admin rights removed. It isn't easy and certainly some editors who are voicing legitimate concerns might be silenced, but they can't really keep doing this kind of bullying too long without getting caught.
I take it that you've never maintained any sort of wiki for more than a few minutes. I dare you to start your own wiki on any topic of your own choosing and try as you might to keep the cruft off of it. Use your own definition of cruft as well, but penis enlargment pill links thrown into the middle of a discussion of Princess Leia might easily fall into most typical definitions I can imagine. Going to a place like wikia.com is one way to start your own wiki, although other wiki hosting services are plentiful.
After awhile, you will find that random nonsense and pure junk is the rule rather than the exception, and for high profile wikis like Wikipedia really get some absurd junk. For those poor souls who make a hobby of diving into the sewer of recent changes and the new page patrol, it is just freaking amazing that they don't simply say "screw it" and reject everything.
There are reasons why the Wikipedia social structure is the way that it is. Admittedly it could certainly be improved and there are some real asshats and jerks that make putting edits onto Wikipedia sort of a pain in the behind. None the less, it is possible for anybody to edit Wikipedia and to get the edits to stick as generally permanent content. It just takes more than a few seconds to get that to happen.
Much of the controversy right now is with regards to a press release and a website that claims a certain professional Wikipedia editing service indeed has a group of Wikipedia admins on its payroll that will help in terms of "protecting" those articles from edit wars and libelous statements added to those article. If those admins are doing more than simply enforcing Wikipedia policy (aka keeping trolls away from throwing in random unsourced and blatantly false information into articles), I would agree that is a significant problem.
None of the proposals even remotely address the issue of rogue admins protecting those articles, other than a requirement to disclose any conflicts of interest.
That is a little bit harsh, but if you get into a proper discussion of people who cite Wikipedia articles as factual information need to be also discussing reliable sources of information in general and what it means to find any source of information as reliable and authoritative. If you are going to be complaining about Wikipedia, you should be saying the same thing about any encyclopedia reference, as they are all tertiary sources (not even secondary reporting like is commonly done by traditional news outlets). If that teacher or professor would find the Encyclopedia Britannica as an acceptable source of information, they should have no qualms over using Wikipedia. The opposite is also true.
For most school papers, I would think that looking into primary sources would be ideal with some secondary sources helping to comprehend the information contained in those primary sources. Things like EB or Wikipedia are a good first stop to get an overview of a topic and to help that student (especially with Wikipedia) to find strongly suggested links or references to begin a proper investigation of the topic. That should be the first place to read about the topic... something I've found that even many people with a PhD would likely do as well for topics they don't have any significant background or knowledge.
That was a thought-provocative comment, thank you for writing it. As to pot, don't they have a problem with voting for a man who wants some of their friends and families in prison? I'd say that's pretty important.
The day that the folks who participated with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party groups get together, finding they have far more in common with each other than the respective political parties they are working under is the day that the Republicrats finally realize that they are screwed. Unfortunately the major political powers that be would rather keep all of the infighting going on rather than having that happen.
I happen to agree with you about the absurdity of putting people into prison for distributing and using something that just a half century earlier there were federal funds being used to subsidize the cultivation and distribution of that very same substance (the USDA even printed up a pamphlet telling farmers how to grow the stuff and even distributed seeds through county ag agents). I don't know about others, but I think it is idiotic to enforce those drug laws. It is interesting how large companies still are able to get around those laws as well (Coca-Cola still imports coca leaves on a legal basis... try to get one of those licenses yourself if you would even dare). There are more absurdities with federal law than I care to count.
Again, what are the alternatives? Vote for one guy who keeps these kind of laws on the books or vote for the other guy who will do the same thing or even support legislation to make it worse?
If it wasn't for the Soviet-developed Soyuz rockets, there wouldn't even be a manned spaceflight program.
No, if it wasn't for the Soyuz, we'd have built the fancy new shuttle instead of any of these unmanned Mars programs.
You mean like the CEV before it was transformed into the Orion capsule? How many billions of dollars more do you think would have been dumped down that rat hole had NASA not gone begging and pleading to Roscosmos to let NASA astronauts fly on the Soyuz spacecraft?
The problems at NASA are very deep and a part of the culture. As I was trying to point out, future missions to Mars are already being cut AND NASA is still using Soyuz spacecraft for getting to the ISS. That hasn't changed. Your premise and suggestion simply isn't even true.
So why then didn't they rise up early in the Bush administration when he reversed course and ran up the biggest deficit we had ever seen?
Who said "they" didn't? Do you really think that most Republicans were enamored with George Bush and thought he was the savior of America? Why do you think it won both elections in 2000 and 2004 with such utterly slim margins that people are still calling him the "illegitimate president"?
This was because even Republicans didn't like him. Oh, he was a good campaigner and knew the internal structure of the Republican Party well enough to know what people to impress in terms of getting the nomination... thus getting on the ballot as a major candidate in the general election. Still, I know for a fact that there were many dissatisfied Republicans who hated Bush and thought he (and especially "his men" inside of the party) were pretty awful. At best the reason why many Republicans and those who complain about "big government" even stuck with Bush at all is because they considered him to be a lesser evil compared to alternatives being presented, not because Bush was necessarily any decent.
If you are going to be critical of Bush and specific things like this, at least note what other alternatives were presented at the time. Also note it wasn't just the Obama budget plans that were the source of criticism, but also what the Republicans were doing with the TARP program (which was something passed in the final days of the Bush administration). Also note that the consequences of having these "tea party activists" involved has been a near total disruption of several state GOP organizations and a major reshuffling of the internals of the Republican Party.
Besides, it takes time. I should also ask the question: why didn't Democrats and their supporters object to this massive spending increase as well? Where were people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry (not to mention Barack Obama himself on the few votes he bothered to actually show up to cast when he was a senator) make much of a stink about these things too?
I'll note that the PATRIOT Act is one of the things that I have seen as a major complaint at these tea party rallies too, and it justifiably is an embarrassment to the Republican Party... as it should be.
As for the legalization of marijuana.... you might be surprised too. At least have you ever gone to a tea party gathering and asked some of the major activists what they thought on that issue? If anything, the whole issue is likely sidelined as being relatively unimportant in the larger scheme of things and sort of a question of if that is something that they want to blow all of their political capital on or wait until a better opportunity comes along?
All I'm saying is don't believe all of the hyped up rhetoric that you might see in the news media about these rallies, at least not until you've actually talked with many of those who were there and involved afterward too.
When it comes to space, the primary thing you're looking for is ruggedness. You don't want to waste a several hundred million dollar launch because your solar array failed. If possible, you surface mount. If you need more power, you unfold an array with the smallest amount of moving parts you can, which means limited or no sun tracking, which means panels instead of focused solar. If your lifespan needs are limited, you may consider cheaper silicon cells. If you need longer duration, you use Ga-As cells, since they are less susceptible to UV damage.
There is also a huge difference between a solar panel that may be a dozen watts (for a nanosat) or even a few kilowatts (like a large telecom satellite) as opposed to the claims of practical space-based solar power transmitter that is in the megawatt range or higher. The only thing that has gone into space with that kind of power production (or at least anything near that scale) has been the ISS. It was built with several different payloads by a human crew involved in its assembly. If you are talking something 10x or 100x the power production (and that is supposedly a "small" solar power satellite) the complexity involved is going to be even larger and IMHO likely require some astronauts to physically work out the issues at the location directly. There certainly is no way that such an array would ever be built in one launch.
BTW, I completely agree with you in terms of cost, which is one of the things that IMHO kills even the discussion of such a concept. At the current launch prices of about $10k/kg, you could build solar panels out of pure gold & diamonds yet still be overwhelmed with launch costs. Trying to get cheap like is done for terrestrial based solar panels simply is just being silly as in penny wise and pound foolish. Actual manufacturing of the solar cells themselves might as well be geared toward high efficiency per pound rather than high efficiency per dollar... and for space-based applications they actually are built for weight and not per unit cost. Spending $100k for a kilowatt solar panel is actually a very reasonable expenditure if as you suggest it can be rugged and last as long or longer than the rest of the components on that spacecraft.
Amateur and university groups have been doing this in the past. One group that I do think is impressive is this effort by Copenhagen Suborbitals, as they are motivated by real world constraints and the fact they are going to put this spacesuit around a person who actually will be in the vacuum of space.
While it is certainly a technology that needs to be developed in order to actually get into space, it is hardly the most important thing. If they were showing how to make spacesuits on the cheap (like the Copenhagen Suborbital example) or showing an alternative design that really pushes the concept of a spacesuit (like some of the "skin tight" examples I've seen that are more like a diving wet suit as opposed to a military aviation flight suit) I'd be more impressed. There are some very real challenges for building space suits, but it is also a well developed and tested engineering regime. About a thousand people have been into space so far, which has given plenty of practical tests and mountains of data to compare against including some problems that happened in terms of the assumptions people made with those suits that simply is incorrect.
It is nice that some people are thinking about these issue, but I hardly think this group in the main parent article is going really be setting any sort of standards for suit design.
The array itself is big and powerful, but it's nothing we haven't been doing for decades, and not the kind of design you would want to use if your whole mission was power generation.
Oh, really? I've seen all kinds of whimsical proposals for space solar power that sort of presumes that the solar panels you can pick up at Harbor Freight (or whatever dealer you can find online or via Amazon) can simply be slapped together with super light weight duct tape and bailing twine and magically be able to transmit that power to the Earth.
From my perspective, the actually transmitters are the easy part of the whole space solar power, not the deal breaker. Instead, you need to find a way to scale up these arrays in a way that will actually work. You need to find ways to cool down those arrays and also find a way to actually get them built. While no doubt there might be some ways to automate the deployment of these panels, some considerable experience can be gained in terms of how the ISS was constructed in the first place and may very well require getting a few people to get "out there" to perform some EVAs in order to get such large scale structures built. Scaling structures is never easy, and I contend that the ISS, as well as experience on both MIR and Skylab for their solar arrays can prove to be invaluable in terms of realizing what real world issues you will encounter when trying to actually deploy these kind of devices.
Yes, this is something that is very different than what has been done for decades on other spacecraft. I will admit that the basic solar cell has been largely identical the whole time, but again that isn't the show stopper in terms of getting one of those large mega arrays built. The solar panel array on the ISS simply has no equal and is a real world example and something that is in current use as opposed to something that is a fairy tale and pipe dream on some designers desk. Anybody who ignores the engineering challenges that were discovered and overcome (much less some serious problems that the station has had to deal with over its lifetime) is ignoring a huge database of information that will be absolutely vital to building a real large scale solar panel array.
At the very least I would expect designers to try and explain why their design is superior to the ISS array and mention specific engineering flaws in the ISS array as something they intend to overcome with an alternate approach. That is real world engineering here, and in the literature I've read I simply don't see that kind of thing happening at all. They simply pretend that the ISS was never even built in the first place.
That may be true, but in the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of computing technology. The Apollo Guidance Computer was nearly the very first major device built with integrated circuits. So many chips were used by NASA that it represented something like 60%-70% of the global production for computer chips at the time and one of the reasons why many people associated NASA with computer technology. NASA also created the first real-time operating systems, as well as the notion of a time-share system that would have multiple users concurrently using the same computer resources. Web servers are a lasting legacy to this early technology. There was a time that NASA really did push the technology and got software and computer engineers to really do things, very basic and fundamental things, that had never been done before and helped advance the industry in ways that still are being impacted by those efforts.
While I will admit that Velcro and Tang (much less the Fischer Space Pen) had nothing to do with NASA other than NASA used all of those items, there certainly were many advances in technology that happened when NASA really pushed the boundaries. It really is remarkable realizing just how little was known about the Moon in 1961 when Kennedy made his famous speech about going to the Moon "before this decade is out". Even when the Gemini flights were happening, there was still debate going on about how many of the craters on the Moon were volcanic vents as opposed to impact craters (some apparently are, but far fewer than was thought at the time). Theories like the Late Heavy Bombardment simply had never even been considered until after the astronauts actually got to the Moon and were really examining the features up close.
My point is that NASA is no longer in the forefront of pushing technology like it was doing in the 1960's. As a result, while there certainly are some interesting things that NASA is still doing, it is just a shadow of what it was like. Simply dumping money into NASA isn't going to change that either.
Oh, I think there still are some things NASA could be doing that could really push the frontiers of technology in a similar fashion. The NAUTLUS-X spaceship (yes, spaceship as opposed to spacecraft) is one of those wacky off the wall things that IMHO should be getting much more support to actually get built. A real space program with a strong vision for what it should be doing is another. There just hasn't been a president since LBJ that cared to do any of that, which is why NASA is just a lame government agency right now.
I could have said the same thing about the Occupy movement, other than the fact that the Reform Party had almost nothing to do with what happened in that case. While the specific actions or kinds of people involved may be different, both were a reaction that something is fundamentally flawed with America and that it needs to be fixed in some fashion.
On the other hand, there were some basic principles involved with many in the Tea Party events. I don't mind if there are some basic objections to those principles and a disagreement with how they should be implemented, but I do object to people painting what happened as a sort of joke or spouting off flat out lies that are perpetuated by liberal publications by people who never even attended those events.
The most telling of what has happened occurred at the GOP National Convention last year, when several motions were presented before the convention and in spite of extremely loud "No" votes and motions asking for a poll (aka formally counting votes) of the delegates, the "chair" decided that the resolutions passed and completely ignored that the delegates even existed. They claimed to be using Robert's Rules of Order, but the whole convention was a farce. Certainly individual delegates were completely meaningless on any opinion they represented.... in stark contrast to political conventions done in the 20th Century were delegates really did matter. That wasn't being easily swayed by others, that is simply being out right ignored and sidelined.
Well, there is mountains of indisputable evidence that illustrates how the Tea Party was funded by billionaires
I wouldn't mind some of those billionaire's funds being sent my way. No doubt there were some of the events that may have had some sponsorship as you suggest, and certainly a great portion of the anger and energy from these groups has been redirected to help support sell-outs. Everything I've ever been involved with has not had a single dime of that money so I know for a fact that you are full of it to even think that it is strictly the actions of a couple of billionaires.
None the less, your "mountains" of evidence completely betray the fact that there were millions of people who did come out to these events in protest and did want to make a difference politically. That they've been betrayed from the principles that they went to support is sort of sad.
The problem I've seen is not really that they are delusional, but rather that they are extremely naive in believing that the officially published rules and the proclaimed ways of doing politics (aka showing up to meetings and speaking out, writing letters to members of congress, etc.) actually work. Especially signing some sort of silly petition. Most of the people I've met simply don't understand hard ball politics as it really is the first time they became politically active. When they realize that being politically involved is a whole lot of hard work of knocking on doors and really digging deep to try and get support on some issue or the other, most of them pretty much fade away and just bicker on the sidelines.
...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
I would rather use the number of federal employees as a yard stick of the size of the government, which certainly was larger under the FDR administration, that still doesn't give the notion that we are living under a less controlling government right now.
Hell, do you really think America as it exists today has the same freedoms that we enjoyed in 2000 (aka before 9/11)?
For myself, I don't give a damn about whatever or whoever calls themselves a "tea party conservative" as the term is meaningless at the moment. Regardless, such stereotyping nonsense that you are giving here also shows how utterly out of touch you are with those who actually tried to make a difference and have been cast off to the side as meaningless stepping stones on the careers of several politicians.
A good friend of mine was held as a political prisoner in America (his crime was getting elected as the chair of his precinct then speaking out against party officials). When the judge finally heard the case about a week later, the charges were dropped.... but still didn't get any kind of apology and indeed his "credentials" were stripped from him. Yeah, that is somebody who is full of ignorance, racism, and astroturf. Oh yeah, that week while he sat in prison was during a political convention that he was supposed to be attending. Anybody that supported him was also similarly threatened with arrest.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place.
The Koch brothers?
Nice try. If you really think the whole thing involves just two brothers who have otherwise bribed a bunch of gullible people into doing their dirty work, perhaps America is really a lost nation. Do you really think there aren't greater principles involved?
That is Zero point five percent or a half of a percent, not five percent. It was only that high (about 4%-5%) during the Apollo program with the race to the Moon, and hasn't even been close to that funding level for decades.
Since you bring up ROI, I would have to agree that the money spent on Apollo has ultimately resulted in more money going into the American economy and in the long run far more economic activity from the resulting technology developed than if the money had simply been refunded to the tax payers for them to spend on Super Bowl tickets and other frivolous things. That said, how much of that kind of extreme cutting edge technology is being developed at NASA at the moment?
Computer technology for NASA missions is using not just yesterday's technology, but even a generation or two even further back. To give an example, the computer being used for the New Horizons spacecraft (currently enroute to Pluto) has the same CPU (admittedly radiation hardened and a bit more robust) that the Sony Playstation One uses. The Space Shuttle guidance computers were 16-bit computers that were about as powerful as the original IBM-PCs.
The SLS program seems to be a reboot to the Apollo program. The engines on the SLS are going to use the Space Shuttle Main Engines (literally.... they are using the very same engines that were used on the now retired shuttles and will throw them away in the Atlantic when the 1st stage is used). They are even reviewing the J-2 engine that the Saturn V used for its 2nd stage.
I could go on, but my point is that so little is really breaking new ground and pushing technology that I fail to see what NASA is actually doing at the moment that is worth even the limited funds it is receiving at the moment. From a ROI perspective, there basically isn't any.
It should be of note that even within NASA, programs like those you have mentioned are being cut in favor of SLS & the James Webb telescope. Like all government funding, those projects which go under budget and are efficient tend to get even less funding, while wasteful projects tend to get an ever larger share of the funding. Robotic missions have been cut so severely over the last couple of budget cycles that it is simply amazing that any of the researchers are even bothering to stick around.
As Ronald Reagan said: "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
That wasn't Ronald Reagan who said that. Instead, it was Everett Dirksen, who admittedly was a Republican congressman in the 1960's. He supposedly said this on an appearance with the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
One thing that the ISS has that is of particular note is the largest solar power farm in space. For all of those who think that the future of energy needs can be obtained by harvesting power from space, I don't know why virtually none of the "space solar power" advocates use any of the lessons learned from the ISS, nor why it isn't being used more actively to conduct tests from orbit.
Keep in mind that the ISS has a solar power plant of about 100 kilowatts, with an effective 30-40 kilowatts of continuous usage. That is a considerable power reserve that could be put to use in a number of ways even if people are pulled from the station completely.
Yeah, there is a whole lot of engineering research that could happen on the ISS that simply isn't being done right now.
The human spaceflight portion of this agency should be entirely decimated. In particular we should end US participation in the ISS. Little good science is returned from that endeavor at this point.
Those who complain about human crews in space simply don't have a damn clue about what it is that people actually do in space.
I'll agree that the current manned spaceflight program is a total joke at the moment, particularly with the infatuation with the manned program for going to Mars that is really nothing more than a jobs program to keep the companies who build ICBMs in business until the next round of missiles need to be developed. The Constellation/SLS programs in particular are a complete and total joke and a waste of money on such a monumental scale that it amazes me that anybody involved can keep a straight face when they talk about it. Considering that the Manned Spaceflight Center has no vehicles currently or even under contract that can take astronauts into space, it shows how little they actually give a damn about even trying to get a crewed program going. If it wasn't for the Soviet-developed Soyuz rockets, there wouldn't even be a manned spaceflight program.
This said, I think a responsible crewed spaceflight program can most certainly be developed... even a government program that is slightly more wasteful simply because it is a government program. Realistic goals and pushing the frontier of human existence is what was the original manned spaceflight program under NASA. There was a time when astronauts really were going "boldly where nobody has gone before" instead of "meekly going where hundreds have been". There is a point to having people in space being able to react to the environment and be able to perform tasks that machines simply are horrible about doing. It certainly shouldn't be seen as "robots vs. humans", but instead as complimentary uses where each kind of exploration program can help the other.
The ISS program was certainly not done for any science, but instead needs to be viewed as a foreign aid program. From that perspective, the ISS has been a tremendous benefit for world peace and has done a whole lot of good, at least as good as any other foreign aid program of comparable size. For myself, I sort of go "meh" in terms of continued support of the ISS. It did its job and is a nice facility for the amount of money dumped on it. If continued use of the ISS doesn't cost all that much additional money, there are some real positive things that could be done there. The best would be some real research on partial gravity (not microgravity) in a rotating reference frame, trying some technologies that will be needed for crewed missions to Mars (like perhaps even inflatable modules like the Trans-Hab.... let's get that up there finally!), and running some long term duration tests with ion engines or the VASMR engine. These are all technologies that simply can't be tested on the ground and the ISS is a perfect place to perform those kind of engineering tests. Note, I'm not saying science should happen, at least not pure science. Still, there are some things that having people in space can most definitely do.
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place. It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place. I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Yes, those involved with the Tea Party also know full well that they are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of cutting pork for their home states and wanting the government to be significantly scaled back on all levels, both federal, state, and locally. It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent and thinking both Democrats and Republicans are screwing up, and that it will take a huge economic redistribution to "set things right again" that will most certainly hurt a number of people if all of those programs are cut. The hope is that if the government is cut down significantly, that those abuses of authority can be much more easily identified and removed as well. As it is, the government at all levels is so huge that many of the current abuses are really background noise.
I will agree with you that the "neo-cons" who have taken over the banner of the "Tea Party" and trashed any real progress that those involved actually tried to accomplish. These congressmen are largely stateists who really do want their their own special interests (aka campaign contributors) to get government money instead of the special interests of the other guys. The whole thing that is currently happening in DC is just churning my stomach and making me want to barf. Yes, I'm talking about you, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And they're the best of the lot. Don't get me started on guys like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who are complete sell-outs.
PS: For the great majority of ancient, we *do not* have the equivalent of FaceBook posts to augment the vast reams of inventory, royal notices and laws. The peasant's lives are reconstructed from evidence, not learned from text.
You obviously don't do much research on 19th Century historical events. There are indeed substantial amounts of written information from that time period where "peasants" were literate and left behind a considerable legacy. To name one particular historical record that IMHO is almost precisely like a bunch of Facebook posts that instead was from the 1860's is this diary of a private in the U.S. Army during the U.S. Civil War (he served in the 2nd California Infantry Regiment). He was not a great war leader or for that matter anything more than a humble farmer that was drafted into military service at the time, just like hundreds of thousands of other people where the same thing happened.
While I will agree that prior to about the 18th Century such diaries were uncommon, my point is that such things do exist, and surprisingly give an interesting bit of information when you do find such things. I have seen ancient pictographs written on the walls of caves and cliffs, put there by societies without a formal written language. More than art, they actually do convey some substantial information if you can but try to understand it.
Part of the reason why we can understand how some ancient Sumerian common villager lived is also in part by watching how similar peasants live today in 3rd world countries under similar living conditions. A surprising amount of that information comes from diaries and such as well written for modern ethnographers, or at least researched by those who are studying modern cultures in part to understand cultures of the past. Such mundane records would definitely be of interest to historians trying to get some additional information about what happened in some significant event.