i imagine this is just too complicated a problem to solve..
Just one coat of some sort of film would double the lifespan of the solar arrays. I am not sure what the battery situation is like, but it seems at the moment that the panels will go first. As to the film type, thats just one of the ideas. But one could imagine many systems, and if we are talking one coat, it could be just plain mechanical tension or even opaque (so that it does not need to be too exotic) adhesive between the individual panel elements.
Does your windex take off rust that's chemically bonded?
Why oh why would someone coat the panels with something that can even remotely be prone to chemically binding with soil?! And I am going to repeat the million times mentioned simple solution of a peel-off film! And guess what? ONE coat of peeloff film means twice the lifetime of the rover. Ponder that!
BTW, the RTGs are so politically loaded that noone is going to send any anywhere anytime soon. Besides they are apparently much heavier then they wanted the rovers to be for the types of boosters they could afford.
..the vast majority of users need to run the following apps..
The minimal list in our case is indeed just a web browser (web based email). Some people have web-based CRM or MRP systems, some others use stuff like, for example, a customized Syspro's Impact Encore.
I'm aware you can do this sort of customisation and establish a Terminal Server in Windows; I've done it myself several times. However, it's much MUCH easier to do it with Linux, plus you're not worrying about licence management/violations with MS Office apps.
Not only that but you cant actually properly lock down a Windows Terminal Services session. There are always backdoors and tricks the user can do to get at the IE or some other apps since Windows security is laughable and many apps just will not run unless they have access to 1/2 of the system. If you restrict access to the IE then the bloody desktop wont run! I mean its just a nightmare.
Oh, and the whole Group Policy system is the most retarded thing ever invented. I mean noone has any clue what the hell is going on inside that thing and the results are totally unpredictable and completely resiliant to any sort of debugging (like most stuff in Windows).
...but desktop systems have rollouts only every e.g. 3-4 years rather than every e.g 2.
We find this much longer. I have some older solid-state IBM NetVista ThinClients (4-5 years) and before that some, believe or not, old DEC X-windows terminals which approach 6-10 years range, hopping along happilly. The only thing that wears out are keyboards and mice and those are dime a dozen (the old DEC keyboards are near-indestructible). I hope the trend continues, with more profound cost saving impact yet, since we started agressively pushing $300 specialized solid-state (no moving parts) clients like
these. The linux embedded OS version of course. I expect 10-year service out of them (again excluding keyboards etc). There is absolutely no reason that I can foresee which would require anyone to upgrade these.
I'm not the one assuming that Nasa engineers are stupid here.
Neither am I. The same cannot be however said about the managers of NASA and all the other assorted bureaucratic bullshit that goes on there. My theory is that the engineers knew very well this is going to happen but some other politcal reasons exist for which no solution was made. And so now engineers must tow the company line.
Dirt that contains chemicals that interact with the material of the panels == Magic Space Dirt
And so you design the coating of the panels just so it actively reacts with Martian dust or athmosphere. Composition of which is pretty much known. And forget our extensive knowledge of ceramic and silicon based coatings. Not to mention other more exotic materials.
You are stuck in "lemme make things seem way more complicated then they are so I can defend those guys no matter what mistakes they make" mode. Its draining your batteries.
For problems like this, there's no such thing as a 'simple answer'.
In general, when problems are complex, I would agree. But we are talking about dirt here. Something people have been cleaning for millenia from all imaginable surfaces in all imaginable conditions. I just will not accept any cop-outs in the vain of "Oooh.. dirt on Mars is like... Space Dirt, man! Its magical!". As many others and myself pointed out in other messages on this thread, this particular technical problem is just too dumb to not have a feasible solution. Therefore things other then shortage of engineering creativity are far more likely to be the cause of not having such solution in place.
...rednder common dust abatement methods here on earth ineffective
While thats true, we know hell of a lot about properties of dust in myriad of conditions. Things like conductive surfaces as means of reducing the clinging force, things like translucent films that can be peeled off the surface of the panels along with the dust, things like liquids that do not freeze even below -80 and have similiar properties to the common solvants etc etc etc. Not to mention mechanical solutions like vibration and high pressure gas jets (small chemical charges or compessed CO2 or some such). I mean thre are miriad of potential solutions to one of the most common problems human kind ever encountered!
Re:Concerning charged particles...
on
Mars Rovers Update
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· Score: 2, Informative
but this reduces transparency quite a bit,
I am not sure you realize that all of the LCD displays feature transparent conductive surfaces for the electrodes. Hell, most of them have entire circuits that are transparent (TFT = Thin Film Transistor). There are chemicals that are for all practical purposes transparent and are conductive.
There is nothing that can convince me that there is no way around this problem.
Same here. I am more and more convinced it was some kind of political/managerial cockup. NASA is famous for having roaming bands of pointy-hear manager morons who engage in turf wars and pissing contests between each other either due to influence peddling on behalf on contractors or just because they are jerks with egos the size of Texas. That was the main reason behind the 2 shuttle accidents and I am sure it has some part to play in this as well.
I dont buy this for a second. Removal of fine, electro-statically dust, has been practiced on this planet for centuries if not millenia. There are entire industries based on this practice. I am convinced that it was one of those famous NASA managerial pissing contests that ensured no "feasible" or "practical" solution. Read: the companies which proposed the solutions were not part of the "in" crowd.
That is not the point. If a bunch of random yahoos can come up with, on the face of it, at least partially feasible ideas and the engineers in charge dont do anything about it including providing explanation as to why they ignored the issue, you got an impression of incompetence or some hidden agendas.
A vibrator? Might work although probably could be destructive...
Hmm, after another 15 minutes of mental effort: a thin brush on an arm mounted to the side of the camera mast. You lower the (very thin and light single file brush) with a small step motor to the horizontal position and then you rotate the camera mast to create a sweeping motion on the panels. You could brush the 2 side panels that way, since if you planned for it, there would be no portruding gear to get in the way of the brush (all such gear would be back of the mast).
And so on...
I am really flabbergasted why there is absolutely no provision for any sort of cleaning (even a partial one) on the rovers. Its not like this wasnt expected. I smell some sort of hidden agenda in shortening the life of the rovers.
Say, a step motor and some mechanical jiggery-pokery ending with a stiff wire, a hook on its end, the layers would have tabs with holes in them to pull at.
Or.. a glue between layers that deteriorates on contact with Martian athmosphere and so the layers will peel off after a fixed (based on chemistry) time.
I mean, give me a break, those took less then 10 seconds to come up with and I am sure NASA engineers could have thought up much more effective methods.
You know, this sort of an oppinion can only come from someone who never spent years in real-life trenches of IT.
It's certainly not easier to use..
Depends on the definition of "easier to use". We customise all user desktops (we use Linux as a terminal server) so that only 5-10 icons are present and those are the only apps the users can access. Easy to use, no confusion. Study after study shows that giving the administrative workers access to all sorts of "accessiores" produces hours of fucking around with screen savers. Web access is restricted to the intranet and few choice sites. No ebay and chatting. Huge increases in productivity and a lot of whining from the spoiled brats when we implement this, usually in the vain of "this sux! On Windows I could play my Backgammon with the dude in shipping all day!". Those who are there to work and make their company successful somehow never complain. Go figure.
Oh and I can just imagine the sort of friction the dudes in Munich are getting from the government workers, I truly sympathise guys.
.. the performance isn't better on average..
Again depends on the definition. If you are looking to squeeze the maximum from your existing hardware so that your return on investment is maximized, you use Linux. Otherwise you go upgrade all your PCs every 2 years on schedule. The advent of Windows Terminal Services (something Linux/Unix had for ages) made Windows more competetive but thats not how most Windows installations are deployed. We tend to use Linux based Terminal Servers as a primary mode so the hardware requirements on clients are next to nothing.
.. and the support isn't as good.
You cant be for real. I have people with applications on Windows who pay $7.5k in "support contract" fees for their windows software and they call me to rescue them because that wonderful support just works so great. Did you ever call Microsoft for anything? I did a dozen or so times. Last time it was ~$250 US per "incident" (you will not catch me dead with a MS support contract) and after spending 1/2 a day I still didn't get to talk to anyone who could diagnose a BSOD, even though I went to all the trouble of preparing the dumps and messing with the system debugger and symbol files to try to get the call stack extracted so we could backtrack to the offending code. Oh, and that other time when I called after finding out a critical bug in MS SQL only to find out that a) SQL support is ~$350US per incident and its a call-back "less then 48hrs" response time and b) its not a "bug" but it will be fixed in the "next release". I stopped calling MS many years back, simply because when I looked at the results they never provided me any useful assistance.
Windows world suport is not in any shape or form better then that on Linux and unlike Windows apps, I can at least attempt a work around or even a fix since I can program in several languages.
I am starting to find all these people who repeat mindlessly Redmont's propaganda with no actual practical experience in the matter, truly infuriorating.
While I don't disagree that unregulated globalism does impact the local job scene to some extent
This is even more complicated, even though you are right about a maximum ceiling the employers are willing to pay per worker, also take into consideration the fact that contrary to what some charlatans and demagouges of globalization propose, it is the manufacturing jobs that are the mainstay of any economy. Plants hire workers to produce new products directly, they need auxiliary services of transportation, support, parts, IT and other infrastructure, etc. Workers themselves (now richer) need additional services and so on. It is no wonder that Chinese economy is booming while ours stagnates. Our manufacturing has been shipping itself out abroad for decades now. And without those foundations all other businesses are at a disadvantage and thus the abilities to hire people at the maximum wages that make sense are severely lowered. Both the capacity and the top wage levels. We are in effect financing their boom because vast majority of our money ends up in pockets of Chinese manufacturers and is recycled in China. This applies to other low cost manufacturing havens. We are utterly doomed with the current imbecillic politicos running the show here and in Europe. Business elites are doing their damnest to make sure this situation lasts as long as possible since they are the ones benefiting by managing the flow of finances between the countries (with their own pockets growing steadilly from the outflow). I believe that you managed to escape France just in time to witness the shit hit the fan here, and just watch all the whining that is going to be coming from the corporate TV channels about "socialist lazy workers" in the US.
This will continue until the business elites are many many times wealthier and the rest of us are at the level of the common lowest global denominator for wages and social services. That is if the fascists, commies or some other radical movement doesnt take advantage of massive poverty and anger that will be the result of this here.
Welcome to the slippery slopes of hell! Enjoy the ride!
The truth is that EVERYONE can do that. However, current society makes degenerates out of people, it tries to make not creators but consumers...
That is where I beg to differ. Taking your own evolutionary yardstick, people's capacities are distributed on a bell curve, where the extremes are the drooling morons and geniuses. Vast majority will fall in the fattest part of the curve. Unfortunately the ratio of combined morons, average Joes and those just above average people will always be greater then that of the self made "winners".
It is all the question of balance. If potential underachivers are educated at school properly, they will try tyo become achivers. And I don't mean salary; many people agree that the different between a winner and a loser is inside their minds.
Same thing again, I dont believe that it is achievable without some serious reingeenering of the inner workings of the human mind by means of genetic engineering, Sparta-like pruning or some such. No I dont think mysticism will do the trick. On top of that, you have the probem of vastly uneven starting positions. In Libertarian society it would be possible (just like presently) for some people to be so far ahead in wealth and power (implied by material resources) of others that their offspring would be unassailable by default. If I were to be born at the bottom of the pile and have the smarts and ability to be a "winner" and if the "mystical" teachings found little traction with me I might consider some rather unorthodox strategies of getting ahead if you get my meaning. And smarter a villain I would be, quicker I would overtake the place. I am sure there would be enough of malcontents to organise into some sort of bloody revolution fueled by my genetically engineered weapons of mass destruction. I would like also to point out that you seem to equate the "losers" with lazy and uresourceful. Unfortunately many of these people today are very smart and can be quite tennacious when they hate someone. They just find a vegeatative state more appealing most of the time. That is how a band of jealous "losers" who feel wronged can organise itself into something rather frightening and efficiently lethal to the "winners". You see their "winner" traits are only triggered if they feel envy and subsequently hate. And the strategies they usualy employ when annoyed have little to do with peaceful competiton.
In essence what I was trying to explain before is that the system like that is at best an unworkable utopia and is just as flawed and vulnerable as the current concoctions. It would only succeed if nearly everyone was of similiar mindset. And that is by definition an impossibility with the current memebers of Homo Sapiens.
The Libertarian one will try to make everyone better.
So tried Communism (as Marx would have it - he went endlessly on about education and bettering oneself). This failed for the same reason Libertarian approach is doomed. I say what you describe is equally against human nature as what Marx proposed. He believed people will share and cooperate selflessly, you believe people will respect each other and their society will achieve a state of balance. Both cases dont account for a smart, creative, achieving and utterly ruthless band of villains hell bent on perverting them to their own ends. And both lack safeguards against such band. Our current system has at least a precursory set of precautions, complete with semi-controllable government which is tasked with keeping some of the more destructive forces in check.
Ha, I have no troubles whatsoever with this, mysticism not required, I am quite at ease with my materialist worldview. I was merely describing what happens to the vast majority of people.
You've forgotten the word "ignorant";-).
Well, lets not get personal, shall we. What is one man's ignorance and delusion is another's sane and methodical approach to the world. I was trying to be diplomatic but as you can probably imagine, talking to a materialist about "energy of Judgement" is about as futile as it is going to get.
As to the qigong I can only go by pieces like this.
On the subject women and sexual exploits I shall remain mute although I would admit that every discipline has its masters and I am probably not considered one. But then again, for me, unlike for some others, that not the goal of my existence.
You indicated the athlete/couch potato gap as the example of societal differences. If it were statistically similiar indeed, we would have less then 0.1% of population competing and the rest homeless/hermits/addicts. That was my main objection. In addition if you were to insist on this analogy, one would have to start making adjustments like making some people start 1/2 mile behind some others and make some other people carry 150 pound rocks while they take part in the race. Also one would start asking what is this race all about ? What is the prize? Why is this taking place in the form of a "race" and is this the only way human societies can function, as a winner-takes-all competitions?
In theory, all those things are good for the employees. In practice, all those things prevented me from starting a career there.
I think the reason for this is somewhat different that you believe. These types of regulations that force social responsibility work only if they are applied uniformely across the board. Otherwise the employers (many if not most being greed motivated) would look for ways to weasle out of it. Or destroy the protection in some way. So they will "outsource" to India or keep denying employment to young people (and scream about it as loud as they can on the pages of right-wing magazines). That is why these sort of systems are doomed to failure when coupled with "capital globalization" whereby the capital/corporations can freely move around the globe and labour cannot.
Looking for a job in my native country turned out to be an humiliating process. There was so much competition. I had so little experience. It didn't make any sense to stay there.
I am sorry to hear that but what I pointed out above is already producing what is known here as a "race to the bottom" whereby wages and employment opportunities are being equalized with those of the more abusive and backwards societies like China or India. If this brand of globalization were to succeed, our standards of living will soon be at the level of those in Haiti.
That gap will grow wider and uglier everyday. I've come to accept that. I don't pretend to offer any solution, but at least I don't want to have anyone else interfere with the process.
I dont understand. Does this mean you advocate total abolishment of government? Thats a recipe for feudal lords returning. Am I missing something? Are you expecting to become one? Or expect to be sold in bondage? I for one will try to hold this unwieldy pack of explosive crap called "western society" in some state resembling stability. I disagree with your premise that every measure has to backfire. Or at least I dont consider some of the effects as "backfire". It all depends on your definition of our society's "purpose". If happiness of a majority is the point, perheaps stagnation and supression of achievers beats the opposite case of really pissed off masses at war with a few Ubermensch. At least until such time that progress (slowed down as it might be) brings us about some technological solution to this mess.
Your comparison to athletes has no bearning on this, because for it to be true, every citizen would have to be competing. On top of that the sport itself is an utterly pointless excercise in futility, but I digress.
This has many fallacies and its long, so I will tackle just a choice few
.. True, it will be harder on the "loserish" part of population, but the "welfare capitalism"="european socialism" is much harder on active, achieving part of the population whose freedom and creativity is stiffled and whose very existance is threatened by the liberal brainwashing..
It all depends what you deem the "purpose" of human society is. If you put "progress", "innovation" and "creativity" ahead of "happiness", than what you say is true. Having large part (the "loserish" part is something like 60% of the population) of the society unhappy so that the creative few can be free and live large is an acceptable price. On the other hand when one answers "happiness", then the happiness of the majority takes precedence over the few who are then limited in achieving their potential. Its this choice that is being made. Tyranny of the masses I am afraid and if you want to go your way you will most likely end up shoving it down the throats of rather ungrateful majority of "losers". I dont see much prospect for sucess in this recipe.
At the same time, how will they be able to take over the society of strong and determined people who are not afraid of anything, including uniting?
What I understood from that book, it described a society of ultimate egoists who practice non-agression as means of maintaining social order. That means they have no government, no army and no common funds for defense. Accordingly, I, the would-be-emperor Ignoramus, would simply gather a sufficiently large number of my fellow jackasses and then form an army of loot and pillage types to raid the whole Libertarian thing sitting there ripe for the picking. By the time the good citizens of Utopialand would get themselves organized (first they would have to build an army from ground up complete with tax funding and military contractors), my crooks would have them all under gun point or dead. Since we pack modern weapons, even 10 to 1 numerical superiority would be insufficient to defend against us with ad-hoc tactics and weaponry. On top of that, since we are dogs of war, we dont obey any humanitarian treaties and shoot dead anyone who oposes us...
Who in your opinion deserves to be happier - achievers or lazy ones?
If by making the achievers happy you plan to piss off the vast majority of non-achievers, you got some seriously painful lessons coming up about the rules of politics.
...It is America of the strong versus America of the weak....
You know, this whole thing reminds of Sparta. I think Spartans were Libertarians in that sense. They even made sure only strongest children are allowed to live. I think it fits quite nicely with what you promote. I knew this had a familiar ring.
This is not about strong versus weak. It is about how to find a system where all these various stripes of society can cooperate without major friction. Trying to make everyone uniform (and thats what the Spartan.. err... I mean Libertarian system is) will not work. The problem is difficult and messy and I dont think what is going on is particularly efficent or effective way to solve it. But it sure beats the hell out of starting a civil war..
OK, answer a question - do you think that it will be much or any worse comparing with the current "modern American capitalism" system? WHERE exactly it will be worse?
Red Banner waving commies or Brown Shirts on the streets of New York? Or perheaps the raiding army of one Emperor Ignoramus? It would end up in something like that if you tried your system as you described it in something remotely resembling current conditions.
Oh by the way, guess what. After a spectacular and heroic fight... Spartans got their asses handed to them.
However, if the true spirituality/mysticism* will be taught societywide,
Oh, brother..
If you want to change your life and the world, change yourself
Sure its true that by "changing yourself" you can achieve state of harmony with the world. A rock is in harmony with the world too. No pain. No worries. Perfect synchrony with the universe. Trouble is people are not rocks. What upsets the balance all the time are: faulty evolutionary (assuming you are not a creationist) psychological baggage (some of which can indeed be controlled by mental effort), disturbing social interactions and knowledge about the world. It is a long known fact that more knowledgeable you are, less comfortable and more stressed you are. "Ignorance is bliss", one of the wisest proverbs in existance. That is because knowledge, while offering some kinds of power, also offers uncertainity. As more questions get answered, even more new questions arise. That is what pains most people. That is why they invent various religions. To simplify their worlds. To give them order and meaning.
This spirituality/mysticism is just another go at it. It might work as a therapy if one believes in it, but battle scarred, thick skinned materialists like myself are far beyond its reach.
And it is cynical dudes like us who you gotta worry about when promoting a way to "get or strengthen all kind of gifts and achieve enlightenment". We might just start asking for proof, complete with controlled lab experiments.
Certainly, modern Libertarianism is a R-based ideology* that stresses individual responsibility and meritocracy, but it is not that inhumane unlike your depictions.
What I am objecting to is the fact that this philosophy appears to have severe deficiences when dealing with imperfections of human nature. As the experience with all the "revolutions" and attempts at introducing social changes have shown in the past, the designers of an "improved" social system must first show that the system will not fail miserably under the worst case scenarios. Not the best, where nearly everyone participates and contributes. If everyone would take part and respect the rules of the social order, Libertarianism would work... but so would Communism! The problem is that it only takes a small cabal of determined and smart assholes to take over both! So you have to come up with a way to make this work with this unfortunate reality: "population = 80% irrational, pleasant and honest idiots, 15% jackasses and 5% nice and smart people who would make a go of any utopia". Until then you can file this right next to Marx.
Btw, I tried to check that link and my commie Mozilla showed only top few lines. It looked like some sort of interlaced bitmap..
As far as I was able to see you were referring to reproductive strategies of human spieces. If you are trying to apply this paradigm to a political system... I fear you would end up with a repeat of the October revolution if you would try to put forth some sort of "survival of the fittest" idea as the governing social motto.
Man, I cant believe this stuff, the woman is either super-naive or has some other hidden agenda. She lays down some resonable assumptions and observations and then... flings herself two continents over into some completely unsubstantiated conclusions which bear no resemblance to the arguments supposedly leading to them.
Lemme see, "we are tought to be non-violent and respect others" so that leads to...... "we should have no taxes!". Ugh. She misses of course the wee little points like that you just cant count (proven by nasty experiences in the late 1800s) on an affluent majority to help poor minorities. And that you just cannot count on people to donate to keep an army going or else there will be 10 dudes with a bicycle, a donkey and a canoe acting as national defense. And so on.
All of these gems of illogic after just one chapter! Cool stuff, I sensed serious comedy here and so I kept reading.
Then we find out that wealth = knowledge. Hardly suprising but unfortunately the conlusions again land far away from the assumptions. US did get disproportionately wealthy due to its profiteering first on freshly stolen land and then on financing two world wars. Following which it positioned itself as a central hub of world finances and commerce. So aggression served it quite well thank you. Freedom had its part but many other places with equal freedoms (Great Britain, France) did not prosper even remotely as well. Japan, an aggressor in WWII was a wealthy and powerful country even at that time (capable of challenging the US) even though it was an imperial authocracy. And so on. The link between wealth and freedom is tenuous at best while the link of conquest with wealth is proven throughout millennia of history. Furthermore the US was far less tolerant of others in its history than she makes it out to be. Many southern states are the result of conquest of Mexico. Caraibbean islands are the result of conquest against Spain, etc etc.
Licensing = aggression + evil is another funny claim. Leading theme is that somehow the "smart" consumer will be able to tell which medical doctor is qualified and which is not by the results. Too late by then! Not only that, quackery was the main reason the regulations were introduced, terms like "snake oil salesman" are in our vocabulary for a reason (yes AMA abused the process for profit, but we chose lesser of two evils). The lesson hard learned is that as products become more and more distanced form the level of knowledge of an average purchaser, lesser the chances of him making a wise purchase. Some industies are just too dangerous for everyone to leave to quacks. Witness the PC industry and the amount of hoodwinkling and chickanery that happens here, average Joe Sixpack is just as good as conned when he buys his home PC. Lambs to the slaughter! Her ideas about making the victim "whole" do not even apply here. The victim has no clue he was screwed. He might find out looong afterwards. As a matter of fact, the "disappearing act" that conmen are fond of, is another trick that she just cant deal with. If not licensed, a con-artist will exploit a number of people with fancy talk and a lot of smoke about something they have no hope understanding and then when found out or threatened, he will dissapear only to set up shop elsewhere. This happens in limited way even now, strenuous licensing and all, but it is much harder to pull off. It would be commonplace should all the licensing be gone. Furthermore, the assumption that the consumer will somehow be able to tell who is legit when he is in pain is prepostrous. What if you are in an unfamiliar city? Yellow pages for help? I assume we get no 911 in her system (who would pay for that?! "I dont need it, cant make me, you pay for it"). It gets zany once you start pondering implications of what she is saying.
On the "making the victim whole" front, I just have no clue how this is supposed to work in case of
Slashdot Mirror
Just one coat of some sort of film would double the lifespan of the solar arrays. I am not sure what the battery situation is like, but it seems at the moment that the panels will go first. As to the film type, thats just one of the ideas. But one could imagine many systems, and if we are talking one coat, it could be just plain mechanical tension or even opaque (so that it does not need to be too exotic) adhesive between the individual panel elements.
Why oh why would someone coat the panels with something that can even remotely be prone to chemically binding with soil?! And I am going to repeat the million times mentioned simple solution of a peel-off film! And guess what? ONE coat of peeloff film means twice the lifetime of the rover. Ponder that!
BTW, the RTGs are so politically loaded that noone is going to send any anywhere anytime soon. Besides they are apparently much heavier then they wanted the rovers to be for the types of boosters they could afford.
The minimal list in our case is indeed just a web browser (web based email). Some people have web-based CRM or MRP systems, some others use stuff like, for example, a customized Syspro's Impact Encore.
I'm aware you can do this sort of customisation and establish a Terminal Server in Windows; I've done it myself several times. However, it's much MUCH easier to do it with Linux, plus you're not worrying about licence management/violations with MS Office apps.
Not only that but you cant actually properly lock down a Windows Terminal Services session. There are always backdoors and tricks the user can do to get at the IE or some other apps since Windows security is laughable and many apps just will not run unless they have access to 1/2 of the system. If you restrict access to the IE then the bloody desktop wont run! I mean its just a nightmare.
Oh, and the whole Group Policy system is the most retarded thing ever invented. I mean noone has any clue what the hell is going on inside that thing and the results are totally unpredictable and completely resiliant to any sort of debugging (like most stuff in Windows).
We find this much longer. I have some older solid-state IBM NetVista ThinClients (4-5 years) and before that some, believe or not, old DEC X-windows terminals which approach 6-10 years range, hopping along happilly. The only thing that wears out are keyboards and mice and those are dime a dozen (the old DEC keyboards are near-indestructible). I hope the trend continues, with more profound cost saving impact yet, since we started agressively pushing $300 specialized solid-state (no moving parts) clients like these. The linux embedded OS version of course. I expect 10-year service out of them (again excluding keyboards etc). There is absolutely no reason that I can foresee which would require anyone to upgrade these.
Neither am I. The same cannot be however said about the managers of NASA and all the other assorted bureaucratic bullshit that goes on there. My theory is that the engineers knew very well this is going to happen but some other politcal reasons exist for which no solution was made. And so now engineers must tow the company line.
And so you design the coating of the panels just so it actively reacts with Martian dust or athmosphere. Composition of which is pretty much known. And forget our extensive knowledge of ceramic and silicon based coatings. Not to mention other more exotic materials.
You are stuck in "lemme make things seem way more complicated then they are so I can defend those guys no matter what mistakes they make" mode. Its draining your batteries.
In general, when problems are complex, I would agree. But we are talking about dirt here. Something people have been cleaning for millenia from all imaginable surfaces in all imaginable conditions. I just will not accept any cop-outs in the vain of "Oooh .. dirt on Mars is like ... Space Dirt, man! Its magical!". As many others and myself pointed out in other messages on this thread, this particular technical problem is just too dumb to not have a feasible solution. Therefore things other then shortage of engineering creativity are far more likely to be the cause of not having such solution in place.
While thats true, we know hell of a lot about properties of dust in myriad of conditions. Things like conductive surfaces as means of reducing the clinging force, things like translucent films that can be peeled off the surface of the panels along with the dust, things like liquids that do not freeze even below -80 and have similiar properties to the common solvants etc etc etc. Not to mention mechanical solutions like vibration and high pressure gas jets (small chemical charges or compessed CO2 or some such). I mean thre are miriad of potential solutions to one of the most common problems human kind ever encountered!
I am not sure you realize that all of the LCD displays feature transparent conductive surfaces for the electrodes. Hell, most of them have entire circuits that are transparent (TFT = Thin Film Transistor). There are chemicals that are for all practical purposes transparent and are conductive.
Same here. I am more and more convinced it was some kind of political/managerial cockup. NASA is famous for having roaming bands of pointy-hear manager morons who engage in turf wars and pissing contests between each other either due to influence peddling on behalf on contractors or just because they are jerks with egos the size of Texas. That was the main reason behind the 2 shuttle accidents and I am sure it has some part to play in this as well.
Not if the problem was well known beforehand as it was in this case. The dust was even experimentally observed on the Sojourner rover.
I dont buy this for a second. Removal of fine, electro-statically dust, has been practiced on this planet for centuries if not millenia. There are entire industries based on this practice. I am convinced that it was one of those famous NASA managerial pissing contests that ensured no "feasible" or "practical" solution. Read: the companies which proposed the solutions were not part of the "in" crowd.
That is not the point. If a bunch of random yahoos can come up with, on the face of it, at least partially feasible ideas and the engineers in charge dont do anything about it including providing explanation as to why they ignored the issue, you got an impression of incompetence or some hidden agendas.
Hmm, after another 15 minutes of mental effort: a thin brush on an arm mounted to the side of the camera mast. You lower the (very thin and light single file brush) with a small step motor to the horizontal position and then you rotate the camera mast to create a sweeping motion on the panels. You could brush the 2 side panels that way, since if you planned for it, there would be no portruding gear to get in the way of the brush (all such gear would be back of the mast).
And so on...
I am really flabbergasted why there is absolutely no provision for any sort of cleaning (even a partial one) on the rovers. Its not like this wasnt expected. I smell some sort of hidden agenda in shortening the life of the rovers.
Say, a step motor and some mechanical jiggery-pokery ending with a stiff wire, a hook on its end, the layers would have tabs with holes in them to pull at.
Or.. a glue between layers that deteriorates on contact with Martian athmosphere and so the layers will peel off after a fixed (based on chemistry) time.
I mean, give me a break, those took less then 10 seconds to come up with and I am sure NASA engineers could have thought up much more effective methods.
It's certainly not easier to use..
Depends on the definition of "easier to use". We customise all user desktops (we use Linux as a terminal server) so that only 5-10 icons are present and those are the only apps the users can access. Easy to use, no confusion. Study after study shows that giving the administrative workers access to all sorts of "accessiores" produces hours of fucking around with screen savers. Web access is restricted to the intranet and few choice sites. No ebay and chatting. Huge increases in productivity and a lot of whining from the spoiled brats when we implement this, usually in the vain of "this sux! On Windows I could play my Backgammon with the dude in shipping all day!". Those who are there to work and make their company successful somehow never complain. Go figure.
Oh and I can just imagine the sort of friction the dudes in Munich are getting from the government workers, I truly sympathise guys.
Again depends on the definition. If you are looking to squeeze the maximum from your existing hardware so that your return on investment is maximized, you use Linux. Otherwise you go upgrade all your PCs every 2 years on schedule. The advent of Windows Terminal Services (something Linux/Unix had for ages) made Windows more competetive but thats not how most Windows installations are deployed. We tend to use Linux based Terminal Servers as a primary mode so the hardware requirements on clients are next to nothing.
You cant be for real. I have people with applications on Windows who pay $7.5k in "support contract" fees for their windows software and they call me to rescue them because that wonderful support just works so great. Did you ever call Microsoft for anything? I did a dozen or so times. Last time it was ~$250 US per "incident" (you will not catch me dead with a MS support contract) and after spending 1/2 a day I still didn't get to talk to anyone who could diagnose a BSOD, even though I went to all the trouble of preparing the dumps and messing with the system debugger and symbol files to try to get the call stack extracted so we could backtrack to the offending code. Oh, and that other time when I called after finding out a critical bug in MS SQL only to find out that a) SQL support is ~$350US per incident and its a call-back "less then 48hrs" response time and b) its not a "bug" but it will be fixed in the "next release". I stopped calling MS many years back, simply because when I looked at the results they never provided me any useful assistance.
Windows world suport is not in any shape or form better then that on Linux and unlike Windows apps, I can at least attempt a work around or even a fix since I can program in several languages.
I am starting to find all these people who repeat mindlessly Redmont's propaganda with no actual practical experience in the matter, truly infuriorating.
This is even more complicated, even though you are right about a maximum ceiling the employers are willing to pay per worker, also take into consideration the fact that contrary to what some charlatans and demagouges of globalization propose, it is the manufacturing jobs that are the mainstay of any economy. Plants hire workers to produce new products directly, they need auxiliary services of transportation, support, parts, IT and other infrastructure, etc. Workers themselves (now richer) need additional services and so on. It is no wonder that Chinese economy is booming while ours stagnates. Our manufacturing has been shipping itself out abroad for decades now. And without those foundations all other businesses are at a disadvantage and thus the abilities to hire people at the maximum wages that make sense are severely lowered. Both the capacity and the top wage levels. We are in effect financing their boom because vast majority of our money ends up in pockets of Chinese manufacturers and is recycled in China. This applies to other low cost manufacturing havens. We are utterly doomed with the current imbecillic politicos running the show here and in Europe. Business elites are doing their damnest to make sure this situation lasts as long as possible since they are the ones benefiting by managing the flow of finances between the countries (with their own pockets growing steadilly from the outflow). I believe that you managed to escape France just in time to witness the shit hit the fan here, and just watch all the whining that is going to be coming from the corporate TV channels about "socialist lazy workers" in the US.
This will continue until the business elites are many many times wealthier and the rest of us are at the level of the common lowest global denominator for wages and social services. That is if the fascists, commies or some other radical movement doesnt take advantage of massive poverty and anger that will be the result of this here.
Welcome to the slippery slopes of hell! Enjoy the ride!
That is where I beg to differ. Taking your own evolutionary yardstick, people's capacities are distributed on a bell curve, where the extremes are the drooling morons and geniuses. Vast majority will fall in the fattest part of the curve. Unfortunately the ratio of combined morons, average Joes and those just above average people will always be greater then that of the self made "winners".
It is all the question of balance. If potential underachivers are educated at school properly, they will try tyo become achivers. And I don't mean salary; many people agree that the different between a winner and a loser is inside their minds.
Same thing again, I dont believe that it is achievable without some serious reingeenering of the inner workings of the human mind by means of genetic engineering, Sparta-like pruning or some such. No I dont think mysticism will do the trick. On top of that, you have the probem of vastly uneven starting positions. In Libertarian society it would be possible (just like presently) for some people to be so far ahead in wealth and power (implied by material resources) of others that their offspring would be unassailable by default. If I were to be born at the bottom of the pile and have the smarts and ability to be a "winner" and if the "mystical" teachings found little traction with me I might consider some rather unorthodox strategies of getting ahead if you get my meaning. And smarter a villain I would be, quicker I would overtake the place. I am sure there would be enough of malcontents to organise into some sort of bloody revolution fueled by my genetically engineered weapons of mass destruction. I would like also to point out that you seem to equate the "losers" with lazy and uresourceful. Unfortunately many of these people today are very smart and can be quite tennacious when they hate someone. They just find a vegeatative state more appealing most of the time. That is how a band of jealous "losers" who feel wronged can organise itself into something rather frightening and efficiently lethal to the "winners". You see their "winner" traits are only triggered if they feel envy and subsequently hate. And the strategies they usualy employ when annoyed have little to do with peaceful competiton.
In essence what I was trying to explain before is that the system like that is at best an unworkable utopia and is just as flawed and vulnerable as the current concoctions. It would only succeed if nearly everyone was of similiar mindset. And that is by definition an impossibility with the current memebers of Homo Sapiens.
The Libertarian one will try to make everyone better.
So tried Communism (as Marx would have it - he went endlessly on about education and bettering oneself). This failed for the same reason Libertarian approach is doomed. I say what you describe is equally against human nature as what Marx proposed. He believed people will share and cooperate selflessly, you believe people will respect each other and their society will achieve a state of balance. Both cases dont account for a smart, creative, achieving and utterly ruthless band of villains hell bent on perverting them to their own ends. And both lack safeguards against such band. Our current system has at least a precursory set of precautions, complete with semi-controllable government which is tasked with keeping some of the more destructive forces in check.
Ha, I have no troubles whatsoever with this, mysticism not required, I am quite at ease with my materialist worldview. I was merely describing what happens to the vast majority of people.
You've forgotten the word "ignorant" ;-).
Well, lets not get personal, shall we. What is one man's ignorance and delusion is another's sane and methodical approach to the world. I was trying to be diplomatic but as you can probably imagine, talking to a materialist about "energy of Judgement" is about as futile as it is going to get.
As to the qigong I can only go by pieces like this.
On the subject women and sexual exploits I shall remain mute although I would admit that every discipline has its masters and I am probably not considered one. But then again, for me, unlike for some others, that not the goal of my existence.
You indicated the athlete/couch potato gap as the example of societal differences. If it were statistically similiar indeed, we would have less then 0.1% of population competing and the rest homeless/hermits/addicts. That was my main objection. In addition if you were to insist on this analogy, one would have to start making adjustments like making some people start 1/2 mile behind some others and make some other people carry 150 pound rocks while they take part in the race. Also one would start asking what is this race all about ? What is the prize? Why is this taking place in the form of a "race" and is this the only way human societies can function, as a winner-takes-all competitions?
I think the reason for this is somewhat different that you believe. These types of regulations that force social responsibility work only if they are applied uniformely across the board. Otherwise the employers (many if not most being greed motivated) would look for ways to weasle out of it. Or destroy the protection in some way. So they will "outsource" to India or keep denying employment to young people (and scream about it as loud as they can on the pages of right-wing magazines). That is why these sort of systems are doomed to failure when coupled with "capital globalization" whereby the capital/corporations can freely move around the globe and labour cannot.
Looking for a job in my native country turned out to be an humiliating process. There was so much competition. I had so little experience. It didn't make any sense to stay there.
I am sorry to hear that but what I pointed out above is already producing what is known here as a "race to the bottom" whereby wages and employment opportunities are being equalized with those of the more abusive and backwards societies like China or India. If this brand of globalization were to succeed, our standards of living will soon be at the level of those in Haiti.
I dont understand. Does this mean you advocate total abolishment of government? Thats a recipe for feudal lords returning. Am I missing something? Are you expecting to become one? Or expect to be sold in bondage? I for one will try to hold this unwieldy pack of explosive crap called "western society" in some state resembling stability. I disagree with your premise that every measure has to backfire. Or at least I dont consider some of the effects as "backfire". It all depends on your definition of our society's "purpose". If happiness of a majority is the point, perheaps stagnation and supression of achievers beats the opposite case of really pissed off masses at war with a few Ubermensch. At least until such time that progress (slowed down as it might be) brings us about some technological solution to this mess.
Your comparison to athletes has no bearning on this, because for it to be true, every citizen would have to be competing. On top of that the sport itself is an utterly pointless excercise in futility, but I digress.
It all depends what you deem the "purpose" of human society is. If you put "progress", "innovation" and "creativity" ahead of "happiness", than what you say is true. Having large part (the "loserish" part is something like 60% of the population) of the society unhappy so that the creative few can be free and live large is an acceptable price. On the other hand when one answers "happiness", then the happiness of the majority takes precedence over the few who are then limited in achieving their potential. Its this choice that is being made. Tyranny of the masses I am afraid and if you want to go your way you will most likely end up shoving it down the throats of rather ungrateful majority of "losers". I dont see much prospect for sucess in this recipe.
At the same time, how will they be able to take over the society of strong and determined people who are not afraid of anything, including uniting?
What I understood from that book, it described a society of ultimate egoists who practice non-agression as means of maintaining social order. That means they have no government, no army and no common funds for defense. Accordingly, I, the would-be-emperor Ignoramus, would simply gather a sufficiently large number of my fellow jackasses and then form an army of loot and pillage types to raid the whole Libertarian thing sitting there ripe for the picking. By the time the good citizens of Utopialand would get themselves organized (first they would have to build an army from ground up complete with tax funding and military contractors), my crooks would have them all under gun point or dead. Since we pack modern weapons, even 10 to 1 numerical superiority would be insufficient to defend against us with ad-hoc tactics and weaponry. On top of that, since we are dogs of war, we dont obey any humanitarian treaties and shoot dead anyone who oposes us...
Who in your opinion deserves to be happier - achievers or lazy ones?
If by making the achievers happy you plan to piss off the vast majority of non-achievers, you got some seriously painful lessons coming up about the rules of politics.
You know, this whole thing reminds of Sparta. I think Spartans were Libertarians in that sense. They even made sure only strongest children are allowed to live. I think it fits quite nicely with what you promote. I knew this had a familiar ring.
This is not about strong versus weak. It is about how to find a system where all these various stripes of society can cooperate without major friction. Trying to make everyone uniform (and thats what the Spartan.. err... I mean Libertarian system is) will not work. The problem is difficult and messy and I dont think what is going on is particularly efficent or effective way to solve it. But it sure beats the hell out of starting a civil war..
OK, answer a question - do you think that it will be much or any worse comparing with the current "modern American capitalism" system? WHERE exactly it will be worse?
Red Banner waving commies or Brown Shirts on the streets of New York? Or perheaps the raiding army of one Emperor Ignoramus? It would end up in something like that if you tried your system as you described it in something remotely resembling current conditions.
Oh by the way, guess what. After a spectacular and heroic fight ... Spartans got their asses handed to them.
Oh, brother..
If you want to change your life and the world, change yourself
Sure its true that by "changing yourself" you can achieve state of harmony with the world. A rock is in harmony with the world too. No pain. No worries. Perfect synchrony with the universe. Trouble is people are not rocks. What upsets the balance all the time are: faulty evolutionary (assuming you are not a creationist) psychological baggage (some of which can indeed be controlled by mental effort), disturbing social interactions and knowledge about the world. It is a long known fact that more knowledgeable you are, less comfortable and more stressed you are. "Ignorance is bliss", one of the wisest proverbs in existance. That is because knowledge, while offering some kinds of power, also offers uncertainity. As more questions get answered, even more new questions arise. That is what pains most people. That is why they invent various religions. To simplify their worlds. To give them order and meaning.
This spirituality/mysticism is just another go at it. It might work as a therapy if one believes in it, but battle scarred, thick skinned materialists like myself are far beyond its reach.
And it is cynical dudes like us who you gotta worry about when promoting a way to "get or strengthen all kind of gifts and achieve enlightenment". We might just start asking for proof, complete with controlled lab experiments.
What I am objecting to is the fact that this philosophy appears to have severe deficiences when dealing with imperfections of human nature. As the experience with all the "revolutions" and attempts at introducing social changes have shown in the past, the designers of an "improved" social system must first show that the system will not fail miserably under the worst case scenarios. Not the best, where nearly everyone participates and contributes. If everyone would take part and respect the rules of the social order, Libertarianism would work... but so would Communism! The problem is that it only takes a small cabal of determined and smart assholes to take over both! So you have to come up with a way to make this work with this unfortunate reality: "population = 80% irrational, pleasant and honest idiots, 15% jackasses and 5% nice and smart people who would make a go of any utopia". Until then you can file this right next to Marx.
Btw, I tried to check that link and my commie Mozilla showed only top few lines. It looked like some sort of interlaced bitmap..
As far as I was able to see you were referring to reproductive strategies of human spieces. If you are trying to apply this paradigm to a political system... I fear you would end up with a repeat of the October revolution if you would try to put forth some sort of "survival of the fittest" idea as the governing social motto.
Man, I cant believe this stuff, the woman is either super-naive or has some other hidden agenda. She lays down some resonable assumptions and observations and then ... flings herself two continents over into some completely unsubstantiated conclusions which bear no resemblance to the arguments supposedly leading to them.
Lemme see, "we are tought to be non-violent and respect others" so that leads to ...... "we should have no taxes!". Ugh. She misses of course the wee little points like that you just cant count (proven by nasty experiences in the late 1800s) on an affluent majority to help poor minorities. And that you just cannot count on people to donate to keep an army going or else there will be 10 dudes with a bicycle, a donkey and a canoe acting as national defense. And so on.
All of these gems of illogic after just one chapter! Cool stuff, I sensed serious comedy here and so I kept reading.
Then we find out that wealth = knowledge. Hardly suprising but unfortunately the conlusions again land far away from the assumptions. US did get disproportionately wealthy due to its profiteering first on freshly stolen land and then on financing two world wars. Following which it positioned itself as a central hub of world finances and commerce. So aggression served it quite well thank you. Freedom had its part but many other places with equal freedoms (Great Britain, France) did not prosper even remotely as well. Japan, an aggressor in WWII was a wealthy and powerful country even at that time (capable of challenging the US) even though it was an imperial authocracy. And so on. The link between wealth and freedom is tenuous at best while the link of conquest with wealth is proven throughout millennia of history. Furthermore the US was far less tolerant of others in its history than she makes it out to be. Many southern states are the result of conquest of Mexico. Caraibbean islands are the result of conquest against Spain, etc etc.
Licensing = aggression + evil is another funny claim. Leading theme is that somehow the "smart" consumer will be able to tell which medical doctor is qualified and which is not by the results. Too late by then! Not only that, quackery was the main reason the regulations were introduced, terms like "snake oil salesman" are in our vocabulary for a reason (yes AMA abused the process for profit, but we chose lesser of two evils). The lesson hard learned is that as products become more and more distanced form the level of knowledge of an average purchaser, lesser the chances of him making a wise purchase. Some industies are just too dangerous for everyone to leave to quacks. Witness the PC industry and the amount of hoodwinkling and chickanery that happens here, average Joe Sixpack is just as good as conned when he buys his home PC. Lambs to the slaughter! Her ideas about making the victim "whole" do not even apply here. The victim has no clue he was screwed. He might find out looong afterwards. As a matter of fact, the "disappearing act" that conmen are fond of, is another trick that she just cant deal with. If not licensed, a con-artist will exploit a number of people with fancy talk and a lot of smoke about something they have no hope understanding and then when found out or threatened, he will dissapear only to set up shop elsewhere. This happens in limited way even now, strenuous licensing and all, but it is much harder to pull off. It would be commonplace should all the licensing be gone. Furthermore, the assumption that the consumer will somehow be able to tell who is legit when he is in pain is prepostrous. What if you are in an unfamiliar city? Yellow pages for help? I assume we get no 911 in her system (who would pay for that?! "I dont need it, cant make me, you pay for it"). It gets zany once you start pondering implications of what she is saying.
On the "making the victim whole" front, I just have no clue how this is supposed to work in case of