Authoritarianism

Yes my question was ambiguous . I hear the word 'freedom' frequently but I'm usually left confused. Your point that 'freedom is always freedom from' I agree with but my difficulty is thus; who is the most free? The loner in the remote Alaskan wilderness or the wealthy banker on a paradise island? Your introduction of 'authority and responsibility ' illustrates the ambiguity of 'freedom'. I have a mortgage ,gas bills, electric bills, property tax, car insurance etc ,etc all to give me the 'freedom to', to what? In my experience the less of both responsibility and authority leaves me 'feeling' more free. Although my choices may be reduced my freedom to chose seems liberating.
Gotta go.

 

Depends on the engineer. In the first half of my career I used to joke that I had a career in fixing the screw ups of substandard engineers. About half of those getting degrees in engineering tend to end up in an administration or management position, and not always by choice.

If you are an industrial maintenance guy, your gripe is more likely with facility engineers.

 

Please show the evidence that Ronald Reagan or anybody at the White House ordered the shuttle launch to proceed despite the concern of the engineers . Everything I've read indicated it was NASA personnel who made that decision. (including the wiki page you linked).

 

I studied engineering for a couple of years and aced all of my mechanical engineering exams. However I ended up in Information Technology instead and there was still very much a haphazard approach to programming when it came to machine code and early languages. The code was full of bugs and difficult to maintain as a result.

That was why I started coming up with my own "code modules" that I knew worked and I could just plug them into new programs and systems and eliminate basic level errors. The next stage was to expedite the error "dump" which was usually reams of paper to wade through when all you needed was about 2 lines of it. I invented a "flagging" system so that the error message would contain the flags and I could then search the memory dump online via the editor for the relevant flags. That efficiency alone increased my turnaround rate by about 500% over the standard method of debugging.

Originally CPU's were really slow so "drop through" coding had been considered to be the norm but as soon as I realized that this was no longer the case I revamped my coding into a structural design instead. I then took that a step further by making all of my structures follow the same logical patterns.

While working as a consultant I gained a reputation for being able to bring new systems online in a fraction of the time that everyone else took. What was more my systems worked and were virtually bug free. I used the same approach when designing databases and networks.

I also developed a philosophy that those that use my systems will have no concept of how they work. All they needed to know was how to use them and my objective was to make that as simple as possible. That applied to computer operations just as much as it did to ordinary users.

One of the places I worked had an operations manager who tracked the incidence of errors found in systems and he was presenting this data at a meeting. Some of the systems were so bad as to have problems on a daily basis but most were on a weekly or monthly error rate. I noticed that none of my systems were listed on his statistics so I asked about them. He said that across all five, which included the corporate wide database and inventory systems, they had a combined error rate of once every 9 months and that was mostly due to operator error in the control room.

So yes, modularity and in depth knowledge of all of the moving parts is the key to successful design IMO. The mechanics of swapping out one defective module and replacing it with another means less downtime in the field. Proactive maintenance means fewer unplanned breakdowns. Having the right information means understanding a problem and resolving it faster.

 

The pressure on NASA management came directly from St Reagan himself. He INVOLVED himself in NASA right from the outset. This is documented history and you will find plenty of photo ops and speeches and other things that indicate that St Reagan considered it to be PRIORITY for his administration.

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/speeches/reagan_legacy.html

There has been a great deal of "whitewashing" to try and hide his PRESSURE on NASA management to meet an unrealistic launch schedule which resulted in overriding the legitimate concerns of the engineers in order to meet the political goals of the Reagan regime.

Even the Rogers reports openly states that NASA management VIOLATED their own safety protocols. There can only be one reason for them to take that risk but feel free to come up with any others that you believe would justify RISKING the ENTIRE SPACE PROGRAM against BOTH the expert advice of the engineers and the existing safety protocols.

 

Exaggerate much?

 

Abject FAILURE to refute anything at all means that my position remains uncontested.

Have a nice day!

 

You haven't backed up any of your allegations.

 

Freedom is subjective. Liberty is necessarily what it is. My first priority is liberty, so freedom from unjust infringement upon individual liberty is the most important freedom to me. Socialism offers the exact opposite. Socialism offers freedom from liberty. Socialism offers freedom from individuals authority over and responsibility for self. That's too high of a price. Even if socialism produced everything is offered, the loss of individual liberty would be too high a price to pay. Give me liberty, or give me death.

 

Oops

 

It is rather funny when I here a conservative talk about freedom. It often seems to me that conservatives are more likely to have authoritarian and sadist tendencies. Freedom for you, but not others?

 

"Unjust" is subjective.

"Freedom" must be qualified or defined. Freedom from what?

 

Oh please the list is long on how some people on left want Authoritarianism

1) Wanting the Fairness doctrine back

2) gun control/treating the 2nd amendment like it doesn't exist

3) banning big gulps, straws plastic bags

4) seat belt laws, helmet laws

5) forcing people to car insurance

6) Obama care mandate

7) demanding taking down the 10 commandments/ crosses

taking away people's stupid MAGNA hats

9) removing historical statues of the Democrats evil past

10) trying to force people to bake a cake, give out murder pills against there will, trying to force atheist beliefs onto others

11) ban indoor smoking/ while indoor smoking of an federal illegal substance is ok

12) getting rid of the electoral college

Did I miss any?

 

I think that it is common for good engineers to acquire a collection of ideas that they reuse time and time again. No use in redesigning the wheel.

Throughout my career, I have had my own ideas that I squeezed into projects. So that in a certain way, I was designing my own stuff, but using company projects to do so, to try out new ideas.

It seems to me that there has always been a race between hardware and software developers. I remember, sometime in the early eighties, when I first came to the realization that digital music and video was just over the horizon. I was frustrated that speed and capacity was lacking. But it didn't take long for the hardware to catch up. Once the hardware became fast enough, the entire world changed. 20 years ago or so it was being predicted that it wouldn't be until after 2020 that the software and hardware would be up to snuff to create true artificial intelligence. It seems that prediction is coming true.

 

I couldn't even get through the first sentence of your post. You really do think of yourself and others first and foremost as members of groups rather than as individuals. WOW!

 

Unjust is subjective. Unjust does need to be qualified.
The only justifiable infringement upon individual life, liberty or private property are the lives, liberty and private property of others. Any law that has no nexus to the defense of individual life, liberty or private property can be disobeyed with moral impunity. Just be careful, as the bible warns us, moral impunity is not legal immunity.

 

Wrong!

Post #405 above contains a link with CREDIBLE SUBSTANTIATION.

 

The hardware guys came up with some amazing developments which were game changing IMO. Things we take for granted today like full color flat screens did not exist when I began my career in the 1970's. Disk storage was both expensive and fragile and RAM was at a premium. The PC revolution removed a lot of what was exclusively in the grasp of large corporations and put it into the hands of anyone who was interested. The same applied to software. I am glad that I lived through that digital revolution because there was always something new to learn and to experience.

 

I’m sure you think of yourself as an individual with free will, but I am also sure that in most situations, there is only one choice for you. A choice that is quite predictable, given other “choices” that you have made.

 

Wow we didn't know flat color screen televisions didnt exist in the 1970s.. please tell us more !!!!

 

IBM used to use magnetic core memory which took up lots of space. They built a hard drive research and manufacturing facility in Boulder, which is said to have launched Boulder into the tech sector. Soon every American hard drive company had operations in Boulder. I worked briefly for Storage Technology, who made washing machine sized hard drives that had as much as 1 gig of storage, and cost thousands of dollars. The original Radio Shack computer had a whopping 4K of RAM, which is what I think was also in the original Apple. When I look back, I think that I was lucky to see the computer revolution unfold, and feel glad that I was part of it.

I even remember when dial up internet clocked in at 2-4K baud. We have witnesses the birth and evolution of a life changing industry.

 

If you think that the Apple with 4K of RAM was bad the original mainframe that I was programming in machine code only had 24K of RAM and everything was stored on magnetic tape.

 

LOL...I was coding FORTRan, Pascal and COBOL on a Vax 11/750 mainframe.

 

Funny you would mention that. I do not believe in "free will' if what you mean by "free will" is that we choose from undetermined possibilities. We make choices, and we have no way of knowing what they will all be, but none of that is evidence to me that we choose from undetermined possibilities.
Pride is a very specific ignorance. pride is the ignorance of one's own subjectivity. The ultimate expression of pride is the belief in "free will".

 

Here we go again...Can you post a link?
Where on earth are you getting this info? Are you just making them up as you go?
You're doing the same thing Trump does all day long.

"Free will is a precious gift from God, for it lets us love him with our “whole heart”—because we want to."—Matthew 22:37.