Corruption analysis

(This is a reply given by me to the suggestion on a forum that it is now important to remove the two Indian political parties BJP and Congress.
I feel there is enough juice in it to share it on my blog too.
Text in squared brackets[like this] are grammatical correction or filled ommission.
The original thread is available here
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/India-Force/messages/14035?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1)

I am no expert in these subjects .. So don't call on details if you
want to explain me something .. My question is whether removing
Congress and BJP will really remove the roots of the problems ?

Currently corruption follows power. And a large part also follows
"power potential". If power shifts from BJP to Congress or from
Congress to BJP or any other party/ organization/ whatever, corruption
follows suite. Some corruption stays back if there is "power
potential" still remaining in the party. If there is another
party/organization which a part of corruption sees that it has "power
potential", it will move to that if circumstances affecting the
corruption's victim compulse it.

Where does this corruption come from? Citizens. Can you remove
corruption from citizens without corruption drive[ing] it's forces against
your plans? The corruption in Government( with a few lakh employees?)
does not have a chance against clean citizens (100 crore!!!). Can you
turn this growing population "problem" into a strength against
corruption (not just in the Government), thus being it's own
solution?.

The world is shrinking by the minute in terms of communication and
technology. So corruption can make it's way through those channels.
Can you make people immune to such channels of corruption? Can you
come up with an elaborate plan to block only corruption from various
channels of information exchange and then implement flawlessly all the
plans in one go? If you have a[ny] delay between to parts of plans,
corruption can slip through.

I am really sorry that I am not good at expressing everything I feel,
especially thoughts sift too quickly through my mind for me to
construct examples required to convey my ideas. May be that is where
my corruption point lies.

Can you do all the above in one go ? Then we may have a chance against
corruption.


(To this, Someone replied :)
yes sure to some extent. This is not a permanent solution but would work
miracles and help root out the problem once and for all time in near future.


(And my reply was:)

Yes. You are quite right. But unless you have the complete solution to
the problem of corruption, we must not attempt this. I will explain.

The circle of corruption is a vicious one. The Government is corrupted
because the citizens are corrupted. And the citizens are corrupted
because the government is corrupted. The citizens are supported by our
Government. So if we remove BJP and Congress, we should have something
in it's place that can fit and support us otherwise, as a society, we
will collapse. And of course, it goes without saying that it should be
able to withstand the corruption from the citizens and should be free
from corruption itself. Unfortunately, for most citizens it has become
a matter of pride to be corrupted. Any point of time where we need to
be corrupted should be a matter of sadness to us and we should not
stop at fixing our individual problems which forced us to be
corrupted. If a father died because of cigarette smoking, the son
should not continue smoking saying "My dad used to love smoking.. I am
smoking for him.". Instead he should fight against the people who
corrupt their body with unnecessary chemicals.

I completely understand that sometimes corruption becomes necessary to
avoid any glitches in the design of the Government. But instead of
being temporary, it becomes a permanent thing. Like an Asthma patient
getting addicted to the steroids. That is what we should be always
aware about and avoid.

BJP and Congress, are the fruits of such a society and thus the
corruption is concentrated there. Nothing wrong in it. They are our
own fruits. In the plan to remove it, we citizens should also include
ways of cleaning ourselves and in the mean time prepare a replacement
Government which is clean, strong and has a high resistance to
corruption as well.

"Taking granted" is a convinience.

We should realize that the concept of "taking granted" serves only as a convinience. While you may label me as the "Master of the Obvious" for saying that, most people dont realize that it means, on a larger scale of time, we should always be aware that there might be other possibilities. We need to preiodically research and revise of what we have taken for granted. This is way easier said than done. It is important to be critically minded to be able to search for, go after, and dig out to view things taken for granted.

BTW, This happens to be a way of "Be prepared" strategy.

Human behavioural statistics.

Human behavioural statistics stays true till the moment it published.

Power saving on GNU/Linux laptops

1. Forget all snazzy desktop stuff. Especially those that update the screen unnecessarily.
2. Try this: http://lesswatts.org .
3. If you have a IBM THinkpad check out this one too: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption

Then also try these tips :

1. In Firefox: disable prefetch. For that :
   
   • In urlbar type about:config
   • In the resulting table.. type "prefetch" in the search box to filter out those keys that have "prefetch" in them.
   • In the result, set "network.prefetch-next" to "false".
     
     • If you have Stumbleupon installed, disable it's prefetch too. stumbleupon.somenumber.prefetch
   • Unless you are a heavy user of gmail, use the simple html mode.
2. Use text based browsers unless the page demands a GUI browser. Elinks is an excellent choice.
3. Disable anything that blinks/ updates the screen. This makes X wake up the CPU on every update.
   
   • Disable blinking cursors. Many terminals allow a way to disable the blinking of the cursor.
   • Disable the "seconds" indicator on the clock. Really, are you on a race track ?
4. Disable "system monitor" "battery monitor" and such other applets. Configure key shortcuts that run a command like "uptime" "date" "acpi" or somthing like that and pipe it to xmessage or something like that. Also havea script that .. every 30 seconds call these commands and checks for dangerous values. If any, popout a xmessage.
5. Have a decent amount of RAM. This reduces the kernel having to wake the hard disk often to play with the swap.
6. Remove anything unnecessary. Unnecessary daemons, Unnecessary devices, Unnecessay drivers, etc..
7. I dont know if this works: Try using small flash based drives to store frequently used small documents, music, etc. This brings disk usage to a minimum.
   

To think or not to think?

To think or not to think? That is the question. Lot of times we do mistakes because we sub-consciously decide not to think about the consequences.
At times the consequences of not thinking seem to be less costly than consequences of thinking.

Eg: ..
[The following situation has not happened to me] You are about to meet up with a huge client who will be discussing with you about the new contract. You are about to leave office when you do a childish but irritating mistake.
You obviously realize your mistake. Stopping to ask an excuse is the same as losing the client. Not asking an excuse means weakening your relationship with the colleague.
Losing the client on the other hand means losing the colleague entirely and surely anyway .. as you may be fired to lose such a huge client and won't remain as a colleague. So the best choice is obviously to leave immediately - You can always convey the apology later.
Now the question is ..
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are on your way to client's office help ? You may not get enough time to think about how to impress and win the client.
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are discussing with clients about the contract help? Again.. you might do a mistake that may make you lose the client.
Does thinking and feeling gloomy about this situation when you are on your way back help ? Unless you have a personal driver for your vehicle, this is a big no too. Feeling gloomy while riding is equivalent to drinking and driving. And the consequences might be you may not remain as a living being in the first place to go and ask for excuse or forgiveness.

Now most colleagues might understand this. Replace colleague with someone from home, like parents, wife or children. "You did not even have a bit of concern. You are an insensitive clod!". Of course, you must think about your loved ones too. You cannot blame your loved ones either. They have not faced thosituations. So the question is "to think or not to think?".

If you analyze thoroughly, the mistake you did in the first place was also because your sub-conscious was in a dilemma of whether to think or not.

Useful XKCD charts

Internet / World Wide Web (www)

http://xkcd.com/195/ Map of the Internet.

http://xkcd.com/256/ Online communities

http://xkcd.com/802/ Online communities 2.

http://xkcd.com/124/ Blogofractal

http://xkcd.com/94/ AIM Profile creation flowchart.

http://xkcd.com/1335/ When can we disturb them?
http://xkcd.com/now is now a shortcut to the above.

http://xkcd.com/773/ Intersection of what university websites contain and what people really look for.

Science

http://xkcd.com/388/ Grapefruit varieties

http://xkcd.com/1056/ Best known Felines

http://xkcd.com/273/ Electromagnetic spectrum.

http://xkcd.com/1080/ Visual Field tester

Quantity comparisons

http://xkcd.com/482/ HeightChart - the observable universe, from top to bottom.

http://xkcd.com/1040/large/ Lakes and oceans

http://xkcd.com/485/ DepthChart - Size of matters on a log scale.

http://xkcd.com/1338/ Earth's Land Mammals By Weight

http://xkcd.com/1389/ Solar system solid surfaces stitched together

http://xkcd.com/1461/large/ Spacecraft mass measured in horses.

http://xkcd.com/1649/ Fluids manufactured in US

Units of measure

http://xkcd.com/526/ Converting to metric.

http://xkcd.com/394/ Kilobytes.. there are several of them.

http://xkcd.com/1205/ Is it worth the time?

Nature Alarm

http://xkcd.com/1379/

http://xkcd.com/1732/ Earth Temperature timeline/

 

Timelines

http://xkcd.com/1491/large/ Stories Published Time Vs Time they are set in

http://xkcd.com/1392/ Dominant sport players over time

http://xkcd.com/1410/ California Draught

Misc

http://xkcd.com/832/ Complete map of optimal Tic-Tac-Toe Moves

http://xkcd.com/1196/ Subways of North America

http://xkcd.com/1468/ Worries

http://xkcd.com/1509/ US Movie Background Cheat Sheet

http://xkcd.com/1688 Map Age Guide

http://xkcd.com/1626/ Judgement day (Not really a chart, but I wish this happens one day)

Too much time on the computer

You know you are working too much on the computer when you attempt to switch off the monitor by trying to take the mouse cursor to the switch on your monitor.

The greatest magic show.

A pile of mud. Lifeless, inanimate, simplistic pile of mud. Lying on the ground or flowing around at the whim of the wind's and gravity's wishes. Stones, rocks, rivers. All behaving exactly as simple physics could explain.

Now imagine a part of the pile of the mud thinking for itself, being able to control where it goes, or may be collect water from the ground, energy from the sun, and channel, store it for future. Now wouldn't it be the most amazing magic trick you could see?

The magic pile of mud that could be you, your pet, the moss growing on a stone in your backyard, the snail feeding on it, the bird high up in the air planning to do a "drop" on your car you just washed.

This magic show is called "Life". Life is the most amazing magic shows you can witness. Don't miss it ! And please don't mess with it.

Enhance Knowledge channel experience with wikipedia.org

Especially if you are seeing Discovery, National Geographic, or such knowledge channels, keep Wikipedia ready for action. When I was watching Future Weapons today, I learnt about Bangalore Torpedo, Blade, Machine gun ,etc.

Linux is not the end of being "Open source"

Most people have the feeling that using or just installing GNU/Linux is both the beginning and end of the Free Software and "Open Source" philosophy. But if you see their businesses, you will understand that they are anything but "open".
One or more of these usually show that the other end has no clue about "Free and Open Source" philosophy. or they are afraid to give you the real clue about the philosophy :-) .

1) They "use" GNU/Linux and other FOSS products, but their product itself is closed and proprietary. In other words, it runs over "Free and Open Source Software", but is not "Free and Open Source Software" itself. This also includes plug-ins and extensions for existing "Free and Open Source Software".
2) It keeps consuming and spewing data in an extremely non-standard and non-flexible format.
3) All development is done in-house and other developers are warded off if they come into their "territory", at all times
4) All the source code is available, but you can compile it and use it only if you have proprietary compiler/ toolkit.
5) The product is not a complete software, but is a value addition.
6) They build a custom software for you , they tell you it is open source, because the OS it runs on, any server it runs on, The interpreters it uses , the compiler they chose everything is "Free and Open Source Software". But they are not ready to give you the source of the custom Software they built for you.
7) They don't have a proper "copyright" and "license" section anywhere in the Source, and /or don't give credit to those people from whom they got code snippets, and/or the libraries where due.

Truth, Beauty and Justice

A lot of people try to convince me that I am too much "alone". I would like to quote this from Albert Einstein.

"Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation". - Sir Albert Einstein

Stop fighting for this speck of dust.

I have always argued that compared to the universe, the earth is just a speck of dust. And for this speck of dist we try to fight for land, power and everything that our human mind can think of. Isn't it simply stupid?

I wanted to write down analogies which can help people perceive how small our earth is, and hence how small and powerless we humans are in front of the universe, how insignificant we are in comparison to the universe.

As I was thinking of analogies, it suddenly occurred to me that someone on the net might already have done that. I went ahead and searched, and I got almost perfectly what I was expecting. Please read go through the results of http://www.google.com/search?q=sun+earth+milky+way+size+comparison and realize how stupid it is to have hatred based on religions, caste, occupation, nation.... skin colour ! (ROTFL) hohoho!.



Update:
YouTube - How big is the Universe?
The universe - How big are you?
YouTube - Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)
YouTube - Large scale simulation of the universe

More Updates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot