We don't intend to disrespect the current rovers or teams, we are just engineering-minded and naturally think woulda-coulda-shoulda.

I went to an amusement park with some co-workers the other day. We walked into a small building made out of beer bottles. My first comment was, "what if there's an earthquake"? Two people then lambasted me for "being negative". I wasn't trying to "be negative", but merely was being engineer-minded, debugging the world, if you will. It's just our nature. We mean you no harm, were just from Planet Geek.

Read a bit of the blogs from the teams. They are pretty damned incredible.

I'm only able to locate out-of-date stuff. Anything recent you could link to? Thanks.

running countless simulations...and we still haven't figured out

Not all problems have solutions. The rovers cheated lady luck many times already. It has to end eventually. The dice will have their day. We've just got spoiled. Spirit just got out of another precarious spot roughly a month before it got jammed in the current spot, for example.

this is a far cry from star trek...where Picard just has to ask Commander Data to theorize and reverse polarity and stuffs...and the world is saved.

There's a Fi in their Sci.
   

Correction: I believe the winter sun faces north, not south. Thus, spinning the north-side wheels will dig in the north side of the rover deeper, making the panels face slightly north instead of straight-up.

I think they are kind of clutching at straws now.

It's more like they arrived at a figurative fork in the road:

Choice 1: Try yet again to free it from the trap, risking making the problem worse, dooming it to freeze to death if that fails because it then cannot rove to a better wintering spot.

Choice 2: Dig in the north side deeper in order to make the solar panels tilt toward south winter sun. This will probably doom it to forever be a stationary weather station, but at least it will survive the winter.

It's kind of like decapitating the gangrene legs of a soldier so that he/she lives, even if they cannot ever walk again. Trying to heal the legs risks patient death. Thus, NASA has to make a hard choice.
       

That's one of the reasons why you explore a planet: to know what the dangers are. I'm sure future rover designs will be better able to handle sand-traps. I would point out that the MER designs were generally based on Sojourner, which didn't encounter that problem. Neither would the MER rovers if they only lasted their expected duration.

It doesn't have to be a big arm. It could be long and thin. And it only uses power when it's needed, such as digging the wheels out or cleaning the solar panels. It's not like the x-ray spectrometer that runs and runs when used.

We in the US have corporate censorship rather than political censorship. The RIAA, DRM, DMCA, and their likes are pretty powerful tools. Witness Scientology's use of them to remove stuff they don't want out there.

Rocking may work on snow, but powdery dirt/sand may be a different matter. When a gap opens up, dust at the top falls down into it. Snow tends to be clumpier than dust.

But all that costs money. Also, the more parts there are, the more that can break down.

And in my estimation, a robotic arm with a little shovel may be a better deal because it could also have a brush to clean the solar panels.

There is a single big rover that will be launched fairly soon. They didn't have time to change it for sand-trap problems, so it may get stuck also.

I was thinking that a thin but flexible robotic arm would have 3 uses: 1) Moving rocks to study what's beneath, 2) Digging out stuck wheels, and 3) cleaning off solar panels with a little brush.
 

There are some unexplored rock formations around it's area, dubbed "Home Plate", that they wanted to explore more if it was mobile. But even if they could free it from the dust trap, it has only 4 good wheels left, meaning its mobility is limited to very flat and safe areas if it ever escapes.

AaaaaCHhoooooo! Damn! back to square one.

the first instrument wasn't actually intended to be [an astronomic] telescope at all; instead, it was a spyglass that was expected to find use as an instrument of war.

War, yeah right. More likely Galileo wanted to peep at the neighbor's bosomy daughter. Porn drove new tech back then also.
     

I wasn't arguing with you, I was just pointing out that the only two things which have had any real effect on security are passengers fighting back and re-enforced cockpit doors.

In fact I can't remember hearing about a single incident of a potential terrorist being stopped at airport security. Some have been caught before their plans came to fruition and some have been caught after their attacks failed, but seemingly not by airport security.

Passengers fighting back is about the only realistic security measure you can take.

All other options are either unreliable (metal detection, pat-downs etc) or would disrupt things too much (cavity searching everyone etc). It's like playing whack-a-mole anyway because the bad guys will keep coming up with new ways to get around whatever you do.

That's life for you. Lives could be saved by banning cars or limiting them to 3mph. You could stop knife crime by banning knives. No-one will do that though because cars and knives are too useful to us and we judge the risks to outweigh the benefits. For some reason airport security seems to think that anything less than a 100% safety record is unacceptable.