The main reasons I see people being upset about this guy are as follows:
(1) Having the nicely spelled domains (flicker.com, dig.com, iphone.com, whatever have you) are now filled up with junk content and not real content. It makes the quality of the internet overall worse.
(2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do, he steals a bunch of traffic from visitors that were really intending to visit your website but now are just directed to some ad page. You just lost a few potential customers, have someone doing some other junk business in your name, and now you have to also spend on lawyers to rectify the issue.
in this case, though, publishing a javascript hack isn't a crime even in the US. if i'm legally provided with data, i'm free to render the data to myself however i want, and others are free to publish tips on how to render data.
Oh, and while I'm at it, I also want to pass a law that says this:
If another individual or organization has published and made available a technology, in patented or non-patented form, you do not have permission to claim a patent to it. In particular, you may not patent technologies that have already been released into the public domain by other individuals. You may only patent works for which there is substantial evidence that you are the first creator of the said technology.
Corollary:
You may not, under any circumstance, patent anything for which any currently existing, publicly available, published, or publicly proposed technologies infringe upon your proposed patent, unless you are one of the authors of the said currently existing technology.
Example: You may not create a patent now that sudo infringes upon, since sudo was already created and is publicly available.
I'm up for creating and passing a bill that says this:
If you own a patent on something, infringements must be caught when they happen within 2 weeks of the first public knowledge of the infringing technology. Delaying lawsuit until a further time when supposed damages will be higher is not an excuse to obtain higher compensation. Lack of lawsuit on an infringing technology made available for public consumption, at the time of release, is to be considered a form of permission to use the patented technology.
Why not? Architecturally two VM's can each handle their own separate USB keyboards and mice and sound systems on the same PC. Whether or not the software supports it right now is another question, but it's definitely doable, much in the same way a bajillion users can each have their own virtual PC's on a Xen server.
It's not BS. Singapore is a nice, clean, free country for anyone who cares about the environment enough to not litter and cares enough about other people not to vandalize, etc. Trust me, if you behave ethically, you won't be nailed for anything in Singapore (the actual ban of gum is debatable, but besides that, I mean).
In any case, I'm sick and tired of seeing cigarette butts everywhere, especially places like the beach and parks where it's wrecking the environment. We have a responsibility as humans not to wreck the environment. And if some idiots are going to pollute it, the government is one place that can enforce things that will keep these idiots under control. Littering is terrorism to the other species of this world (specifically, because over time, it mass-kills in numbers beyond what is necessary for the food chain to exist).
And yes, I would support high penalties for improper gum disposal as well. I'd be more than happy about ANY law that will prevent me from having to touch someone else's gum under my desk, ever again. Even if they got fined $10000 for it, terrific, I'm in support -- that way, I will never have to touch someone else's gum. Do I care about the amount of the fine? No, because I myself am not going to litter.
They should levy huge fines on people who improperly discard cigarettes and/or actually randomly decide to patrol parts of cities and cite people who drop cigarettes for littering. It's dangerous, filthy, bad for the environment, and makes cities just look bad.
This is an unfathomably silly idea that shows how much energy is being wasted in commuting. The solution is instead to reduce the amount of driving and replace the insane amount of driving in this country with a decent train and bus network that actually gets people where they want to go. New Jersey has extremely poor public transportation for its density compared to other similar-density parts of the world outside the USA. The amount of energy that could be saved (in joules provided by gasoline) by reducing driving would be orders of magnitude higher than that you could generate (in joules of electrical energy) from turbines from the wind from cars. Even if you reduced driving by as much as 5-10%, I would suspect that that energy reduction would by greater than what could be generated.
In addition, yes, this will create some degree of drag on the cars, and in essence, they are using gasoline to produce electricity in about the most inefficient way possible. Considering oil is already becoming scarce and is not renewable, they should not do this.
All motors draw more power when you put a load on their rotor.
Consequently, a fan would draw much less power if placed in a vacuum (because it is not pushing any air).
As another example, consider a paper airplane that aerodynamically glides to the ground. If you put a propeller at the front of it and try to generate power using it, it will create drag.
My point simply that 1. your player sucks if it cannot fast-forward (whether it's obedience on their part, stupid technical limitations, etc.). it just sucks. 2. i just read the data that's physically on the desk. it's in plain bytes. it's easy. i.e. my player can fast-forward anything. 3. to me, a player that lacks fast-forward is antiquated and that a player that can fast-forward is better because it contains an essential feature.
does this actually mean that my 400mhz PC with a 1x DVD drive, no region codes, and software that can play anything is actually better than your player? if so, why the heck do they don't they make good players anymore like the good old days? i betcha if i started making players that fast forward again (heck, a simple feature... if you have unlimited rewind, why not unlimited fast forward?) people might actually like to buy mine!
Exactly. So long as this country (and the rest of most of the developed world) holds up to the usual common ideals, there should be nothing illegal about editing and toying with the disc you own for personal use only. this means not sharing it back, not sharing programs to do it, and so on. under those circumstances, i don't see why i can't write myself a script to do this all by myself. after all, the contents of my hard drive are my property. they may not be my intellectual property, but they are my physical property, and as long as i'm not recirculating or affecting others, they should be mine to do whatever i want to do with. that said, if that act becomes illegal, i'll be really upset about the law.
If course you can skip the ads on a DVD. Once the DVD is in your possession, you have the data. It's not like the ad gives you a magic key you need to use to decrypt the rest of the data -- the rest of the data is physically there, on the disc, ready to read, so why not read it?
If your player insists on not being able to fast forward through certain tracks... well... wow, you're back in the cassette age. get a better player.
Really? I've lived in Singapore and people at my work place got 18 *work* days off per year and could take off additional days as unpaid days, and was told that this was the norm.
Most of Europe except the UK gets longer breaks. In Germany the average is about 6 weeks and in Italy the average is about 8 weeks. In the USA, the average is about 11 days granted, most of which doesn't actually get taken. I can't remember the source, but google for it. The USA is by far the country with the least vacation time in the world -- much lower than most third-world countries.
This is exactly why MS Word sucks and LaTeX is awesome, at least in terms of readability. Try reading a LaTeX'ed documunt on the screen, it is extremely pleasant.
If this is built with a rail line, please run a passenger train now and then... perhaps once or twice a week, connecting to the Trans-Siberian. It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only. London and Singapore are connected by passenger rail, so why not Alaska, and then the rest of the US and Canada?
In addition, part of school is to learn what a good source is. The best way to do this is to provide unrestricted access and teach them.
Furthermore, Wikipedia is an excellent source. While it is not entirely correct, it's probably about 90% correct, which means it's a good place to find collected and aggregated information and verify every piece of information you use through another source.
is the screen that cramped that they could not fit both? surely the RAM and disk space limits don't prevent having just an address bar separate from the title bar... ? i mean, come on, there's a solid reason to have both title bar and address bar. in particular, to spot phishing. yes, kids should learn that at some point in their schooling. and the OLPC laptops, imho, should be designed in a way that both kids and adults can enjoy and use them efficiently. there is no reason you can't use the $100 laptop to manage a bank account and send serious e-mails later in life. why can't parents (who can't afford laptops of their own) use their childrens' $100 laptops to conduct serious business once in a while?
as it stands, they'd get phished in no time if there isn't a visible address bar. functionality matters. there's no reason a techie can't design a user interface. teh underlying implementation matters a lot from a security standpoint and the average joe user *should* learn a little about it so they protect themselves. after all, you know how your toaster works and you know at least a little about how your car works. likewise, you should know how internet addresses work, or at least, know how an URL breaks down. let's not dumb down the interface too much -- the kids in those countries need to learn, too, and most likely can handle it.
The browser lacks an address bar!!! Why would anyone want this OS? If I had an OLPC in a third-world country I'd just download xubuntu and use it. I'm sure full Epiphany or Opera will run on it just fine. But the built-in multitasking just sucks and there's no reason a child should be restricted in features beyond that provided by a regular OS. They should learn to use a typical OS right from the start so they can accomplish real work with the capable computers that they have. It should be made easy for them to learn Perl or C++ and run 5 copies of xterm alongside 2 different browsers for development. Debian+Fluxbox runs great and fast on a 90mhz PC, full Opera works fine on a 300mhz, so I'm sure a full-blown OS will run fine on the $100 laptop.
I'm nice to fat people. It's just that I paid for my seat, and I expect to get all of it, not 80% of it. It's small enough already that I really would like all of that space that I paid for. Same goes for buses and trains.
Slashdot Mirror
"you're only a professional if your email address has a legitimate domain"
.edu's.
Side comment... fortunately, this still works for the
The main reasons I see people being upset about this guy are as follows:
(1) Having the nicely spelled domains (flicker.com, dig.com, iphone.com, whatever have you) are now filled up with junk content and not real content. It makes the quality of the internet overall worse.
(2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do, he steals a bunch of traffic from visitors that were really intending to visit your website but now are just directed to some ad page. You just lost a few potential customers, have someone doing some other junk business in your name, and now you have to also spend on lawyers to rectify the issue.
in this case, though, publishing a javascript hack isn't a crime even in the US. if i'm legally provided with data, i'm free to render the data to myself however i want, and others are free to publish tips on how to render data.
Oh, and while I'm at it, I also want to pass a law that says this:
If another individual or organization has published and made available a technology, in patented or non-patented form, you do not have permission to claim a patent to it. In particular, you may not patent technologies that have already been released into the public domain by other individuals. You may only patent works for which there is substantial evidence that you are the first creator of the said technology.
Corollary: You may not, under any circumstance, patent anything for which any currently existing, publicly available, published, or publicly proposed technologies infringe upon your proposed patent, unless you are one of the authors of the said currently existing technology.
Example: You may not create a patent now that sudo infringes upon, since sudo was already created and is publicly available.
I'm up for creating and passing a bill that says this:
If you own a patent on something, infringements must be caught when they happen within 2 weeks of the first public knowledge of the infringing technology. Delaying lawsuit until a further time when supposed damages will be higher is not an excuse to obtain higher compensation. Lack of lawsuit on an infringing technology made available for public consumption, at the time of release, is to be considered a form of permission to use the patented technology.
It may not be considered "US soil" if Google or YouTube has a presence in Thailand, even just as a registered business there.
Why not? Architecturally two VM's can each handle their own separate USB keyboards and mice and sound systems on the same PC. Whether or not the software supports it right now is another question, but it's definitely doable, much in the same way a bajillion users can each have their own virtual PC's on a Xen server.
This isn't anything new. It's called launching VMware twice, three times, or more.
I bet Microsoft is doing this so that it can claim the patent, then promptly sue VMware and linux for copying "their" idea, and then make billions.
Classic American monopoly lawsuit thinking.
It's not BS. Singapore is a nice, clean, free country for anyone who cares about the environment enough to not litter and cares enough about other people not to vandalize, etc. Trust me, if you behave ethically, you won't be nailed for anything in Singapore (the actual ban of gum is debatable, but besides that, I mean).
In any case, I'm sick and tired of seeing cigarette butts everywhere, especially places like the beach and parks where it's wrecking the environment. We have a responsibility as humans not to wreck the environment. And if some idiots are going to pollute it, the government is one place that can enforce things that will keep these idiots under control. Littering is terrorism to the other species of this world (specifically, because over time, it mass-kills in numbers beyond what is necessary for the food chain to exist).
And yes, I would support high penalties for improper gum disposal as well. I'd be more than happy about ANY law that will prevent me from having to touch someone else's gum under my desk, ever again. Even if they got fined $10000 for it, terrific, I'm in support -- that way, I will never have to touch someone else's gum. Do I care about the amount of the fine? No, because I myself am not going to litter.
They should levy huge fines on people who improperly discard cigarettes and/or actually randomly decide to patrol parts of cities and cite people who drop cigarettes for littering. It's dangerous, filthy, bad for the environment, and makes cities just look bad.
This is an unfathomably silly idea that shows how much energy is being wasted in commuting. The solution is instead to reduce the amount of driving and replace the insane amount of driving in this country with a decent train and bus network that actually gets people where they want to go. New Jersey has extremely poor public transportation for its density compared to other similar-density parts of the world outside the USA. The amount of energy that could be saved (in joules provided by gasoline) by reducing driving would be orders of magnitude higher than that you could generate (in joules of electrical energy) from turbines from the wind from cars. Even if you reduced driving by as much as 5-10%, I would suspect that that energy reduction would by greater than what could be generated.
In addition, yes, this will create some degree of drag on the cars, and in essence, they are using gasoline to produce electricity in about the most inefficient way possible. Considering oil is already becoming scarce and is not renewable, they should not do this.
If it helps you to understand:
All motors draw more power when you put a load on their rotor.
Consequently, a fan would draw much less power if placed in a vacuum (because it is not pushing any air).
As another example, consider a paper airplane that aerodynamically glides to the ground. If you put a propeller at the front of it and try to generate power using it, it will create drag.
My point simply that
1. your player sucks if it cannot fast-forward (whether it's obedience on their part, stupid technical limitations, etc.). it just sucks.
2. i just read the data that's physically on the desk. it's in plain bytes. it's easy. i.e. my player can fast-forward anything.
3. to me, a player that lacks fast-forward is antiquated and that a player that can fast-forward is better because it contains an essential feature.
does this actually mean that my 400mhz PC with a 1x DVD drive, no region codes, and software that can play anything is actually better than your player? if so, why the heck do they don't they make good players anymore like the good old days? i betcha if i started making players that fast forward again (heck, a simple feature... if you have unlimited rewind, why not unlimited fast forward?) people might actually like to buy mine!
Exactly. So long as this country (and the rest of most of the developed world) holds up to the usual common ideals, there should be nothing illegal about editing and toying with the disc you own for personal use only. this means not sharing it back, not sharing programs to do it, and so on. under those circumstances, i don't see why i can't write myself a script to do this all by myself. after all, the contents of my hard drive are my property. they may not be my intellectual property, but they are my physical property, and as long as i'm not recirculating or affecting others, they should be mine to do whatever i want to do with. that said, if that act becomes illegal, i'll be really upset about the law.
If course you can skip the ads on a DVD. Once the DVD is in your possession, you have the data. It's not like the ad gives you a magic key you need to use to decrypt the rest of the data -- the rest of the data is physically there, on the disc, ready to read, so why not read it?
... well... wow, you're back in the cassette age. get a better player.
If your player insists on not being able to fast forward through certain tracks
Elemental mercury is still a problem. If it gets into the ground and reacts with other substances, it could produce something harmful.
According to http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/research/questi onofthemonth/aug03.html 7 days is the minimum mandated, not the average. The average is generally much higher for most skilled jobs afaik.
Really? I've lived in Singapore and people at my work place got 18 *work* days off per year and could take off additional days as unpaid days, and was told that this was the norm.
Most of Europe except the UK gets longer breaks. In Germany the average is about 6 weeks and in Italy the average is about 8 weeks. In the USA, the average is about 11 days granted, most of which doesn't actually get taken. I can't remember the source, but google for it. The USA is by far the country with the least vacation time in the world -- much lower than most third-world countries.
This is exactly why MS Word sucks and LaTeX is awesome, at least in terms of readability. Try reading a LaTeX'ed documunt on the screen, it is extremely pleasant.
If this is built with a rail line, please run a passenger train now and then... perhaps once or twice a week, connecting to the Trans-Siberian. It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only. London and Singapore are connected by passenger rail, so why not Alaska, and then the rest of the US and Canada?
In addition, part of school is to learn what a good source is. The best way to do this is to provide unrestricted access and teach them.
Furthermore, Wikipedia is an excellent source. While it is not entirely correct, it's probably about 90% correct, which means it's a good place to find collected and aggregated information and verify every piece of information you use through another source.
is the screen that cramped that they could not fit both? surely the RAM and disk space limits don't prevent having just an address bar separate from the title bar... ? i mean, come on, there's a solid reason to have both title bar and address bar. in particular, to spot phishing. yes, kids should learn that at some point in their schooling. and the OLPC laptops, imho, should be designed in a way that both kids and adults can enjoy and use them efficiently. there is no reason you can't use the $100 laptop to manage a bank account and send serious e-mails later in life. why can't parents (who can't afford laptops of their own) use their childrens' $100 laptops to conduct serious business once in a while?
as it stands, they'd get phished in no time if there isn't a visible address bar.
functionality matters. there's no reason a techie can't design a user interface. teh underlying implementation matters a lot from a security standpoint and the average joe user *should* learn a little about it so they protect themselves. after all, you know how your toaster works and you know at least a little about how your car works. likewise, you should know how internet addresses work, or at least, know how an URL breaks down. let's not dumb down the interface too much -- the kids in those countries need to learn, too, and most likely can handle it.
The browser lacks an address bar!!! Why would anyone want this OS? If I had an OLPC in a third-world country I'd just download xubuntu and use it. I'm sure full Epiphany or Opera will run on it just fine. But the built-in multitasking just sucks and there's no reason a child should be restricted in features beyond that provided by a regular OS. They should learn to use a typical OS right from the start so they can accomplish real work with the capable computers that they have. It should be made easy for them to learn Perl or C++ and run 5 copies of xterm alongside 2 different browsers for development. Debian+Fluxbox runs great and fast on a 90mhz PC, full Opera works fine on a 300mhz, so I'm sure a full-blown OS will run fine on the $100 laptop.
I'm nice to fat people. It's just that I paid for my seat, and I expect to get all of it, not 80% of it. It's small enough already that I really would like all of that space that I paid for. Same goes for buses and trains.