You seem to be making the mistake that (every/the) receiving country is totally in a deplorable state and has needs lower in maslov's pyramid. For those country OLPC does not make sense, and these countries/regions do not contract the OLPC project to sell them those laptops. But there are countries that have their basic needs fixed and think they might profit from this project. And they are not basing their investments on a english-language PR website, that is for the donors, hence the sentimental tones. I think the problem is not hardware for the infrastructure. That is something some well spend money/training can solve. The problem is in the actual curriculum. Where are the books/texts these kids need to read on them. Who is going to write those? What is this going to do the rest of the local market for educational books? This content is instrumental in the succes of the project, but I have seen very little info on how they think to solve that. 50 Billion is a lot of money anywhere, not only in OLPC countries.
Parent has a very good point: recruitment is not about giving a fair impression of a soldiers life, but to select the dumb and hopeless from the smarter folks. Really who would like, to get paid to be shot at, and have a whole hierachy to piss on you as well? If that game was about reality, they'd lock you up for a few hours to simulate the boredom, and then shove you into a hummer that gets blown up at the next corner. The last scene in my version would be their mothers cashing their son's life insurance and having a party at their funeral: So long sucker! But too many knuckleheads would be able to connect the dots and give the recruitment officers a good beating, so their rosy version makes some sense from their perverted point of view.
Sorry, but they do exist on my side of the pond. Granted they have a plastic plug around them and they are intended to be hammered into concrete (after drillin a hole). But because americans are to cheap to built houses with concrete, you won't see them on your side of the pond.
MS broke the law here and over there. That has nothing to do with competition (and its not businessee that are sueing), but with their behaviour. So MS was a conspiracy to brake those laws. You worked for them. You were part of that conspiracy, and that is what you are guilty of. Furthermore you are guilty of egocentrism and or americacentrism. You refer to a lack of research done in europe in a time you probably were not born yet. You bluntly claim there was none because you know of none. Maybe that points to a problem in your knowledge and not in the research done. For instance do some research on microkernels and see what universities they originated from.
All patents are arbitrary anyway, so no matter where you put the borders on it, they are arbitrary. A patent is a monopoly granted by gouvernment. This isn't a monopoly on anything you desire, but delineated by your patent claims, other patents, prior inventions and other rules of the gouvernment. So if gouverment says 'no patent can be implemented totally in software' then that is the rule. There is nothing illogical about it.
Sorry. First of all they did not pollute my mailbox with a flyer (I'm gratefull about that) and second I would never vote for a party whose average IQ would be that low.
Neurons work with a voltage potential across the celmembrane. Those potentials are significant (millivolts to volt region) and not vanishinly small. Yes the current that flows across the membrane when a neuron fires is extremely weak, but that is just because a cell is that tiny. There is no way that radiation that has a wavelenght that is a few orders of magnitude greater than that of a neuron can influence said neuron, ofter than to warm it and its surroundings.
But that sadly is all wasted on you. Either you are convinced there must be something bad there, or (more likely on/.) you are just trolling to see who bites. I did:-)
If only to weed out the gunnuts and other looniebin characters. Give 'em some toys to play with and some ways to retreat themselves from the genepool and it makes out society a bit nicer. Just make sure the headloony does not declare war on you.
You proposal (referenda for everything) would seriously hamper budgetting, as most people choose for more money for [insert favourite employee group here]. It would give responsibility to a lot of people without making them really responsible. If you have a minister that goes over budget, he has to come and explain in parliament. voters can't. They would not have all the information to make desicions anyway, and even if they had, you can't expect them to research it all for one vote only. That is what we pay politicians for. Not every choice is a simple and purely ethical as ruining a kid and mothers life vs killing an embryo.
Ok, you are totaly right: I never made the effort to read any of those propaganda fliers. I only got those for two parties so that was what my choices were limited to. The choice was not that hard: one had a bald man on front, the other a nice woman of my agegroup (the only downside of her is that she had her hair cut when she got kids...) Actually, i could have voted for the first foreign sounding female on their list (AKA the 'troetelturk'[toyforeigner]) but these don't show pictures. So I am just happy i voted for a hot woman (that shared a lot of my political ideas, but I did not learn that from their propaganda)
BTW: the bald man party made huge victory, from 9 to ~26 seat (out of 150), so he didn't need my vote anyway. Too bad bald man and hot chick can't go make a gouvernment, maye with the help of harry potter(who lost some seats) and the ideal son in law (who lost more seats).
Somehow not many people took their advice, which is always D66. D66 went from 6 to 3 seat in parliament. But nice of them to characterise potential D66 voters as stupid;)
Mind if I introduce you the church of 'erisgeenrozeeenhoorn'. These people beleive there is no invisible pink unicorn. Since you do not believe in the invisible pink unicorn either, you are part of this church. Idem for the church of noflyingteapot or the church of noflyingspagettimonster. Or you might accept that people that do not believe in your god or any god, are not therefore part of a group. Your 'us against them' stance is as stupid as your beliefs.
They certainly are not very convincing, or at least me too was not impressed. It might make a good fishing expedition though; declare a week of the X-bugs and hope those X-bugs come flowing in. Maybe someone should send in a lookalike exploit to find their intentions out.
There are still people alive that have suffered in those camps. Anybody proclaiming the holocaust didn't happen are deeply hurt by that. That is where freedom of speech does not apply anymore. When these people are gone in about 40 years, then it would be wise to remove that aspect of the law. If you don't you are just forcing a particular belief, just like is happening in Turkey: It is forbidden to call the Armenian genocide just that, because it is insulting the turkish national identity or some other crap. So, you would be right if the were no victims alive today.
You seem to imply that because your argument over a sub-subject may hold some water (it does not as the other users have already shown you), the whole house of cards falls down. That is just not true, science does not work that way. There is no archilles heel vulnerabilty that you can expose and then every scientist says: ok we pack it in. That is the mechanism of religion: you have to believe it because it is in the holy book, and everything that is in the holy book is true. Once something turns out not to be true, then the whole books comes in a different light. You might try accepting that man wrote the holy books, and man created the religions around it, and man created the god(s). I have created my own that I call My Invisible Friend that watches over me at night. During the day he keeps himself fit by kicking the crap out of your invisible friend/god/dog.
You don't need to believe in the holocaust, because it is a fact. Or do you believe in gravity too? Freedom of expression is nice, but when you start insulting other people (something rightwing nutters cannot resist) you loose that right. Oppression? maybe. In my opinion the punishment for those wackos should be banishment to a deserted island where they can be free of any people with the wrong haircolor. Just a shovel, some seeds and a simple shelter and let them fend for themselves. Instructions for ropemaking will be send after 2 months.
the idea about Inertial Electrostatic Confinement did not come from them. Farnsworth (of TV tube fame) and hirsh developed that, but ran into problems with the anode or kathode not being transparent enough. Their invention is to make this electrode with magnets, which is a logical progression. You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even. The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish. The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
Are you projecting you inability to understand the subject on this guy? He looks, walks and talks like an old man, yes. How does that make him a nutcase? This was a very nice talk, the main problem I had with it it was that I wasn't there to ask questions myself.
Sorry, but all those people that vote for socialist parties (I probably will next week) do not do so to help your 'elite' to get a gouvernment the way you describe. It could be that they all are being decieved, or it could be that you are just plain wrong? Socialism in my book is about the gouvernment behaving socially. Maybe your ideal is more like each man for himself?
To see if there really is damascene wootz steel in that plane you'd need to etch it with acid and rub the surface with Fe3(?)Cl to make the typical damascene bands appear. Since this plane is flying way over your head it is impossible to see if it is made from wootz. However since this 747 is most likely made from aluminium instead of steel one can apply Occams razor (that for this time is made from damascened wootz) and conclude that it is not.
Are you sure you did not mean communism? I know these countries called themselves socialist, but they all had a communist party. These did not come to be all by themselves, but under the influence of stalinist Russia. And stalin was very much a product of the 1930 (stalin came to power in 1924) so his idea of civil rights is not soo shocking. There are plenty of of socialist gouvernments that function in a true democracy that are not the totalitarian regimes you are made to think. Socialism is about the (rights of) the people.
If they get caught with a scheme like that, or even encouraging their employees to donate to the candidate, they will be in hot water and so will the candidate.
So, how many candidates get in that hot water with each election? If the motive is certainly there, but nobody is getting caught, then either your assumption (companies are motivated to buy political influence) is wrong, or the corruption happens but goes undetected. IMHO all political advertising in all media should be forbidden, there should be no ties between political parties/factions and the media. If a candidate can not spend his election money on ads, he might be less inclined to start smearing. Alas, one can dream... (or live in the Netherlands:)
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be making the mistake that (every/the) receiving country is totally in a deplorable state and has needs lower in maslov's pyramid. For those country OLPC does not make sense, and these countries/regions do not contract the OLPC project to sell them those laptops. But there are countries that have their basic needs fixed and think they might profit from this project. And they are not basing their investments on a english-language PR website, that is for the donors, hence the sentimental tones.
I think the problem is not hardware for the infrastructure. That is something some well spend money/training can solve. The problem is in the actual curriculum. Where are the books/texts these kids need to read on them. Who is going to write those? What is this going to do the rest of the local market for educational books? This content is instrumental in the succes of the project, but I have seen very little info on how they think to solve that.
50 Billion is a lot of money anywhere, not only in OLPC countries.
Parent has a very good point: recruitment is not about giving a fair impression of a soldiers life, but to select the dumb and hopeless from the smarter folks. Really who would like, to get paid to be shot at, and have a whole hierachy to piss on you as well? If that game was about reality, they'd lock you up for a few hours to simulate the boredom, and then shove you into a hummer that gets blown up at the next corner. The last scene in my version would be their mothers cashing their son's life insurance and having a party at their funeral: So long sucker!
But too many knuckleheads would be able to connect the dots and give the recruitment officers a good beating, so their rosy version makes some sense from their perverted point of view.
Sorry, but they do exist on my side of the pond. Granted they have a plastic plug around them and they are intended to be hammered into concrete (after drillin a hole). But because americans are to cheap to built houses with concrete, you won't see them on your side of the pond.
you had screws you could hammer in and screw out if needed?
MS broke the law here and over there. That has nothing to do with competition (and its not businessee that are sueing), but with their behaviour. So MS was a conspiracy to brake those laws. You worked for them. You were part of that conspiracy, and that is what you are guilty of.
Furthermore you are guilty of egocentrism and or americacentrism. You refer to a lack of research done in europe in a time you probably were not born yet. You bluntly claim there was none because you know of none. Maybe that points to a problem in your knowledge and not in the research done. For instance do some research on microkernels and see what universities they originated from.
All patents are arbitrary anyway, so no matter where you put the borders on it, they are arbitrary. A patent is a monopoly granted by gouvernment. This isn't a monopoly on anything you desire, but delineated by your patent claims, other patents, prior inventions and other rules of the gouvernment.
So if gouverment says 'no patent can be implemented totally in software' then that is the rule. There is nothing illogical about it.
Minix was written by Andrew Tannenbaum, a professor at the vrije universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Your employer is a convicted monopolist, here and over there. That makes you guilty by association if one were to use the same logic as you do.
Sorry. First of all they did not pollute my mailbox with a flyer (I'm gratefull about that) and second I would never vote for a party whose average IQ would be that low.
Neurons work with a voltage potential across the celmembrane. Those potentials are significant (millivolts to volt region) and not vanishinly small. Yes the current that flows across the membrane when a neuron fires is extremely weak, but that is just because a cell is that tiny.
/.) you are just trolling to see who bites. I did :-)
There is no way that radiation that has a wavelenght that is a few orders of magnitude greater than that of a neuron can influence said neuron, ofter than to warm it and its surroundings.
But that sadly is all wasted on you. Either you are convinced there must be something bad there, or (more likely on
If only to weed out the gunnuts and other looniebin characters. Give 'em some toys to play with and some ways to retreat themselves from the genepool and it makes out society a bit nicer. Just make sure the headloony does not declare war on you.
You proposal (referenda for everything) would seriously hamper budgetting, as most people choose for more money for [insert favourite employee group here]. It would give responsibility to a lot of people without making them really responsible. If you have a minister that goes over budget, he has to come and explain in parliament. voters can't. They would not have all the information to make desicions anyway, and even if they had, you can't expect them to research it all for one vote only. That is what we pay politicians for. Not every choice is a simple and purely ethical as ruining a kid and mothers life vs killing an embryo.
Ok, you are totaly right: I never made the effort to read any of those propaganda fliers. I only got those for two parties so that was what my choices were limited to. The choice was not that hard: one had a bald man on front, the other a nice woman of my agegroup (the only downside of her is that she had her hair cut when she got kids...)
Actually, i could have voted for the first foreign sounding female on their list (AKA the 'troetelturk'[toyforeigner]) but these don't show pictures. So I am just happy i voted for a hot woman (that shared a lot of my political ideas, but I did not learn that from their propaganda)
BTW: the bald man party made huge victory, from 9 to ~26 seat (out of 150), so he didn't need my vote anyway. Too bad bald man and hot chick can't go make a gouvernment, maye with the help of harry potter(who lost some seats) and the ideal son in law (who lost more seats).
Somehow not many people took their advice, which is always D66. D66 went from 6 to 3 seat in parliament. But nice of them to characterise potential D66 voters as stupid ;)
Mind if I introduce you the church of 'erisgeenrozeeenhoorn'. These people beleive there is no invisible pink unicorn. Since you do not believe in the invisible pink unicorn either, you are part of this church. Idem for the church of noflyingteapot or the church of noflyingspagettimonster.
Or you might accept that people that do not believe in your god or any god, are not therefore part of a group. Your 'us against them' stance is as stupid as your beliefs.
They certainly are not very convincing, or at least me too was not impressed. It might make a good fishing expedition though; declare a week of the X-bugs and hope those X-bugs come flowing in. Maybe someone should send in a lookalike exploit to find their intentions out.
here
There are still people alive that have suffered in those camps. Anybody proclaiming the holocaust didn't happen are deeply hurt by that. That is where freedom of speech does not apply anymore. When these people are gone in about 40 years, then it would be wise to remove that aspect of the law. If you don't you are just forcing a particular belief, just like is happening in Turkey: It is forbidden to call the Armenian genocide just that, because it is insulting the turkish national identity or some other crap.
So, you would be right if the were no victims alive today.
You seem to imply that because your argument over a sub-subject may hold some water (it does not as the other users have already shown you), the whole house of cards falls down.
That is just not true, science does not work that way. There is no archilles heel vulnerabilty that you can expose and then every scientist says: ok we pack it in. That is the mechanism of religion: you have to believe it because it is in the holy book, and everything that is in the holy book is true. Once something turns out not to be true, then the whole books comes in a different light.
You might try accepting that man wrote the holy books, and man created the religions around it, and man created the god(s).
I have created my own that I call My Invisible Friend that watches over me at night. During the day he keeps himself fit by kicking the crap out of your invisible friend/god/dog.
You don't need to believe in the holocaust, because it is a fact. Or do you believe in gravity too? Freedom of expression is nice, but when you start insulting other people (something rightwing nutters cannot resist) you loose that right. Oppression? maybe. In my opinion the punishment for those wackos should be banishment to a deserted island where they can be free of any people with the wrong haircolor. Just a shovel, some seeds and a simple shelter and let them fend for themselves. Instructions for ropemaking will be send after 2 months.
the idea about Inertial Electrostatic Confinement did not come from them. Farnsworth (of TV tube fame) and hirsh developed that, but ran into problems with the anode or kathode not being transparent enough. Their invention is to make this electrode with magnets, which is a logical progression.
You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even.
The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish.
The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
Are you projecting you inability to understand the subject on this guy?
He looks, walks and talks like an old man, yes. How does that make him a nutcase?
This was a very nice talk, the main problem I had with it it was that I wasn't there to ask questions myself.
Sorry, but all those people that vote for socialist parties (I probably will next week) do not do so to help your 'elite' to get a gouvernment the way you describe. It could be that they all are being decieved, or it could be that you are just plain wrong?
Socialism in my book is about the gouvernment behaving socially. Maybe your ideal is more like each man for himself?
To see if there really is damascene wootz steel in that plane you'd need to etch it with acid and rub the surface with Fe3(?)Cl to make the typical damascene bands appear. Since this plane is flying way over your head it is impossible to see if it is made from wootz. However since this 747 is most likely made from aluminium instead of steel one can apply Occams razor (that for this time is made from damascened wootz) and conclude that it is not.
Are you sure you did not mean communism? I know these countries called themselves socialist, but they all had a communist party. These did not come to be all by themselves, but under the influence of stalinist Russia. And stalin was very much a product of the 1930 (stalin came to power in 1924) so his idea of civil rights is not soo shocking.
There are plenty of of socialist gouvernments that function in a true democracy that are not the totalitarian regimes you are made to think. Socialism is about the (rights of) the people.
So, how many candidates get in that hot water with each election? If the motive is certainly there, but nobody is getting caught, then either your assumption (companies are motivated to buy political influence) is wrong, or the corruption happens but goes undetected.
IMHO all political advertising in all media should be forbidden, there should be no ties between political parties/factions and the media. If a candidate can not spend his election money on ads, he might be less inclined to start smearing.
Alas, one can dream... (or live in the Netherlands