school houses aren't expensive in poor countries.
laptops ARE expensive.
infrastructure lasts many years. you don't need to rebuild that school year by year. that school creates a community. the teacher is a part of the community.
if your village is so ignorant that you don't even have a teacher do you think they will magically be taught by a laptop?
its absurd.
western do gooders are trying to perform a misguided societal experiment on poor people on THEIR dime.
it is highly unethical.
as said before, other countries like china and india are pushing ahead using REAL schools. funding real infrastructure. look into the history of how your own country was built. the massive infrastructure projects that were started a century ago help give you the comfy life you live today. there is no skipping the process of building a country into the first world. real world examples are china and india. the wisdom of teachers cannot be replaced by a screen. children are not little computers you can program like that. many tech people live in their little bubble of technology where they mistakenly believe it is the thing that runs the world. they forget everything else providing the base line services that make it possible. perhaps they even regard the other segments that support society with disdain.
"
Give a man a bowl of rice and he eats for a day. Give a man access to all the information in the world and he can improve the way he does everything from farming,to building, to teaching his community.
"
i think the people in question know how to fish..how to farm. you can teach a farmer all you want, but without the government building things like power generators and water projects, he will be subject to his enviromental/working conditions as he has always been. poor farmers don't have the capital or the time to pull off the required improvements.
and the major problem with this "teaching man to fish" nonsense is that you are taking a LOT of money for this lesson you are supposedly giving them. if we gave it free, all the blathering about teaching man to fish being awesome would be just that, very good. but you aren't. you are asking poor governments to take money which could go to normal improvement projects and putting them into a gadget. an unproven and highly dubious experiment using money of those who can least afford it is UNETHICAL.
you are so wrong.
access to the internet automatically makes it an advertising delivery mechanism.
thats just how it works.
dvoraks argument is that certain priorities are more important. making poor governments pay for gadgets while people are dying seems to be missing the point. the people who push olpc don't seem to understand how the west built its wealth and infrastructure over generations.
if you think people arent starving because of lack of money for food aid etc, then there are other problems to solve obviously. it doesn't matter why the food isn't getting there, it only matters that it doesn't get there. and an olpc won't make it get there any faster. thats for certain.
as for education. building schools and training teachers is a better use of money and strengthens communities more than any toy computer could.
its a nice idea. give a farmer a pen and some paper. he will be so englightened right? his creativity will pour forth and enrich his society. the reality is he needs a new plow so he can feed is %#@^@# family.
some in the west don't understand how our wealth was built. go back and look at how old your water/sewer systems are in much of the city, built decades ago and have served generations. its massive water and other infrastructure projects which have raised our standard of living so we can pursue other jobs. trying to skip this step by handing out laptops is just naive and a total waste of money. its fine if you are the one paying for such pet projects, its quite unethical if you try to convince poor governments to foot the bill for your edu toy gadget. its funny how the device already admits its going into areas where there is no electricity with its nonsense hand crank power, and doesn't realize the fundamental absurdity of its position. but i guess the reality is that many tech egos are behind this. and you don't get your name in lights for funding an electricity power station:P
look at china. they know what they are doing. massive infrastructure projects to improve the lives of their people. they aren't handing out cheesy laptops to their poor. there are somethings you cannot skip.
the record of computers in education is very mixed here in the west. its funny how people ignore how lousy our own children are doing in basic skills when they have plenty of access to computing. it is and was never a magic solution. early on in the 80's-90's remember the schools were so afraid children wouldn't be computer literate they made classes play oregon trail and other nonsense on their apple 2's as if that were actually doing something valuable.
apparently the delusion continues.
did access to computers increase us students math/language scores?
of course not.
its books and teachers and basic infrastructure that matter
but thats not sexy
so gadgets are sold as miracle cures, and geek bazillionaires think they are saving the world. its fine if you give them away, slightly dodgy if you ask their poor governments to pay for this toy. i mean seriously, you are asking them to spend money on a toy when they cant even get electricity to some of these people, as acknowledged by the olpc's hand generator and other such nonsense.
mostly a 3rd party is a waste of time. a party that represents even less % of the people holding presidential power? great idea.....
why not 4 parties? 5? 6? why not have one party per voter, thats the only way to have real representation.
massive numbers of parties only results in coalitions to get things passed and coalitions are just parties by default really. and so its really its the same thing. the reality is compromise. unless you are dictator no governments going to 100% represent you.
whipping out the strawmens again?
just more simplistic drivel claiming intellectual superiority over americans.
have you taken political science courses in both europe and america? i'm sorry, but talk radio isn't a political science course you know.
anyways, we have incredible problems with universal healthcare because we have a broken immigration system. we rely on illegals for cheap labor, and they are protected both by political greed and fear of being perceived as racist if you do anything about them. and so our border remains porous and floods of illegals come and put massive strain on our government resources. although illegal immigrant advocates like to claim they pay taxes, they never include the fact that low wages = low taxes and they don't even pay for a fraction of the cost of the services they and their families consume. now add universal healthcare as an additional lure for illegal immigration and cost. our fall back medicare and such systems are already under financial strain, a universal healthcare system would be broken on day one. and so the collusion between ethnic pressure groups, white guilt, political correctness and corporate greed continues to keep our immigration system in shambles..and uhs a fantasy.
"Hillary gave up on on universal health care and is back to an insurance-company based plan, just as corporate America requested."
theres a difference between his characterization of does not care and being realistic.
she saw what happened the last time she went for universal healthcare.
remember? you want to hand the republicans power for another 8 years?
as for that guy characterizing everyone in the us as right wing being modded to "insightful" 5 points, somethings seriously wrong there. it couldn't have been more simplistic or stupid of a post.
i'm using 490mb, but i have over 70 tabs open:P
firefox gets the blame for many a shoddily built system i bet. low quality psus, borked windows installations and other nonsense. it can use a lot of memory but it also does a lot. i rarely crash and i'm quite the tab whore. perhaps because firefox so easily uses resources it puts strain on systems quite easily and thus reveals instability.
yea but we aren't talking about giving exlusive control to canada. any international solution includes countries that are pretty horrible.
and frankly its probably a lot easier to push canada around than the us.
actually it is being pushed by nations with an agenda that goes beyond business. as far as we know we can't break the good encryption easily accessible to corporations these days.
it really is a non issue.
as for china and such and business information, i think us corps have more to fear from ip loss than any of those countries.
bingo, people love to criticize the us without any relation to reality really. there is no fair mindedness there, it is plain antiamericanism when one comes down so harshly on one side while totally ignoring the evils of the other. esp when one uses this willful blindness to pretend the alternative of international control is actually a good thing. criticism of america tends to be an easy way to dodge reality. whether it be oppression in china or russia... bring up the us and you can get the heat taken off yourself because so many people are stupid enough to fall for that lame trick. it might be a self serving thing really. complain about the us and really you generally have to do nothing. if you have to look at chinas lack of human rights or russia, you might actually have to make sacrifices or cause trouble and stand up to your unethical trade partner. so better to keep yourself in a little feel good bubble and attack america instead.
the problem is the assumption
hddvd owners are hddvd film buyers
ps3 owners are not automatically bluray format supporters. to assume they all are is the problem with counting ps3.
buying a standalone is far more definitive in ascertaining consumer intention
32" crt tv's dont have the phosphor dots to resolve full 1080i.
1080 scans = hdtv label even if it doesn't fully resolve any detail.
such is marketing and fudging specs.
so don't judge hd resolution by crt, as many are really edtv if honest about their true potential.
theoretical and not real world advantage from real world evaluation of discs.
extra space is fine for special features, but so is an extra disc.
in the end, it doesn't really matter unless you are one of those who has golden ears and thinks they can pass a double blind test on lossless audio vs compressed...which frankly most everyone fails.
frankly microsoft in "control" is preferable to sony.. sony is the riaa/mpaa all rolled up into a nice ball of toxic poison.
hate ms as much as you want, but they haven't been sueing their potential customers.
on the other hand there are plenty of quiet people who don't shoot up schools. more than 99.99%:P
its just another knee jerk thing. i really don't think he just needed to be "talked to".
"I don't have a PS3, but considering 1080P = 1920*1080, which is more than most monitors people have, if its cumbersome, its not because of the resolution, thats for sure...
"
probably the resolution relative to size of the screen. its why the 30" lcds for pc/mac have double that resolution. for text what matters is sharpness and pixel density, not overall size unless you are doing a presentation. lower dpi text on a large screen would be clumbersome. connecting two displays of different sizes to a ps3 is also clumbersome, so its not a good solution
the power of laptops is impressive these days
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 1
dual core, that would have been undreamable 5 years ago. now every laptop is powerful enough for most desktop use and pleasant to use as well since lcds don't look like garbage anymore. you even get the bonus of always having a ups with the laptop battery. add the portability and the final killer app of wifi built in on every laptop and the selling points of a desktop just rapidly diminish. and the final blow is the low prices, a laptop is now cheap whereas in the past you could only get a laptop with passable cpu speed if you bought high end. now even low end is quite usable.
and for the green crowd, a laptops 30-40watt total power consumption and power suspend/resume features cannot be beat. maybe apple desktops are good with the quick suspend stuff, but many self built or other desktops fall down on this one.
yup, no real point putting pressure on companies and perhaps reducing job growth.
poverty creates plenty of carbon output. burning dirty sources of heating and collected wood in inefficient fireplaces etc. and in other countries, its slash and burn agriculture.
canada is being propped up by oil in the west. i don't think you realize certain industries won't like the strong canadian dollar. all those film/tv productions from the us that go to canada for the "savings" will now have no reason to stay for one. which is honestly a good thing since bland canadian cities/locations trying to pass as us ones is getting a bit tiresome.
Slashdot Mirror
lol new story..slashdot pwned:)
school houses aren't expensive in poor countries. laptops ARE expensive. infrastructure lasts many years. you don't need to rebuild that school year by year. that school creates a community. the teacher is a part of the community. if your village is so ignorant that you don't even have a teacher do you think they will magically be taught by a laptop? its absurd. western do gooders are trying to perform a misguided societal experiment on poor people on THEIR dime. it is highly unethical. as said before, other countries like china and india are pushing ahead using REAL schools. funding real infrastructure. look into the history of how your own country was built. the massive infrastructure projects that were started a century ago help give you the comfy life you live today. there is no skipping the process of building a country into the first world. real world examples are china and india. the wisdom of teachers cannot be replaced by a screen. children are not little computers you can program like that. many tech people live in their little bubble of technology where they mistakenly believe it is the thing that runs the world. they forget everything else providing the base line services that make it possible. perhaps they even regard the other segments that support society with disdain. " Give a man a bowl of rice and he eats for a day. Give a man access to all the information in the world and he can improve the way he does everything from farming,to building, to teaching his community. " i think the people in question know how to fish..how to farm. you can teach a farmer all you want, but without the government building things like power generators and water projects, he will be subject to his enviromental/working conditions as he has always been. poor farmers don't have the capital or the time to pull off the required improvements. and the major problem with this "teaching man to fish" nonsense is that you are taking a LOT of money for this lesson you are supposedly giving them. if we gave it free, all the blathering about teaching man to fish being awesome would be just that, very good. but you aren't. you are asking poor governments to take money which could go to normal improvement projects and putting them into a gadget. an unproven and highly dubious experiment using money of those who can least afford it is UNETHICAL.
you are so wrong. access to the internet automatically makes it an advertising delivery mechanism. thats just how it works. dvoraks argument is that certain priorities are more important. making poor governments pay for gadgets while people are dying seems to be missing the point. the people who push olpc don't seem to understand how the west built its wealth and infrastructure over generations. if you think people arent starving because of lack of money for food aid etc, then there are other problems to solve obviously. it doesn't matter why the food isn't getting there, it only matters that it doesn't get there. and an olpc won't make it get there any faster. thats for certain. as for education. building schools and training teachers is a better use of money and strengthens communities more than any toy computer could.
its a nice idea. give a farmer a pen and some paper. he will be so englightened right? his creativity will pour forth and enrich his society. the reality is he needs a new plow so he can feed is %#@^@# family. some in the west don't understand how our wealth was built. go back and look at how old your water/sewer systems are in much of the city, built decades ago and have served generations. its massive water and other infrastructure projects which have raised our standard of living so we can pursue other jobs. trying to skip this step by handing out laptops is just naive and a total waste of money. its fine if you are the one paying for such pet projects, its quite unethical if you try to convince poor governments to foot the bill for your edu toy gadget. its funny how the device already admits its going into areas where there is no electricity with its nonsense hand crank power, and doesn't realize the fundamental absurdity of its position. but i guess the reality is that many tech egos are behind this. and you don't get your name in lights for funding an electricity power station:P look at china. they know what they are doing. massive infrastructure projects to improve the lives of their people. they aren't handing out cheesy laptops to their poor. there are somethings you cannot skip. the record of computers in education is very mixed here in the west. its funny how people ignore how lousy our own children are doing in basic skills when they have plenty of access to computing. it is and was never a magic solution. early on in the 80's-90's remember the schools were so afraid children wouldn't be computer literate they made classes play oregon trail and other nonsense on their apple 2's as if that were actually doing something valuable. apparently the delusion continues.
did access to computers increase us students math/language scores? of course not. its books and teachers and basic infrastructure that matter but thats not sexy so gadgets are sold as miracle cures, and geek bazillionaires think they are saving the world. its fine if you give them away, slightly dodgy if you ask their poor governments to pay for this toy. i mean seriously, you are asking them to spend money on a toy when they cant even get electricity to some of these people, as acknowledged by the olpc's hand generator and other such nonsense.
mostly a 3rd party is a waste of time. a party that represents even less % of the people holding presidential power? great idea..... why not 4 parties? 5? 6? why not have one party per voter, thats the only way to have real representation. massive numbers of parties only results in coalitions to get things passed and coalitions are just parties by default really. and so its really its the same thing. the reality is compromise. unless you are dictator no governments going to 100% represent you.
whipping out the strawmens again? just more simplistic drivel claiming intellectual superiority over americans. have you taken political science courses in both europe and america? i'm sorry, but talk radio isn't a political science course you know. anyways, we have incredible problems with universal healthcare because we have a broken immigration system. we rely on illegals for cheap labor, and they are protected both by political greed and fear of being perceived as racist if you do anything about them. and so our border remains porous and floods of illegals come and put massive strain on our government resources. although illegal immigrant advocates like to claim they pay taxes, they never include the fact that low wages = low taxes and they don't even pay for a fraction of the cost of the services they and their families consume. now add universal healthcare as an additional lure for illegal immigration and cost. our fall back medicare and such systems are already under financial strain, a universal healthcare system would be broken on day one. and so the collusion between ethnic pressure groups, white guilt, political correctness and corporate greed continues to keep our immigration system in shambles..and uhs a fantasy.
"Hillary gave up on on universal health care and is back to an insurance-company based plan, just as corporate America requested." theres a difference between his characterization of does not care and being realistic. she saw what happened the last time she went for universal healthcare. remember? you want to hand the republicans power for another 8 years? as for that guy characterizing everyone in the us as right wing being modded to "insightful" 5 points, somethings seriously wrong there. it couldn't have been more simplistic or stupid of a post.
rol of the internet to countries like china?
i'm using 490mb, but i have over 70 tabs open:P firefox gets the blame for many a shoddily built system i bet. low quality psus, borked windows installations and other nonsense. it can use a lot of memory but it also does a lot. i rarely crash and i'm quite the tab whore. perhaps because firefox so easily uses resources it puts strain on systems quite easily and thus reveals instability.
yea but we aren't talking about giving exlusive control to canada. any international solution includes countries that are pretty horrible. and frankly its probably a lot easier to push canada around than the us.
actually it is being pushed by nations with an agenda that goes beyond business. as far as we know we can't break the good encryption easily accessible to corporations these days. it really is a non issue. as for china and such and business information, i think us corps have more to fear from ip loss than any of those countries.
bingo, people love to criticize the us without any relation to reality really. there is no fair mindedness there, it is plain antiamericanism when one comes down so harshly on one side while totally ignoring the evils of the other. esp when one uses this willful blindness to pretend the alternative of international control is actually a good thing. criticism of america tends to be an easy way to dodge reality. whether it be oppression in china or russia... bring up the us and you can get the heat taken off yourself because so many people are stupid enough to fall for that lame trick. it might be a self serving thing really. complain about the us and really you generally have to do nothing. if you have to look at chinas lack of human rights or russia, you might actually have to make sacrifices or cause trouble and stand up to your unethical trade partner. so better to keep yourself in a little feel good bubble and attack america instead.
the problem is the assumption hddvd owners are hddvd film buyers ps3 owners are not automatically bluray format supporters. to assume they all are is the problem with counting ps3. buying a standalone is far more definitive in ascertaining consumer intention
32" crt tv's dont have the phosphor dots to resolve full 1080i. 1080 scans = hdtv label even if it doesn't fully resolve any detail. such is marketing and fudging specs. so don't judge hd resolution by crt, as many are really edtv if honest about their true potential.
theoretical and not real world advantage from real world evaluation of discs. extra space is fine for special features, but so is an extra disc. in the end, it doesn't really matter unless you are one of those who has golden ears and thinks they can pass a double blind test on lossless audio vs compressed...which frankly most everyone fails.
frankly microsoft in "control" is preferable to sony.. sony is the riaa/mpaa all rolled up into a nice ball of toxic poison. hate ms as much as you want, but they haven't been sueing their potential customers.
stand alone http://www.tvpredictions.com/forum/comments.php?y=07&m=11&entry=entry071108-051750 the 90,000 recently announced for a week did not include online sales by amazon and others so its actually higher.
yup npr interview on talk of the nation http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=7454969 link good for today only since its only todays show that is downloadable seems profiling is about as good as astrology.
on the other hand there are plenty of quiet people who don't shoot up schools. more than 99.99%:P its just another knee jerk thing. i really don't think he just needed to be "talked to".
from what i remember it came out with the absurd conclusion because they included the sick as "thin"....as happens when you are dying.
"I don't have a PS3, but considering 1080P = 1920*1080, which is more than most monitors people have, if its cumbersome, its not because of the resolution, thats for sure... " probably the resolution relative to size of the screen. its why the 30" lcds for pc/mac have double that resolution. for text what matters is sharpness and pixel density, not overall size unless you are doing a presentation. lower dpi text on a large screen would be clumbersome. connecting two displays of different sizes to a ps3 is also clumbersome, so its not a good solution
dual core, that would have been undreamable 5 years ago. now every laptop is powerful enough for most desktop use and pleasant to use as well since lcds don't look like garbage anymore. you even get the bonus of always having a ups with the laptop battery. add the portability and the final killer app of wifi built in on every laptop and the selling points of a desktop just rapidly diminish. and the final blow is the low prices, a laptop is now cheap whereas in the past you could only get a laptop with passable cpu speed if you bought high end. now even low end is quite usable. and for the green crowd, a laptops 30-40watt total power consumption and power suspend/resume features cannot be beat. maybe apple desktops are good with the quick suspend stuff, but many self built or other desktops fall down on this one.
yup, no real point putting pressure on companies and perhaps reducing job growth. poverty creates plenty of carbon output. burning dirty sources of heating and collected wood in inefficient fireplaces etc. and in other countries, its slash and burn agriculture.
canada is being propped up by oil in the west. i don't think you realize certain industries won't like the strong canadian dollar. all those film/tv productions from the us that go to canada for the "savings" will now have no reason to stay for one. which is honestly a good thing since bland canadian cities/locations trying to pass as us ones is getting a bit tiresome.