True, sampling without permission outside a context of parody is wrong. Oh I don't know. There's definitely a vague and unfocussed line that shouldn't be crossed somewhere, but to me it's definitely a moral grey area.
Sampling a four bar loop, repeating it, making it prominent in the mix and offering no credit to the original, I would agree is wrong. But creative sampling doesn't do this. Public Enemy would take snippets of James Brown one-off horn riffs, and turn them into the core of a song. Sounds would be placed so the beats were offset from where they would have been in the original.
Then there's the question of practicality. I want to hear creative cut-ups from kids who won't be selling thousands of records. The overhead of cataloguing samples, finding the owners and paying them would simply prevent them from releasing their works.
But by your post, he should one of the biggest outlaws in Texas because he's poor and there are others around him who are rich. You're confusing an generalisation with an absolute predictable cause and effect. We're talking about statistics here.
Imagine a hypothetical inequality index (HII) -- something you can measure in an individual's circumstances at any one time.
At HII=x, let's say 1% of people get tempted into crime. Your dad is one of the 99% of people who behave. At HII=2x, maybe 1.5% of people get tempted into crime. Your dad is one of the 98.5%.
The vast majority of people are law abiding. Fluctuations in the small number of criminals have a big effect on our perception of lawlessness around us.
_The Shining_ is often considered a "literary classic". A lot of the "literature" you read got that way simply because it's old. Much of it is still pretty much crap.
Whereas The Shining is both new(ish) and crap (seriously -- cite me a respectable source that really claims it's a literary classic)
Something I was wondering in general (but which might apply well for OLPC laptops due to the lower processing power) is if it would be feasible to implement a multicomputer parallel processing capability. That is, use the mesh network to divide processing between multiple laptops, based on a language like Erlang (if it requires substantial changes or simplification maybe give it a new name like IntErlang). I imagine it would use a BitTorrent approach to managing jobs and transferring data, and the connected laptops each run a safe process that handles computation & calculation (like is done with SETI@home).
Doing all this would seem to create a virtual community-based supercomputer, but I don't know enough to identify if there are any showstoppers. Translation: "Imagine a Beouwulf cluster of these things"
Please, if 3rd worlders were that educated then 419 scams wouldn't be half as funny. Yes, because all Nigerians are 419ers, Nigeria is just like every other developing country, and every developing country is just like Nigeria.
What reality does this dude live in that he believes a kid would choose "Pride and Prejudice" over Halo? "a kid"?
I bet if you sampled a typical mixed classroom of British 14 year olds, at least 10% of them would choose Jane Austen over Bungie. After all, more than half of them will be girls, and while many girls do enjoy gaming, Halo's a particularly macho example.
But, you know, you can have both. Monday: save Princess Peach. Tuesday: The Old Man and the Sea.
I'm starting to wonder if anybody at the OLPC project (or even on Slashdot) has actually watched kids in real life? Even when a kid has a sense of ownership, that doesn't mean they won't leave the thing sitting on the floor of the living room for someone to step on, or next to a window that will get direct sun in 12 hours. Kids don't work like that. You generalise. Also we don't know what age kids we're talking about.
When I was -- ooh -- 9 years old perhaps, my parents bought a BBC Micro for the family. It cost £400 -- a lot of money in those days, and a big investment by my parents. They sat me down and explained that it was an expensive and precious thing, and that I wasn't to boast about it at school because other kids would be envious. I was as good as gold, I used it every day, and I treated it with great care, and I most certainly did not crow about its bling.
Kids can do that. If they want to.
Of course, if all their friends have a Playstation, they're given one as if it's nothing special, they don't know it's value, they won't look after it. Easy come, easy go.
and before we worry about delivery method... shouldn't someone verify that the target user can... read? Literacy rates in the target countries are probably not what they are in the developed economies. An abundance of (interesting) reading material is a pretty fundamental tool in developing literacy.
Before worrying about distributing text books, OLPC hopefully will figure out how to overcome the possible problem that the user can't understand anything but the picture on the screen. And if the pictures on the screen resemble a "desktop", would that have any meaning to a typical user? TFA indicates that the UI is language-free.
Do you really think the "desktop metaphor" bears any resemblance to the top of a desk? I think early Xerox and Apple UIs bore some resemblance to a desk, but I have great difficulty mapping any of the objects on my Windows screen to any of the objects on my desk any more.
(When we were using MacOS 9 at university, my girlfriend commented that it was desktop because it had an apple in the corner)
According to TFA: "In general, the XO uses what Bletsas calls 'Extreme Suspend,' going to sleep after two seconds of inactivity, but waking up within 300 milliseconds of an action."
When I'm reading something online, I don't scroll more frequently than two seconds. I would probably find something else to do if I had to keep jogging the touch pad to keep the display active. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this? I understood this as being the CPU suspending, not the whole machine. The display subsystem would stay up. I could be wrong also, though.
I don't like the idea of the OLPC because there is some fundamental problem that needs to be fixed before that. That is, a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies. Now, what gain would it be if you give the chance to obtain information that has been already altered and censored? I'd say to worry about that problem first.
I've been reading about the USSR recently. One of Lenin's beliefs was that the interim proletariat dictatorial state would wither into an state-free utopia once the right conditions were engineered, and that abuse of power would not be possible because the people would not allow it. Of course, notwithstanding Lenin's own exercising of state terror, Stalin blew that theory away. I'd say that one of the aspects that prevented "the people" from reining in Stalin was the state of communications. A Ukrainian peasant couldn't really know what was going on in (for example) Khazakhstan (in fact later on, an increase in travel associated with service in WWII opened people's eyes to what was going on in other parts of their Union, and fuelled resistance to Stalin).
Distributing these computers is a step towards empowering these people with mass communication. As the OLPC people point out, people tend to find workarounds for state Internet filtering. Maybe increased education and communication is a tool to foster democracy, rather than something to introduce afterwards?
Go for it, you find me quotes from printers for runs of over five thousand books where they cost any more than, oh, five bucks apiece. And that is assuming conventional paper, hardcover (which is, btw, a terrible design approach compared to, say, tyvek over soft plastic), and the book being the awkward size and design of "normal" textbooks.
$5 is considerably more than "free", of course. And then there's distribution costs.
Is the target market for this thing really those kids we see on the Christian Children's Fund adds? If they are, I think a better goal for the worlds resources would be something like "A pair of shoes for every chilled" I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day.
We're probably not talking about refugee camps in famine-struck areas -- those really are people with more pressing needs.
But there are villagers in the developing world who are not starving, but who are definitely "knowledge have nots". We're in the realms of "give a man a fish / give a man a fishing net" here.
Great 5 million laptops all needing more power. Say 100W per laptop, 500MW extra power is now needed to run them. Why speculate about the power requirements, when you can RTFA?
Peak consumption is around 5 watts for high-demand media applications, it falls to around 3 watts for browsing, under a watt when used as an e-Reader in black and white mode, and only 350 milliwatts to participate in the mesh network. ... and in many parts of the world the power will be generated by the owner pulling on bit of string.
I accept that manufacturing and distribution will have an environmental impact. Whether or not an empowered and informed next generation of world population offsets that, I can't begin to guess.
Security is not really a great concern in the ones which will never get networked, and those that do can be updated. But the intention is that the vast majority will be networked. Almost all will join a mesh with nearby machines. Provision of Internet access to communities is part of the project.
One nod to security is that each application runs in its own VM. (Why am I replicating TFA??)
Just wondering... What happens when somebody forgets the thing on direct sunlight (which is IMHO quite likely with kids)? Won't it damage the LCD or battery if left there for a while? They've suggested that one reason they want to give the machines directly to kids, and not to schools, is that the kids will value them more that way, have a sense of ownership, and look after them better. By that logic, once they've learned that leaving one out in the sun kills it (if that's the case), they won't do it again.
The question then is, how easy is it to get a replacement? Make it too easy, and you lose the incentive to look after the one you have. Make it too hard, and there'll be deserving children with no laptop.
I don't know what the OLPC crowd count as a "child" but by the age of 14 a bright child could probably tackle as many Gutenberg type "literary classics" as many adults: if they were interested. Alice in Wonderland is in the Gutenberg archive; I'm sure there are many more children's books there too. Something like Frankenstein contains some ponderous language, but still has the capacity to grip a developing reader.
TFA also mentions that the Mexican government is working towards providing all curriculum textbooks as OLPC compatible ebooks.
I'm British, so I deal with both systems on a daily basis and I think we've got it pretty sorted. Doing something important, where you need accuracy do it in metric doing something fun, do it in imperial.
Distance to the shops in miles, distance to the sun in kilometers I measure my weight in stones and pounds, but I cook in grams. Oh but it's so much more delightfully complex and nuanced!
For example, cold weather in metric ("It's minus four!"), hot weather in imperial ("It's almost a hundred!"). Wines and spirits in ml, beer by the pint.
What's your point? I'll rephrase my response to avoid any confusing sarcasm or inference.
You stated that atheism had articles of faith, and quoted a list of purported articles of faith from atheists.org.
My response is that atheism.org is misrepresenting atheism. Those are a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs, but they do not define atheism, and it is perfectly possible to be an atheist without believing any of them.
(a) I am an atheist. (b) I believe those three things. But that doesn't mean that (a) == (b).
The four buttons just below the screen and to the right are marked Triangle, Circle, Square, X.
What's the story there? Did Sony suggest it? Were Sony asked for it? Is it product placement, or did the OX designers see merit in the culture-agnostic use of geometric shapes?
Atheism is a doctrine that states 1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter), 2) that thought is a property or function of matter, 3) and that death irreversibly and totally terminates individual organic units.
These are philosophical statements not scientific ones. They are not proven philosophically or scientifically. Well, if atheists.org says it, it must be true, right?
Actually, I do believe all of those things -- but those beliefs are tangential to my atheism.
Incidentally, the "to be continued..." at the end of Back to the Future was rather gutsy Notably, BttF 2 finished with "To Be Concluded". Polite, I thought.
This is the most pathetic list of "celebrities" I have ever seen - the UK equivalent of the "D-List", or worse. I doubt that anyone in the US would pay much attention to what Ted "Isaac your Bartender" Lange said about science issues, and these people look like the near-equivalent. When Kathy Griffin testifies before congress on the dangers of large hadron colliders, then, we should be worried. Most of those people are regulars in the British tabloid gossip columns.
Gillian McKeith is in a popular show in which she doles out sensible advice on healthy eating, mixed in with some absolute drivel (she also has a range of health foods).
Are those what qualify as celebrities in Britain? Yes. And many of your American household names are unknown to us. That's what makes travel interesting.
The organization of the World-Wide Web. I love the Web, but finding something specific on it is a nightmare. And because the Web is growing by leaps and bounds, I just don't see things getting easier anytime soon.
How little they knew...
None of them predict search engines - because they were a genuine and unexpected innovation. I remember using the Web at around that time - before Yahoo attempted to create a directory, and Altavista produced their webspider-driven search engine. O'Reilly had a small directory of useful sites, but other than that the only way to find pages was by surfing from link to link, or by being given a URL out-of-band.
I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Sampling a four bar loop, repeating it, making it prominent in the mix and offering no credit to the original, I would agree is wrong. But creative sampling doesn't do this. Public Enemy would take snippets of James Brown one-off horn riffs, and turn them into the core of a song. Sounds would be placed so the beats were offset from where they would have been in the original.
Then there's the question of practicality. I want to hear creative cut-ups from kids who won't be selling thousands of records. The overhead of cataloguing samples, finding the owners and paying them would simply prevent them from releasing their works.
It's complicated.
Imagine a hypothetical inequality index (HII) -- something you can measure in an individual's circumstances at any one time.
At HII=x, let's say 1% of people get tempted into crime. Your dad is one of the 99% of people who behave.
At HII=2x, maybe 1.5% of people get tempted into crime. Your dad is one of the 98.5%.
The vast majority of people are law abiding. Fluctuations in the small number of criminals have a big effect on our perception of lawlessness around us.
I think he's talking about Squeak.
I'm a full grown adult, and I couldn't make head nor tail of Squeak, using online resources I could find.
Whereas The Shining is both new(ish) and crap (seriously -- cite me a respectable source that really claims it's a literary classic)
Doing all this would seem to create a virtual community-based supercomputer, but I don't know enough to identify if there are any showstoppers. Translation: "Imagine a Beouwulf cluster of these things"
Tsk.
I bet if you sampled a typical mixed classroom of British 14 year olds, at least 10% of them would choose Jane Austen over Bungie.
After all, more than half of them will be girls, and while many girls do enjoy gaming, Halo's a particularly macho example.
But, you know, you can have both. Monday: save Princess Peach. Tuesday: The Old Man and the Sea.
When I was -- ooh -- 9 years old perhaps, my parents bought a BBC Micro for the family. It cost £400 -- a lot of money in those days, and a big investment by my parents. They sat me down and explained that it was an expensive and precious thing, and that I wasn't to boast about it at school because other kids would be envious. I was as good as gold, I used it every day, and I treated it with great care, and I most certainly did not crow about its bling.
Kids can do that. If they want to.
Of course, if all their friends have a Playstation, they're given one as if it's nothing special, they don't know it's value, they won't look after it. Easy come, easy go.
Do you really think the "desktop metaphor" bears any resemblance to the top of a desk? I think early Xerox and Apple UIs bore some resemblance to a desk, but I have great difficulty mapping any of the objects on my Windows screen to any of the objects on my desk any more.
(When we were using MacOS 9 at university, my girlfriend commented that it was desktop because it had an apple in the corner)
When I'm reading something online, I don't scroll more frequently than two seconds. I would probably find something else to do if I had to keep jogging the touch pad to keep the display active. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this? I understood this as being the CPU suspending, not the whole machine. The display subsystem would stay up. I could be wrong also, though.
I don't like the idea of the OLPC because there is some fundamental problem that needs to be fixed before that. That is, a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies. Now, what gain would it be if you give the chance to obtain information that has been already altered and censored? I'd say to worry about that problem first.
I've been reading about the USSR recently. One of Lenin's beliefs was that the interim proletariat dictatorial state would wither into an state-free utopia once the right conditions were engineered, and that abuse of power would not be possible because the people would not allow it. Of course, notwithstanding Lenin's own exercising of state terror, Stalin blew that theory away. I'd say that one of the aspects that prevented "the people" from reining in Stalin was the state of communications. A Ukrainian peasant couldn't really know what was going on in (for example) Khazakhstan (in fact later on, an increase in travel associated with service in WWII opened people's eyes to what was going on in other parts of their Union, and fuelled resistance to Stalin).
Distributing these computers is a step towards empowering these people with mass communication. As the OLPC people point out, people tend to find workarounds for state Internet filtering. Maybe increased education and communication is a tool to foster democracy, rather than something to introduce afterwards?
Go for it, you find me quotes from printers for runs of over five thousand books where they cost any more than, oh, five bucks apiece. And that is assuming conventional paper, hardcover (which is, btw, a terrible design approach compared to, say, tyvek over soft plastic), and the book being the awkward size and design of "normal" textbooks.
$5 is considerably more than "free", of course. And then there's distribution costs.
Is the target market for this thing really those kids we see on the Christian Children's Fund adds? If they are, I think a better goal for the worlds resources would be something like "A pair of shoes for every chilled" I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day.
We're probably not talking about refugee camps in famine-struck areas -- those really are people with more pressing needs.
But there are villagers in the developing world who are not starving, but who are definitely "knowledge have nots". We're in the realms of "give a man a fish / give a man a fishing net" here.
I accept that manufacturing and distribution will have an environmental impact. Whether or not an empowered and informed next generation of world population offsets that, I can't begin to guess.
One nod to security is that each application runs in its own VM. (Why am I replicating TFA??)
The question then is, how easy is it to get a replacement? Make it too easy, and you lose the incentive to look after the one you have. Make it too hard, and there'll be deserving children with no laptop.
I don't know what the OLPC crowd count as a "child" but by the age of 14 a bright child could probably tackle as many Gutenberg type "literary classics" as many adults: if they were interested. Alice in Wonderland is in the Gutenberg archive; I'm sure there are many more children's books there too. Something like Frankenstein contains some ponderous language, but still has the capacity to grip a developing reader.
TFA also mentions that the Mexican government is working towards providing all curriculum textbooks as OLPC compatible ebooks.
Distance to the shops in miles, distance to the sun in kilometers
I measure my weight in stones and pounds, but I cook in grams. Oh but it's so much more delightfully complex and nuanced!
For example, cold weather in metric ("It's minus four!"), hot weather in imperial ("It's almost a hundred!").
Wines and spirits in ml, beer by the pint.
Such fun!
You stated that atheism had articles of faith, and quoted a list of purported articles of faith from atheists.org.
My response is that atheism.org is misrepresenting atheism. Those are a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs, but they do not define atheism, and it is perfectly possible to be an atheist without believing any of them.
(a) I am an atheist. (b) I believe those three things. But that doesn't mean that (a) == (b).
The four buttons just below the screen and to the right are marked Triangle, Circle, Square, X.
What's the story there? Did Sony suggest it? Were Sony asked for it? Is it product placement, or did the OX designers see merit in the culture-agnostic use of geometric shapes?
Here's a few straight from atheists.org
Atheism is a doctrine that states
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter),
2) that thought is a property or function of matter,
3) and that death irreversibly and totally terminates individual organic units.
These are philosophical statements not scientific ones. They are not proven philosophically or scientifically. Well, if atheists.org says it, it must be true, right?
Actually, I do believe all of those things -- but those beliefs are tangential to my atheism.
Gillian McKeith is in a popular show in which she doles out sensible advice on healthy eating, mixed in with some absolute drivel (she also has a range of health foods).
Under the list Worst in Net Entertainment:
How little they knew ...
None of them predict search engines - because they were a genuine and unexpected innovation. I remember using the Web at around that time - before Yahoo attempted to create a directory, and Altavista produced their webspider-driven search engine. O'Reilly had a small directory of useful sites, but other than that the only way to find pages was by surfing from link to link, or by being given a URL out-of-band.I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.